on had been different. At twelve years of age he
was a clerk in a counting house on the island of Nevis in the West
Indies; at sixteen he entered a grammar school in New Jersey; at
seventeen he became a sophomore at King's College. It is then that he
spoke "in the Fields"--not as a sophomore, not as a precocious youth
with unripe thoughts, not as a boy orator--but as a man speaking with
the wisdom of genius.

After the meeting "in the Fields" patriotism proved stronger than
prejudice, and in November, 1774, the Committee of Fifty-one gave
place to a Committee of Sixty, charged with carrying out
recommendations of the Continental Congress. Soon after a Committee of
One Hundred, composed of members of the Committees of Fifty and
Fifty-one, assumed the functions of a municipal government. Finally,
in May, 1775, representatives were chosen from the several counties to
organise a Provincial Congress to take the place of the long
established legislature of the Colony, which had become so steeped in
toryism that it refused to recognise the action of any body of men who
resented the tyranny of Parliament. Thus, in the brief space of
eighteen months, the government of the Crown had been turned into a
government of the people.

For several months, however, the patriots of New York had desired a
more complete state government. All admitted that the revolutionary
committees were essentially local and temporary. Even the hottest Son
of Liberty came to fear the licentiousness of the people on the one
hand, and the danger from the army on the other. Nevertheless, the
Provincial Congress, whose members had been trained by harsh
experience to be stubborn in defence and sturdy in defiance, declined
to assume the responsibility of forming such a government as the
Continental Congress recommended. That body had itself come into
existence as a revolutionary legislature after the Provincial Assembly
had refused either to approve the proceedings of the first Continental
Congress, or to appoint delegates to the second; and, although it did
not hesitate to usurp temporarily the functions of the Tory Assembly,
to its great credit it believed the right of creating and framing a
new civil government belonged to the people; and, accordingly, on May
24, 1776, it recommended the election of new representatives who
should be specially authorised to form a government for New York.

The members of this new body were conspicuous characters in New York