On this day 250 years ago, Lt. Gov. William Bull of South Carolina (who would end up a Loyalist) wrote to Lord Dartmouth that South Carolina considered the dispute between the Colonies and the British Government to be a choice between “liberty or slavery”.
Month: July 2024
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On this day the people of the Town of Biddeford, Massachusetts (now Maine) met at the First Parish Meetinghouse to adopt resolutions opposing the closure of the Port of Boston and the Intolerable Acts. The inhabitants of the town pledged their persons and fortunes to the Patriot cause and to hold as an enemy of the country anyone who refused to take the pledge.
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On this day 250 years ago Thomas Jefferson is sick at home in Monticello and unable to travel to Williamsburg to attend the Virginia Convention. However, Jefferson had completed his pamphlet on A Summary View of the Rights of British America and dispatched a servant to ride to Williamsburg to deliver a copy to Peyton Randolph and another copy to Clementina Rind for printing and distribution to the other delegates to the Virginia Convention who were scheduled to meet in Williamsburg beginning August 1.
A Summary View would create Jefferson’s reputation across all the Colonies and in Britain as one of the leading thinkers and writers of the Patriots. In A Summary View Jefferson laid out an explanation for why “the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.” He also previewed the ideas he would restate and summarize in the Declaration of Independence two years later. But several stirring passages would not make it into the Declaration including his assertion of a natural right of immigration to America:
our ancestors, before their emigration to America … possessed a right which nature has given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness.
and his condemnation of slavery:
The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.
Sources: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffsumm.asp; https://virginiahistory.org/learn/thomas-jeffersons-1774-summary-view-rights-british-america; Trend & Tradition, (Spring ed. 2024) (Williamsburg)
Also on this day 250 years ago, the people of Deerfield, Massachusetts erected a Liberty Pole.
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=230729
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On this day 250 years ago, the people of Buckingham County, Virginia adopted resolutions in opposition to the Intolerable Acts and in support of the people of Boston and also elected delegates to the Virginia Convention.
Also on this day in Williamsburg, Virginia, Clementina Rind’s Virginia Gazette published on its front page an article by Thomas Mason that included the following incendiary language:
Let them draw up and transmit to England, an address to your gracious sovereign, expressive of the most affectionate loyalty to his person, . . . but
assuring him of their determined resolution to sacrifice their lives, and
every thing that is valuable to them, rather than submit to the legisla-
tion of a British parliament; and . .. that if his majesty, deaf to these their reiterated complaints, should persist in permitting such acts of parliament to be enforced in America, his subjects of that great continent, though struck
with horror at the idea of disloyalty to his sacred person, are, though
reluctantly, firmly determined to break off all connections with Great
Britain, and trust to that God who hath told them that the race is not
always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, to support their en-
deavours in preserving that liberty they received from their British an-
cestors. . . .But the stopping up the port of Boston, and prohibiting the owners
from using their own wharfs, under colour of acts of parliament, which
the inhabitants, or their representatives, had no share in framing, is
such an illegal stretch of power, such a despotic invasion of property,
that may be legally resisted, and ought not to be submitted to; indeed,
I look upon it as little less than a declaration of war, which would justify
all America in running immediately to arms, to repel so horrible an at-
tack upon their libertiesRind’s Virginia Gazette published Resolves from the Counties of Henrico, Caroline, Gloucester, Isle of Wight, Stafford, Hanover and Elizabeth City (now the City of Hampton) expressing support for Boston, opposing the Intolerable Acts, pledging aid to Boston, requesting a halt to the African slave trade, and electing delegates to the Virginia Convention. Rind stated that she had received similar resolutions from other Virginia counties but did not have enough space to publish them all.
Clementina Rind also reported that a “meeting of the freeholders and others” of Surry County had pledged “150 barrels of Indian corn and wheat and . . . eleven or twelve hundred barrels of commodities . . . for the benefit of those firm and intrepid sons of liberty, the Bostonians.”
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On this day 250 years ago, the Liberty Boys of Georgia led by John Houstoun, George Walton, Archibald Bulloch and Noble W. Jones held a meeting at Tondee’s Tavern in Savannah. They appointed a committee to draft resolutions opposing the Intolerable Acts, and they scheduled another meeting for August 10 to consider the resolutions.
