Volume 3, Chapter 54, The Committees of Correspondence
As soon as the judge's salary decision became known, Sam Adams mounted a campaign of pressure
for a Boston town meeting on the issue. Writing in the Boston Gazette, Adams asked whether
it was not high time for the people of this country explicitly to declare whether they
Let Associations and Combinations be everywhere set up to consult and recover our just rights.
But Adams' campaign faced once again the opposition of his conservative colleagues,
led now by John Hancock and other Boston selectmen. Finally, by October 28, the determined Adams
The determined Adams had pushed through a town meeting. At a final meeting on November 2 and
after great difficulty, Adams won support for his plan for a permanent committee of correspondence.
As a standing committee of Boston, it was to expound the rights of the colonists and to
communicate its declarations to other towns and colonies. There had been several other
Other Committees of Correspondence, especially as Standing Committees of Colonial Assemblies
in America, but those had been ad hoc for specific tasks of protest. Adams was the first
to propose and secure a Committee of Correspondence on a permanent footing. Its purpose, as Edward
Collins wrote, was to organize in such a way that it could be utilized that spirit of suspicion,
Discontent and Rebellion, which he had long been fomenting in Massachusetts.
Election to the 21-man Committee of Correspondence was spurned by the conservative leaders of
the American Resistance, Hancock, Speaker Thomas Cushing, and several select men and
wealthy merchants.
As a result, the leadership of the Committee devolved upon determined radical spirits.
Sam Adams, the returned Dr. Thomas Young, and William Cooper.
Eighteen of the committee members were Sons of Liberty.
James Otis, as frontman, was made original chairman, but Otis' insanity soon forced
Adams to take up the chairmanship.
Assurances of support for Boston's militant leadership were secured by Adams from such
eminent friends and allies as Elbridge Gary of the town of Marblehead and James Warren
of Plymouth. Sam Adams was now in his element and on November 20 this driving libertarian
leader presented from the committee to the Boston town meeting the Boston Resolves. The
Resolves consisted essentially of a state of the rights of the colonist written by Adams
Adam's stunned the Tories by going beyond mere positive law to rest his case for liberty,
squarely upon that old clarion call to revolution, natural rights. For if rights were derived
Adam's asserted man's natural rights bluntly and lucidly.
Among the natural rights of the colonies are these, first, a right to life, secondly, to
to liberty, thirdly, to property, together with the right to support and defend them
in the best manner they can. Those are evident branches of, rather than deductions from,
the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the First Law of Nature. All men have a right
to remain in the state of nature as long as they please. And in case of intolerable oppression,
Civil or Religious, to leave the society they belong to and enter into another. Every natural
right not explicitly given up or from the nature of a social compact necessarily ceded remains.
The list of infringements summed up the specific grievances of the colonists against the British
for violations of their rights, assumption by Parliament of the power to legislate for
The appointment of a corps of royal customs officials supported by fleets and by troops quartered in Boston and New York without their consent, payment from taxes of gubernatorial and judicial salaries by Britain rather than by the assemblies, extension of the powers of vice admiralty courts, restriction of American iron-and-hat
manufacturing, and attempts to impose an Anglican Episcopate in America.
The determined opposition of the conservative patriots to Adam's campaign proved to be
the pivish expression of a small minority of the people of Massachusetts.
The 300 members of the Boston town meeting of November 20 voted unanimously to approve
and disseminate these resolutions.
What is more, the resolutions had immediate success in other towns throughout Massachusetts
and spread like wildfire, along with the idea of permanent committees of correspondence.
Massachusetts opinion was set ablaze, and even as cautious a liberal as John Adams was
moved to declare that there was no more justice left in Britain than there was in hell, that
and I wished for war.
Town after town endorsed the Boston Resolves.
Of the 240 towns in Massachusetts, 80, including the major towns, quickly voted support, while
most of the others prepared to follow.
Along with this approval, each town appointed its own permanent committee of correspondents,
led by Plymouth, then Cambridge, Marblehead, Charlestown and Newbury Port, and the town
The decision of Pembroke enthusiastically made the Adams resolutions even more explicit.
The American people, it declared, are warranted by the laws of God and nature, in the use
of every rightful act and energy of policy, stratagem and force.
In that era, being poor was deemed rather a disgrace than a badge of merit.
