being disturbed, by any one ; and James De Lancey, who had been the Sheriff of the County, since June, 177(1, and David Dayton, who had been the Surrogate, since June, 1766, and John Bartow, who had been the Clerk of the County, since April, 1760, each in his appointed official place, continued to discharge the official duties which were incumbent on them, and to receive and to enjoy the emoluments which those several offices secured to them -- the Courts of the County continued their several Sessions, at the appointed times; and, as we have said, with occasional individual or neighborhood exceptions, a general quiet prevailed, a quiet which preceded a terrible convulsion, as the reader will shortly see.

The machinery of government which had been created by the revolutionary elements, within and without the Colony of New York, was, very soon, put in motion. It was composed of only a series of conclaves, each of which exercised, arbitrarily, Legislative, Executive, and Judicial functions, unrestrained by either constitutional or statutory provisions, and controlled, in whatever it determined to do or not to do, only by the individual impulses of such, within this Colony, as the Livingstons and the Morrises, the Van Cortlandts and the Thomases, and as James Duane and John Jay, men, in every instance, who were distinguished for their entire disregard of and contempt for the unfranchised and lowly masses, of every class, as well as of those who were frauchished, but not " well-born '' -- the former being looked on, by them, as fit only for labor and for fighting ; and the latter as no better than, the others, unless on electiondays -- and who represented only the uncontrolled and purely aristocratic prejudices and antipathies and the equally uncontrolled and malignant partisan animosities and jealousies of those who, during many years, had been excluded from official life, and who, by the whirligig of rebellion, were, then, first enjoying, in an extremely diluted form, what they had so long and so anxiously hankered for. 1