The speech was remarkable for its incisive directness and boldness, for the exact clearness with which it portrayed things as they were, for the broad sense of American nationality that it displayed, and for the accurate forecasts that it contained as to our future course in certain particulars,--such as freedom from European wars and entanglements, a strong but purely defensive foreign policy, the encouragement of the growth of the West, while keeping it united to us, and the throwing open our doors to the oppressed from abroad.
Soon after the delivery of this speech news came that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted by the Continental Congress; and Jay, one of the New York delegates to this body, and also a member of the Provincial Congress, drew up for the latter a resolution emphatically indorsing the declaration, which was at once adopted without a dissenting voice. At the same time the Provincial Congress changed its name to that of "The Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York."
These last acts were done by a body that had been elected, with increased power, to succeed the third Provincial Congress and provide for a new constitution. Just before this, Morris had been sent to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to complain that the troops from New England were paid more largely than those from the other colonies; a wrong which was at once redressed, the wages of the latter being raised, and Morris returned to New York in triumph after only a week's absence.
The Constitutional Convention of New York led a most checkered life; for the victorious British chevied it up and down the State, hunting it in turn from every small town in which it thought to have found a peaceful haven of refuge. At last it rested in Fiskhill, such an out-of-the-way place as to be free from danger. The members were obliged to go armed, so as to protect themselves from stray marauding parties; and the number of delegates in attendance alternately dwindled and swelled in a wonderful manner, now resolving themselves into a committee of safety, and again resuming their functions as members of the convention.
The most important duties of the convention were intrusted to two committees. Of the first, which was to draft a plan for the Constitution, Morris, Jay, and Livingston were the three leading members, upon whom all the work fell; of the second, which was to devise means for the establishment of a state fund, Morris was the chairman and moving spirit.