Sources: https://mrsstreeter.wixsite.com/georgiastudies/unit-3; https://jeannetteaustin.medium.com/tondees-tavern-in-savannah-georgia-9789801042f8; https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-tondees-tavern
Also on this day the citizens of Accomack County, Virginia met to adopt Resolutions in support of the people of Boston and to elect delegates to the Virginia Convention.
And on this day 250 years ago in London, Benjamin Franklin forwarded to America 200 copies of a pamphlet recently published in London entitled A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to a Share in the Legislature; Which Is the Fundamental Principle of the British Constitution of State for distribution to the delegates to the upcoming Continental Congress and to other Americans.
Source: https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%2227%20July%201774%22&s=1111311111&sa=&r=5&sr=
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On this day 250 years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia the Albemarle County Resolutions were adopted. They were drafted by Thomas Jefferson and previewed ideas that he would state more forcefully and succinctly two years later in his famous Declaration:
Resolved, that the inhabitants of the several states of British America are subject to the laws which they adopted at their first settlement, and to such others as have been since made by their respective legislatures, duly constituted and appointed with their own consent; that no other legislature whatever may rightfully exercise authority over them, and that these privileges they hold as the common rights of mankind, confirmed by the political constitutions they have respectively assumed, and also by several charters of compact from the crown.
Resolved, that these their natural and legal rights have in frequent instances been invaded by the parliament of Great Britain, and particularly that they were so by an act lately passed to take away the trade of the inhabitants of the town of Boston, in the province of Massachusetts Bay, that all such assumptions of unlawful power are dangerous to the rights of the British empire in general, and should be considered as its common cause, and that we will ever be ready to join with our fellow subjects, in every part of the same, in exerting all those rightful powers, which God has given us, for the re-establishing and guaranteeing such their constitutional rights, when, where, and by whomsoever invaded.
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On this day 250 years ago the Committee of Correspondence of Berkshire County, Massachusetts wrote to the Boston Committee of Correspondence of their planned response to the Massachusetts Government Act that the British Parliament had passed with the other Intolerable Acts earlier in the year. The Massachusetts Government Act provided that all judges would be appointed by the King instead of by Massachusetts’s elected Council as they had been before the Act went into effect. The court in Berkshire County was the first court scheduled to open with judges appointed by the Crown after the Act went into effect. The Berkshire County Committee wrote that the “people this way” would “by no means submit to the New Regulations.” They said they were planning to prevent the court from sitting when it was scheduled to convene on August 16, “unless we should hear from you.”
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On this day 250 years ago Royal Governor Dunmore of Virginia wrote that he would “proceed immediately to [Pittsburgh] or the mouth of Wheeling with 250 or 350 good men as many more as can be spared in order to compel the Indians to a lasting peace.”
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On this day 250 years ago, at New Brunswick, New Jersey, “a general meeting of the Committees of the several Counties of the Province of New Jersey” was held to adopt resolutions in opposition to the Intolerable Acts, to organize aid for the people of Boston and to elect “James Kinsey, William Livingston, John DeHart, Stephen Crane, and Richard Smith . . . Delegates to represent this Province in the General Continental Congress, to be held at the City of Philadelphia, on or about the first day of September next.”
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On this day 250 years ago in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Assembly selected eight men to serve as Delegates to the First Continental Congress — John Dickinson, Joseph Galloway, Thomas Mifflin, George Ross, John Morton, Edward Biddle, Samuel Rhoads, and Charles Humphreys. Unlike the delegations of most of the other colonies, which were filled with ardent Patriots, the Pennsylvania delegation was balanced between radicals and conservatives. Nevertheless all but two of these men would later hold important posts in the national and Pennsylvania governments and thus can be considered Founding Fathers.
Galloway would soon defect to the British. Although he did not join the British, as a Quaker and a pacifist, Humphreys could not support Independence and knew it would prolong the War. So Humphreys would resign from the Second Continental Congress and sit out the Revolution.
On This Day In The Revolution 