In this address to King George III, memorial to the House of Lords, and remonstrance to the House of Commons dated December 8, 1764, members of the House of Burgesses articulate their objections to the Stamp Act and assert their sole right to tax Virginians. Despite colonial dissent, the king approved the Stamp Act on March 22, 1765.
In this document signed on May 30, 1774, twenty-five members of the former House of Burgesses call for a convention to determine the colony’s response after the royal governor, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, dissolved the House of Burgesses for protesting Parliament’s closure of Boston Harbor. The convention, which took place in Williamsburg in August 1774, was the first of five revolutionary conventions in Virginia.
In this excerpt from June 14, 1775, a committee of the House of Burgesses assigned to investigate the Gunpowder Incident gives its report of lawyer Benjamin Waller’s testimony. Waller claims that threats by royal governor John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, to free enslaved people turned more colonists against the governor than seizing the powder did.
Members of the House of Burgesses signed this nonimportation agreement on June 22, 1770, replacing an association signed the previous year. The new association exempts more goods from the list of banned imports to garner support from merchants and smaller farmers. The agreement also establishes five-person committees in each county to publish the names of associators who violated the resolutions.
Former members of the House of Burgesses signed this association on May 17, 1769, after royal governor Norborne Berkeley, baron de Botetourt, dismissed the assembly. The nonimportation agreement, based on a draft by George Mason and George Washington, bans imports of luxury goods and commodities above certain prices and prohibits the import of enslaved people. This was the first in a series of associations established to protest taxes levied by Parliament.
In this deposition collected as part of a June 14, 1775, report by a committee that the House of Burgesses appointed to investigate the unrest surrounding the Gunpowder Incident, Loyalist John Randolph testifies about the seizure of gunpowder from the Williamsburg Magazine in April 1775 by John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore. Randolph testifies that a group of Black Virginians offered to join Dunmore’s forces, but the governor rejected the idea. This encounter occurred after one of Dunmore’s enslaved servants overheard the governor threatening to free enslaved people to stop colonists’ resistance. Randolph’s report shows the agency of enslaved people, who offered to take up arms before Dunmore officially embraced the strategy himself in November of 1775, when he issued a proclamation offering freedom to people enslaved or indentured by Patriots who joined his army.
Eighty-nine members of the former House of Burgesses published this broadside on May 27, 1774, criticizing Parliament’s retaliatory actions against Boston for the Boston Tea Party as an attack on the constitutional rights of all colonists. The previous day, the royal governor, John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, dissolved the House of Burgesses for protesting Parliament’s closure of Boston Harbor. In this document, the burgesses call for a boycott against most goods imported by the East India Company and recommend an annual “general congress” of representatives from across the colonies. Throughout the summer of 1774, the burgesses and other colonists continued to organize resistance to British policies.
In this record of the September 21, 1734, proceedings of the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s assembly of elected representatives orders a bill to authorize a petition made by the Nottoway Indian Tribe to sell a portion of the Circle Tract of the Nottoway Reservation. Because the bill dismisses the Nottoway language interpreters, it is not clear whether the Nottoway fully understood the true implications of the sale. The bill passed into law in 1735. This was the first of many reservation land sales that took place in the eighteenth century.
On March 23, 1662, after hearing the report of a special committee, the House of Burgesses determines that the Patawomeck chief Wahanganoche has been unjustly framed for murder and penalizes the perpetrators, all planters in Westmoreland County. The burgesses also combine Westmoreland and Northumberland counties. Some spelling has been modernized.
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