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Ship Dutchess of Gordon, New-York Harbour,
December 4, 1775.
SIR: I desire you will lay before the Corporation the enclosed paper, containing my sentiments on the present convulsed state of this country, and that you will please to make the same publick.
I am, &c˙, WILLIAM TRYON.
To Whitehead Hicks, Esq˙, Mayor of the City of New-York.
I take this publick manner to signify to the inhabitants of this Province, that His Majesty has been graciously pleased to grant me his royal permission to withdraw from my Government, and at the same time to assure them of my readiness to perform every service in my power to promote the common felicity.
If I am excluded from every hope of being any ways instrumental towards the re-establishment of that harmony, at present interrupted, between Great Britain and her Colonies, I expect soon to be obliged to avail myself of His Majesty' s indulgence.
It has given me great pain to view the Colony committed to my care in such a turbulent state as not to have afforded me, since my arrival, any prospect of being able to take the dispassionate and deliberate sense of its inhabitants, in a constitutional manner, upon the resolution of Parliament for composing the present ferments in the Provinces. A resolution that was intended for the basis of an accommodation, and if candidly considered in a way which it will be most probably successful, and treated with that delicacy and decency requisite to the cultivation of a sincere reconciliation and friendship, might yet be improved for the purposes of restoring the general tranquillity and security of the empire. I owe it to my affection to this Colony, to declare my wish that some measure may be speedily adopted for this purpose, as I feel an extreme degree of anxiety in being witness to the growing calamities of this country, without the power to alleviate them; calamities that must increase, while so many of the inhabitants
WILLIAM TRYON.
Ship Dutchess of Gordon, Harbour of New-York,
December 4, 1775.
Letter from Governour Tryon to Whitehead Hicks, enclosing an Address to the Inhabitants of New-York
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withhold their allegiance from their Sovereign, and their obedience to the parent country, by whose power and patronage they have hitherto been sustained and protected.