The Committee of Correspondence and the Stringer Bell Rule

The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum social media has been sharing an image from the Boston committee of correspondence records, showing what that group of hard-core activists was doing in December 1773.

Or rather, not showing.

These records are now held by the New York Public Library. The pages in question are in the subcollection “Minutes,” volume 6, pages 463–4. The whole collection is digitized but not transcribed, so you have to read a lot of pages or know what you’re looking for.

The committee of correspondence was an official arm of the Boston town meeting, and thus had some responsibility to keep public records. Most of those records are the letters the committee sent to committees in other towns and colonies, copied by town clerk William Cooper. It was a committee of correspondence, after all.

However, like the Continental Congress making itself a committee of the whole to debate sensitive matters like a little light treason off the record, the Boston committee had ways around openness.

As Stringer Bell reminded us on The Wire, you don’t take notes on a criminal conspiracy.

On Sunday, 12 December, a day after sending a subcommittee to meet with Francis Rotch about his ship Dartmouth and a day before meeting with colleagues from neighboring towns, the Boston committee gathered at the selectmen’s chamber in Faneuil Hall after dark on the Sabbath. But the record of that meeting is:

No Business transacted to be made matter of Record

The discussions with the other towns’ committees “continued thru. the Evening” on Monday. Not that we know what anyone said.

On Tuesday, the Boston men gathered again in the morning.

No Business transacted, matter of Record—

And in the evening.

No Business transacted, matter of Record—

There were no meetings on 15–16 December. Presumably all the committee members were busy at Old South Meeting-House and, well, elsewhere.

On 17 December, with tea leaves floating in the harbor, the committee chose five members of their group to write a “Declaration” about the destruction of the tea. Those men included several of the most radical writers in Boston: Samuel Adams, Dr. Benjamin Church, Dr. Thomas Young, and Dr. Joseph Warren. The fifth was Nathaniel Appleton (1731–1798), since these committees needed someone to represent the town’s merchants.