“Letters of an extraordinary Nature”

When the Massachusetts General Court convened in Boston’s Town House in May 1773, one of the first substantial pieces of business the house did was to respond to a letter from the House of Burgesses in Virginia suggesting a committee to trade information and coordinate action.

On 28 May, Boston representative and house clerk Samuel Adams proposed setting up a committee of correspondence. Four staunch supporters of the royal government voted against it. The committee was soon stacked with strong Whigs.

The next day other committees took up the issues of banning slave imports, improving the militia, getting rid of Boston’s old powder house, and paying the legislature’s lobbyists in London, including Benjamin Franklin.

For a while, the Council kept asking for the house to join in a response to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson’s address opening the session, and the house kept putting that off. Adams himself went up the Council chamber to explain why. The Council stopped asking.

Then on 2 June:

The House was informed by one of its Members, that he had Matters that greatly concern’d the Province, to communicate with the Leave of the House. And the same Member moved that the Galleries be cleared.

Word went out that all members should come into the chamber, and the doors were closed.

Then Mr. Adams acquainted the House, that he had perceived the Minds of the People to be greatly agitated with a prevailing Report that Letters of an extraordinary Nature had been written and sent to England, greatly to the Prejudice of this Province:

That he had obtain’d certain Letters with different Signatures, with the Consent of the Gentleman from whom he had received them that they should be read in the House under certain Restrictions, namely that the said Letters be neither Printed nor Copied in Whole or in Part; and accordingly he offered them for the Consideration of the House.

The “Gentleman” who had given the letters to Adams was Thomas Cushing, speaker of the house, who had received them from Franklin. As quoted back here, Franklin had asked those letters to be shown around only to a small circle of men.

Adams argued that public concern meant that the entire house should hear the letters read aloud. Of course, if “the People” were “greatly agitated” about those documents, that was because Adams and his political allies had been talking about them for months.

TOMORROW: Behind closed doors.