Background
The General Assembly was in session in Williamsburg in May 1774, five months after the Boston Tea Party, when legislators received news that Parliament had passed the Boston Port Act to punish Bostonians by closing Boston Harbor. On May 24, the House of Burgesses adopted a resolution to condemn the action of Parliament and declare June 1 as a day of fasting in solidarity with the people of Boston. Governor Dunmore immediately summoned the legislators to the Council chamber in the Capitol and dissolved the assembly. By dissolving the assembly, the governor temporarily abolished the colony’s legislature, which could not constitutionally meet again until after the governor called for a new election of members of the House of Burgesses and summoned them to meet in Williamsburg.
The former burgesses were unwilling to return to their homes without taking any action. They gathered informally at Raleigh Tavern and elected Peyton Randolph, the speaker of the House of Burgesses, as moderator of the meeting. The men promised to cooperate with the other colonies and appeal to the king to restore the relationship between Great Britain and the colonies that had existed before Parliament passed and the king signed the first laws to tax residents of North America. News of the passage of additional laws to punish Boston, which together with the Boston Port Act became known as the Intolerable Acts, arrived in Williamsburg a few days later. The former burgesses remaining in the city reassembled and issued a call for a convention to meet in Williamsburg in August to consider what additional measures to take and to select delegates to represent Virginia in the First Continental Congress. They were acting on their own authority, outside the normal institutions and practices of the British or colonial constitutions.
The organizers of the convention invited the former burgesses, as the legally elected representatives of the colony’s voters, to attend. Dunmore also issued writs for election of members of a new House of Burgesses in July, and the men elected then also regarded themselves as eligible to attend the convention.
The word convention had a specific historic meaning dating to the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and 1689 in England, when the two houses of Parliament declared that James II had in effect abdicated by fleeing England and invited William and Mary to take the throne. The actions of members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords were not formal acts of Parliament because the Crown had not taken part. Their meeting was known as the Convention Parliament, convention being the proper name for a meeting of members of Parliament who adopted no laws. A convention was the legitimate, immediate, undiluted embodiment of representatives of the people. That the men in Williamsburg chose to call their August 1774 gathering a convention suggests that they followed a seventeenth-century English precedent that they believed provided legitimacy for their actions.
The First Convention (August 1–August 6, 1774)
During the summer of 1774, white men in most or all Virginia counties endorsed the participation of their burgesses in the August convention, and in a few counties, they elected or re-elected delegates to represent them in the convention. In many or most counties, they also adopted instructions or recommendations to their representatives, such as the Fairfax Resolves. The widespread participation of the colony’s voting men in 1774 when they approved their representatives’ participation in the convention and adopted their resolutions gave a large measure of legitimacy to the actions of the men who attended the convention in August.
The First Convention met in a tavern in Williamsburg from August 1 to August 6, 1774. Randolph, who had been speaker of the House of Burgesses, chaired the convention as president. More than a hundred men attended, but the exact number is not known. Styling themselves “his Majesty’s dutiful and loyal Subjects,” they appointed seven delegates to represent Virginia in the First Continental Congress that was scheduled to meet in Philadelphia in September: Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison, and Edmund Pendleton, in order of seniority. Convention delegates pledged solidarity with the people of Boston and promised to discontinue the use of tea, “the detestable Instrument which laid the Foundation of the present Sufferings of our distressed Friends in the Town of Boston.”
The convention adopted an agreement (called an association) to prohibit the importation of merchandise from Great Britain in hopes of pressuring British merchants to persuade Parliament to repeal or relax the obnoxious measures. (That technique had appeared to work when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766.) The convention also promised to stop the export of tobacco to British mercantile houses in August 1775 if the colonists’ grievances were not sooner redressed. It authorized men to form county and town committees to enforce the association and to prevent an undue rise in prices as a result of the anticipated shortage of imported goods. In spite of some later scholarship, the county and town committees were not called committees of safety until the twentieth century.
The Second Convention (March 20–March 27, 1775)
In October 1774, the First Continental Congress adopted an association similar to the Virginia association and endorsed the creation of local committees to enforce the Continental Association. Congress also requested that the British government retreat from its stern measures and new policy of taxing residents of the colonies. Uncertain how the king and Parliament would react, the delegates in Philadelphia resolved to return in the spring of 1775 if the king and Parliament did not respond favorably. In keeping with that resolve and also with a provision that the First Convention had adopted in August 1774, Speaker Randolph, who had been president of the Congress, issued a summons for a second convention to meet in March 1775 and elect delegates to the Second Continental Congress.
