Lexington Alarm

Committees of correspondence

As the British Crown and Parliament policies created an increasingly greater divide with American colonists, the Sons of Liberty organization was founded. Samuel Adams led the creation of the Committees of correspondence, including the Committee of safety, to uphold the rights of colonists and communicate and respond to noteworthy events. Adams brought the issue before a town meeting in Boston on November 2, 1772. Soon the organization spread to other towns in Massachusetts and like-minded organizations were established by July 1773, in other colonies. A committee for intercolonial correspondence was established by Virginia's House of Burgesses. By 1774, there were committees established in every colony.

Wherever the power of Great Britain was thrown off or disavowed, all political control passed by its natural course into the hands of the people… Hence the primary movement was to bring the people to understand their interests and act in concert, and the first means used to attain this end was the establishment of Committees of Correspondence in different parts of the country.

— Jared Sparks, American historian and educator

The network that was created allowed for planning and execution of activities when the colonial assemblies and the Continental Congress were not in session. Although the committees were not started as revolutionary endeavors, according E. D. Collins' Committees of Correspondence, "Its importance as a piece of revolutionary machinery can hardly be overestimated."

Towns developed the methods that they would use to manage and respond to dispatches, with Boston central to the overall network's operations. There were up to 8,000 delegates, or members, to the committee across the colonies, which became a mechanism for patriots to communicate with other patriots. Loyalists did not have a similar means to communicate throughout the colonies, which impacted the result of the war.

A false alarm was generated when the British removed 250 half-barrels of gunpowder from a powder house in Charlestown, Massachusetts on September 1, 1774. Thirteen boats carried 260 British soldiers to carry off with the gunpowder. A man warned that British soldiers were headed for Cambridge, initiating the Powder Alarm. At about the same time, a communication was sent of the perceived threat, and a group of men left on horseback to investigate the happenings at the British camp. They reported that there was no movement there. In the meantime, a message that men were shot in Boston by the British was carried through Connecticut to New York by September 5 and the next day to Philadelphia, where the First Continental Congress was held on September 6. The Congress, with Joseph Palmer, planned for a network of couriers to transport messages throughout the colonies. A Committee of safety was formed in October 1774 to evaluate the need for alarms and set them in motion. Its eleven members at the beginning of 1775 were Benjamin Church, Richard Devens, Jabez Fisher, John Hancock, William Heath, Azor Orne, Joseph Palmer, John Pigeon, Joseph Warren, Abraham Watson, and Benjamin White.

Realizing the ramifications of a communication going out that would result in men being mustered and commencing to fight, Joseph Hawley, a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, wrote on February 22, 1775,

I have been most seriously contemplating the commission and most important trust of our committee of safety, and especially that branch of it which relates to their mustering the minutemen and others of the militia... The soldiers, when thus mustered... will suppose it their duty to fight... They will suppose that the continent have devolved the resolution ofthat question upon this province, and that this province have devolved it on the committee of safety, and that the committee, by calling them, have decided it... Thus, hostilities will be commenced...

When once the blow is struck it must be followed, and we must conquer, or all is lost forever... I beg of you, therefore, as you love your country, to use your utmost influence with our committee of safety, that the people be not mustered, and that hostilities be not commenced, until we have the express, categorical decision of the continent, that the time is absolutely come that hostilities ought to begin.