Special to the Cape Charles Mirror by Paul Plante.
As to the Virginia Resolves, Wikipedia tells us that they were a series of resolutions passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses in response to the Stamp Act of 1765.
The key point this essay wishes the reader to take from that above relationship A, then B – the Stamp Act, then the Virginia Resolves – cause and then effect, and this is important in the context of understanding the relevance of the Virginia Resolves to the times we now find ourselves mired in as American citizens, no matter what political creed we might profess to follow, the Stamp Act had been passed by the British Parliament to help pay off some of its debt from its various wars, including the French and Indian War fought in part to protect the American colonies.
Note that critical phrase in there – “help pay off some of its debts from its previous wars.”
The reality is that those were debts the king himself had burdened his country with, because he was essentially vainglorious as well as pig-headed and stupid (does that at all sound familiar in our times?), and it was in the end foolish of him to think that after having displayed to the Americans he was trying to tax after the French and Indian Wars were concluded to pay his debts accrued during the French and Indian War, where the Americans witnessed first-hand just how poorly led his English troops were, that the Americans would willingly begger themselves to reimburse him for his incompetence.
Living in a part of the country where the ravages of the French and Indian War ran rampant over the land and people’s lives all around the area of the state of New York I grew up in, a historical war zone between the Mohawks on the west bank of what became known to history as Hudson’s River, and the Mahicans on the east bank, and having studied that history from the time I was young from the perspective of journals written by people alive in those times, that it was the greatest and gravest of insults for the British Parliament far across the sea to actually attempt to charge the colonists a fee for the inept and incompetent military actions of the British during the French and Indian War, which the border Americans up in my region bore the brunt of, that because the British in England and the French in France simply could not get along.
Consider “The Hoosic Matters: A Brief History of the Hoosac Valley,” by Lauren R. Stevens, as follows:
The Hoosic River provided a significant Indian trail, both for canoes and, on the side, for a footpath, as the Mohawks had found.
Along with the Deerfield River, it joined the Connecticut and Hudson valleys; and the route up the Hoosic tributary Owl Kill was a major pathway to and from Canada.
It was the universal warpath of colonial days.
The English built Fort Massachusetts on the trail, in what’s now North Adams, in 1745, to prevent the French from invading the area and as a warning to the Dutch not to encroach from the west.
In 1746, 900 French and Canadian Indians captured the fort, flew the French flag above it briefly, and then burned it, taking its defenders over the trail to Canada.
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With the Stamp Act, the English king was telling the Americans that they had to pay extra taxes because of that fiasco.
With regard to the British claim in the Stamp Act to taxes from the Americans for the failure of the British to protect them during the French and Indian War, in 1753, the year of the first settlement in Williamstown, an American named Elisha Hawley followed the trail to create a rough route over the Hoosacs to Charlemont, and then the next year Indians descended on Dutch Hoosac (Petersburgh), burning and scalping, including the Brimmer family on what is now called Indian Massacre Road; and the next day hit a settlement on the Walloomsac.
The French and Indian War had begun—or, begun again.
Both communities had previously been destroyed in the raid on Fort Massachusetts.
Then, in June on 1756, soldiers from the fort were ambushed and the subsidiary Fort West Hoosac (Williamstown) was attacked in July.
Ephraim Williams, Jr., commander of a string of Forts along what Massachusetts took to be its northern boundary, volunteered to fight the French at Lake George.
He was killed September 8, 1756, although the British won the engagement.
Of more lasting importance in terms of the feelings of settlers to the Indians, was the Marquis de Montcalm’s siege of the undermanned British Fort William Henry, on Lake George.
The day after signing an honorable peace, on August 10, 1757, the retreating British column was attacked by Indians from 33 different tribes, mostly from Canada, attached to Montcalm’s troops, massacring soldiers, women, and children.
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And that is more of what the English king thought the Americans should pay him for.
