Committees of correspondence

The news was typically spread via hand-written letters or printed pamphlets, which would be carried by couriers on horseback or aboard ships.

[1] A total of about 7,000 to 8,000 Patriots served on these committees at the colonial and local levels, comprising most of the leadership in their communities; Loyalists were naturally excluded.

The committees became the leaders of the American resistance to Great Britain, and largely directed the Revolutionary War effort at the state and local level.

The committees promoted patriotism and home manufacturing, advising Americans to avoid luxuries, and lead a more simple life.

[2] The first committees of correspondence were established in Boston in 1764 to rally opposition to the Currency Act and unpopular reforms imposed on the customs service.

[3] During the Stamp Act crisis the following year, the Province of New York formed a committee to urge common resistance among its neighbors to the new taxes.

The Province of Massachusetts Bay's correspondents responded by urging other colonies to send delegates to the Stamp Act Congress that fall.

Pro-revolutionary Patriot leaders in Boston, believing they were confronting increasingly hostile threats by the British royal government, established the first long-standing committee with the approval of a town meeting in late 1772.

In Delaware Colony, a committee of correspondence was established by Thomas McKean after ten years of agitation centered in New Castle County.

With imports from Britain cut off, the committees sought to make America self-sufficient, so they encouraged the cultivation of flax and the raising of sheep for wool.

[4] In November 1772 in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, and Mercy Otis Warren formed a committee in response to the Gaspée Affair and to the recent British decision to have the salaries of the royal governor and judges be paid by the British Crown rather than the colonial assembly, a measure which effectively stripped the colony of its means of holding public officials accountable to their constituents.

[7] In response to the news that the Port of Boston would be closed under the Boston Port Act, an advertisement was posted at the coffee house on Wall Street in New York City, a noted place of resort for shipmasters and merchants, inviting merchants to meet on May 16, 1774, at the Fraunces Tavern "in order to consult on measures proper to be pursued on the present critical and important situation.

[15] This caused friction with the more radical Sons of Liberty, known as the Committee of Mechanics faction, who held a meeting in the fields on July 6.

[23] In early March 1773, Dabney Carr proposed the formation of a permanent Committee of Correspondence before the Virginia House of Burgesses.