The outbreak of the American Revolution thrust would-be revolutionaries into a paradoxical relationship with the law. As they overthrew colonial governments from New Hampshire to Georgia during the summer and fall of 1775, leaders of the resistance to Great Britain found themselves in the awkward position of having to justify rebellion against British authority while still professing to be law-abiding Britons. The revolutionaries’ mandate to govern rested on protecting rights to property and representation that many colonists believed had been violated by agents of the Empire, but the practicalities of war demanded extra-legal measures. The popular governments that replaced colonial administrations had to find a way to balance upholding many of the laws of the old regime while simultaneously organizing an armed insurrection against it. Much of this burden fell on revolutionary committees at the town and local level. As the Continental Congress and provincial elites vacillated between rebellion and reconciliation and struggled to assert control over the fast-growing revolutionary coalition, ad hoc governments comprised of ordinary citizens took on the tasks of governing their regions and organizing for armed struggle. For much of 1775 and early 1776, these popular regimes precariously balanced the need for extra-legal expediencies with the need to maintain at least a semblance of law to maintain their legitimacy.

Perhaps not surprisingly, their efforts fell short. While popular regimes adopted legalistic procedures and appropriated the trappings of the colonial governments, time after time their adherence to what remained of legal tradition collapsed in the face of popular enthusiasm for extra-legal policies such as property confiscation, arbitrary imprisonment, forced labor, and other measures at odds with both British and colonial law. When the leaders of these popular governments attempted to check the popular will with considerations of due process, protection of property, and other legal procedures, they risked being themselves the targets of these tactics. As a result, many who favored an orderly, restrained revolution that respected due process and the rule of law found themselves swept up administering policies that violated that revolution’s most basic principles of equal protection and property rights. The experience, however, did not sour these people on the revolutionary cause. Rather, it convinced many that only the creation of a new state—with new laws and new representative institutions that would grant those laws undisputed legitimacy—could reconcile revolutionary ideals with the extra-legal measures necessary to secure them. By the late spring of 1776, local committeemen proved the most enthusiastic supporters of national independence.

Because of both their chaotic nature and their brief tenure before being replaced by state and national constitutions, these popular regimes have been continually underestimated.Footnote ¹ Relatively recently, however, a paucity of scholarship has been supplemented by several careful studies, as scholars have increasingly recognized that the ad hoc popular governments of 1775 and 1776—especially committees of safety in towns and counties—played an enormous role in driving the revolutionary movement during its formative months. Despite this emphasis, however, there has yet to be a systematic study of how local committees worked on a granular, day-to-day level.Footnote ² Further, scholars almost universally interpret these governments as fundamentally extra-legal, ignoring their leaders’ earnest, if misguided, attempts to establish legal bases for their regimes.Footnote ³ Instead, studies almost universally emphasize their fundamentally arbitrary nature—in some cases to stress the natural restraint and instinct for law and order that set American revolutionaries apart from their French, Russian, and other counterparts, and for others to highlight the violence and bigotry that accompanied the coming of American independence.Footnote ⁴ In both interpretations, the committees played a transitory role, important not for their own sakes but as bridges between the pre-war ideological ferment and the post-independence flowering of representative institutions. Regarding the popular administrations as simply extra-legal and transitory, however, does a deep disservice to the people who led them, as well as to the crucial role that their efforts to consolidate popular authority played in the eventual establishment of revolutionary government.

Throughout 1775 and early 1776, revolutionaries attempted to assume the trappings of colonial legal authority at all levels, as crown officials Charles Dudley and Henry Preston found out to their shock and horror. Three months and nearly a thousand miles apart, both Dudley—customs collector for the bustling port of Newport, Rhode Island—and Preston—crown clerk and prothonotary in Savannah, Georgia—received fateful knocks on their doors. In Newport on November 11, 1775, a messenger delivered to Dudley a written order from patriot governor Nicholas Cooke “demanding … All the Money then in his hands belonging to the Crown” for the use of the revolutionary government.Footnote ⁵ Cooke, whose position as a duly elected governor under Rhode Island’s colonial charter gave him a degree of legitimacy beyond that held by most revolutionary leaders, took pains to couch his demand in legalistic terms. In his order to Dudley, he explained that the revenues would be “detained” only until “satisfaction is made to me for the Roberyes [sic] and depredations committed … By the commanders of his Majesties Ships” in Newport’s harbor the previous summer. Here, claiming to seek to recoup shipping losses he and other merchants suffered at the hands of the British navy, Cooke mimicked the effects of the 1774 Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston to trade until the cost of British East India tea destroyed at the Boston Tea Party was paid. To further make his appropriation seem official, the governor promised the customs collector a thorough accounting and receipt for the money and assured him that he and the Rhode Island government would be accountable for its disposition. Despite these reassurances, Dudley balked, declining to turn over his charge to the upstart government.Footnote ⁶

Three days after receiving the order and after demurring, Dudley received a visit from Esek Hopkins, then in command of revolutionary Rhode Island’s military forces. Hopkins, a merchant adventurer whose career included forays as a privateer and trafficker in enslaved Africans, informed him that “his person, and private Property, would be accountable for his conduct” should he fail to deliver the money. Despite the threat, Hopkins couched his demand in legalistic terms, declaring Dudley “commanded and forbid” to remove any of the revenue money “until such time as you have further orders from me, or from the Commander in Chief of this Colony [Governor Cooke], or from the General Assembly thereof.” The written command—itself a nod to bureaucratic formality—almost exactly mimicked orders given to British soldiers and officials by their superiors in the imperial chain of command, using terms such as “Commander in Chief” that had in the past exclusively referred to royally appointed governors and generals.Footnote ⁷ Finally, to further underscore that his command was a legal order and not simply an act of intimidation by a group of insurgents, Hopkins allowed Dudley “a few hours to consider of it”—a courtesy befitting a colleague in government rather than an official of a deposed regime. Presumably, Hopkins and Cooke hoped that official forms and language, in addition to blunt force, would convince the customs collector not only to hand over the money but also to acquiesce to the new administration. Dudley, however, used this time not to reconcile himself to revolutionary rule but rather to beat a “speedy retreat … with the Revenue Money, Bonds, and other Papers of consequence on board his Majestys Ship Rose,” a frigate then anchored in Newport’s harbor.Footnote ⁸ In so doing, the customs official abandoned his home, his family, and what had been a prosperous life in colonial Newport.