And then there was General Braddock’s defeat in 1755, at the hands of the French and their Indian allies out near what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where the arrogant but very ignorant British general Edward “Braddock the Haddock” led his forces, consisting of two regular line regiments, the 44th and 48th with about 1,350 men, along with about 500 regular soldiers and militiamen from several British American colonies, including future American Commander-in-Chief during the Revolution George Washington, and artillery and other support troops into a French and Indian ambush which promptly got him killed, hence the name ”Braddock the Haddock,” like a fish with no fight in it, he flopped but once, and then he was gone.
The English king was not asking, but telling those same Americans that they owed him money for that fiasco, and with the Virginia Resolves, the people of America told that English king to go to hell.
And they couldn’t forget Montcalm’s defeat of the British and American colonists at Fort Ticonderoga on 8th July 1758 at the southern tip of Lake Champlain in the United States, on the borders of northern New York State and Vermont where the combatants were British and American colonial troops against French regular and colonial troops.
The very venal but highly incompetent General James Abercromby and Brigadier Lord Howe, a very popular British officer among the Americans who was to die at Ticonderoga because of Abercromby’s ineptness and sheer incompetence, commanded the British and Americans, while the Marquis de Montcalm, a very competent French leader and soldier, commanded the French.
With him in his losing effort due to gross incompetence, Abercromby had 15,000 British and American Provincials against around 3,600 French regular troops with a few Canadian provincials.
The French fort of Ticonderoga lay at the southern end of Lake Champlain, part of the long inland waterway that was the main route for a British land invasion of French Canada.
In June 1758 a force of British regular and American provincial troops from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and the other New England provinces, in all 15,000 men gathered at the head of Lake George.
The nominal commander was General James Abercrombie, an elderly portly man raised to high command through political influence lacking military experience or ability.
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The Americans alive at that time fighting with the British against the French in the French and Indian Wars in that losing encounter got to witness those character flaws in Abercromby first-hand, so when they were told they had to reimburse the foreign king for foisting off an incompetent like Abercromby on them, they rebelled.
So the Stamp Act was about making the Americans have to pay for GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE during the French and Indian War the British government had forced upon the Americans because of its actions across the ocean in its dispute with France the American colonists had no role in fomenting, nor political means of ending.
Until either the French won, or the English won, and that was highly in doubt that the English could have won given their execrable performance in the field, the one certainty was that the Americans were going to be burned out and bleed and die, with absolutely no voice in the matter, and no control over their fate, which was in the hands of a foreign king who did not know they were alive, nor did he much care to know.
They were merely subjects, for him to use and spend as he pleased.
So, in the course of the French and Indian War, where American colonists were attached as auxiliary troops to the British Regulars, the Americans got to see first-hand just how incompetent the British leadership really was, and how poorly the British could fight in a wilderness environment.
That knowledge gained by observation and experience by Americans fighting with the British in the French and Indian led to the young Alexander Hamilton 1775 in “The Farmer Refuted” making the following observation as to how ultimately the British would be defeated by the more poorly armed Americans:
Let it be remembered that there are no large plains for the two armies to meet in and decide the conquest….
The circumstances of our country put it in our power to evade a pitched battle.
It will be better policy to harass and exhaust the soldiery by frequent skirmishes and incursions than to take the open field with them, by which means they would have the full benefit of their superior regularity skills.
Americans are better qualified for that kind of fighting which is most adapted to this country than regular troops.
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That last observation came directly from those previous experiences fighting alongside the British in the French and Indian War.
Thus, when the Americans, who had been doing the real fighting and defending on the borders where no British troops dared venture were told by the British that the French and Indian War had been fought in part to protect the American colonies, they laughed out loud in the King’s face, and then they went to war and defeated that king in England who thought the American people owed him money for his inability to protect them from the ravages of the French and Indians during the French and Indian War the king in England had forced upon the Americans without their consent and to their detriment.
