A usurped kind "of Government took place: a medley of Military " Law, Convention Ordinances, Congress Recommen- " dations, and Committee Resolutions." 2

It is proper that we shall say, however, that, notwithstanding the Declaration of Independence was thus nominally accepted and approved, and notwithstanding New York was thus formally obligated to stand or fall with her sister States in the support and defense of the cause in which they were engaged, Independence had not been, as we have already seen, what the revolutionary faction of the great party of

2 Jones's History of Neiv York during the Revolutionary War, ii., 115.

WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

the Opposition, in New York, had desired and aimed for; nor, since it had been crowded through the Continental Congress without the approval of the masterspirits of that revolutionary faction of the party and in the face of the determined opposition of those who represented or who, in other Colonies, were affiliated with that faction, although the Declaration and Independence itself had been acquiesced in by the Provincial Congress, did the same faction regard either with the slightest favor; nor, as the subsequent conduct of its leading members, those of its number from whom the character and disposition of the whole may be fairly estimated, in postponing the establishment of a new form of Government for the young State and leaving it during more than nine months without the slightest semblance of a Government of any kind, clearly indicated, did that remarkable faction, then, intend to respect either the Resolution for Independence or the Declaration of it any longer than w.iuld be necessary to enable it to effect a reconciliation with Great Britain, and, thereby, to secure to that family of whom all the faction were either members or hungry followers, all those official places, within the Colony, which were then occupied by their hereditary rivals, and all that influence, for like purposes of aggrandizement, within other C lonies and within the Congress of the confederacy, to which that horde of miscellaneous office-seekers desperately aspired, and to which, it was fondly considered, it would become reasonably entitled.