Randolph invited men who had been eligible to attend the First Virginia Convention to attend the Second Virginia Convention in the town of Richmond, far enough inland from the coast that British warships and marines could not prevent the delegates from meeting. About 120 delegates met from March 20 through March 27, 1775, in Henrico Parish Church, which early in the nineteenth century was renamed St. John’s Episcopal Church. Again, the delegates elected Randolph president. They approved the proceedings of the First Continental Congress, thanked the delegates who had represented Virginia, and appointed Peyton Randolph, George Washington, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Edmund Pendleton, Benjamin Harrison, and Richard Bland, in order of seniority, to represent Virginia in the Second Continental Congress.
The most famous event of the Second Convention took place on March 23, the fourth day. Patrick Henry moved “that this Colony be immediately put into a posture of Defence.” The colonial law that regulated the militia had expired without being renewed when the royal governor dissolved the General Assembly in May 1774, and the people therefore had no legal authority under which they could organize to defend themselves from Native tribes on the frontier, from enslaved people who might present a danger anywhere, or from the king’s forces on the coast. Henry delivered his famous “Liberty or Death” speech in support of his resolution, which narrowly passed. The convention created a twelve-member committee that consisted of delegates from various parts of the colony and the most experienced military men, including George Washington, “to prepare a Plan for embodying, arming and disciplining such a Number of Men as may be sufficient for that purpose.”
The Third Convention (July 17–August 26, 1775)
The Third Convention also met in Henrico Parish Church from July 17 through August 26, 1775. Peyton Randolph issued the call for the meeting on June 26, two days after the end of a short, abortive session of the General Assembly. The situation in the colonies had grown rapidly more dangerous since the Second Convention, and the royal governor had actually fled the capital during the assembly session to take up residence on a British warship. In June 1775, the Second Continental Congress issued a declaration of the causes of taking up arms and created the Continental Army, with Virginian George Washington as commander in chief.
Records indicate that 109 delegates attended the Third Convention, though not all of them attended all of the time. They elected Randolph president, but on August 16, the members allowed him to return to Williamsburg to recoup his health so that he could travel back to Philadelphia and resume his seat in Congress. Robert Carter Nicholas, the treasurer of the colony, presided during the final days of the convention.
The convention elected a new delegation to represent Virginia in the Continental Congress: in order of seniority, Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson Jr., Richard Bland, and George Wythe. Bland declined “on Acct. of his Advanced Age,” and the convention elected Francis Lightfoot Lee to replace him. The convention created a two-regiment army with Patrick Henry as commander in chief. It also authorized county committees to reconstitute the militia in each county, and it recruited a force of minutemen ready to march anywhere at a moment’s notice. The convention issued paper money to pay for the military forces and created an eleven-member Virginia Committee of Safety to act as the executive arm of the unofficial, revolutionary government. The committee issued commissions to officers of the two regiments, the minutemen, and the militia, and it appointed or hired contractors to supply provisions, horses, guns, and other military supplies.
The convention also adopted an ordinance—the conventions called their enactments ordinances, not laws, that being the proper style for an act of a convention—to authorize voters to elect new convention delegates for one-year terms in April 1776. The convention also directed the colony’s treasurer to pay the delegates’ travel expenses and per diem wages as if they were legally elected burgesses attending the General Assembly. Except in the administration of justice, the conventions, Committee of Safety, and the county committees took over and exercised nearly all legislative and executive governmental responsibilities in Virginia from the end of August 1775 to the sixth day of July 1776.
The Fourth Convention (December 1, 1775–January 20, 1776)
The Fourth Virginia Convention assembled in Henrico Parish Church in Richmond on December 1, 1775, in response to a summons that Robert Carter Nicholas, acting president of the Third Convention, issued on November 16. On the last day of the Third Convention, its members had voted to reassemble in Richmond at the call of the president. Peyton Randolph, president of the first three conventions, had died in Philadelphia on October 22, while attending the Second Continental Congress, so Nicholas issued the call, probably after consultations with military leaders and members of the Virginia Committee of Safety.
On the first day of the Fourth Convention, the members elected Edmund Pendleton to serve as president. He had relinquished his seat in Congress to become president of the Committee of Safety in August. The convention then adjourned until Monday, December 4, to meet in Williamsburg at the College of William and Mary. Too few delegates made it to Williamsburg in time, so the work of the convention actually began on December 5. A total of 113 delegates attended the convention at one time or another before it adjourned on January 20, 1776. On December 15, they elected Carter Braxton to succeed Peyton Randolph in the colony’s delegation to the Continental Congress. The delegation remained unchanged until the summer of 1776, and Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson Jr., George Wythe, Francis Lightfoot Lee, and Carter Braxton were the Virginia signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Most of the work of the convention involved defensive measures. A skirmish between Virginia volunteers and the crew of a royal warship near Hampton in September had escalated tensions in the colony. Governor Dunmore recruited a regiment of Loyalists to fight for the king (the Queen’s Own Loyal Virginia Regiment) and on November 7, issued a proclamation of martial law and promised freedom to enslaved Virginians who joined him to fight for the king and against their former enslavers. The governor formed the men into another regiment (the Ethiopian Regiment). The Virginia Committee of Safety dispatched the Second Virginia Regiment to the outskirts of Norfolk to control Loyalists in the vicinity and in hopes of preventing Dunmore from expanding his hold on the southeastern corner of the colony.
