George Washington Papers

[Diary entry: 12 March 1773]

12. Did the same.

After passing an act authorizing new treasury notes to replace the colony’s current compromised ones, the House of Burgesses today turned its attention to what it perceived as increasing British encroachments upon both English liberty and colonial rights (JHB description begins H. R. McIlwaine and John Pendleton Kennedy, eds. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia. 13 vols. Richmond, 1905–15. description ends , 1773–76, 26–28). A group of younger burgesses, including Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee, proposed that the house create a committee of correspondence, whose “first measure would be to propose a meeting of deputies from every colony at some central place,” as Jefferson later recalled (JEFFERSON [2] description begins Paul Leicester Ford, ed. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 10 vols. New York and London, 1892–99. description ends , 1:8). Sitting as a committee of the whole house, the burgesses drafted a resolution authorizing and appointing an 11–member committee of correspondence and then passed it in open session without dissent (JHB description begins H. R. McIlwaine and John Pendleton Kennedy, eds. Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia. 13 vols. Richmond, 1905–15. description ends , 1773–76, 28). GW was not a member of the committee of correspondence.

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