Committees of Correspondence

Committees of Correspondence. Throughout the eighteenth century, colonial assemblies designated some of their members as committees of correspondence to communicate with their agents in Britain and with other assemblies. Merchants used similar bodies to keep in touch and to lobby politicians. The most significant committee of correspondence, however, had different purposes and a more crucial impact.

In 1772, at the urging of Samuel Adams and others, Boston's Town Meeting created a committee of correspondence to maintain contacts with the selectmen of every Massachusetts town and, through them, with every town meeting. Its goals were to defeat Governor Thomas Hutchinson's efforts to create a proadministration faction; to rally support for Boston's resistance to imperial taxation; to educate townspeople about their constitutional rights and the threats to those rights; and, finally, to habituate the townspeople to concern themselves with larger political and constitutional issues. The committee's efforts proved spectacularly successful. Even before the 1774 crisis over the Coercive Acts, many Massachusetts towns were becoming more unified in resistance to Britain and had developed a nascent republicanism that would animate the populace as the revolutionary crisis unfolded. As Samuel Adams exulted in 1776, the Boston Committee of Correspondence had “raised the Spirits of the People, drawn their attention from picking up pins, and directed their Views to great objects.”

Loyalists such as Hutchinson claimed that the Boston Committee of Correspondence tricked gullible country folk into rebellion, but the reality was quite different. Encouraged to express their own ideas, the towns developed more radical democratic ideals than Boston itself. The committee of correspondence diffused and decentralized thought about the nature and structure of government, producing by late 1774 in the critical colony of Massachusetts a more unified and fiercer resistance to Britain and a more sophisticated ideology of republicanism, than had hitherto existed.
See also Colonial Era; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Revolutionary War.

Bibliography

Richard D. Brown , Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774, 1976.

John L. Bullion