Gaspee and the Committees of Correspondence

On the night of 9 to 10 June 1772, Rhode Island men boarded the Royal Navy schooner Gaspee, which had run aground in Narragansett Bay while chasing a packet. They burned the schooner and wounded its commander, Lieutenant William Dudingston. London answered with a commission of inquiry that could send suspects to England for trial. No one was convicted. The affair mattered because a colonial crowd had destroyed a navy vessel and the Crown's remedy looked like trial far from a local jury.

Boston created a standing Committee of Correspondence on 2 November 1772, with Samuel Adams among its organizers. The committee's job was to state the town's rights and to write to other Massachusetts towns. It was a letter network, not a legislature. Virginia took the next step on 12 March 1773. The House of Burgesses resolved to keep a committee to correspond with the other colonies on the Gaspee inquiry and on any similar threat. That is the intercolonial committee.

On 28 May 1773 the Massachusetts House agreed to Virginia's proposal and named its own corresponding committee. By the end of 1773 most colonies had a committee that could receive a letter and answer it.

When the Port Act arrived in 1774, those committees were already there. The Boston committee's circular of 13 May 1774 used that network to say the port closing was aimed at every colony, not at Boston alone.