Today, we here in the United States of America are at a similar juncture, except we are not saddled with an incompetent, pig-headed foreign king in England today; to the contrary, we are saddled with a federal government in Washington, D.C. that is so inept and incompetent and riddled with corruption while warring factions wage internecine war with each other at taxpayer expense that like the British during the French and Indian War, it is totally incapable of protecting us, as the invading Russians so handily proved during this last presidential election.
So it is once more time for a new set of Virginia Resolves, in my estimation as an American citizen loyal to the Constitution, not the cults of Trump or Obama or Clinton, or the Democrat or Republican factions fighting their own version of the French and Indian Wars with our taxpayer dollars today to our detriment as a people and as a nation.
Why are We, the People, who gained our freedom fighting a tyrannical English king who was trying to impose a tax on the American people that would reward the king for being incompetent, now paying taxes to a government that is even more incompetent?
Any thoughts, anyone?
The candid world that watches and waits would like to know.
About the Author
At p.503 of “A Short History Of Western Civilization” by Charles Edward Smith, Louisiana State University, and Lynn M. Case, University of Pennyslvania, copyright 1948, the authors make this following comment concerning the effect the Seven Years War or French and Indian War was to have on the people of the colonies which were to rebel and subsequently become the United States of America:
Much more formidable, however, was the rising tide of resentment engendered in the American Colonies by the imposition of taxes designed to compensate, in a measure, for the cost of the wars with France.
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It was that resentment which was to lead to the Virginia Resolves, which in turn led to open rebellion against a foreign tyrannical king.
So what caused the French and Indian War?
Let’s see what the basic reference Wikipedia has to say on the subject:
The Seven Years’ War was a major military conflict that lasted from 1756 until the conclusion of the treaties of Paris (signed on 10 February 1763) and Hubertusburg (signed on 15 February 1763).
It involved all of the major European powers of the period — but in reality had begun two years earlier as the French and Indian War in Colonial America (and heavily involving a young George Washington as emissary and commander) after the Governor of Virginia ordered the Forks of the Ohio be fortified to better establish English claims to the Ohio Country.
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That order was transmitted, if not originated by Robert Dinwiddie, who was a British colonial administrator who served as lieutenant governor of colonial Virginia from 1751 to 1758, first under Governor Willem Anne van Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle, and then, from July 1756 to January 1758, as deputy for John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun.
As Wikipedia tells us, since the governors at that time were largely absentee, he was the de facto head of the colony for much of the time.
Dinwiddie joined the British colonial service in 1727 where he was appointed collector of the customs for Bermuda, and following an appointment as surveyor general of customs in southern American ports, Dinwiddie became Lieutenant Governor of Virginia.
As a review of our American history tells us, Dinwiddie’s actions as lieutenant governor of Virginia are cited by one historian as precipitating the French and Indian War, commonly held to have begun in 1754.
Dinwiddie, on behalf of the English king he groveled to, wanted to limit French expansion in Ohio Country, an area claimed by the Virginia Colony and in which the Ohio Company, of which he was a stockholder, had made preliminary surveys and some small settlements.
The dude had money on the table he didn’t want to lose, so he started what became a world war, and lost the colony of Virginia, as a result, but in the meantime, he was not afraid to squander the lives of Virginians to protect his investments.
Of course, to be balanced here, that version of history holding Dinwiddie to blame is disputed when one notices that Father Le Loutre’s War in Acadia began in 1749 and did not end until the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755, so to pin the blame on Dinwiddie seems both hasty and harsh.
In fact, Thomas Jefferys, the Royal Geographer of the day, produced a pamphlet out of his Parliamentary testimony that explained the misconduct of the French in what amounted to a Treaty of Utrecht boundary dispute.
Notwithstanding, in 1753, Dinwiddie learned the French had built Fort Presque Isle near Lake Erie and Fort Le Boeuf, which he saw as threatening Virginia’s interests in the Ohio Valley.
