54. The Committees of Correspondence

As soon as the judges’ 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 explictly to declare, whether they would be freemen or slaves.” He concluded: “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 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 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 twenty-one man Committee of Correspondence was spurned by the conservative leaders of the American resistance—Hancock, Speaker Thomas Cushing, and several selectmen 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 front man, was made original chairman, but Otis’s 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 Gerry 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 Colonists,” written by Adams himself, and a “List of Infringements and Violation of Those Rights,” drawn up by young Dr. Joseph Warren. Adams 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 by man from his nature, then any body of positive law violating those rights can be and indeed must be challenged. Adams asserted man’s natural rights bluntly and lucidly:

Among the natural rights of the colonies are these: First, a right to life; secondly 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 a 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 Americans without their consent, and to tax them without their consent; 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 Adams’ campaign proved to be the peevish 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 Resolves. 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 I wished for war.” Town after town endorsed the Boston Resolves. Of the 240 towns in Massachusetts, eighty, 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 correspondence, led by Plymouth, then Cambridge, Marblehead, Charlestown, and Newburyport. And the town 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 has greatly influenced later historians) were wont to pillory the resistance movement as a collection of poor and lowly rabble. In reality, however, this was a true mass movement led by the bulk of the propertied in almost every town of Massachusetts, small or large. Only a few towns of varying size, such as Salem and Weston, failed to join the ranks.

Alarmed by the rapid spread of popular rebellious agitation, and seeing the implication of the Resolves for revolution and independence, Governor Hutchinson 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 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 significantly fewer votes than his colleagues in the House; and the towns reaffirmed their instructions in behalf of liberty. In Andover, the wealthiest citizen, Councillor Samuel Phillips, led the popular movement for the Resolves, and even Hatfield replaced its Tory representative, Israel Williams, with an eminent liberal of the town. The popular liberals also ousted two Tories from the Council, asked to have Hutchinson 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 Correspondence, were spread to other colonies by the committee, and had immediate impact. Undoubtedly by this time Sam Adams and other farsighted 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 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 intercolonial 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 Gaspée inquiry rather than on Massachusetts judicial salaries.

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 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, 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 wholehearted sympathy with the alleged criminals in the Gaspée 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 Gaspée. Remarkably, not a single informer could be found. After holding meetings in January and May, the Gaspée commission acknowledged defeat and disbanded in June 1773.* As a corollary, Lieutenant Dudingston was successfully sued by some merchants for confiscating their rum and sugar. Customs officials throughout the colonies relaxed their enforcement, and seizures 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 ship Gaspée 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 Gaspée affair, these committees remained as continuing expressions of public opinion and revolutionary pressure.

*Edward D. Collins, “Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolution,” American Historical Association, Annual Report (1901), p. 247.

*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. See Knollenberg, Growth of the American Revolution, pp. 84–86.