flourishing city and its vicinity; while we sympathize in the
calamities which have reduced so many of our virtuous fellow-citizens
to want and distress, and are anxiously solicitous for means to repair
the wastes and misfortunes which we lament," we cannot hearken to
these petitions. They were referred to a select committee, which
committee in a few days reported against granting their prayer, and
the house instantly, without a division, agreed to the report. This
was on the 9th of February, 1784.

On the 11th of February, 1784, the assembly passed a resolution
directing that the names of those persons that had been attainted
should be communicated to the governors of the several states;
requesting to be supplied, in like manner, with "a list of the persons
proscribed or banished by their respective states, in order that
thereby the _principles of federal union_ may be adhered to and
preserved." In the senate this resolution was permitted to sleep.

Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, in a letter to John Jay dated the
25th of January, 1784, thus speaks of parties at this period. "Our
parties are, first, the tories, who still hope for power, under the
idea that the remembrance of the past should be lost, though they
daily keep it up by their avowed attachment to Great Britain;
secondly, the violent whigs, who are for expelling all tories from the
state, in hopes, by that means, to preserve the power in their own
hands. The third are those who wish to suppress all violence, to
soften the rigour of the laws against the loyalists, and not to banish
them from that social intercourse which may, by degrees, obliterate
the remembrance of past misdeeds."

On the 8th of March, 1784, Peter Yates and three hundred others