The Origins of the Revolution: 250th Anniversary of the Fairfax Resolves

Reception, Ann Mason Room, Gunston Hall

Keynote Discussion and Plenary Session, MODERATED BY KATE STEIR, SENIOR CURATOR AND HEAD OF COLLECTIONS, GEORGE MASON’S GUSTON HALL

Fairfax's Final Three: The Resolutions that Forced Ideals into Existence
Catherine Treesh (Independent Scholar; Yale Ph.D. 2021)

Considering that the first half of the Fairfax Resolves posited a theory of colonial governance and the second half strategized how to defeat an imperial conspiracy, the final three logistical resolutions can appear like a deceptively lackluster endnote. These resolves created a county committee, endorsed the Virginia Convention, and tapped into the newspaper network -- and in doing so, decisively enmeshed Fairfax County in a regional and continental political community. Colonists had developed these political and communications institutions over the previous decade of resistance, believing that the only way to defeat conspiracy was through shared understanding and joint action. The Fairfax Resolves were informed by this political worldview and enacted it most poignantly in the critical final three resolutions.

"[W]hen they left their native Land, and settled in America": The Fairfax County Resolves and the Revolutionary Debate on the Origins of Colonies and Empire
Steven Sarson (Professor of American Civilization, Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3)

This paper explores the first clause of the Fairfax County Resolves and its articulation of a long-held belief that colonists not only possessed not only natural and English rights but had also acquired and inherited rights as Americans from their settler ancestors who conquered American lands at their own efforts and expense. The paper also explores how the Resolves represented a stage in the development of a radical argument that informed the Declaration of Independence, made by Virginians Richard Bland and Thomas Jefferson, that initial settlement had established the colonies as “states” and founded the empire as a “league and amity” with the crown.

The Sons of Liberty and the Genesis of Revolutionary Protest
Micah Alpaugh (Professor of History, University of Central Missouri)

The Sons of Liberty’s opposition to the Stamp Act in 1765-66 created a fundamentally new kind of protest campaign. Utilizing growing commercial connections, correspondence, and newspaper publicity, the colonists combined their efforts into a political direct-action network of corresponding societies, reaching a scale never before utilized for political reform. In so doing, they created a model with far-flung ramifications both for their recurring standoff with British authorities and subsequent Atlantic movements over the following decades. In this paper, I delve into the Sons of Liberty’s coalition-building in late-1765 and early 1766, as the loose organizations developed amidst the first months of anti-Stamp Act protests gained cohesion and began formally affiliating together. In so doing, they violated British traditions of keeping political clubs ‘independent,’ with the American organizations openly associating to project their power and (if necessary) undertake armed resistance.

Panel 1: Virginia, moderated by Amanda Moniz, David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Measuring Submission in the Tidewater: Virginia Gentry Resistance and the Road to Fairfax, 1765-1774
John Patrick Mullins (Associate Professor of History and Public History Director, Marquette University)

This paper analyzes the Fairfax Resolves of 1774 within two historic contexts. First, it outlines the British doctrine of “the measures of submission.” Second, the paper approaches the Resolves as the culmination of a series of resolutions framed by Virginia gentry since the Stamp Act: the Virginia Resolves of 1765, the Leedstown Resolves of 1766, and the Williamsburg Agreement of 1769. The Fairfax Resolves applied to new circumstances the logic already established by these earlier Virginian resolutions. Moreover, the Resolves fell within 18^th century Britain’s consensus on the limits of obedience and the right of resistance to the Crown. Behind this document’s hope for peace through non-violent strategies lay a grim acknowledgment that the failure of these strategies would leave no alternative but armed resistance.

Adaptive Justice: How Virginia Courts Remained Open in 1774
Turk McCleskey (Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Virginia Military Institute)

The Fairfax Resolves included a threat to suspend future debt litigation.  Contemporary merchants complained vociferously that Virginia courts already were closed, and modern historians uncritically have taken them at their word.  County court records tell a different story, however.  Rather than closing, Virginia’s courts turned to alternative common-law procedures for enforcing credit contracts.  The shift ensured that credit contracts would reliably continue their essential contributions to Virginia’s local economies while enhancing the credibility of the Fairfax Resolve to close future courts if the imperial crisis persisted.