Following his flight, Dudley spent three miserable months on board HMS Rose as she cruised Narragansett Bay, watching helplessly as Rhode Island’s revolutionary government confiscated his belongings and dismantled his landed estate in another imitation of legal process. Soon after he fled aboard ship, his wife, Catherine “Kitty” Dudley, informed him that “your houses and all the Stocks were yesterday sold at Vendue.” Many items sold for far less than they were worth, although a friend of the Dudleys claimed a few horses and pieces of furniture in lieu of a debt, hoping to keep them safe in the event Charles should be able to return. The revolutionary committee itself made a gift of Dudley’s bed and bedding to Continental General Charles Lee when he arrived in Newport in late December.Footnote ⁹ The public seizure and sale of the Dudleys’ belongings—including their two enslaved servants—mirrored the fate of loyalists everywhere, as property confiscation became a key component of the establishment of revolutionary states.Footnote ¹⁰ Still, Charles Dudley maintained that he had correctly fulfilled his duty under British law and that he would be vindicated in the long run. He assured Kitty that he remained “convinced that the Government I have the honor to serve will see that Justice is done me,” instructing her to take a careful injury of their seized property for later recompense.Footnote ¹¹ Dudley’s faith was at least somewhat well-placed—he was indeed compensated in part for his losses by the Loyalist Claims Commission set up in the 1780s, though not to the extent he valued it, and he never returned to Rhode Island to reclaim his lands. Rather, in late January 1776, he sailed for Boston, then Halifax, and finally England, where he reunited with Kitty and lived in relative obscurity until his death in 1790. Even if it led to his personal ruin, Charles Dudley’s defiance demonstrates both the lengths to which revolutionary governments went to claim legitimate legal standing and the fragile foundations upon which those claims lay. Unable to recoup the crown revenues by persuasion in the language of the law, Cooke and Hopkins resorted to intimidation and then punitive confiscation of Dudley’s personal property.

The demands made on Georgia crown clerk Henry Preston proved even more grounded in force yet also more effective. Around the time Dudley embarked for Boston, on January 23, 1776, Preston awoke early to a visitor at his home in Savannah. An acquaintance called Adam Trick, representing “the Gentlemen of the Council of Safety”—which Preston took to mean the Provincial Congress—demanding “all of the keys of the Court house,” as they intended to begin meeting there. When Preston refused, replying that “it was contrary to my Duty and my Oath” to turn them over to anyone but a representative of the king’s government, two more representatives of the council arrived and ransacked his home in search of the keys, threatening “in the hearing of Mrs Preston that a file of Muskiteers [sic] would take me into Confinement” should he continue his recalcitrance. Another committeeman took a more diplomatic tack, arguing that handing over the keys would “save the Country the Expence [sic] of New Doors & locks for they were determin’d to be into the Court house at all Events.” Whereas Cooke and Hopkins had treated Charles Dudley as a potential colleague, Savannah’s committee apparently regarded Preston as a rank inferior. Still, the embattled clerk continued to resist, even though the violation of his home and threats to his person must have frightened him and his family.Footnote ¹²

Entry into the courthouse itself was essential in taking control of Savannah and establishing revolutionary rule in Georgia. The building served a symbolic purpose, as it was not only the traditional seat of the criminal and civil courts but also the location of the all-important land office and a frequent meeting place for the royal governor and his council. The records in Preston’s own office had more practical value, comprising deeds and mortgages, wills, court judgments, tax lists, and other legal documents necessary to trace property ownership, debts, and estate valuations—the economic lifeblood of the colony. Perhaps sensing the importance of these papers and attempting to assuage his violent interlocutors, Preston did offer “that if they did break open the office & take the Records … I would attend as a private person and direct them” in order to identify the various types of records, how they were stored, and how they might be used. In addition to attempting to avoid bloodshed while keeping the letter of his oath, Preston hoped that by his aid the records would “not to be greatly injured, or much mislaid” in the tumult and that they may be preserved for a potential restoration of royal rule. As it happened, a few hours later, the Council sent for the clerk once more, summoning him to the courthouse, where he found armed men milling about and the doors broken open, both to the main building and to his private office. Preston then spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through the court papers under the supervision of the new revolutionary government, packing all of the documents into “two large Cases near Four feet square & one smaller trunk,” presumably for safekeeping. In contrast with his experience that morning, the committeemen “behaved very politely” and even allowed him to take his own personal papers and effects from the office without molestation. Still, despite his cooperation, that evening another messenger arrived and asked Preston not to leave the town of Savannah without permission from the “Commanding Officer” of the revolutionary militia, to which the clerk reluctantly assented. The warning foreshadowed the flight, two weeks later, of Georgia’s royal governor, Sir James Wright, from the house arrest the Provincial Congress had placed him under to a British warship in the Savannah River.Footnote ¹³

Preston, however, remained in Savannah and, unlike Dudley, seems to have lived relatively peacefully alongside the revolutionaries. While he was later listed by the Georgia Council of Safety as a person “whose going at large is dangerous to the liberties of America” and subsequently imprisoned in September 1776, he was released after only a week after petitioning the Council and “giving good and sufficient security for [his] behavior in the future.”Footnote ¹⁴ After this, he seems to have escaped the notice of the revolutionary government, slipping into obscurity until his death. And, unlike Dudley, his property does not seem to have been seized by the revolutionary authorities. On his death in 1777, an inventory of his estate listed substantial property, including fine furniture, firearms, and over a dozen enslaved people—assets that surely would have been confiscated for the benefit of the new government if Preston had truly been considered an enemy of the state.Footnote ¹⁵ Perhaps because of his willing, if coerced, cooperation with the new regime, or his lowly status as a clerk of the crown—a position not even meriting a salary under the colonial regime, but expected to live on fees—Preston managed to uphold his duty under the laws of the British Empire while avoiding punishment under those of the new regime.Footnote ¹⁶ Still, his experience demonstrates the precarity of revolutionary regimes’ claims to legal footing—while Georgia’s Council of Safety desperately desired the trappings of law, they had to resort to brute force to obtain them.

Charles Dudley and Henry Preston’s experiences also demonstrate the ham-handedness of revolutionary states’ attempts to appropriate the trappings of legal authority. In effect, Rhode Island and Georgia’s revolutionary regimes sought to position themselves as successor governments to the colonial regimes that they overthrew, with similar official authority and modes of enforcing that authority. Their approaches to the royal officials reflect these ambitions. In Dudley’s case, Rhode Island’s governor and chief general cajoled the tax collector as they would a reluctant colleague, inherently accepting his authority as a royal appointee and seeking to persuade him to recognize their own authorities under Rhode Island’s royal charter, even if they were engaged in armed rebellion against the crown that granted and guaranteed it. By contrast, Georgia’s Provincial Congress, which had paid lip service to cooperation with Governor Sir James Wright despite, by January of 1776, actively holding that governor under house arrest, treated Henry Preston as a subordinate whose allegiance could be taken for granted and merely demanded. In both cases, the fig leaf of legal authority dropped almost immediately, and both regimes resorted to force to try to achieve their ends. This paradox—the use of arbitrary force to claim the trappings of legitimacy—haunted the attempts of early provincial-level revolutionary regimes and hamstrung their attempts at building legitimacy in the eyes of the population—most of whom had no fewer illusions than Charles Dudley or Henry Preston about the real source of their power.

