The permanent committee was composed of the last eight and Frederick Kimball, who lived below the line. These were really the government until the organization of the Territory. Gayoso admitted the neutrality of the district even before the Spaniards evacuated the town on March 30, 1798. Hutchins was a disturbing factor for a time, organizing a counter committee of safety and correspondence. Among his friends were Thomas Green, James Stuart, Ashly, (a Baptist minister,) Messrs. Shaw, (an attorney,) Davis, Justice King, Abner Green, Hocket, and Mr. Hunter, afterwards member of Congress from the Territory. Ellicott says that Gayoso declined to let Hutchins move below the line and that he therefore remained, to be prominent in Mississippi.[147] Of the 299 pages of Ellicott's printed Journal, the first 176 are taken up with events before beginning the survey. General Wilkinson accuses him of officiousness with the Spaniards and of gross immorality on board his boat on the river. It may be true, but Wilkinson is no reliable authority, although he ought to have been a good judge of rascality. Ellicott had been in public life before. He was a Quaker of Pennsylvania, and about 1789 ran the western line of New York, and afterwards the lines of the District of Columbia and the streets of Washington. In 1791 he was commissioner to run the line between Georgia and the Creeks.[148] On the present occasion he had with the party an escort of soldiers, at least part of the time under the gallant Captain John Boyer. The plans annexed as an appendix to the Journal must largely be those of David Gillespie, who did the actual surveying, and his report or journal would have been of greater value than Ellicott's. Ellicott acted as astronomer, but generally was the outside man. He was in New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, St. Marks and circumnavigating Florida, while Gillespie was quietly plodding the forests, running a guide line and by offsets establishing the true latitude of 31°. But nothing from Gillespie can now be found at Washington and even Ellicott's original report seems to have shared the fate of so much else in the vandal destruction of the capital by the enemy in 1814. For the Spaniards Captain Minor acted as surveyor, with Patrick Taggert as assistant, and Mr. Dunbar, (later of Mississippi Territory,) as astronomer.