Massachusetts Loyalist Daniel Leonard was livid. Cloaked by a pseudonym, Leonard penned an open letter that castigated Boston’s town meeting for, as he saw things, inventing a committee of correspondence — “the foulest, subtlest and most venomous serpent that ever issued from the eggs of sedition.”
By 1775, Leonard and other crown officials had good reasons to despise the Boston committee’s success in rallying opposition to British legislative measures. Had they been aware of the earlier history of colonial committees of correspondence, however, Leonard and his friends might have understood how the patriots fashioned their committees of correspondence into such effective instruments of resistance and revolution.
Committees of correspondence had antecedents in Stuart-era England and among the English Protestant churches. As the machinery of empire grew more complex with the expansion of transatlantic Anglo-American commerce, 18th-century legislators engaged agents, or lobbyists, to advance their colonies’ interests with Parliament, crown officials and courts of appeals. South Carolina appointed a committee of correspondence to communicate with its London agents as early as 1712. By midcentury, London-based colonial agents had become a routine feature of imperial administration. And by the end of the French and Indian War, individual colonies were creating committees of correspondence to communicate with agents and direct their work, especially during extended periods when colonial legislatures were not in session.
Perhaps the 1754 suggestion about using committees of correspondence to encourage intercolonial political cooperation came from Richard Peters, of Pennsylvania, whose outline for a colonial confederation suggested that each legislature “appoint a Committee of Union, whose business it shall be to correspond with all the other Committees” and to arrange occasional regional meetings “as in their Correspondencies they shall find it necessary.”
In practice, midcentury committees of correspondence often reflected the chronic tension between royal governors and elected assemblies prevalent throughout the colonies. The influential legislators who dominated these committees frequently used them to defend provincial interests against royal authorities and imperial policymakers. Virginia’s first committee of correspondence, created by the House of Burgesses in 1759, was typical in this regard.
Escalating Tensions
After several confrontations with Gov. Robert Dinwiddie during the 1750s, provincial leaders in the House of Burgesses grew suspicious of James Abercromby, a fellow Scotsman whom Dinwiddie had designated as the colony’s agent in London. Abercromby strongly advocated colonial subservience to Parliament and strict enforcement of imperial regulations such as the Navigation Acts; as a member of Parliament he later voted for the Stamp Act and against its repeal.
But it was Abercromby’s aversion to supporting Virginia’s protests against crown officials in the Parsons’ Cause, a dispute over provincial and imperial authority involving the salaries of Anglican clergy, that led the burgesses to appoint Edward Montague as their own London agent in February 1759.
By arrangement with Gov. Francis Fauquier, an elite committee of correspondence comprising both elected burgesses and members of the governor’s Council was created to direct Montague’s activities in London. Its roster exemplified the conservative Tidewater gentry who dominated the colony’s society and politics. Virginia’s first committee of correspondence included Council president John Blair, Speaker of the House John Robinson, three Carters, two Nelsons, two Randolphs and another five similarly wealthy gentlemen. Initially absent were the less prominent burgesses that Fauquier characterized as “Young, hot and Giddy members.” Of the committee’s original 16 members, however, the 10 who lived to participate in the American Revolution all supported independence. With conservatives like these, historian T.H. Breen once quipped, “Virginia needed no radicals.”
Building Big Ideas
The Capitol in Williamsburg has a footprint like the letter H. The House of Burgesses met in the east wing. Councilors met in the west wing either on the ground floor as the General Court or upstairs in their legislative and executive capacities. Connecting the east and west wings, high above a ground-level colonnade, is a large second-story conference room. When the General Assembly was in session, this sparsely decorated second-floor room was where the burgesses and councilors met for morning prayers as well as a neutral space where they conferred about pending legislation. Dominated by a 14-foot oval conference table surrounded by leather chairs and draped in green fabric that cushioned the strokes of quill pens on paper or parchment, it was a room where significant things happened.