The extra-legal tactics of Rhode Island’s Committee and Georgia’s Council typified the approach taken by provincial committees of safety across British North America. As provincial congresses and conventions emerged to replace colonial legislatures as the centers of popular authority in the revolting colonies, most established small committees—most had around a dozen members—to exercise executive powers in place of royally appointed governors. Termed by one historian “American Dictators,” revolutionary conventions often operated in secret and without due process, empowered committeemen with all manner of arbitrary civil and military authority, including surveilling, imprisoning, or exiling those deemed a threat to the new regime; confiscating private property for the war effort or as punishment for loyalist activities; embodying and commanding militiamen; setting prices for food and essential goods; suspending debts; and even holding ad hoc judicial proceedings. New York’s fourteen-member committee determined explicitly to limit “freedom of speech, the rights of conscience, and personal liberty” in order to protect the “general security” of the state. In Virginia, attorney and revolutionary leader George Mason feared that the eleven-member executive committee’s unprecedented powers—a committee of which he was a member—over civil society far outstripped any held by the defunct royal administration. Virginia’s convention authorized the executive body, among other things, to command, reorganize, and deploy all military forces within the state; to administer loyalty oaths and imprison those who refused to sign; and to confiscate private property—including enslaved people—from those deemed enemies of the new regime.Footnote ¹⁷

Even if their actions went beyond the powers of colonial governors, however, provincial committees, like the conventions that appointed them, claimed their legitimacy as successors of the colonial regimes they replaced. Delegates to provincial congresses and conventions were elected in the same manner as colonial legislatures and, for the most part, met and deliberated in the same way. In many cases, elected legislatures comprised the entirety of the conventions, following a precedent set by the Massachusetts General Court when its members met in defiance of royal governor Thomas Gage’s order to disperse in October 1774, declaring themselves not a colonial legislature but a Provincial Congress. In some colonies, like Rhode Island and Connecticut, the composition of colonial assemblies changed, but the assemblies retained their old names and rules for debate and legislation. Continuity with past lawmaking procedures was a vital font of legitimacy. As Virginia’s Convention drafted legislation in the summer of 1775 to reorganize the state’s government, George Mason assured a correspondent that “[e]very ordinance goes through all the formalities of a bill in the House of Burgesses … and in every respect wears the face of law.” Many of the former legislators no doubt hoped that the Committees of Safety established by these conventions would carry the same imprimatur of traditional authority that underpinned their own revolutionary activities.Footnote ¹⁸

When confronted with explicit challenges to their authority by Loyalists, provincial committeemen turned to Britain’s history to further justify their actions. Many leaders of the revolutionary movement were careful students of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, viewing those events—as many Britons did and continue to do—as the origination point of the mixed constitutional government that set Britain apart from its European rivals. Some delegates recalled that during the 1640s, Parliament appointed a Committee of Safety from among its members to serve executive functions left vacant by the absence of a monarch. The Long Parliament charged this group with administering its armies, crafting military policy, and naval affairs, and the Committee nonetheless played a powerful role in English politics during the Civil War. Although it became defunct under the Protectorate, this Committee of Safety was revived in 1659 upon the death of Oliver Cromwell and again in 1688 upon the forced abdication of James II, each time to assume emergency executive power in the absence of a monarch (or Lord Protector). Such bodies even had a North American precedent. In 1689, when Jacob Leisler and his allies seized control of much of New York and New Jersey in the name of the newly crowned William and Mary, they ruled through a Committee of Safety in the absence of legitimate royally appointed officials. Legislators-turned-revolutionaries steeped in both English and colonial history, then, could find a great deal of precedent for extra-legal committees that operated in the absence of defined authority to organize military affairs, exercise emergency powers, and take on police powers in the absence of a functioning royal government.Footnote ¹⁹

If provincial-level committees represented continuity with colonial legislatures in terms of personnel and procedure, local committees of safety—those operating at the county and town levels—represented more of a departure from earlier forms of municipal government. In part, this distinction emerged because local committees were not originally intended as governments at all. Authorized by the First Continental Congress, local committees were intended for two purposes: to elect delegates to provincial and continental congresses and to enforce the strictures of the Articles of Association, a non-importation pact agreed to by the Congress in response to Britain’s closure of the port of Boston. On both counts, Congressional instructions for their formation and operation proved both rigidly narrow and frustratingly vague. The Articles of Association instructed “[t]hat a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town” by qualified voters—a distinction it left to each community to interpret for itself. The Congress further instructed each committee to persuade their neighbors to agree to the Association, to collect and make use of confiscated British goods, and to “observe the conduct of all persons touching this association.” Again, the Association’s wording left the nature and extent of that observation, as well as the proper way to actually compel merchants and shopkeepers to conform, to the committees’ judgement. However, one of the only explicit authorities granted to the committees by the Association, publishing the names of violators to be “universally condemned as enemies of American liberty,” suggests the application of intimidation and social pressure on those suspected of breaking the pact, but local committees were given instructions neither on how to determine who was violating the association nor on what exactly to do with goods taken from violators. Further, there was no guidance on what authority committees were to act under or how to avoid legal consequences of their actions. Perhaps because of the tentativeness of the Congress itself, such decisions were apparently left entirely to local leaders.Footnote ²⁰

Further muddying already opaque waters, the local committees were also subject to the orders of provincial assemblies and conventions, whose prerogatives could overlap with Congressional priorities. which also left vague and sometimes contradictory instructions. Pennsylvania’s Provincial Convention of January 1775, for example, mentioned local committees only very briefly, instructing them to aid one another in enforcing the Continental Association, to publicly advertise the names of opponents of the movement, and to encourage home manufacturing—echoing directions included in the Articles but adding few clarifying amendments. Virginia’s convention was no better: in March 1775, it recommended that local committees begin collecting “contributions for supplying the necessities and alleviating the distresses of our brave and worthy fellow subjects of Boston,” to “take effectual measures for the procuring such gunpowder, lead, flints, and cartridge paper,” and, as in Pennsylvania, to promote home manufacturing. These passages typified the early relationship between provincial revolutionary institutions and local-level bodies. While county committees were universally acknowledged as an important cog in the revolutionary machinery, nowhere did provincial conventions instruct the county committees on how to carry out their directives, what measures to take, or how far their authority carried. And, when in May 1775 the Congress reconvened, the chain of command became further muddled, leaving local committeemen to navigate directives coming both from Congress and their provincial capitals as best they could. Lacking coherent direction from above, the actions these bodies took, especially in the early months of the revolution, drew on their members’ experiences and conceptions of their roles as leaders within their communities.Footnote ²¹

