Virginia Proposes Standing Committees of Correspondence Among the Colonies

Committees to share news and coordinate protest were not new in 1773. The American Battlefield Trust notes that Bostonians formed one against the Currency Act in 1764, and that Bostonians and New Yorkers formed others against the Stamp Act the next year, but these groups were short-lived and dissolved once the offending act was dealt with. On November 2, 1772, the Trust says, Samuel Adams used a Boston town meeting to set up a standing Committee of Correspondence, partly in answer to the Crown's move to pay colonial judges' salaries. Its task was to state the rights of the colonists and to communicate them to the towns of Massachusetts and to the world.

On March 12, 1773, the Virginia House of Burgesses took the idea across colonial lines. Its resolutions named a standing committee of eleven, including Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, any six of whom could act. The committee was to gather early and authentic intelligence of acts of Parliament and proceedings of administration affecting the colonies, and to keep up a correspondence with the sister colonies. It was also told to look into a court of inquiry said to have been held in Rhode Island, with power to send persons accused of offences in America overseas for trial. The House agreed to the resolutions without a dissenting voice and ordered its speaker to send copies to the speakers of the other colonial assemblies, asking each to appoint people to correspond with the Virginia committee.

The Battlefield Trust reports that committees spread quickly: more than 80 in Massachusetts alone by early 1773, and committees in eleven of the thirteen colonies before the end of 1774. This standing network gave the colonies a way to share information and agree on a response without relying on royal governors or on Parliament. When a Continental Congress was called in September 1774, the committees provided a structure for choosing delegates, which is the step that leads toward the First Continental Congress and, in time, a common government.