the House of putting on airs, of insulting royal authority, and of a want of common decency. And he wrote to beseech of England to punish New York, as an example to all America. Sir Danvers Osborne hanged himself within a week after his arrival in New York. It was supposed his dread of the consequences of attempting to coerce the action of the Assembly unsettled his reason. The government was administered for some years by Lieutenant-Governor James De Lancey, a native New Yorker, whose genius and culture, whose boldness and sagacity, and whose tact and statesmanship, won for the community one of the greatest of triumphs. The ministry yielded the long contested point in the spring of 1756, and agreed to annual support bills for the future. "No other colony," writes Bancroft, "was tinctured with such fearlessness of monarchical power as New York—at this time the central point of political interest in English North America."
On the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 James McEvers was appointed stamp collector for New York. He was a bachelor, residing with his brother, Charles McEvers, in an elegant new mansion in Wall Street, corner of William. The popular indignation at this parliamentary measure was such that he declined to receive the stamps or distribute them, and sent a formal resignation of his commission to Lieutenant-Governor Golden, then at the head of the government of New York. Meanwhile the famous Stamp Act Congress assembled in the city hall. No other in the succession of spirited events which have rendered Wall Street historic ground was more heroic under the circumstances, or far-reaching in its influence than this first attempt at Union of the colonies. It was a Congress without precedent, an institution unknown to the laws, an experiment at systematizing an opposition to the established government in which all America was to be united, and its seat was coolly fixed in the capital of the central province, in direct antagonism to the will of the king's officers, civil and military, who declared the whole proceeding unconstitutional, treasonable, and illegal. It met in the very face of the headquarters of the standing army, commanded by a general with military powers as ample as those of a viceroy, organized itself with measured precision, and continued its deliberations unmolested for three weeks. Massachusetts and South Carolina contributed largely to the force and eloquence of the occasion; Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York were well represented; New Hampshire had no delegate, but agreed to abide by the action of the Congress; and Georgia sent an express messenger nearly a thousand miles by land to obtain a copy of the proceedings. This Congress took a
