North, Massachusetts took the lead in opposing what the Colonists regarded as the unconstitutional acts of the Crown.  The patriotic lawyer of Boston, James Otis, shook the Colony with his eloquence against the illegal encroachments and actual tyranny of the English.  Other popular orators of equal eminence, John and Samuel Adams and Josiah Quincy, fanned the flames of discontent.  Even the most radical did not yet whisper the terrible word Revolution, or suggest that they aspired to independence.  They simply demanded their “rights” which the arrogant and testy British Tories had shattered and were withholding from them.  At the outset rebels seldom admit that their rebellion aims at new acquisitions, but only at the recovery of the old.

Next to Massachusetts, Virginia was the most vigorous of the Colonies in protesting against British usurpation of power, which would deprive them of their liberty.  Although Virginia had no capital city like Boston, in which the chief political leaders might gather and discuss and plan, and mobs might assemble and equip with physical force the impulses of popular indignation, the Old Dominion had means, just as the Highland clans or the Arab tribes had, of keeping in touch with each other.  Patrick Henry, a young Virginia lawyer of sturdy Scotch descent, by his flaming eloquence was easily first among the spokesmen of the rights of the Colonists in Virginia.  In the “Parsons Cause,” a lawsuit which might have passed quickly into oblivion had he not seen the vital implications concerned in it, he denied the right of the King to veto an act of the Virginia Assembly, which had been passed for the good of the people of Virginia.  In the course of the trial he declared, “Government was a conditional compact between the King, stipulating protection on the one hand, and the people, stipulating obedience and support on the other,” and he asserted that a violation of these covenants by either party discharged the other party from its obligations.  Doctrines as outspoken as these uttered in court, whether right or wrong, indicated that the attorney who uttered them, and the judge who listened, and the audience who applauded, were not blind worshippers of the illegal rapacity of the Crown.

Patrick Henry was the most spectacular of the early champions of the Colonists in Virginia, but many others of them agreed with him.  Among these the weightiest was the silent George Washington.  He said little, but his opinions passed from mouth to mouth, and convinced many.  In 1765 he wrote to Francis Dandridge, an uncle of Mrs. Washington: 

The Stamp Act imposed on the colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain, engrosses the conversation of the speculative part of the colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of taxation, as a direful attack upon their liberties, and loudly exclaim against the violation.  What may be the result of this, and of some other (I think I may add) ill-judged measures, I will not undertake