On this day 250 years ago in Richmond the Third Virginia Convention resolved that

a Committee of Safety be appointed, to consist of eleven members, to be chosen by ballot, by the members of this Convention, who are to continue to the next sitting of the Convention

With this resolution the Virginia Convention established a government elected through a democratic process that was independent from British rule. In other words, Virginia became Independent of Great Britain.

Sources: https://www.revwartalk.com/edmund-pendleton/; https://lawlibrary.wm.edu/wythepedia/library/ProceedingsOfTheConventionOfDelegates17July1775.pdf

Also on that day in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Lt. Col. Loammi Baldwin wrote General Washington with intelligence received from Washington’s spy “Mr. J.C.” in Boston. Mr. J.C. was “John Carnes a grocer in the South Part of Boston” who stayed behind enemy lines to spy on the British. Carnes would go on to become a chaplain in the Continental Army and at the end of the War, a justice of the peace in Massachusetts.

Sources: “Lieutenant Colonel Loammi Baldwin to George Washington, 16 August 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0213. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 1, 16 June 1775 – 15 September 1775, ed. Philander D. Chase. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985, pp. 312–314.]; https://allthingsliberty.com/2016/10/general-washingtons-first-spy-mission-doomed-start/

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