Even if their mandates proved slippery, local committeemen could draw upon a heritage of communal municipal government as long and authoritative as the constitutional system that underpinned their provincial counterparts. And, as with the provincial committees, their conceptions of their proper role in government dated back to the seventeenth century. During the English Civil War, Parliament appointed not only a central Committee of Safety but also committees in each of the realm’s counties, empowered to organize enlistment in the Parliamentary army, requisition supplies, and govern the regions in place of royal appointees. In extreme circumstances, these county committees were even empowered to suppress royalists by disarmament, imprisonment, or other punitive measures. As one influential eighteenth-century history of the conflict narrated, these institutions emerged when Parliament “resolved upon the execution of their full sovereign power”—that is, the moment when Parliament ceased to pay homage to the monarchy. Many of these committees never came into existence or exercised even a fraction of their envisioned power, but they served to “shew [sic] what they meant to do all over England”—in short, as a symbolic assertion of Parliamentary authority in opposition to the monarch that extended even to the most remote parts of the kingdom. And even if these committees themselves did not make an impact on rural life, the partisan divisions awakened during the Civil War reshaped politics in towns and villages throughout England—and its colonies—for more than a generation. In response to the violence engendered by political division during the 1640s and 50s, municipal corporations developed varied institutional procedures to incorporate conflict within communal governance. Reforming corporate charters combined with the professionalization of the royal courts to enshrine in England’s counties a participatory style of politics both more responsive to local conditions and remarkably stable, even if the reality of factional competition belied the rhetoric of unified, bucolic governance. Through participation in town councils, commercial guilds, municipal and royal courts, and religious congregations, townspeople negotiated local authority under a dynamic system that balanced divergent local interests just as effectively, if with less fanfare, as the national constitution balanced the interests of the gentry, nobility, and commons.Footnote ²²

In British North America, the local leaders who became committeemen in 1774 and 1775 inherited England’s tradition of participatory corporate government in ways that diverged from the mother country and, in many cases, one another. In jurisdictions of varying sizes, local institutions across the colonies granted to most free adult white men, at least, what historian Barbara Clark Smith has called “common ground” for political activity and agency. The institutions of communal government ensured that almost every member of the polity, regardless of social standing, had the opportunity to participate in their local government. What this meant could vary widely based on local conditions. Especially in New England and the mid-Atlantic, residents voted directly for selectmen, members of their town council, and other local officials. Even if only those with relatively elite standing could attain these posts, the act of having to court the votes of their inferiors allowed for the balancing of class and ethnic interests. Wealthy notables—plantation owners, urban patrons, and leading merchants—sat atop systems of patronage that served a similar purpose, allowing ordinary colonists access to their superiors and input, even if informal, in the important decisions facing their communities. Compulsory public service also played an important role. Across the colonies, authorities could appropriate the labor of enslaved people or free men to build roads, clear forests, or drain swamps for the communal good. Almost all white male adults were subject to duty in their county militias, and urban dwellers were also required to serve periodic stints in the municipal town watch. In the South, nearly all white men served in local slave patrols, with even those who did not own enslaved people helping to police the community’s captive labor force. In larger cities and towns, craftsmen and merchants served as overseers of the poor, alternately doling out public charity and assigning the children of their impoverished neighbors to apprenticeships and domestic service. Outside of government, participation in voluntary societies and evangelical religious congregations—both of which flourished in the decades leading up to the Revolution—provided yet another avenue both for mass participation in group decisions and, for the leading men of the community, the exercise of informal leadership among their friends and neighbors.Footnote ²³

While disparate, each of these activities provided a civic baseline upon which local revolutionary committees could draw to legitimate their authority. What they did not provide, however, was a blueprint for how to bring that authority to bear on the novel problems created by the outbreak of a revolutionary war. Surviving records of the revolutionary committees of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Tryon County, New York—arguably the two best-documented local committees—demonstrate that as the war broke out in April and May of 1775, local committeemen were largely left to their own devices, bereft of any instructions on how to proceed. In organizing their communities for revolution, each committee followed a course that strayed increasingly far from familiar customs. As war broke out, both committees began to organize men and materiel for the revolutionary cause, to suppress expressions of loyalism, and to undermine attempts to reassert royal control. These efforts intensified as the weeks and months passed after Lexington and Concord, and through the late summer and early fall of 1775, the committees expanded both in their personnel and in the scope of their activities. As they took on more and more governmental power, each attempted, like the Georgia and Rhode Island provincial governments, to maintain a veneer of legal procedure and due process, even as their actions strayed further and further from their Congressional mandate. As in other communities throughout the revolting provinces, most leaders of Lancaster and Tryon’s committees were cautious not to overextend their authority and sought to exercise restraint and what due process they could despite their inherently extra-legal tasks.Footnote ²⁴ After all, the committees only maintained their legitimacy if they upheld the constitutional ideals that they had been created to safeguard. In theory, because their actions were relatively moderate and justified both by military exigency and constitutional tradition, their communities would overlook their technical illegality and accept both their actions and, more generally, recognize the authority of the committees themselves, without undue protest. Even so, in both counties, some members of the community rejected these committees’ claims to authority entirely, while others sought to push their boundaries even further beyond the pale of legitimacy. Suppressing loyalists and conciliating radicals required imposing a degree of force, which in turn provoked more resistance and eroded the legitimacy of the revolutionary regimes.

During the winter of 1775-76, as royal governments ceased to function, the county committees reached the apex of their power, exercising almost complete civil and military authority within their jurisdictions. In asserting these prerogatives, however, these popular local governments had to resort to more and more authoritarian modes of conduct, and the façade of legality slipped even further. By the spring of 1776, both committeemen and their constituents grew convinced of the unsustainability of committee rule and turned to sources of authority at the provincial and Continental levels. For these local leaders, experience had demonstrated better than any rhetoric that only the establishment of an independent government, with full legal authority, could legitimize their rule and restore order and harmony to their communities.

