In the prosecution of that ill-advised and injudicious, as well as barbarous, policy, it continued to make arrests of individuals whom somebody had denounced as " suspected ; 3 and even individual members of the Convention, on their individual motions, without the slightest charge against their victims, ordered individuals into imprisonment. 4

1 Journal of the Provincial Congress, " Wednesday morning, White "Plains, July 10th, 1776."

Doctor Sparks erroneously stated, (Writings of George Washington, Hi., 470, note,) that that change in the title of the Provincial Congress was made on the ninth of July, and cited the Manuscript Journal of the Congress, of the ninth of July, as his authority : we have preferred to depend on the official copy of that Journal, as it was printed by order of the Legislature, in 1842, which clearly indicates that the change was made on the following day.

s John Adams was either a very poor judge of human nature or a very besotted and haughty aristocrat, regarding the masses as unworthy of his sympathy or respect, or both, when he wrote of these people, then

bleeding from every pore, from outrages inflicted on tbem by authority or with the permission of the Provincial Congress, and rejoicing that protection had been extended to them and to their property, by strangers, in such words as these : " The unprincipled and unfeeling and un- " natural inhabitants of Staten-Island are cordially receiving the enemy ; " and, deserters say, have engaged to take arms. They are an ignorant, " cowardly pack of scoundrels. Their numbers are small, and their "spiritless." (Letter to Mrs. Adams, "Philadelphia, July 11, 1776.")