Bonds of Charity: Slavery, the Fairfax Resolves, and Aid to Boston
Spencer Wells (Lecturer, Master of Interdisciplinary Studies, Southern Utah University) and Jeremy Snow (independent scholar)

In June of 1774, the Parliament of Great Britain shut down Boston Harbor after the Boston Tea Party. In the months following, colonies chose to support the beleaguered town, sending food to nearby ports, and carting them to Boston. While scholars have noted how such assistance helped unite the colonies in a patriotic cause before the Revolution began in earnest, less attention has been paid to how such charity was made possible through the labor of enslaved individuals. Bonds of Charity examines how aid supplied by Virginia and other southern colonies depended on enslaved labor while also asking how patriots attempted to rhetorically distance themselves from admitting that such efforts were linked, at root, to uncomfortable realities of servitude.

Panel 2: The Backcountry, Moderated by Brendan McConville, Professor of History, Boston University

A Western Wall: American Nationalism on the Virginia Frontier Before Independence
Jay Donis (Assistant Professor of History, Thiel College)

This paper’s title deliberately plays upon John Murrin’s classic article “A Roof Without Walls” and argues that Americans along Virginia’s frontiers contributed an understanding of American national identity, even nationalism, in the years leading up to the American Revolution as sovereignty came under reconsideration in the colonies. In so doing, this paper challenges the scholarly consensus that American nationalism could not have existed before July 4, 1776 and urges scholars to seriously consider the ways frontier communities understood and contributed to the ongoing discourses of rights, independence, and the evolving conception of American identity both within and without of the British Empire. Rather than depict frontier communities as prone to anarchy or otherwise powerless, Anglo-American frontier communities actively contributed to the ongoing political reckonings brought about by the crisis of empire.

"this is the border beyond which for the advantage of the whole empire, you shall not extend yourselves": Western Land Policy as a Precondition to Revolution
Brandon Downing (Associate Professor History, Marietta College, OH)

In 1774, Britain fortified its perceived weaknesses along the North American frontier by legislating a new land reform act that deviated from granting land titles through land-owning interests in the colonies to that of the Crown. The Quebec Act, passed later the same year, canceled the sea-to-sea land claims in colonial charters and extended Catholic Canada into the Ohio Valley. These unpopular land policies led to the fusion of traditionally opposing forces in the backcountry. Together, they linked the lower classes of farmers, frontiersmen, and urban workers to the planters, merchants, and urban middle-class professionals of the social elite that served as a precondition to the Revolutionary War.

Committees, Conventions, and Court Closings in Revolutionary Massachusetts
Tristan New (PhD Candidate, Boston University)

This paper examines the role that Massachusetts’ committees of correspondence, county conventions, and radical crowds played in suspending the colony’s courts in the late summer of 1774. This revolutionary mobilization was, as many scholars have noted, part of a program of resistance against the Coercive Acts. But this was not the full extent of its significance: it was also part of a movement for popular control of the judicial branch and the courts of law. This paper considers the court closings in this context, viewing them not simply as a moment of imperial fracture, but also as an expression of popular authority with wide-ranging implications for the course of the Revolution in Massachusetts.

Panel 3: Commerce, moderated by Alexandra Montgomery, Manager, Center for Digital History

Arming the Revolution: The Trusted Dutch Trade Channels, 1774-1776
Pauline Wittebol (PhD Candidate, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

This presentation focuses on the role the Dutch played in arming the American Revolution during the unsettling years 1774-1776. Existing trade routes between the Dutch Republic and North America continued as usual but were adapted to the new situation. To supply the patriots with arms, gun powder and ordinance, American merchants like John and Nicholas Brown, Aaron Lopez, Robert Morris, Alexander Gillon and Thomas Mumford relied on their established and trusted Dutch contacts for this booming trade. However, the blockades of the northern ports did cause a hitch and resulted in more trade via St. Eustatius. To continue this trade, new routes and tricks were sought to fool the British, Dutch and Loyalist administrators.

Sibling Rivalry: British and American Mercantile Competition on the Eve of Revolution
Jeremy Land (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

Following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British-based merchants began to pressure the British government, with dozens of petitions, to place more controls and limits on what they perceived as the encroaching competition from American merchants, complaining of losing profits thanks to both legal and illegal trade passing through American ships and merchants. In response to British efforts to enforce restrictions on American trade, the Fairfax Resolves provides evidence of a growing self-confidence in the American economy and its importance to the British Empire. This paper will examine the growing rivalry between American and British merchants for preeminence within the Atlantic basin and, using the Fairfax Resolves and other similar documents, explore how American resistance against mercantilism transitioned from nonchalant avoidance of trade rules and restrictions into an existential war for independence.

Founding Debt: Merchants, the Continental Association, and the Slave Trade
James R. Fichter (Associate Professor of European and American Studies, University of Hong Kong)

The Farifax Resolves and the Continental Association banned the slave trade beginning December 1, 1774. That trade involved, among other things, debt. This paper examines how debt affected, and was affected by, the slave trade ban. Using slave traders’ papers from Rhode Island, South Carolina, and New York, it examines how the Association’s continued permission to export crops to Britain (until September 1775 for most goods and even after that for rice) allowed slave traders to collect debt in the form of colonial cargoes, offering slavers a way to get paid for their past human cargoes if they ceased importing goods from Britain or people from Africa.

Panel 4: Self-Fashioning, moderated by Michelle McDonald, Director of the Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society

True Merit: Horatio Gates as a Case Study of Radicalization
Kieran O’Keefe (Assistant Professor of History, Lyon College)

This presentation will explore how and why Horatio Gates went from a dutiful subject of the crown to a committed revolutionary. Although he is best known as the general who oversaw the American victory at Saratoga in 1777, for much of his life, Gates was a loyal British Army officer. He is also one of several prominent Revolutionaries who did not move to America until late in the Imperial Crisis, settling in Virginia in 1772, long after the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts crises. Thus, Gates serves as a case study for why some recent immigrants became so radicalized against British rule in a seemingly short period. Gates’ drift to revolution stemmed from personal grievances with the British ministry, political ideology, resentment against class hierarchy, and shifting geographic context.

George Washington: Fashion Icon
Chloe Chapin (Assistant Director of Course Development, Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning, Harvard University; Harvard PhD 2023)

After the Fairfax Resolves determined to defend the American Colonies, George Washington chose buff and blue for the Fairfax County Independent Company uniforms because they were Whig colors, the opposition British political party. When later chosen as Commander in Chief for the United States Army, his assigned aides-de-camp also dressed in buff and blue to visually align themselves with the General, helping to shift the symbolic reference of buff and blue from the Whigs to Washington. I read this adoption of buff and blue—in military dress and later in men’s civilian fashion in both America and England—as a form of sartorial citational practice, in which men staked political claims, claimed allegiances, formed alliances, and invented American identity. These non-written, non-verbal political declarations suggests that there is a whole language of American democracy that remains to be translated.

Sovereignty, Constitutionalism, and Self-Government: Thomas Burke and the Coming of the Revolution in North Carolina
Aaron N. Coleman (Professor of History, University of the Cumberlands)

This paper examines Thomas Burke’s career between his arrival in North Carolina and his selection to serve in Congress. In particular, the paper examines the “Attachment Controversy” in North Carolina that consumed much political energy during Burke’s early years in the colony. The bitterness of the controversy mingled with other issues to create a strong whig movement in the colony, a movement in which Burke participated. His activity soon turned into a leading role in the colony’s provincial congresses in 1775, a topic that will also be discussed in detail.  The Attachment Controversy and the issues discussed during the provincial congresses in 1775 illuminate the context surrounding Burke’s thinking regarding the most important provision of the Articles of Confederation, Article II.