Events in the years leading up to July 4, 1776 are boiled down to just a few prominent events in our collective consciousness,: colonists protested taxation without representation at the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere warned the British were coming, and the Continental Congress convened to debate independence. This oversimplification gives the impression that the patriotic movement in colonial North America was largely a series of spontaneous and isolated events. Instead, those high-profile occurrences have a common origin and were the byproducts of an ingenious political engine invented by Sam Adams — the Committees of Correspondence.
In Adams’ Committees of Correspondence system, a group of pro-liberty residents of each town would call a meeting and elect a board of patriots to represent them, which would communicate directly with the boards of the other towns to educate the public on their rights and coordinate political activity to preserve those rights against government abuse. Read more.
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