e Meeting of Patriots--Committees of Correspondence--
Washington--Dunmore visits the Frontier.

IN the year 1770, all the duties on articles imported into America
having been repealed, save that on tea, the American merchants refused
to import that commodity from England. Consequently a large stock of it
was accumulated in the warehouses of the East India Company; and the
government in 1773 authorized the company to ship it to America free
from any export duty. The light import duty payable in America being far
less than that from which it was exempted in England, it was taken for
granted that it would sell more readily in the colony than before it had
been made a subject of taxation. It was, indeed, by some looked upon as
now rather a question of commerce than of taxation; the main object of
the British government appears to have been to put an end to the trade
between the colonies and Holland, (a trade contraband according to the
letter of the law, but the law had been practically long obsolete,) and
to give to the East India Company a monopoly of the colonial markets.
But it was in general regarded in America as a test question of revenue.

The tea-ships arrived in America, and measures were taken to prevent the
landing of the tea; at Boston several cargoes were thrown overboard in
the night of December the eighteenth, into the sea, by a party of men
disguised as Indians, acting under the advice of Samuel Adams, and other
leading patriots. Other colonies either compelled the masters of the
tea-ships to return with their cargoes, or excluded them from sale; and
thus not a chest of it was sold for the benefit of the company. Tea had
hitherto been imported by Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts
into the colonies to the value of three hundred thousand pounds annually
from Holland and her dependencies. In Virginia the use of this beverage
was now generally abandoned.[569:A]

Intelligence of the occurrences at Boston having reached England,
parliament ordered the port of that town to be closed on the fourth day
of June; and other strong measures were adopted in order to reduce
Massachusetts to submission. The colonies, like the captives in the cave
of Polyphemus, were conscious of being involved in a common danger; and
that if one should fall a victim, the destruction of the rest would be
only a question of time.

When John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, the newly-appointed governor of
Virginia, reached Williamsb