Although the two communities—three hundred miles apart—differed in nearly every way, they nonetheless followed similar paths. Lancaster, in southeastern Pennsylvania, was one of the original counties laid out by William Penn in the 1690s and was settled en masse by European migrants starting in the 1730s. One of the most densely populated rural counties in the British colonies, its eponymous capital was one of the largest cities in the colonies, boasting more than 2500 residents. As inland Pennsylvania’s most prominent outpost, Lancaster City possessed more than 300 craftspeople and served as a commercial hub and administrative center for the rapidly growing settlements further west. Outside of the county seat, around 35,000 German, English, and Scots-Irish settlers resided on prosperous farms and neat townships amidst nearly 1500 square miles of rolling hills and fertile valleys in a region historian James T. Lemon termed “the best poor man’s country” in colonial North America.Footnote ²⁵ Tryon County, by contrast, was the newest county in New York, incorporated in 1772 at the behest of Sir William Johnson, the powerful Indian agent whose family dominated the region. Comprising parts of more than thirty modern-day counties in western New York, much of the massive territory had only recently been secured by treaty from the Iroquois, whose constituent tribes—particularly the Mohawk—maintained a significant presence. The area’s approximately 10,000 European settlers, most of whom were of German, Dutch, or Scots-Irish ancestry, were sparsely settled on small farms and ragged villages, some of which were hundreds of miles remote from the county seat of Johnstown. Even if they could spare the time for the arduous journey, travelers would have had to traverse mountains and dense forests via one of the few reliable roads in the underdeveloped territory. Once they arrived at the county seat, they would find that Johnstown was a fortified town entirely dependent on Sir William for its livelihood, who so completely controlled the affairs of the region that, despite holding no title, residents referred to him as “Your Lordship.” All positions of public trust, from jailer to sheriff to even the pastor of Johnstown’s Anglican church, owed their positions to Johnson and maintained strict loyalty to their patron. While Sir William Johnson died in the summer of 1774, his son Sir John Johnson and nephew Colonel Guy Johnson maintained the family’s domination of the county’s politics through at least the summer of 1775 and continued to contest revolutionary rule through the 1780s.Footnote ²⁶ Whereas Lancaster’s committee sprang from a relatively egalitarian community, Tryon’s emerged under the oppressive rule of one of British North America’s most powerful families.

Despite the drastic differences between the two counties, the men who formed and operated the local committees were much the same, reflecting a mixture of established local elites and men on the make. Attorneys and jurists chaired each committee for the most part, while most rank-and-file committeemen pursued careers in commerce, agriculture, or crafts. Socially, they represented a wide spectrum of educational attainment, wealth, and status, yet important commonalities bound them together in solidarity. All were of the class that traditionally participated in rural or municipal government. Many of the older members had firsthand experience in colonial administrations—holding minor offices, serving on municipal committees, or appearing before the bar—and their younger and poorer colleagues would have expected similar public service roles in due course. All had served at least a stint in the colonial militia, and many had seen extensive service alongside British regulars during the Seven Years’ War. All either owned land or had extensive commercial interests. Although they hailed from a variety of faiths and national backgrounds—nearly half of both committees spoke a language other than English at home—all were Protestants, and all were white. There were limits to how far each could advance: with few exceptions, local committeemen were generally not those selected for provincial assemblies or appointed to the most lucrative or desirable imperial posts. Although, most operated one rung underneath the colonial elite who served in these roles and who would go on to serve in state legislatures and the Continental Congress. Their experience and standing within their communities distinguished them as local leaders.

In Lancaster, a central committee of correspondence first convened in the summer of 1774 to select and instruct delegates to the first Continental Congress and began operating as a “Committee of Observation” under that body’s instructions that October.Footnote ²⁷ Chosen through “general election” (though who exactly was eligible to vote is unclear from the extant records), most committeemen came from the local elite, and many had direct experience in the colonial administration. Edward Shippen III, a septuagenarian judge and Penn family favorite who had held high office in the county for two decades, chaired the committee from its inception through the outbreak of war and was joined by between seven and twelve colleagues—depending on the meeting—who included men like up-and-coming young attorney Jasper Yeates, ironmonger George Ross, physician Adam Simon Kuhn, dyer and assistant burgess Casper Shaffner, and innkeeper Adam Reigart, whose tavern provided the meeting place for the committee throughout its first year of existence. Most came from the borough of Lancaster, though a few, such as militia colonel James Burd of Paxton, represented outlying townships. Burd and others from smaller towns served double duty, attending both the central committee meeting in Lancaster and their own town committees, which comprised notable residents in each of these communities. As influential farmers, craftsmen, and professionals, most committeemen were likely accustomed to serving in positions of trust either in municipal government, religious congregations, or voluntary associations. While the revolutionary committees were novel in structure and mission, then, their personnel had a great deal of experience in the collaborative exercise of authority.Footnote ²⁸

In Tryon County, Christopher Yates, a surveyor and attorney in his mid-twenties, chaired what was initially a four-man committee at its inception in August 1774, joined by schoolmaster Andrew Finck, farmer John Frey, and Indian trader Isaac Paris, who later that year represented the county at New York’s Provincial Congress. Although the Johnson family dominated the county’s government and kept many of these men out of official positions, as wealthy settlers, all four nevertheless comprised what historian Edward Countryman has called “the nucleus of a new frontier elite.” While they may not have had the governmental resumes of Judge Shippen or Burgess Schaffner in Lancaster, many did have experience in other modes of collective governance in the county militia, as commissioners of highways, for instance. And, as in Lancaster, the committee encompassed diverse occupations and social backgrounds. As Countryman observes, Tryon County’s revolutionary committee contained “a large proportion of obscure farmers” alongside the region’s leaders, and many of these “were genuinely small” in fortune. Two members of the committee, for example—George Eader, Jr., and Daniel McDougall—are identified as smallholders and privates in the county militia, indicating their relatively low status. Still, as free men and independent landowners, they almost certainly had served on juries and helped to construct roads and fortifications. As young independent men on an unstable but expanding frontier, they likely saw peace and a booming economy as a path to upward mobility. Most committeemen, then, could draw on at least prior experience in collective governance.Footnote ²⁹

In their infancy, the activities of these committees resembled municipal committees and voluntary organizations with which members would have been familiar. Even where they did diverge from tradition, from their inception through the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, committees pursued a subdued and moderate course of action. This caution stemmed from an understanding of the precarity of their positions and the potential legal jeopardy of their mandates. The First Continental Congress, after all, was of distinctly dubious legitimacy—its critics argued that it constituted an illegal counter-government—and, since they initially drew their mandate from the Congress, this questionable legality extended to provincial and local committees alike. Indeed, the extra-legal nature of their charge led Tryon County’s committee to meet in secret for nearly a year, from the summer of 1774 through May of 1775. The ruling Johnson family, who continued to control the levers of county government through mid-summer 1775, actively sought to suppress committee activity, threatening to bring criminal charges against those caught meeting in accordance with the Congress’s instructions or attempting to enforce the nonimportation and other tenets of the Continental Association. As a result, we know little of the activities of Tryon’s committeemen through this period, and the precariousness of their situation remained a sore spot even after the committee emerged into the open after Lexington and Concord. On May 19, 1775, as they began preparations for war, the committee lamented to its counterpart in Albany that “different Branches” of the Johnson family “are still strenuous in dissuading people from coming into Congressional Measures,” going so far as to send armed retainers to break up a meeting in the Mohawk District of the county. In Tryon County, as Edward Countryman observes, committee membership constituted “a public stand against all that the Johnson family stood for,” and the committees could not come out from the shadows until they had sufficient support to openly challenge the Johnsons for authority in the county.Footnote ³⁰

In contrast, despite its nominal illegality, the Lancaster County Committee—as well as its subsidiaries—operated in the open from the beginning. From the summer of 1774, the County Committee posted notices of its meetings in local newspapers—often in both English and German—and invited the wider public to participate in at least some of its proceedings. The election of delegates to the Continental Congress and to the Provincial Convention in November 1775, for example, occurred in the same manner as an annual election for the colonial Assembly. Likely, the presence of some of the county’s most prominent residents—many of them officeholders themselves—aided in this quasi-legal standing.

