Author: Catherine Treesh

Catherine Treesh earned her PhD in history from Yale University. Her dissertation is entitled “Writing Union into Resistance: How Committees of Correspondence Forged a Continental Community” (2021).
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The Fincastle Resolutions

On January 20, 1775, freeholders in Fincastle County met and sent an address to Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress. Though not a series of resolutions in the traditional form, this address is known as the Fincastle Resolutions because the intent and content mirror those of the resolutions passed by dozens of Virginia counties in the summer and fall of 1774 in response to the Boston Port Act and the other Coercive Acts passed by the British Parliament. Like those other resolutions, the Fincastle address stated county residents’ political opinions on the imperial conflict and delimited their responsibilities to the empire and other colonists. In addition, the Fincastle Resolutions declared the county’s adherence to the First Continental Congress’s Continental Association and named a committee of fifteen men to enforce the boycott, thus linking the county to the broader continental resistance movement. However, as historian Jim Glanville argues, unlike the resolutions passed by other counties, the Fincastle Resolutions reflect western colonists’ interest in acquiring land and fighting Native tribes.

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The Fairfax Resolves

The Fairfax Resolves were the longest, most detailed set of resolutions written by disaffected Virginians in the summer of 1774. Likely drafted by George Mason and revised with assistance from George Washington, the Fairfax Resolves asserted the fundamental constitutional rights of the North American British colonists and called for a union of the colonies to protest the usurpation of these rights. Among other grievances, the resolves protested British overreach regarding taxation and representation, judicial powers, and trade and commerce in the colonies. The strategies to counter British oppression included nonimportation and nonexportation agreements and a continental congress to plan for a common defense of the colonists’ rights. The Fairfax Resolves were adopted by the freeholders of Fairfax County on July 18, 1774. They captured the feelings of many colonists at the time and had an impact far beyond the borders of Fairfax County: they heavily influenced Virginia’s colony-wide association and the First Continental Congress’s Continental Association.

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The Virginia Committee of Correspondence

The Virginia Committee of Correspondence was an eleven-man group formed by the House of Burgesses on March 12, 1773, in response to perceived threats to colonial charters and legislative authority resulting from the Gaspee affair. The burgesses ordered the Committee of Correspondence to write to other colonial legislatures with a request to share information about imperial legislation and any actions they might take in response. Colonial committees of correspondence previously had existed to facilitate transatlantic communication between the colonies and London, but the intent of the House of Burgesses was to create a permanent inter-colonial communication network that would be active in times of crisis and peace. In response to the request from the Virginia legislators, other colonial legislatures quickly agreed to form a network of committees of correspondence. These committees would help organize the First Continental Congress in 1774. The network that the Virginia Committee built was not itself revolutionary, but it did produce critical opportunities for colonists to acknowledge shared grievances and frame their local problems in terms of a broader community—all of which helped catalyze the American Revolution.

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