The individual members of the first Provincial Congress of New York, at the opening and during the earlier period of the existence of that body, may, therefore, be classed as, first, the avowed Conservatives, who were led by such as John De Lancey and Benjamin Kissam and Abraham Walton and Richard Yates and George Folliot and Walter Franklin; as, second, the "Corporal's Guard" of avowed Revolutionists, who were led by John Morin Scott and Alexander McDougal and Abraham Brasier ; as, third, a larger number, those who, under the guise of patriotism, were aiming at nothing else than at places and at the influences and emoluments to be produced by those places, who were led by the Livingstons and the Van Cortlandts, by Gouverneur Morris and John Thomas and Melanthon Smith and Abraham Ten Broeck and Egbert Dumond and Nathaniel Woodhull and John Sloss Hobart; and as, last, outnumbering all others, those who had left their several rural homes and come to the City of New" York, for the purpose of serving their country, without having had, at that time, any other aim.

As the several Delegations voted as units, the votes of the several Counties having been cast in accordance with the determination of the majority of the Delegates of each who were then present, the votes of individual Delegates, unless in instances of formal dissent, are not recorded ; but the conservatism of the organized Congress, as an aggregate, was seen, immediately after the organization of that body and the adoption of its necessary Rules of Order, on the first day of the Session, when Isaac Low, of the City of New York, who is already so well known to the reader, had commenced the work of centralizing all of political authority and power which were within the Colony, except those of the local police, in the Continental Congress, a work which has been persistently continued until this day, by men of the same classes of society and politics, and for the same purposes ; and when, very promptly and very aptly, Gouverneur Morris, of the County of Westchester, who was already conspicuously notorious for his contemptuous disregard of the personal and political rights of the unfranchised masses of the Colonists, who were only "poor reptiles" in his aristocratic vocabulary, 2 had seconded the motion.