In fact, he considered Winchester, Virginia, to be “exposed to the enemy”; Cumberland, Maryland, was only to be fortified the next year.
So Dinwiddie sent an eight-man expedition under George Washington to warn the French to withdraw.
Washington, then only 21 years old, made the journey in midwinter of 1753–54.
Washington arrived at Fort Le Boeuf on 11 December 1753 and Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the French commandant at Fort Le Boeuf, a tough veteran of the west, received Washington politely, but rejected his ultimatum.
Jacques Saint-Pierre then gave Washington three days hospitality at the fort, giving Washington a letter for him to deliver to Dinwiddie, which letter conveyed to Dinwiddie that the French Commander would send Dinwiddie’s letter carried by Washington on to Marquis de Duquesne in Quebec and meanwhile, he would maintain his post while he awaited the latter’s orders.
However, in January 1754, even before learning of the French refusal to decamp, Dinwiddie sent a small force of Virginia militia to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio River, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers merge to form the Ohio (present-day Pittsburgh).
In their turn at this escalation of hostilities, the French quickly drove off the Virginians and built a larger fort on the site, calling it Fort Duquesne, in honour of the Marquis de Duquesne, the then-governor of New France.
In the meantime, Dinwiddie named Joshua Fry to the position of Commander-in-Chief of colonial forces.
Colonel Joshua Fry (1699–1754) was a surveyor, adventurer, mapmaker, soldier, and member of the House of Burgesses, the legislature of the colony of Virginia who is best known for collaborating with Peter Jefferson, the father of future U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, on an influential map of Virginia in 1752, and being the immediate predecessor of George Washington as commanding officer of the Virginia Regiment, a key unit in the military developments that led to the outbreak of the French and Indian War.
And here the hostilities that led to the Virginia Resolves began to seriously escalate.
Fry was given command of the Virginia Regiment and was ordered to take Fort Duquesne, then held by the French.
During the advance into the Ohio Country, Fry suddenly fell off his horse and died from his injuries on 31 May 1754 at Fort Cumberland, upon which the command of the regiment fell to Washington.
Thereafter, in early spring 1754, Dinwiddie sent Washington to build a road to the Monongahela, and after having attacked the French at the Battle of Jumonville Glen, Washington retreated and built a small stockade, Fort Necessity, at a spot then called “Great Meadows”, by the Youghiogheny River, eleven miles southeast of present-day Uniontown.
As our history tells us, the Battle of Jumonville Glen, also known as the Jumonville affair, was the opening battle of the French and Indian War fought on May 28, 1754 near what is present-day Hopwood and Uniontown in Fayette County, Pennsylvania where a company of colonial militia from Virginia under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, and a small number of Mingo warriors led by Tanacharison (also known as “Half King”), ambushed a force of 35 Canadiens under the command of Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville.
The British colonial force had been sent to protect a fort under construction under the auspices of the Ohio Company at the location of present-day Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A larger Canadien force had driven off the small construction crew, and sent Jumonville to warn Washington about encroaching on French-claimed territory.
Washington was alerted to Jumonville’s presence by Tanacharison, and they joined forces to surround the Canadian camp.
Some of the Canadians were killed in the ambush, and most of the others were captured.
Jumonville was among the slain, although the exact circumstances of his death are a subject of historical controversy and debate.
Since Britain and France were not then at war, the event had international repercussions, and was a contributing factor in the start of the Seven Years’ War in 1756.
After the action, Washington retreated to Fort Necessity, where Canadian forces from Fort Duquesne compelled his surrender.
The terms of Washington’s surrender included a statement (written in French, a language Washington did not read) admitting that Jumonville was assassinated.
This document and others were used by the French and Canadiens to level accusations that Washington had ordered Jumonville’s slaying.
