He does not seem to have joined in such clandestine methods as those of the Committees of Correspondence, which Samuel Adams and some of the most radical patriots in the Bay State had organized, but he said in the Virginia Convention, in 1774:  “I will raise one thousand men, subsist them at my own expense and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston."[1] The ardor of Washington’s offer matched the increasing anger of the Colonists.  Lord North, abetted by the British Parliament, had continued to exasperate them by passing new bills which could have produced under the best circumstances only a comparatively small revenue.  One of these imposed a tax on tea.  The Colonists not only refused to buy it, but to have it landed.  In Boston a large crowd gathered and listened to much fiery speech-making.  Suddenly, a body of fifty men disguised as Mohawk Indians rushed down to the wharves, rowed out to the three vessels in which a large consignment of tea had been sent across the ocean, hoisted it out of the holds to the decks and scattered the contents of three hundred and forty chests in Boston Harbor.

[Footnote 1:  John Adams’s Diary, August 31, 1774, quoting Lynch.]

The Boston Tea Party was as sensational as if it had sprang from the brain of a Paris Jacobin in the French Revolution.  It created excitement among the American Colonists from Portsmouth to Charleston.  Six more of the Colonies enrolled Committees of Correspondence, Pennsylvania alone refusing to join.  In every quarter American patriots felt exalted.  In England the reverse effects were signalized with equal vehemence.  The Mock Indians were denounced as incendiaries, and the town meetings were condemned as “nurseries of sedition.”  Parliament passed four penal laws, the first of which punished Boston by transferring its port to Salem and closing its harbor.  The second law suspended the charter of the Province and added several new and tyrannical powers to the British Governor and to Crown officials.

On September 5, 1774, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia.  Except Georgia, every Colony sent delegates to it.  The election of those delegates was in several cases irregular, because the body which chose them was not the Legislature but some temporary body of the patriots.  Nevertheless, the Congress numbered some of the men who were actually and have remained in history, the great engineers of the American Revolution.  Samuel Adams and John Adams went from Massachusetts; John Jay and Philip Livingston from New York; Roger Sherman from Connecticut; Thomas Mifflin and Edward Biddle from Pennsylvania; Thomas McKean from Delaware; George Washington, Patrick Henry, Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton, and Richard H. Lee from Virginia; and Edward and John Rutledge from South Carolina.  Although the Congress was made up of these men and of others like them, the petitions adopted by it and the work done, not to mention the freshets