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.

On the afternoon of the ninth of July, immediately after the Provincial Congress had adopted the Report of the Committee to whom the Declaration of Independence had been referred, and, thereby, as far as it could do so, had abrogated every Law and every Commission which had rested on the sovereignty of the King of Great Britain, with singular coolness but entirely consistent with the absolutism which had thus been inaugurated and with the disposition and desires of those who then controlled the Congress, the Sheriffs of the several Counties were " authorized " and directed" [not by Law, but only by the oligarchic will and the consequent ipse dixit of the Congress,] "to "retain and keep in their custody ail prisoners, of " whatever kind, which are or may be in their cus- "tody, until the further order of this Convention, " or until such of them as may be confined for " debt, on civil process, shall be released by the " Plaintiffs so brought against them ; " ' and thus provision was made for the safekeeping not only of the victims of earlier lawlessness but of subsequent absolutism, the latter, by the terms of the Resolution, concentrated within the Provincial Congress itself. 2