Committees of Correspondence

Committees of Correspondence

Sources

Unity. In the 1760s Patriot leaders discovered that the key to resisting imperial policy was unity. Instigating popular outrage proved effective during the controversy surrounding the Stamp Act and Townshend duties. However, by 1770 the nonimportation associations had disbanded, and the only significant grievance to complain about was the tax on tea. Radical leaders such as Samuel Adams of Boston expected Parliament to resume taxing at anytime, especially since it had never surrendered the right to do so. Adams despaired of keeping the quarrel with Britain alive and fresh, but he did not have to wait long for a new crisis to emerge. Tension mounted following the Gaspee incident of 9 June 1772, when inhabitants of Providence, Rhode Island, burnt a customs schooner to its waterline. When royal authorities attempted to apprehend the culprits, propagandists filled the newspapers with cries of oppression. Meanwhile the Boston town meeting unsuccessfully petitioned Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson for a session of the Massachusetts General Assembly to look into the salaries of provincial judges. (Henceforth they would receive their salaries directly from the Crown.)

Function. After Hutchinson refused to comply, Adams on 2 November 1772 proposed an official network of corresponding societies to keep the public notified of political developments. These committees of correspondence would disseminate information and promote unity through formal expressions of support from the various towns in Massachusetts. The objective was “to state the rights of the Colonists and of this province in particular, as men, as Christians, and as subjects, to communicate and publish the same to the several towns in this province and to the world as the sense of this town, with the infringements and violations thereof that have been, or from time may be made—also requesting of each town a free communication of their sentiments on this subject.” The idea for such committees was not new, having been previously recommended by Adams in 1764 and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia in 1768. In fact, during the Stamp

Act crisis the Sons of Liberty formed correspondence circles among several towns, counties, and provinces. Yet it was through the efforts of Adams that the committees of correspondence became “a powerful political weapon for revolutionary action.”

Decision to Commit. At first other leading Bostonians gave a lukewarm response to Adams’s idea. Thomas Cushing, Samuel Phillips, and John Hancock all declined to serve on the committee because of business obligations. Eventually the Boston town meeting created a committee of twenty-one individuals chaired by James Otis to draft a statement of colonial rights and to list violations. On 20 November the Boston Committee of Correspondence presented a circular to the Massachusetts towns written by Adams, Joseph Warren, and Benjamin Church. It addressed the state of the imperial controversy and invited towns to form their own groups. Fifty-eight towns responded and set up committees on the Boston model. Many wrote their own declarations of colonial rights and printed them in newspapers. By January 1773, according to Hutchinson, more than eighty such organizations existed throughout the province. Special couriers carried dispatches between the various towns. Boston silversmith Paul Revere made approximately twenty rides for the Boston Committee of Correspondence between December 1773 and November 1775.

THE RIDES OF REVERE

The following is a compilation of Paul Revered activities as an express rider for a two-year period. All the rides originated and ended in Boston:

Date	Destination	Purpose
Source: David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 299-301.
17 Dec. 1773	1,2	News of Tea Party
14 May 1774	1,2,3	News of Intolerable Acts
Summer 1774	1	Meetings with Whig leaders “for calling a Congress”
11 Sept. 1774	1,2	Deliver Suffolk Resolves
29 Sept. 1774	2	Response to British measures
12 Dec. 1774	4	Warning of British attack
26 Jan. 1775	5	Liaison with N.H. assembly
7 Apr. 1775	7	Warning to move stores
16 Apr. 1775	6	Meeting with town leaders
18 Apr. 1775	6,7	Warning of British march; captured in Lincoln
20 Apr. 1775	8	“Out of door work” for the Committee of Safety
12 Nov. 1775	2	Studying methods for the manufacture of munitions

Key:
1-New York City	5-Exeter,N.H.
2-Philadelphia	6-Lexington, Mass
3-Hartford, Conn.	7-Concord, Mass
4-Portsmouth, N.H	8-Various Places

Network. By a resolution of the Virginia House of Burgesses on 12 March 1773, the movement to form committees of correspondence became intercolonial. While House members discussed the fallout of the Gaspee incident, Thomas Jefferson remembered that “We were all sensible that the most urgent of all measures [was] that of coming to an understanding with all the other colonies, to consider the British claims as a common cause of all, and to produce a unity of action....” As a result the House of Burgesses formed a committee “whose business it shall be to obtain the most early and authentic intelligence of all such acts and resolutions of the British Parliament... as may relate to or effect the British colonies in America, and to keep up and maintain a correspondence and communication with our sister colonies. ...” A group of eleven then sent copies of this statement to the other colonial legislatures; all but New Jersey’s assembly replied favorably. By the end of 1773 committees of correspondence had spread all the way to Charleston, South Carolina.

Worth. Many Loyalists saw the committees as treasonous. Hutchinson called them a “contagion” while Daniel Leonard of Taunton, Massachusetts, called them “the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the eggs of sedition.” Following the passage of the Coercive Acts, the committees proved their worth to the Whig cause. When the port of Boston was closed, the Newport, Rhode Island, committee reported in the Newport Mercury that “the insult and indignity” to Boston “ought to be viewed in the same odious light as a direct, hostile, invasion of every province on the continent.”

Significance. In late March 1774 Adams confidently wrote that “Colony communicates with colony” and that “the whole continent is now become united in sentiment and in opposition to tyranny.” Although his assessment was a bit overoptimistic, Adams correctly identified the value of committees of correspondence in fostering intercolonial solidarity. Many committee members served in their respective colonies’ elected assemblies, a fact that gave them strong credence when the legislatures appointed delegates to attend the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. By 1775 the committees of correspondence had been supplanted in importance by the committees of safety, the paramilitary bodies that secured arms and munitions and trained local militia in preparation for hostilities.

Sources

Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970);

John R. Galvin, Three Men of Boston (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976);

John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943);

Francis G. Walett, Patriots, Loyalists, and Printers: Bicentennial Articles on the American Revolution (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1976).