After the Jumonville affair, the opening battle of the French and Indian War, fought on May 28, 1754, on June 28, 1754, a combined force of 600 French, Canadien and Indian soldiers under the command of Jumonville’s brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers, left Fort Duquesne, and on July 3, they captured Fort Necessity in the Battle of the Great Meadows, forcing Washington to negotiate a withdrawal under arms.
Then, when news of the two battles reached England in August, the government of the Duke of Newcastle, after several months of negotiations, decided to send an army expedition the following year to dislodge the French, and Major General Edward “Braddock the Haddock” Braddock was chosen to lead the expedition, but the “Haddock” was defeated at the Battle of the Monongahela, and the French remained in control of Fort Duquesne until 1758, when an expedition under General John Forbes finally succeeded in taking the fort.
Meanwhile, word of the British military plans leaked to France well before Braddock’s departure for North America, and accordingly, King Louis XV dispatched a much larger body of troops to Canada in 1755, and although they arrived too late to participate in Braddock’s defeat, the French troop presence led to a string of French victories in the following years.
In a second British act of aggression, which the English king thought the American colonists should have to pay for, Admiral Edward Boscawen fired on the French ship Alcide in a naval action on June 8, 1755, capturing her and two troop ships carrying some of those troops, and from there, military matters escalated on both North American soil and at sea until France and Britain declared war on each other in spring 1756, marking the formal start of the Seven Years’ War.
And that is how it happens, people, just like that.
Two kings can’t get along, and a world war is the result.
Stay tuned, more to come.
As an aside here, the involvement of the Mingo Chief Tanacharison in the killing of Jumonville puts paid to the arguments put forth by those who self-identify as “liberals” that the “white man” or “OLD WHITEY” started slaughtering all the Indians in North America as soon as “OLD WHITEY” stepped off the boat.
As this involvement shows or demonstrates, the truth is far different from the version the self-proclaimed and self-professed “liberals,” who seem ashamed that history happened as it happened, that people should have acted better towards each other instead of the way they did, are trying to feed us.
It also serves to show that the politics of the Native American people were quite sophisticated and as devious as those of “OLD WHITEY.”
The Native Americans were hardly “children” sitting at “OLD WHITEY’s” feet in ignorance of politics.
As to the Mingo people, they were an Iroquoian-speaking group of Native Americans made up of peoples who migrated west to the Ohio Country in the mid-18th century, primarily Seneca and Cayuga.
Anglo-Americans called these migrants mingos, a corruption of mingwe, an Eastern Algonquian name for Iroquoian-language groups in general.
Mingos have also been called “Ohio Iroquois” and “Ohio Seneca”.
The Mingo were noted for having a bad reputation and were sometimes referred to as “Blue Mingo” or “Black Mingo” for their misdeeds.
The people who became known as Mingo migrated to the Ohio Country in the mid-eighteenth century, part of a movement of various Native American tribes away from European pressures to a region that had been sparsely populated for decades but controlled as a hunting ground by the Iroquois.
Although the Iroquois Confederacy had claimed hunting rights and sovereignty over much of the Ohio River Valley since the late 17th century, these people increasingly acted independently.
When Pontiac’s Rebellion broke out in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War, many Mingo joined with other tribes in the attempt to drive the British out of the Ohio Country.
As to Tanacharison or Tanaghrisson (c. 1700 – 4 October 1754), he was a Native American leader who played a pivotal role in the beginning of the French and Indian War, and thus, by extension, he also played a pivotal role in the Virginia Resolves and the American Revolution.
As a child, Tanacharison was taken captive by the French and later adopted into the Seneca tribe, one of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
He would later claim that the French boiled and ate his father.
His early years were spent on the southeastern shore of Lake Erie in what is now western New York state.
According to Wikipedia, Tanacharison first appears in historical records in 1747, living in Logstown near present Ambridge, Pennsylvania, a multi-ethnic village about 20 miles (30 kilometers) downstream from the forks of the Ohio River.