In keeping with this showing of legality, during the late summer and fall of 1774, the county committee’s activities were narrowly restricted. For the most part, it endorsed and published the resolves of the Continental Congress and the Philadelphia Committee of Correspondence, organized popular support for non-importation, and collected cash and food donations for the population of occupied Boston. Although technically illegal, these activities mimicked those of the voluntary and charitable associations to which many committeemen had long belonged. Like early committees elsewhere, Lancaster’s committeemen also engaged in extra-legal intimidation and public shaming to enforce the Articles of Association—a non-importation pact agreed to by the First Continental Congress. However, even in pursuing these methods, Lancaster’s committee maintained a semblance of legal procedure and due process. For example, members thoroughly investigated—and acquitted—two shopkeepers of selling tea in violation of the Association’s prohibition. They acquitted another shopkeeper who did not realize that his tea had been sold, although the defendant swore an oath to abide by the Association rules in the future. In another case, the Committee found that a local dancing instructor had violated the Continental Congress’s strictures on “expensive Diversions and Entertainments” and ordered the shuttering of his school. The Committee thus employed both intimidation and official procedure and further bolstered its authority by exercising discretionary moderation. Even if no law granted the County Committee authority to investigate shopkeepers or demand the closure of dance academies, in asserting these powers the committeemen nevertheless acted openly and took great care to shroud their activities not only in moderation but also in the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.Footnote ³¹

Circumstances changed during the spring of 1775. When word arrived of the events of April 19 at Lexington and Concord, local committees immediately began preparations for war. On May 1, Lancaster’s committeemen resolved to “defend and protect the religious and civil rights of this and out sister colonies” and pledged to “use our utmost diligence to acquaint ourselves with Military discipline and the Art of War” and ordered the formation of volunteer companies of one hundred men each. Two days later, the committeemen resolved to “examine the quantity of powder and lead … in the respective Townships” and forbade shopkeepers from selling ammunition without “having a Licence from two Members of the Committee”—its first act beyond the letter of the association but in keeping with its responsibilities as a revolutionary committee. On May 4 they went further, compelling ten different vendors to sell their powder to the committee at prices set by its agents. Although couched in the records as agreements, there is little doubt from the context that these were forced sales, intended both to add to the County Committee’s growing stockpile of ammunition and to prevent the matériel falling into the hands of potential enemies of the revolutionary movement. Two members of the committee agreed to take charge of these military stores and, crucially, to keep hold of the keys to the Lancaster Borugh Magazine, which contained both public and private stores of arms and ammunition. Further preparations for war included printing and distributing regulations for the armed volunteers in both English and German, contracting a local artisan to create “a mould for casting Bullets of different sizes” and taking an inventory of firearms in public and private hands. Over the course of the first five days of May, the committee effectively placed the county on a wartime footing, preparing to join the armed insurrection begun outside of Boston only two weeks earlier.Footnote ³²

Tryon County’s committee underwent an even more dramatic transformation in May 1775 as it emerged into the open and began to rally the county for war. After news of Lexington and Concord arrived, the county committee expanded from four members to more than two dozen, with four of the five districts in the massive county represented. Lacking the resources of Lancaster—especially access to tradesmen and stores with imported goods—the committeemen sent four of their number to purchase “powder and flints and Lead” from town committees in loyalist-dominated Albany and Schenectady. If their representatives were detained by loyalists, the committee pledged “to the utmost of our power do our Endeavors by Force or otherwise to rescue them from Imprisonment.” Between early June and mid-July, the committee oversaw the process of each district forming “armed companies” “with the greatest Expedition.” The committee charged district leaders to “make perfect Lists of all the Freeholders and Inhabitants of their respective Districts” and to offer each the opportunity to sign onto the association. Those who refused were to be noted on a separate list, to be shunned from engaging in commerce or public life until they agreed to support the new regime. At the end of the month, the county committee adopted a diplomatic mien and sent emissaries—alongside Albany’s committee—to the Oneida and Tuscarora tribes to make the case for a military alliance against the king’s forces. By mid-July, the committee had garrisoned Fort Stanwix against attack by Natives and loyalists, requested and received additional reinforcements and ammunition from the committees of Albany and Schenectady, and mobilized militia companies “to keep scouting parties out” for potential threats, despite fears that these activities would distract from the coming harvest season. The committee acted on its own; as late as August 12, no guidance from the Continental or provincial congresses on “how to act in Military and civil Matters” or “how to defray the Expences [sic] necessary for the Common Cause” had reached them.Footnote ³³ Operating with little outside support and across a vast territorial expanse, by the end of the summer, Tryon’s committeemen had readied the county for war.

While local committees acted with a purpose and alacrity that their provincial and continental counterparts lacked, the militarization of the committees brought challenges both from within and without the revolutionary coalition. In Lancaster, popular enthusiasm for the armed struggle caught Lancaster’s committeemen by surprise and threatened to undermine their authority even as they sought to consolidate their new regime. The military fervor that overtook British North America during spring and early summer 1775—aptly described by the historian Charles Royster as rage militaire—swept through the county, as hundreds of young men poured forth to sign up as soldiers.Footnote ³⁴ While the committeemen welcomed this demonstration of popular support for the revolutionary cause, many of the newly enlisted recruits had different ideas about how to proceed and under whose authority. The County Committee quickly found itself fielding questions and demands from townships and citizens that it did not know how to handle. In Salisbury Township, for example, a chaotic muster on May 13 resulted in some heading to Boston without instructions; and in two slates of officers being elected to lead the town’s company, and the townsfolk appealed to the central county committee to resolve the situation.Footnote ³⁵ Others made efforts to conscript unwilling volunteers, and by the end of May, the County Committee received regular reports that those who refused due to “religious tenets” were “maltreated and threatened by some violent & ill-disposed people.” The committeemen viewed this as excessive and resolved to “use every possible means to discourage and prevent such licentious proceedings.” They went on to compose and order printed a broadside in English and German urging “Harmony and Unity,” further promising “to bring all such imprudent persons to a proper sense of their misconduct.Footnote ³⁶ ” Prepared as they were for war, the Lancaster Committee balked at violating the religious liberties of their neighbors. The committeemen doubtless thought their judiciousness set them apart from those “ill-disposed people” who threatened conscientious objectors and likely hoped that this considered moderation would underscore their legitimacy.

