Bunker Hill

today Maine) had more than 250 towns and a total population of about 300,000. By sending out open letters that were then discussed in town meetings across the colony, Boston patriots transformed what had once been a purely local form of government into a forum on the issues that affected everyone. Instead of worrying about repairing roads or bridges, citizens were now using the town meeting to debate the proper response to the Tea Act. This meant that even before Governor Hutchinson had a chance to issue his latest official pronouncement, the inhabitants of what were called the “country towns” of Massachusetts were talking among themselves, forming a consensus, and, more often than not, cheering Boston on its rebellious stand against British tyranny. Through the medium of the Committees of Correspondence, Samuel Adams and his compatriots had created what was, in essence, an extralegal, colony-wide network of communication that threatened to preempt the old hierarchical form of government.
    In the fall of 1772 the Boston committee announced its presence with the publication of the “Boston Declaration,” a kind of tutorial on why natural law superseded anything that Parliament could devise. To the committee members’ pleasant surprise, towns that had never before shown an interest in earlier political controversies responded warmly to Boston’s invitation to weigh in on the need to defend Massachusetts’s long-held liberties. Gorham (about ten miles inland of modern Portland, Maine) was one of seven townships granted to the veterans of King Philip’s War and their descendants in the early eighteenth century. During an Indian raid in 1746 that many town inhabitants still vividly remembered, five people had been killed and three abducted. For the citizens of Gorham, the fight for liberty was not about the current frustrations with Parliament; it was about the terror, anger, and violence that went with colonizing this ancient and blood-soaked land. “Our eyes have seen our young children weltering in their gore in our own houses, and our dearest friends led into captivity,” they wrote to the Boston Committee of Correspondence in January 1773. “We . . . have been used to earn our daily bread with our weapons in our hands. Therefore we cannot be supposed to be fully acquainted with the mysteries of court policy, but we look upon ourselves as able to judge so far concerning our rights as men. . . . We look with horror and indignation on the violation of them. . . . Many of our women have been used to handle the cartridge, and load the musket, and the swords which we whet and brightened for our enemies are not yet grown rusty.”
    In town after town, colonists took Boston’s statement of natural rights and made it their own. And as the citizens of Gorham had made unmistakably clear, they were more than willing to fight for those freedoms.
    Governor Hutchinson was so alarmed by the committee’s inroads throughout the province that he responded with a tutorial of his own. On January 1773 he delivered a lecture to both chambers of the General Court in which he pointed out the fallacies behind the committee’s assertions in the Boston Declaration. Instead of convincing the patriots of the errors of their ways, however, Hutchinson’s response only added to the growing momentum. Much to the governor’s apparent surprise, the Massachusetts House of Representatives quickly replied with a detailed treatise (written by members of the Committee of Correspondence) that laid the philosophical and legal groundwork for future thoughts about independence.
    In the months ahead, Hutchinson watched helplessly as the once lackadaisical pace of events in the colony seemed to accelerate into a disastrous rush. Soon after suffering through the storm ignited by his ill-conceived response to the Boston Declaration, Hutchinson found himself engulfed in the controversy surrounding the packet of letters leaked by Benjamin Franklin. Even before that began to die down in the fall of 1773, he was embroiled in the maneuverings that culminated in the Boston Tea Party. Through it all, the Boston Committee of Correspondence had been sending out letters that gave each controversy an impact and resonance it otherwise never would have had.
    The turnaround was remarkable. In the fall of 1772, Hutchinson had been congratulating himself on the contented calm that had settled over the colony. Then came the Committee of Correspondence,