As was said above, those Iroquois who had migrated to the Ohio Country were generally known as “Mingos”, and Tanacharison emerged as a Mingo leader at this time, also representing the Six Nations at the 1752 Treaty of Logstown, where he was referred to as “Thonariss, called by the English the half King”.
According to the traditional interpretation, the Grand Council had named Tanacharison as leader or “half-king” (a sort of viceroy) to conduct diplomacy with other tribes, and to act as spokesman to the British on their behalf.
However, some modern historians have doubted this interpretation, asserting that Tanacharison was merely a village leader, whose actual authority extended no further than his own village.
Getting back to the precursor events to the Virginia Resolves, in 1753, the French began the military occupation of the Ohio Country, driving out British traders and constructing a series of forts, so we see economics rearing its ugly head here in what was essentially a war over trade between the French and English.
That is because British colonies also claimed the Ohio Country, so that as stated above, Robert Dinwiddie, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, sent a young George Washington to travel to the French outposts and demand that the French vacate the Ohio Country.
As to politics, on his journey, Washington’s party stopped at Logstown to ask Tanacharison to accompany them as a guide and as a “spokesman” for the Ohio Indians.
Tanacharison agreed to return the symbolic wampum he had received from French captain Philippe-Thomas Chabert de Joncaire.
Joncaire’s first reaction, on learning of this double cross, was to mutter of Tanacharison, “He is more English than the English.”
But Joncaire masked his anger and insisted that Tanacharison join him in a series of toasts, and by the time the keg was empty, Tanacharison was too drunk to hand back the wampum.
Tanacharison traveled with Washington to meet with the French commander of Fort Le Boeuf in what is now Waterford, Pennsylvania.
The French refused to vacate, however, and to Washington’s great consternation, they tried to court Tanacharison as an ally.
Although fond of their brandy, he remained a strong francophobe.
Tanacharison had requested that the British construct a “strong house” at the Forks of the Ohio and early in 1754 he placed the first log of an Ohio Company stockade there, railing against the French when they captured it.
He was camped at Half King’s Rock on May 27, 1754 when he learned of a nearby French encampment and sent word urging an attack to Washington at the Great Meadows, about five miles (8 km) east of Chestnut Ridge in what is now Fayette County, Pennsylvania (near Uniontown).
Washington immediately ordered 40 men to join Tanacharison and at sunset followed with a second group, seven of whom got lost in heavy rain that night.
It was dawn before Washington reached the Half King’s Rock.
After a hurried war council, the English and Tanacharison’s eight or nine warriors set off to surround and attack the French, who quickly surrendered.
The French commander, Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, was among the wounded.
With the French words, “Tu n’es pas encore mort, mon père!” (Thou art not yet dead, my father), Tancharison sank his tomahawk in Jumonville’s skull, washed his hands with the brains, “and scalped him,” but not before eating a portion of Jumonville’s brain.
Only one of the wounded French soldiers was not killed and scalped among a total of ten dead, 21 captured, and one missing, a man named Monceau who had wandered off to relieve himself that morning.
Monceau witnessed the French surrender before walking barefoot to the Monongahela River and paddling down it to report to Contrecoeur, commanding at Fort Duquesne.
Tanacharison sent a messenger to Contrecoeur the following day with news that the British had shot Jumonville and but for the Indians would have killed all the French.
A third and accurate account of the Jumonville Glen encounter was told to Jumonville’s half-brother, Captain Louis Coulon de Villiers, by a deserter at the mouth of Redstone Creek during his expedition to avenge his brother’s murder.
Washington was without Indian allies at the battle of Fort Necessity, his hastily erected stockade at the Great Meadows.
Tanacharison scornfully called it “that little thing upon the meadow” and complained that Washington would not listen to advice and treated the Indians like slaves.
He and another Seneca leader, Queen Aliquippa, had taken their people to Wills Creek.
Outnumbered and with supplies running low, Washington surrendered the fort, later blaming Captains George Croghan and Andrew Montour for “involving the country in great calamity”.