For Lancaster’s Committee, however, administrative stability was fleeting. Four days after they had addressed religious objectors, a popular backlash forced eleven members of the County Committee to resign. Although the exact sequence of events is unclear, meeting minutes cited “the situation with regard to the Inhabitants of the Burrough” as the reason for their ouster and admitted that “their well meant endeavours [sic] to serve the public good have proved not satisfactory to divers people” in the community. Given the sequence of events, a probable scenario is that some locals who objected to the protection of conscientious objectors launched a crowd action, threatened violence, or refused to comply until they forced the committee out of power.Footnote ³⁷ The move brought sweeping change as the size of the committee now grew from between seven to twelve fairly elite characters in the past to forty people from remote towns and villages. In the space of a few short days, a popular coup had overtaken the revolutionary leadership of Lancaster County.

The new committee’s choice of leader suggests a deeper-rooted popular rebellion to replace the body’s older, patrician leaders with the radical vanguard of the revolutionary movement. In place of the genteel Edward Shippen III, the newly constituted group elected James Burd, a Pennsylvania militia colonel who had risen from poverty and had seen extensive combat on the Pennsylvania frontier during and after the Seven Years’ War. Although both men were of a similar station and were even related by marriage, they differed markedly in temperament and experience. Where Shippen’s career had been marked by attempts to maintain order and mitigate violence between settlers and Natives in Pennsylvania’s borderlands, Burd was in the front rank of those pushing the colony’s borders west.Footnote ³⁸ Burd also had roots in Paxton, a township at the center of a vigilante movement that, in the wake of Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763, had murdered twenty peaceful Conestoga Indians in one of the most public transgressions against the colonial order before the Revolution.Footnote ³⁹ Burd was not involved in the Conestoga Massacre or the subsequent insurrection of the so-called “Paxton Boys,” but he chaired the Paxton town committee of safety, which had already clashed with the county’s revolutionary leadership when it came to raising troops and procuring materiel. Burd was particularly displeased to be denied access to ammunition stored in Lancaster City’s public powder magazine. In the heat of military fervor, it must have seemed a betrayal to hoard war materiel that could be immediately applied to the cause.Footnote ⁴⁰

From June of 1775 onwards, Lancaster County’s revolutionaries took a much more aggressive line in prosecuting the war against Great Britain and in attempting to consolidate their new regime. Two weeks after taking power, the new committee passed an order compelling all adult males in the county to arm themselves and join a volunteer company; those who refused—even for religious reasons—were to be fined “three Pounds ten shillings,” a substantial sum for all but the well-off. By early August, those who continued to refuse to arm or pay up were to be publicly labeled “Non-Associators,” and their names printed publicly as a means of shame and intimidation. In addition to coercing service, the committee also began to coerce the labor of artisans in the community. In November, the committee assigned each gunsmith in the county—of which there were at least half a dozen—a quota of weapons to make for the volunteers, to be sold at “Philadelphia prices” of the previous year, and barred them from conducting any other commerce until they had completed their allotment. If the commercial ban were not enough, the committee at the same time decreed that those who did not comply would be labeled “enemies of this country,” their names published, and their tools impounded. That same month, the committee took possession of the keys to the county’s powder magazine and directed that “quantities of powder and ball … be made up in Cartridges” and made ready for military use at a moment’s notice. By early December, the committee took direct control of the operation of at least one gunsmiths’ workshop, ordering its personnel to “immediately proceed to work” under the supervision of a committee-appointed barrack master. As the weather turned cold, popular rule in Lancaster County became increasingly authoritarian as it continued its military preparations and consolidated its authority.Footnote ⁴¹

In western New York, the challenge to revolutionary authority came not from overzealous volunteers but from entrenched elites and their followers. Almost immediately after the committee began to organize, the Johnsons deployed their considerable influence among both settlers and Natives to oppose it. As early as May 19, 1775, the committee reported that Sir John Johnson, who had inherited the family seat at Johnstown, “fortified” the estate “by placing a parcel of Swivel [gun]s round the same” and gathered “about 140 Highlanders (Roman Catholicks [sic]) in and about Johnstown … armed and ready to march.” In the prior decade, Sir William had encouraged the immigration of hundreds of Highland Scots pushed off of their land by enclosure, and many of them farmed his lands as tenant farmers. Colonel Guy Johnson, Sir John’s cousin and the newly installed Superintendent of Indian Affairs, also had men under arms at his estate of Guy Park, ten miles away on the Mohawk River, and the committeemen feared that the two Johnsons intended to use their influence with the local Natives, “who we dread most,” in order to suppress the nascent rebellion. These fears must’ve seemed all the more real when armed followers of the Johnson cousins appeared at a meeting in the Mohawk district to “oppose the people from considering their Grievances” and ultimately prevented the district committee from assembling. Men loyal to the Johnsons also began to stop and search travelers along the roads and threatened to stop the county committee’s lines of communication with its counterparts elsewhere, isolating Tryon’s revolutionaries. Ultimately, the committee concluded that Johnsons’ “design is to keep us in awe, and to oblige us to submit to a State of Slavery.”Footnote ⁴²

Even in the face of strong and organized opposition, Tyron’s revolutionary committee took care in the early months of open conflict to at under legal—or legalistic—auspices. As loyalist and Native forces gathered and armed, the committeemen dispatched emissaries and letters to the Johnsons attempting to conciliate them and prevent open bloodshed. Conceding in their address to Colonel Guy Johnson that tensions were rising, they defended the legality of their organization, writing that “[w]e have a Right not only by the overruling Law of Self preservation, but by the Laws and Constitution of England to meet” in order to “consult the Common Safety of our Rights and Liberties.” They further assured the colonel that “[w]e are not ignorant of the very great Importance of yr office as Superintendant [sic] of the Indians,” and pled with the Indian agent “to use your Endeavors with the Indians to dissuade them from interfering in the Dispute with the Mother Country and the Colonies.” After acknowledging Johnson’s legal authority, however, the committee warned the superintendent that maintaining the presence in arms of Native and loyalist militia “greatly inflames the Minds of the people,” urging him to demobilize his forces. The committee further pointed out that stopping travel on public roads was a crime under New York law, although they stopped short of openly accusing Johnson, rather conceding that searches and seizures had “been practised [sic] by persons, who were fond of giving themselves airs of importance, altho’ illegally.” Eager to assuage the powerful grandee, the revolutionaries concluded their missive by assuring the colonel that no member of the body had “ever spoken or made Use of any unbecoming or malevolent Language of you or any of your Family.” Although the letter surely contained a bit of dissembling, as many of the committeemen were open enemies of the Johnsons, their parsing of the law and deference to Colonel Guy’s official position demonstrates how important legal precedent and legal procedures were even as the committee engaged in organizing a rebellion. Ultimately, however, it was the organization of revolutionary militia, rather than legal arguments or flattery, that persuaded Colonel Johnson to retreat. Unnerved by the growing militancy of his foes, he led two hundred of his followers north to Canada, ceding control of the region, for the time being at least, to the committeemen. Still, Sir John remained defiantly in his fortified camp until 1779, and white loyalists and Natives allied to the Johnson family remained a threat to Tryon’s revolutionaries for years to come.Footnote ⁴³

