CHAPTER I:

The Invention of the Boston Committee of
Correspondence and the Popular Declaration

In fall of 1772, Boston Whigs faced a problem that they viewed as systemic. Previous efforts to use the one officially-sanctioned method of communication with the royal authorities in Whitehall or Westminster--the petition to authority to the King or Parliament--had failed. Many Whigs (like Samuel Adams and Isaiah Thomas) insisted that this vein of communication had been exhausted. This chapter describes the two politically consequential communication innovations that resulted from this impasse: the town of Boston’s institution, on November 2, 1772, of a standing committee of correspondence and that committee’s development of a new genre of political communication, the popular declaration. The chapter considers what I am calling "the Boston declaration" in several different ways: 1) as replacing the traditional petition to authority, which was addressed upward with humility to a person or institution of authority, with the public declaration, which was addressed outward to the towns of Massachusetts and ‘the world;’ 2) as articulating an expansive republican concept of liberty (what Quentin Skinner describes as the "neo-Roman theory of liberty"); and finally, 3) as a material text that serves as a political pamphlet, as a script for oral performance, and as a letter that invites the towns of Massachusetts into an open-ended two way "correspondence" with the Boston committee. This chapter argues that the communication dynamic set going by the Boston committee’s publication marks the beginning of the American Revolution.