By Edward Spannaus*
Dec. 31, 2024– As we enter the year 2025, and continue in our commemoration of the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution, it is our solemn obligation to study what happened 250 years ago during the critical year of 1775. This was the year when not only did the shooting war start, but in which British royal authority crumbled as American Patriots created new governing institutions to replace the old colonial administrations.
It is not enough to focus our energies on July 4, 2026. As many have pointed out, the American Revolution began long before the fighting started, and continued long after it ended. From that standpoint, a closer look at 1775 is merited.
Intensive Preparation
There was at least a year and a half of preparation and mobilization, which made the Declaration of Independence possible, and, from an international standpoint, necessary.
We all know about the Boston Tea Party of December 1773. This set things in motion, but, communications being what they were in those days, news of the British response didn’t reach the American colonies until late Spring of 1774. The response, approved by King George on March 31, was what were called the Coercive, or “Intolerable” Acts, which shut down the port of Boston, in addition to imposing other serious infringements on the rights of the citizens of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Citizens reacted to the Coercive Acts throughout the colonies –here, in Massachusetts.
Immediately upon hearing the news, the Boston Patriots issued a call for support from the other colonies, and dispatched messengers. They reached Maryland and Virginia in late May of 1774. Maryland’s response was decisive, with town meetings being held in most counties. Last June 20, Marylanders, led by the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, commemorated the Frederick Resolves, which declared that Boston’s suffering was “in the common cause of America,” and urging a cessation of all trade with Great Britain.
In Maryland, as in other colonies, these local meetings fed into a general colony-wide convention; these, in turn, led to the first Continental Congress held in Philadelphia in September. This Congress created the Continental Association to conduct a trade embargo against Britain, and it called for the creation of revolutionary Committees of Safety (or Observation), to monitor and enforce the cut-off of imports from Britain and later exports. This clearly and decisively set the colonies on the road to revolution.
Frederick County (then encompassing all of western Maryland) is exemplary of this process. In mid-November 1774 a committee was formed to carry out the purposes of the Association created by the Continental Congress. In January 1775, more local Committees of Observation were formed, and a new county government was established under the direction of the county-wide Committee of Observation. Not only was it charged with carrying out the trade embargo, but it undertook the purchase of arms and ammunition. As historian T.J.C. Williams put it: “The Committee of Observation exercised all the functions of government during the turbulent and disorderly times from the date of its organization to the formation of the State Government in 1777.[1]
Lexington and Concord
The first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired on April 19, 1775 at Lexington and Concord. This was not an unplanned event, as it is sometimes portrayed. It is estimated that 14,000 colonists were already under arms in eastern Massachusetts, and they had been undergoing training for a year.
And within days, in response to the report about Lexington and Concord, another 20,000 militiamen and minutemen from the New England colonies, and from other parts of Massachusetts, flooded into the Boston area, encircling the British enclave. Others seized the British forts at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. This mobilization also resulted in the June 17, 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill (or “Breed’s Hill”), which showed that colonial militiamen could take on what was regarded as the strongest and best-trained army in the world at that time.
Virginia: preparations for war
Meanwhile, things were stirring in Virginia, the largest and most important southern colony. Weeks before Lexington and Concord, on March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry had delivered his stirring “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech at the Second Virginia Convention. At issue was a motion that all Virginia counties should create independent militia companies. Pointing to the obvious British preparations for war, on land and sea, Henry said that it was too late to avoid war. “The war is inevitable,” he proclaimed. “The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field!” (Click here for more on Henry’s speech.)
Patrick Henry was not alone in this view. Even before this, on March 14, 1775 the Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had written to Lord Dartmouth in London informing him that Virginia was preparing for war, and that the revolutionary Virginia Convention was voting to raise troops. On April 21, before the reports from Lexington and Concord had reached Virginia, Dunmore had deployed British naval troops to remove the gunpowder from the town magazine in Williamsburg. Angry militia companies led by Patrick Henry marched on Williamsburg, and in June, Dunmore fled to the safety of a British ship.
Our neighbors in Loudoun County, Virginia, fully supported Patrick Henry’s efforts. An independent militia company from Loudoun headed for Williamsburg, and got as far as Fredericksburg when it was informed that Henry had obtained restitution from officials of Dunmore’s weakened government. The Loudoun County Committee on Public Safety adopted Resolves declaring that they completely approved of the conduct of their fellow countrymen – Captain Patrick Henry and the other volunteers who marched with him – in seeking reprisal for the trespass committed by Dunmore, and then avowed that “we are determined to hazard [to put at risk] all the blessings of this life” rather than to allow any injury to Patrick and his men, or to their property.
Creating a new government
Revolutionary fervor and patriotic zeal spread throughout the American colonies during 1775, taking hold most firmly in New England and the southern colonies. Royal Governors fled in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina during 1775, and Georgia’s Royal Governor followed in February 1776. Patriots were in control of all of New England outside of Boston harbor where the British maintained fortifications and its naval ships lurked offshore. The middle colonies, particularly New York and Pennsylvania, were laggards, New York being dominated by merchants, and Pennsylvania by war-opposing Quakers. But even in Pennsylvania, resolutions condemning the Coercive Acts were adopted in Scotch-Irish and German areas.
A landmark was the creation of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775, and the appointment of George Washington as its commander. Congress authorized the creation of ten rifle companies from the frontier areas of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Later in 1775, the Continental Congress created a Navy (on October 13), and a Marine Corps (on November 10).
Maryland was assigned to supply two of these rifle companies, and the Maryland Committee of Observation assigned this responsibility to Frederick County. On June 21, 1775, the two Frederick County companies mustered at the courthouse in Fredericktown – an event which will be commemorated this year on the exact date.
Summarizing the dramatic events of 1775, historian Kevin Phillips writes of the breakdown of royal authority:
It had been replaced by de facto American self-rule through local committees of correspondence and safety, trade-monitoring committees of inspection, oath-swearing associations, militia organizations, and provincial congresses. They began to exercise power twelve to eighteen months before the July 1776 arrival in New York of massive but belated British military might. This Patriot infrastructure, activity, and enforcement represented a governmental and political underpinning of American independence that was never effectively defeated….[2]
1] This account is based in part on Kevin Phillips’ wonderful book, 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (Viking, 2012).
[2] Philips, p. 19.
*This article was adapted from a piece written for the newsletter of the author’s chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution (Sergeant Lawrence Everhart Chapter, Frederick, Maryland).
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Tags: American Revolution, Boston, Committees of Observation, Edward Spannaus, Kevin Phillips, militias
