"To Determine on the Future Government": Robert Yates's Plan of Union, 1774-1775

Abstract

R obert Yates (1738-i80i) was, in his quiet way, one of the most influential and respected of the upriver New York Revolutionaries. An Albany Dutch plebeian lawyer, he rose to local power with his brother Peter and his cousin Abraham Yates when the Revolutionary crisis weakened the DeLancey-Johnson-Dutch patrician alliance. In I77I he gained a city council seat. Three years later he had become a leading penman and theorist for the Whig resistance party. The Albany Committee of Correspondence, led by Abraham Yates, often called on him to draft papers and political statements. As a member of the committee from the city's second ward, and later a delegate to the New York Provincial Convention, he was thoroughly conversant with the thinking of his Revolutionary colleagues; and he impressed them sufficiently with his acumen to be named to the highest court of the new state. The manuscript draft of Yates's plan of union, here printed for the first time, was discovered among the Yates papers in the Freeman gift to the New York State Library in Albany. It is written in his legal hand. Reference to the actions of the first grand a common synonym for the First Continental Congress, and the details of the plan of union date the manuscript in the winter of I774-I775. A large left margin, for comments and corrections, suggests that the plan was intended for internal circulation among Yates's comrades on the Committee of Correspondence. The draft appears unfinished, ending abruptly in the middle of a discussion of qualifications for members of a continental Council. Comparison with other Yates works proves that the language of the plan was his own. The document is not mentioned in the Committee Minutes, the New York Provincial Convention Journal, or the correspondence of other New York Revolutionaries. Yates's caution may be an example of Dutch political circumspection,