On December 9, Dunmore ordered an attack on the Virginia emplacement at Great Bridge, a few miles south of Norfolk, but the Virginians defeated the British and in short order occupied the city. On the first day of 1776, British warships shelled Norfolk. Virginia soldiers and a reinforcement of men from North Carolina who were in the city then set fire to the residences and places of business of loyalists, and the flames spread and destroyed most of the city. The Fourth Convention and the Committee of Safety allowed uncontradicted reports that the British had burned the city to be published throughout the colonies. Dunmore’s proclamation and the blame for the destruction of Norfolk that Virginia officials allowed him to be burdened with undoubtedly won over many Americans who had been reluctant to embrace military resistance to the king even in defense of colonial liberties.
Congress sent Continental Army soldiers to reinforce the Virginians. The convention enlarged the colony’s armed force from two to nine regiments, and it and the Committee of Safety took additional steps to cooperate more closely with the other colonies and with the Continental Congress to defend Virginia against the forces of the king.
The Fifth Convention (May 5–July 6, 1776)
An ordinance that the Third Convention adopted in August 1775 enabled eligible voters to assemble in their counties on court day in April 1776 and elect convention delegates for one-year terms. Voters elected two delegates in each of the colony’s sixty-one counties, two in the District of West Augusta (a portion of Augusta County surrounding Pittsburgh), and one in the city of Williamsburg. The few residents of the original capital of Jamestown and the president and professors of the College of William and Mary also elected one delegate each. Voters in King and Queen County did not elect their delegates until May because bad weather prevented them from assembling on court day, and voters in the burned-out borough of Norfolk did not elect their delegate until May, either. In several counties and in Williamsburg, voters also elected alternate delegates to represent them while their regularly elected delegates were in Philadelphia representing the colony in the Second Continental Congress.
Of the 126 delegates and 6 alternates who had been eligible to attend the Fourth Convention, 88 won election to the Fifth. It was the largest turnover in any general election in Virginia since that of 1758. The ordinance of elections excluded clergymen from the convention, which disqualified two members of the Fourth Convention, and it also excluded army officers, sheriffs, and other men who held posts of profit, which disqualified ten other delegates. Local rivalries or other circumstances largely unrelated to the crisis within the empire brought about the defeat of several convention delegates. A few men chose not to stand for reelection, but a few who did lost their seats, and some who retained their seats won very close contests.
It is unclear whether the large turnover of members represented an increase in strength for advocates of the most aggressive measures. Some of the men who replaced experienced delegates were also men of experience and had served in one or more of the first conventions or in the House of Burgesses earlier. An observer who watched the same men that autumn after they returned to the Capitol as members of the first House of Delegates under the new constitution wrote that the men were “not quite so well dressed, nor so politely Educated, nor so highly born” as the members of “some Assemblies have formerly been,” but he believed that in carrying out their large and unprecedented responsibilities they were “full as honest, less intriguing, more sincere.”
By then, the colonies were in a state of war with Great Britain. In December 1775, the king had signed an act of Parliament that declared the colonies to be in rebellion and no longer entitled to royal protection. As Richard Henry Lee wrote to Patrick Henry mid-way through the April 1776 elections, the act of Parliament had “to every legal intent and purpose dissolved our Government, uncommissioned every magistrate, and placed us in the high road to Anarchy. In Virginia we have certainly no Magistrate lawfully qualified to hang a murderer, or any other villain offending ever so atrociously against the state. We cannot be Rebels excluded from the King’s protection and Magistrates acting under his authority at the same time. This proves the indispensable necessity of our taking up government immediately, for the preservation of Society.”
The elections ordinance specified that the convention meet on the first Monday in May 1776. The elected delegates convened on May 6 in the chamber of the House of Burgesses in the Capitol in Williamsburg. A total of 128 delegates and alternates attended the convention before it adjourned on July 5. When the delegates first met, they elected Edmund Pendleton president by an unrecorded vote. He defeated Thomas Ludwell Lee, who was probably nominated because he was an ally of Patrick Henry. Henry had resigned as colonel of the First Virginia Regiment and commander in chief of the colony’s new army in February as a consequence of differences with the Committee of Safety, of which Pendleton had been president.
