New York was one of several provinces to react to the Boston Port Act with a call for an intercolonial congress. Heartened by this response, the Massachusetts House of Representatives resolved on 17 June 1774 “that a meeting of Committees, from the several Colonies on this Continent is highly expedient and necessary” and proposed that the congress be held in Philadelphia on 1 September.1

The election of delegates from New York to the First Continental Congress decisively split the extralegal Revolutionary movement in the province. On 4 July, the conservative faction on the Committee of Fifty-one gained the group’s endorsement of its slate of congressional nominees: Isaac Low, James Duane, Philip Livingston, John Alsop (1724–94), and John Jay. A day later, the Committee of Mechanics, the radical wing of the protest movement, named their own ticket, on which Duane and Alsop were replaced by Leonard Lispenard and Alexander McDougall.2

Soon the Fifty-one faced a rival platform as well as a rival ticket. On 6 July the mechanics agreed to resolutions calling for a general nonimportation agreement. The Fifty-one had no choice but to formulate their own statement and named a subcommittee to draw up alternative resolves. However, preparation of these resolutions was delayed when eleven radical members of the Fifty-one, three of whom were on the subcommittee on drafting resolutions, resigned from the Fifty-one on 8 July. At a meeting of 13 July, the Fifty-one appointed a new subcommittee which included Jay, who had been absent from meetings since 10 June.3

The resolutions drafted by the new subcommittee were approved by the Fifty-one later in the session of 13 July. These proposals were far more conciliatory than those approved by the mechanics a week earlier, and their position on nonimportation was more ambiguous. They declined to give any implicit instructions to congressional delegates on policy because, “as the wisdom of the Colonies will . . . be collected at the proposed Congress, it would be premature in any Colony to anticipate their conduct by resolving what ought to be done.” Nonimportation was viewed only as a last resort in the resolutions of 13 July: “Nothing less than dire necessity can justify, or ought to induce the Colonies to unite in any measure that might materially injure our brethren, the manufacturers, traders, and merchants in Great Britain.”4

On 19 July a public meeting at the Coffee House considered the resolutions of 13 July as well as the Fifty-one’s slate of delegates to Congress. The session proved a disaster for conservatives and moderates. While the conservative ticket for Congress was approved, the resolutions were roundly defeated after John Morin Scott, the fiery lawyer leader of New York’s radicals, denounced these “pusillanimous Resolves.”5

A new subcommittee of fifteen, with John Jay as a member, was appointed to draw up new resolves after the conservative program was voted down, but Jay and other moderates refused to recognize the legality of any of the proceedings on 19 July. With three other appointees, Jay declined to serve on the subcommittee on the ground that their designation was “proposed and carried out without any previous notice of such design having been given to the inhabitants,” thus making “our election too irregular to assume any authority.”6

In addition, Jay, Low, and Alsop declined to recognize their election to Congress by the Coffee House meeting and refused to serve “until the sentiments of the town are ascertained with great precision.”7 In a private letter to Scott, printed below, Jay was even more outspoken in his criticism of the radical-dominated meeting and of what he considered a personal attack upon himself and the other members of the subcommittee that had drafted the ill-fated resolutions of 13 July.