Committees of Correspondence

Committees of Correspondence, colonial groups organized prior to the American War of Independence to mobilize public opinion and coordinate patriotic actions against Great Britain. They were established by private citizens, town councils, and legislatures in the American colonies. Although colonial legislatures had appointed committees and charged them with communicating with their counterparts in other provinces during the 1760s, the first revolutionary use of Committees of Correspondence occurred in Massachusetts in 1772. On November 2, the Boston town meeting voted to establish a 21-member committee “to state the Rights of the Colonists and of this Province in particular” to the other towns in the colony. Thereafter committees were formed throughout Massachusetts to respond to the Bostonians' communications. So successful were these committees in generating support for the province's radical opposition to the British that the Boston committee itself soon became a power in Massachusetts politics, where it assumed a leading role in organizing resistance to the Tea Act in 1773.

Intercolonial Committees of Correspondence were formed in most American legislatures after the Virginia House of Burgesses called for their creation in March 1773. These committees, along with local ones formed on the Massachusetts model, helped to spread opposition into nearly every county, city, and town in the colonies. As the revolutionary crisis intensified in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 and the imposition of the so-called Intolerable Acts of 1774, local committees, such as the Committees of Safety, began to exercise governmental functions and thus they heralded the later committee system.