On May 15 after two days of debate, members of the convention unanimously adopted a resolution that instructed the Virginia delegates in Congress to introduce a motion “to declare the United Colonies free and independent states” and to create a committee “to prepare a Declaration of Rights and such a plan of government as will be most likely to maintain peace and order in this colony, and secure substantial and equal liberty to the people.” The president appointed a twenty-eight-member committee to prepare the declaration and form of government. The committee included most of the experienced delegates under the chairmanship of veteran legislator Archibald Cary. Pendleton included some promising young men, chief among them Edmund Randolph, alternate delegate from Williamsburg sitting in for George Wythe, who was representing the colony in Congress, and James Madison, making his political debut as a delegate from Orange County. Pendleton appointed a few additional delegates to the committee later, the most important of them being George Mason, who arrived late and took his seat in the convention on May 18.
Mason took the lead in the committee and introduced drafts for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which the convention unanimously adopted on June 12, and the state’s first written constitution, which they unanimously adopted on June 29. In doing so, members of the Convention of 1776 took the bold step of separating themselves from their king, which meant beginning the Revolutionary War; but they clearly did not intend to begin a revolution in government or society.
The principal analyses of the motivations of Virginia’s political leadership at the outbreak of the American Revolution emphasize the non-revolutionary purposes of that leadership. Thad W. Tate’s 1962 article, “The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia: Britain’s Challenge to Virginia’s Ruling Class, 1763–1776,” maintained that the leaders opted for independence to protect their privileged status and political and social institutions from an outside threat. Woody Holton’s 1999 book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia, maintained that the leaders opted for independence to protect their privileged status and political and social institutions from domestic threats. Brent Tarter’s 2013 book, The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia, agreed with both. Marc Engal’s 1980 article “The Origins of the Revolution in Virginia: A Reinterpretation,” better describes regional rivalries late in the colonial period than it does the actual causes of the revolution, but those rivalries and differences of perspective may have affected the pace at which men in different regions embraced independence.
The convention did much other important work. On June 20, Patrick Henry moved to reduce the colony’s delegation to Congress from seven members to five. The convention then elected George Wythe, Thomas Nelson Jr., Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and Francis Lightfoot Lee, in order of seniority. That excluded Carter Braxton and Benjamin Harrison, both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence before they returned home to Virginia. For a majority of the time, the delegates worked on draft resolutions and ordinances to control loyalists, enlarge the army, redeploy forces in response to movements of Dunmore and British warships, procure supplies for the war, and issue orders for securing the western frontiers from feared First Nations and loyalist assaults. They adopted ordinances to create Senate districts and set a date for election of the first state senators; to authorize justices of the peace to remain in office and continue to administer justice; to specify oaths of office and an oath of allegiance to be imposed on suspected loyalists; and to create a board of commissioners for the state’s new little navy.
By a resolution, the delegates amended the Book of Common Prayer to replace prayers for the king and members of the royal family with prayers for the magistrates of Virginia. By another resolution, they adopted a device for the seal of the new state. It depicted “Virtus the genius of the commonwealth dressed like an Amazon resting on a Spear with one hand and holding a Sword in the other and treading on Tyranny represented by a man prostrate a Crown fallen from his Head a broken chain in his left Hand and a Scourge in his right,” with the new motto of the commonwealth, “Sic semper tyrannis,” thus always to tyrants. That visually completed the constitutional revolution of removing the king from the government of Virginia.
The convention included a provision of fundamental importance in the ordinance to enable justices of the peace to continue in office: “That the common law of England, all statutes or acts of parliament made in aid of the common law prior to the fourth year of the reign of king James the first”—that is, before the first settlement of Virginian 1607—”and which are of a general nature, not local to that kingdom, together with the several acts of the general assembly of this colony now in force, so far as the same may consist with the several ordinances, declarations, and resolutions of the general convention, shall be the rule of decision, and shall be considered as in full force until the same be altered by the legislative power of the colony.” That provision effectively re-enacted some British statutes, parts of the common law of England, and the laws of the colony then in force in Virginia.
A few minutes after the delegates adopted the new constitution, they elected Patrick Henry governor, chose members of the Council of State, and appointed Edmund Randolph attorney general. The convention adjourned on July 5, 1776, not yet knowing that on July 2, Congress had voted for independence and on July 4, had adopted the Declaration of Independence. The two actions of Congress and the implementation of the new Virginia Constitution, with the swearing in of Patrick Henry as governor on July 6, made Virginia one of the independent United States of America.
