John Morin Scott represented the radical element among the patriots. By profession he was an able and wealthy lawyer; by occupation a patriotic agitator. John Adams, who breakfasted with him, speaks of his country residence three miles out of town as "an elegant seat, with the Hudson just behind the house, and a rural prospect all around him." But the table seems to have made a deeper impression upon the Yankee patriot than the picturesque scenery of the river. "A more elegant breakfast I never saw--rich plate, a very large silver coffee-pot, a very large silver teapot, napkins of the very finest materials, toast and bread and butter in great perfection. Afterwards a plate of beautiful peaches, another of pears, another of plums, and a musk melon." As a parting salute, this lover of good things spoke of his host as "a sensible man, one of the readiest speakers upon the continent, but not very polite."[15] This is what the Tories thought. According to Jones, the Tory historian, Scott had the misfortune to graduate at Yale--"a college remarkable for its republican principles and religious intolerance," he says, and to belong to a triumvirate whose purpose was "to pull down church and state, and to raise their own government upon the ruins."[16] [Footnote 15: John Adams, _Life and Works_, Vol. 2, p. 349 (Diary).] [Footnote 16: Thomas Jones, _History of New York_, Vol. 1, p. 3.] Scott, no doubt, was sometimes mistaken in the proper course to pursue, but he was always right from his point of view, and his point of view was bitter hostility to English misrule. Whatever he did he did with all the resistless energy of a man still in his forties. He was of distinguished ancestry. His great-great-grandfather, Sir John Scott, baronet, of Ancrum, Scotland, had been a stalwart Whig before the revolution of 1688, and his grandfather, John Scott, coming to New York in 1702, had commanded Fort Hunter, a stronghold on the Mohawk. Both were remarkable men. Tory blood was foreign to their veins. Young John, breathing the air of independence, scorned to let his life and property depend upon the pleasure of British lords and a British ministry, or to be excluded from the right of trial by a jury of his neighbours, or of taxation by his own representatives. In 1775 he went to the Continental Congress; in 1776, to the Provincial Congress of New York; and later he participated in the battle of Long Island as a brigadier-general. After the adoption of the State Constitution he became secretary of state, and from 1780 to 1783 served in the Continental Congress. He lived long enough to see his country free, although his strenuous life ended at fifty-four.