On Friday, June 15, 1764, eight members of Virginia’s committee of correspondence — the president of the Council, the attorney general, the speaker and the clerk of the House of Burgesses, two senior councilors and two prominent burgesses — climbed the stairs to that conference room with some urgency. With the General Assembly in recess until October and its members scattered at their homes throughout the colony, eight of the colony’s most powerful legislators gathered to respond to a political emergency on behalf of their colleagues and constituents. Recent letters from Edward Montague, their agent in London, warned that dire things were happening in Parliament. Prime Minister George Grenville had announced in March that he planned to impose stamp duties directly upon the American colonies.
Meeting around the conference table in the Capitol, the Virginians concluded that Parliament seemed “determined to carry [out] their Intentions of taxing the Colonies at pleasure” — an apprehension that echoed throughout the colonies as Grenville and his successors repeatedly attempted to impose parliamentary taxation in North America. Determined to lobby vigorously against Grenville’s plan of “taxing the internal Trade of the Colony without their Consent,” the committee put Robert Carter Nicholas and George Wythe to work translating its resolve into formal instructions for Agent Montague.
The prospect of a stamp tax was “truly alarming,” Nicholas and Wythe wrote, because it contradicted “the most vital Principle of the British Constitution”: that the king’s subjects were “subservient” only to laws or taxes enacted by the consent of their representatives. If Parliament could ease the tax burden of the king’s English, Welsh and Scottish subjects at the expense of his American subjects, where would it end? “The approaching Storm appear[s] still more gloomy & dismal,” the committee lamented, because a successful precedent for taxing Americans meant that “not only we & our Children, but our latest Posterity may & will probably be involved in its fatal Consequences [emphasis added].”
The committee reiterated its horror in a last-minute postscript: “Every Mention of the parliam[en]ts Intention to lay an Inland Duty upon us,” they wrote, “gives us fresh Apprehension of the fatal Consequences that may arise to Posterity from such a precedent.”
‘The General Interest’
Inasmuch as Grenville’s plans threatened all the colonies, American leaders quickly recognized the necessity of cooperation — especially through their London agents. During the 1760s, the colonies’ early steps toward unity and cooperation happened less by direct communication between provincial leaders than through instructions from the committees of correspondence directing their agents in London, as Samuel Adams put it, “to use your Endeavors...that by the united Applications of all who are Aggrieved, All may happily obtain Redress.”
Virginia encouraged Montague to work with his colleagues for “the general Interest of the Continent of America.” New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island promptly created committees of correspondence that directed their agents “to do every thing in [their] power, either alone, or by joining with the agents of the other governments,” to prevent the enactment of the Stamp Act.
“If some Method could be hit upon for collecting the Sentiments of each Colony, and for uniting and forming the Substance of them into one common Defence...and the several Agents directed to join together,” Rhode Islanders suggested, “it might be the most probable Method to produce the End aimed at.”
In October 1765, delegates from seven colonies took another step toward unity when the Stamp Act Congress met in New York, and by November the forced resignations of stamp distributors throughout North America had thwarted Grenville’s “darling” Stamp Act, as writer Horace Walpole put it. By the following March, when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, Americans had learned a valuable lesson about sticking together.
America’s committees of correspondence had achieved significance — and soon had greater significance thrust upon them. Along with the repeal, Parliament had adopted a Declaratory Act reasserting its authority to impose legislation and taxation in North America. The renewed danger, according to Virginia statesman George Mason, was that “some Bungler in politics” might attempt to enforce those claims “by military Power.” Writing to influential friends in England, Mason warned that “such another Experiment as the Stamp-Act wou’d produce a general Revolt in America.” A year later the newly appointed chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend, leaped into the role of imperial bungler with a cluster of new taxes.
Instruments of Cooperation
John Dickinson’s eloquent objections to the Townshend Duties in his widely disseminated Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania prompted Richard Henry Lee to suggest yet another step toward intercolonial cooperation in July 1768. Introducing himself in a letter to Dickinson, the Virginian suggested that all the colonies appoint “select committees” to encourage correspondence among “the lovers of liberty in every province.”
In the four years since Nicholas and Wythe had drafted Virginia’s letter to its London agent, committees of correspondence had become recognized as valuable instruments for intercolonial cooperation and resistance. Great Britain’s reaction to a mob’s destruction of the revenue ship Gaspée after it ran aground in Narragansett Bay in 1772 prompted their final transformation into weapons of resistance and rebellion.
