To George Washington from the Massachusetts General Court, 13 August 1775
From the Massachusetts General Court
Watertown [Mass.] 13th of August 1775.
Sir
The enclosed hand bills will sufficiently serve to satisfy your Excellency, that the General Court fully concur with you in your opinion of the importance and necessity of the utmost exertions for the reformation of the infamous practices mentioned in your Letter of the 7th instant, directed to the President of the hon’ble Board, and also of the readyness of the General Court to cooperate with you in every measure tending to remedy the mischief therein complained of.1
Copy, , 74. The letter is also in ., 70–71.
1. The General Court’s resolution of this date concerning soldiers absent without leave from the army (see GW to James Otis, Sr., 7 Aug. 1775, n.2) was printed on handbills and sent not only to GW but also to the committees of correspondence or selectmen of the various towns throughout the colony. GW received fifty of these handbills which, according to another resolve of the General Court, he was to have “posted up in such Publick Places in the Camps as to him shall seem proper, that the Soldiery of the Army may be excited to take into their serious Consideration, the Baseness, Fraud and Villainy of the abovemention’d Practice, that they may thereby be made sensible, that every one who shall be guilty thereof, will greatly disparage himself, become justly contemptible and deserving of severe Punishment, and wholly forfeit the respectable Character of an American Volunteer” (., 70; also in “Mass. Council Journal,” July 1775–Feb. 1776 sess., 73–74).