In the period immediately preceding the Revolution, the desire for independence was far less general in New York than in Massachusetts or Virginia. The large land owners and leading merchants were mainly members of the Church of England; and while there was no state church, so called and admitted to be such, the Anglicans were first in wealth and fashion, and their organization enjoyed exclusive privileges. Even King’s College (now Columbia University) was placed officially under Church control. The court party included not only the Anglican clergy and almost all the laity, but even an influential section of the membership of the Dutch Reformed Church. It included such families as the De Peysters, the De Lanceys and the Philippses in the city and its suburbs; and the Johnsons, who dominated central New York. There were Tories even on the Committee of Fifty-one that first authoritatively proposed the assembling of a Continental Congress. In no other colony was the Tory element so numerous and powerful; in none other were the patriots opposed by so active a spirit of loyalty to the Crown, and so vast a bulk of indifference on the part of property-owners, solicitous for nothing but the security of their possessions. At first the Schuylers, the Livingstons, and Hamilton, Jay and Morris found their support almost wholly among the masses, who rose not only against England, but also against the domination of the classes, which was more oppressive in the aristocratic city of New York than in the democratic town of Boston, or in Philadelphia. Thus, it was the so-called Sons of Liberty that had led in the agitation which made the Stamp Act a dead letter, so far as this colony was concerned, and a decade later prevented the landing of taxed tea on New York wharves. And their demonstrative radicalism found little response in the minds of some of the ablest civil and military leaders contributed by this colony to the work of liberation and reconstruction. But the violence of the mob could not blind such men to the essential justice of the American cause, and the actual beginning of the war found a large majority of the best people of the colony definitely committed to a patriotic course. So when Washington and his army were driven hither from Brooklyn and hence to New Jersey, in 1776, New York was no longer the populous place it had been before their sympathizers fled from the terrors of hostile military rule. [Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON.]