After ruling that the burning of the Gaspée was an act of high treason, the Privy Council sent a royal commission to investigate the incident and send its perpetrators to England for trial. Americans quickly denounced the commission as “shocking to Humanity, repugnant to every Dictate of Reason, Liberty and Justice” and “a court of inquisition, more horrid than that of Spain.” Alexander Purdie and John Dixon’s Virginia Gazette published an account of the Gaspée incident in early January 1773. The burgesses had Britain’s latest affront to American liberties in mind when the General Assembly met a few weeks later.
On March 11, 1773, Patrick Henry met with Richard Henry Lee, his brother Francis Lightfoot Lee, Thomas Jefferson and Dabney Carr in a private room at the Raleigh Tavern. The situation of America seemed perilous. The Gaspée affair proved that fundamental constitutional liberties were under threat from the British crown. Unlike the “old and leading members” of the House of Burgesses who seemed to lack the “forwardness and zeal which the times required,” the five strategists felt the urgency, as Jefferson later wrote, of joining “with all the other colonies, to consider the British [threat] as a common cause to all.”
The group proposed a committee of both moderates and radicals that would include all the surviving members of the original committee from 1759. Dabney Carr introduced their resolution the next day, and the House of Burgesses unanimously approved the creation of a new standing committee of correspondence essential for the “communication of sentiments” among the colonies.
The new select committee’s first order of business was a letter, dated March 19, 1773, that Speaker Peyton Randolph (later president of the First and Second Continental Congresses) sent to all the legislatures in British North America. “I have received the commands of the House of Burgesses of this colony,” Randolph wrote, “to transmit to you a copy of the resolves entered into by them...which they hope will prove of general utility, if the other colonies shall think fit.... to appoint some of their body to communicate from time to time with the corresponding committee of Virginia.”
The burgesses, Richard Henry Lee explained to John Dickinson a few weeks later, have “adopted a measure...leading to that union, and perfect understanding of each other, on which the political salvation of America so eminently depends” — “a large and thorough union of councils.”
Gaining Momentum
When Virginia’s resolutions reached Boston, Samuel Adams had the town’s newly created committee of correspondence order 300 copies of them printed and sent to every town in the colony. (The town of Boston had created its committee as the hub of a communications network linking more than 100 of the Bay Colony’s independent towns. Adams’ committee, historian George Bancroft observed, “organized a Province; Virginia promoted a confederacy.”)
Together with Virginia’s call for the creation of intercolonial committees of correspondence, Adams sent the towns letters congratulating them “upon the Acquisition of such respectable Aid as the ancient and patriotic Province of Virginia, the Earliest Resolvers against the detestable Stamp-Act.” Adams amplified his sentiments in a letter to Richard Henry Lee: “The truly patriotic resolves of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, gladden the hearts of all who are friends to liberty,” he exclaimed, “It is a measure which will be attended with great and good consequences.”
From Connecticut and New Hampshire, other New Englanders celebrated “the Resolutions and Measures proposed by the Virginia Assembly” — committees that were sure to “become universal” and “finally terminate in a General Congress.”
In June a correspondent reported to Benjamin Franklin, who was in London, that “Virginia has led the way, by proposing a communication and correspondence between all the Assemblies through the continent.” Between May 15 and May 28, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts created provincial committees of correspondence. Similarly, between July 8 and December, South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina joined the network. The middle colonies were slowest: New York created its committee in January and New Jersey in February 1774.
By May 20, 1774, when Pennsylvania finally acted, the American committees of correspondence were being supplanted by more extensive networks of local and provincial committees under the Continental Association of 1774. That same year, the First Continental Congress became the forum for intercolonial unity and cooperation.
While they lasted, committees of correspondence had been the nerve system of American resistance to Great Britain. In contrast to the New England patriot who exclaimed that “Heaven seems at last to have dictated to the noble Virginians, the Plan for our Deliverance!” however, a London observer recorded a more hostile reaction to Virginia’s call for an intercolonial committee system: It “struck a greater panic into the Ministers” than anything that had taken place since the passage of the Stamp Act.
Jon Kukla, a historian who lives in Richmond, Virginia, is at work on a book about the Stamp Act. His most recent book is the prize-winning Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty.