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 liberties
Rind’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.”
On This Day In The Revolution 