VALENTINE'S MANUAL

So accurate and painstaking a historian as Moncure D.
Conway accepts this theory in one of the chapters he
contributed to James Grant Wilson's Memorial History
of New York. I find that in considering the personnel of
those connected with those earlier deeds of defiance and
those concerned in the establishment of the Society of
Tammany we come upon the same names. They must
have referred to the identical individuals and thus we
may take pride in a related and connected part in the
stirring events of our City's history while those events
were dominated by the presence here of the Great Wash-
ington.

This enables us to support the claim that the Society
of Tammany was established so that our predecessors in
its membership could hold up the hands of Washington
as the hands of Moses were held up by the Children of
Israel. In further support, we find that Washington, in
the formative days of the Nation, ptit all of his strength
and influence with his fellow-men behind the contention
that the declaration of the equality of all men, meant
just exactly that and he welcomed the assistance and sup-
port of every element in the great body of our citizen-
ship. We enjoy, therefore, the honor that substantially
the whole of our earlier membership was with and of
the people whose fidelity and loyalty were Washington's
reliance, under the Divine Providence to which he ascribed
the power and the glory of his every achievement. They
were thoroughly identified with all Revolutionary and pre-
Revolutionary patriotic activities.

An illuminating instance of the historical fact that the
membership of the Society of Tammany was recruited
from among the militant patriots of those strenuous days
is revealed in the list of the signers of the address to

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