Hence Tories, such as Thomas Hutchinson, whose interpretation of the history of Massachusetts
The resistance movement is a collection of poor and lowly rabble. In reality, however,
this was a true mass movement, led by the bulk of the property in almost every town
of Massachusetts, small or large. Only a few towns of varying size, such as Salem and Weston,
Alarm by the rapid spread of popular rebellious agitation and seeing the implication of the
resolves for revolution and independence, Governor Hutchison called together the General
Court in early 1773 and tried to browbeat it into acknowledging absolute parliamentary
authority. But this only succeeded in fanning higher the revolutionary flames. The General
The Federal Court and the Boston town meeting flatly repulsed his efforts. To Hutchinson's
accusations of thoughts of revolution and independence, Sam Adams and Boston countered
with the great and overriding natural law of self-preservation and liberty. In the Massachusetts
Spring elections of 1773, the radicals swept all before them. No longer did Adams receive
The popular liberals also ousted two Tories from the council, asked to have Hutchinson
Hudson and Lieutenant Governor Oliver recalled and threatened to impeach the judges should
they dare to accept salaries from the Crown.
Hutchinson responded by dissolving the general court.
The Boston Resolves and news of the creation of the Boston Committee of Correspondents
were spread to other colonies by the committee and had immediate impact.
Undoubtedly, by this time, Sam Adams and other far-sighted radicals, realizing the implications
of natural rights theory, were toying with the idea of American independence. Samuel
Parsons of Providence wrote to Adams in March 1773 that the idea of unalterable allegiance
to any prince or state is inadmissible. Our seventeenth-century ancestors, he added, were
We're virtually independent of Great Britain. Was this not a useful hint for the future?
Adams intended to urge the sending of a circular letter to all the other colonies, calling
for committees of correspondence in all the provincial assemblies. But here he was anticipated
by the radical leaders of Virginia, who were inspired by Boston's committee to establish
a committee of correspondence of the provincial house. Six years earlier, Richard Henry Lee
had proposed inter-colonial committees of correspondence. Now, Lee, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson
led the Virginia House of Burgesses on March 12, 1773 to create the first standing committee
of correspondence of a provincial assembly. The Virginia committee was to concentrate
naturally on the gas pay inquiry rather than on Massachusetts judicial salaries. The first
The first assembly to follow Virginia's example was Rhode Island, which in mid-May chose a committee of leading merchants and politicians of the colony, including Stephen Hopkins, Moses Brown and Henry Ward.
Rhode Island was quickly followed by the lower houses of Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, led of course by Sam Adams.
Thus, by June 1773, New England and Virginia had established assembly committees of correspondence.
The other colonies were slower to join in the campaign.
First came South Carolina in July, and by the end of the year, all colonial assemblies
except New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had selected committees of correspondence.
New York and New Jersey joined in the first two months of 1774, but Pennsylvania's House,
run by the Tory Speaker Joseph Galloway, failed completely to respond.
The provincial committees of correspondence, however, proved to be of little importance,
necessarily bureaucratic and slow-moving organizations tied to approval of their assemblies and unable
When people to meet when their governing body was not in session, the provincial committees proved too staid and cumbersome to be effective.
Instead, it was the local committees, begun in Boston by Sam Adams, that proved to be the important and efficient engines of agitation and revolution.
These freewheeling local committees were the major instruments of revolution.
For a successful revolution, not only needs ideology, leadership and mass support and enthusiasm,
it needs also institutions and organization.
That organization was now being supplied by the local committees of correspondence in
which the old Sons of Liberty were glad to submerge.
Meanwhile, the Royal Commission of Inquiry, whose menace had touched off such intense
reaction, was mired in ignominious failure. The Commission, denounced as an inquisition
at every hand, could not haul convicts to England unless they were caught. And how could
evidence of crime be gathered when virtually the entire colony approved the deed? Furthermore,
Furthermore, the Commission was dependent on the local authorities for warrants for information
and for enforcing arrests. But local authority was elected by the populace, and in whole-hearted
sympathy with the alleged criminals in the Gaspe affair. Even if the authorities had
cooperated, the Crown could have done little about the stubborn refusal of the people of
Providence to point out the guilty parties in the burning of the Gaspe. Remarkably, not
A single informer could be found. After holding meetings in January and May, the Gaspé Commission
acknowledged defeat and disbanded in June 1773. The disbanding of the commission was
aided by Lord Dartmouth's opposition to any trials in England. A Whig, Dartmouth had succeeded
Lord Hillsborough as Secretary of State for the Colonies in the fall of 1772. As a corollary,
Lieutenant Duddingston was successfully sued by some merchants for confiscating their rum
and sugar. Customs officials throughout the colonies relaxed their enforcement and seizures
was declined by nearly three-fifths. In sum, by mid-1773, the American revolutionary movement
had progressed far beyond where it was the year before. Massachusetts and South Carolina
were embroiled in chronic problems with Great Britain, but more important, the British revenue
New ship Gaspe had been burned and its Royal Commission of Inquiry cleverly thwarted by
the people of Rhode Island. And rising out of this victory was the rapid development
of a crucial network of committees of correspondence that embraced towns, counties and assemblies
of the colonies. Spurred into being by the Gaspe affair, these committees remained as
and its Continuing Expressions of Public Opinion and Revolutionary Pressure