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It was that “great calamity” that was to lead in an unbroken line to the Virginia Resolves and the American Revolution.
Getting back to the narrative, and Native American politics at that time, historian Fred Anderson theorizes about the reasons for Tanacharison’s action in the killing, and provides a possible explanation for why one of Tanacharison’s men reports the event as a British killing of a Frenchman.
Tanacharison had lost influence over some of the local tribes (specifically the Delawares), and may have thought that conflict between the British and French would bring them back under his influence as allies of the British.
According to Parkman, after the Indians scalped the French, they sent a scalp to the Delawares, in essence offering them the opportunity to “take up the hatchet” with the British and against the French.
And thus with simple actions are world wars started, and nations rise and fall as a result.
As to the Virginia Resolves, it was on May 29, 1765 that Virginia’s Patrick Henry made one of his famous speeches before the Virginia House of Burgesses to encourage the passage of the resolutions that became known to history as the Virginia Resolves.
The resolves claimed that in accordance with long established British law, Virginia was subject to taxation only by a parliamentary assembly to which Virginians themselves elected representatives, and since no colonial representatives were elected to the Parliament the only assembly legally allowed to raise taxes would be the Virginia General Assembly.
On that day in May of 1765, Patrick Henry said “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III… (Henry was interrupted by cries from the opposition)… may profit by their example.”
“If this be treason, make the most of it.”
When Patrick Henry paused after the vibrant portion of the speech, Speaker John Robinson stood and shouted, “Treason! Treason!”.
According to Wikipedia, at this point, Patrick Henry issued a semi-apology.
He did appear to be calling for a regicide, afterall, the killing of a king, which would be considered blasphemous, at a minimum.
As history tells us, Henry had waited for most of the more conservative members of the assembly to be away before submitting the resolves, because the Burgesses generally voted along geographic lines with eastern Virginians opposing the resolves and central Virginians supporting them.
That same night, Patrick Henry left or fled Williamsburg, Virginia, depending on one’s point of view, fearing the powerful members of the House would harass him with a warrant.
The next day, with Patrick Henry gone and most conservative assembly members back in session, the assembly again set a vote with conservatives trying to have the Resolves struck from the record.
However, Henry’s supporters managed to preserve the first four resolutions with only the more radical 5th Resolution being struck.
That so-called “more radical” 5th Resolution stated as follows:
5. Resolved, therefor that the General Assembly of this Colony (Virginia) have the only and exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the inhabitants of this Colony and that every Attempt to vest such Power in any person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly aforesaid has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom.
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Strong words indeed, people!
That was radical because it in essence repudiated the authority of the English Crown in the colonies, or at least the Colony of Virginia.
It was the equivalent to sticking a finger into the king’s eye, or loading up their fingertip with a gob of spit and sticking it in the king’s ear.
The people of Virginia were not going to pay for the king’s stupid wars.
In late June the Newport Mercury was the first newspaper to publish the Virginia Resolves to the general public with several other newspapers following soon after.
(Note: I think of the Cape Charles Mirror as a latter-day version of the Newport Mercury)
Notably none of the newspapers drew on the official House records and as a result the published resolutions included not only the 4 ratified resolutions but also the, already removed, 5th resolution.
In fact the newspapers even went so far to include a 6th and 7th resolution the origin of which is still disputed.
Some sources quote those two articles as being part of Henry’s original manuscript while others argue that their origin is completely unknown.
In any event, a direct result of the publishing of the Virginia Resolves was a growing public anger over the Stamp Act and according to several contemporary sources the Resolves were responsible for inciting the Stamp Act Riots.
Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts stated that “Nothing extravagant appeared in the papers till an account was received of the Virginia Resolves.”
Later Edmund Burke linked the resolves with the beginning of the opposition to the Stamp Act that would contribute to the American Revolution.
And such is American history written!