Tryon’s revolutionaries took increasingly extra-legal and arbitrary measures over the second half of 1775 in response to the ongoing challenge to the committee’s authority, combined with the local resource drain and lack of direction from the provincial level. In August, observing an increased level of violent disputes among their recruits, the committee authorized militia officers to determine appropriate fines for such wrongdoing and to “recover the same by distraining the Goods and Chattels of the Transgressors,” authorizing the county’s revolutionary armed forces to confiscate private property without due process. The next month, the committee stripped the obstructionist royally appointed sheriff of authority and replaced him with one of their own, justifying this blatantly illegal action with the vague claim that it was done on “the Behalf of our Constitution.” The new sheriff was elected by “free Voting … by the Freeholders and Inhabitants of our County” in which fewer than two hundred people participated. In the autumn of 1775, Tryon’s revolutionaries imprisoned several suspected loyalists without trial. In November, they ruled that any man resident in the county for “the space of Six Weeks shall be liable to bear Arms, and do Military Duty” in the county militia. In enforcing order among the troops by confiscation, repressing dissent, dismissing colonial officials, and finally passing a measure for forced service in the revolutionary army, the committee went far beyond its original remit and exercised powers never before countenanced, even by the dictatorial Johnsons.Footnote ⁴⁴

By the committee’s increasingly draconian measures to maintain the war effort nonetheless undermined their standing with some in the community. In early August 1775 the committee hauled in a man accused of having “spoke disrespectfully of this Committee.” The man reported that loyalist recruiting was beginning in earnest to supply “the Ministerial Army,” or the king’s forces—the first report of active loyalist recruiting in the region. That same month, a volunteer company “received great abuse” as they passed through the town of Salisbury. Faced with evidence that organized loyalism was on the rise, the popular government’s measures only got more drastic in response. In October, Lancaster’s committee jailed one Mr. Brooks for promoting defiance of the new regime, and decreed that “no person whatever is permitted to visit him but in the presence of one or more of the Gentlemen” of the committee for fear of his influence persuading others to defy the committee’s edicts. These efforts backfired, however, as more and more residents met local leaders’ attempts to recruit soldiers, raise money, and inspire loyalty to the revolutionary cause with apathy or derision. By mid-November, an argument within the committee over rules for the members’ own conduct suggests the mounting pressure on the committeemen.Footnote ⁴⁵

In response to this popular resistance, in early 1776 the committee drastically scaled down its ambitions, shifting away from policymaking and increasingly limiting itself to following the orders of military officers and the Pennsylvania Assembly. Primarily, this meant managing prisoners of war sent to the region by the Continental Army. Although Lancaster’s committeemen continued through 1777 to periodically exercise police powers—jailing the occasional loyalist and publicly denouncing the revolution’s critics as “inimical to the Cause of America”—after the winter of 1775-1776, it was far less involved in the questions of religious toleration and political liberty that framed proceedings in the summer of 1775. After Pennsylvania’s provincial leaders adopted a formal state constitution in September 1776, Lancaster’s committee ceased altogether to claim legitimacy as a government in its own right, ceding that authority to provincial elites under a new system.Footnote ⁴⁶

In Tryon County, the committee’s authority also seems to have waned towards the end of 1775, although records beyond the end of November have regrettably not survived to tell the entire story. In late October, one militia captain complained that “[s]everal privates” refused to muster. Absenteeism on the committee itself became such a problem that its’ members resolved to fine one another twenty shillings—a considerable sum—for missing its meetings “provided they cannot give a Sufficient Reason, why they do not appear or attend.” Even with its more limited operations, the committee continued to garner opposition, especially after much of the militia departed for the ill-fated Canadian campaign. With no military force and diminished popular legitimacy, the committee appealed to provincial and Continental-level revolutionary authorities. A dramatic incident that fall hints at the extent of the body’s growing impotence. Committeeman and militia colonel Jacob Clark reported to the body in early November that one such “Returned Enemy,” a mixed-race man named William Johnson—who may have been a son of Sir William Johnson—came to his home “accoutred [sic] with two pistols, a gun, and a Broadsword. Finding Clock absent commanding his regiment, Johnson proceeded to convey “dangerous threatenings [sic] & other scandalous Expressions” to the committeeman’s family and servants. Johnson declared himself “a King’s Man,” adding that he had “killed so many Yankies [sic] at Fort St. Johns”—during the Continental siege of that post a few weeks prior—and that “the d[amne]d Committee here have gone too far already, I will shew them better, and will cut some of their heads off by and by …” He concluded his graphic tirade by pledging to “come with 500 Men, which I have ready, to cut off the whole River and burn their houses this Fall yet.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Despite these graphic threats and the committeemen’s constant pre-occupation with Native attack, however, the committee uncharacteristically declined in the same meeting to interfere in Indian politics. When one committeeman proposed that the revolutionaries send “an authority” to the Oneida tribe, “to stop Letters or any other packets suspicious to the prejudice of our Country’s Cause” carried by individuals “without a pass of our or any other Committee of the Province,” the majority voted nay, reasoning that “Indn affairs belong top the agents in Albany.” The same committeemen who a few months earlier had boldly threatened Native groups and sent militia companies into their midst to police their actions now subordinated their authority over these groups to another body. Their reign as de facto independent governors of the county had ceased.Footnote ⁴⁸

Tryon county continued to be bitterly divided after the committee ceased to govern in its own right, but the region’s committeemen redoubled their support for the revolutionary cause. Nearly all of the County Committee’s members served in either the Continental Army or the county militia through the summer of 1777, engaging in an increasingly vicious guerilla campaign against loyalist and Native Americans in the region. Several became colonels, and one a general, in the state militia, supporting Continental operations and waging war a vicious internecine conflict against loyalists and Natives in Tryon County. Despite their enthusiasm, the guerilla conflict in Tryon County realized the worst fears of the community’s revolutionary leaders. As opposing forces crisscrossed the Mohawk Valley over the next few years, as many as seven hundred buildings went up in flames and the county’s population shrank by more than half, leaving more than two thousand orphans. Many of the committeemen themselves perished or were captured at the battle of Oriskany, where their old nemesis Sir John Johnson ambushed a militia column attempting to relieve the siege of Fort Stanwix. Those lost included committee leaders John Frey—who was wounded and imprisoned in Canada for the remainder of the war—and Isaac Paris, who perished alongside his eldest son. General Nicholas Herkimer, commander of the county militia and one-time chair of the county committee, also lost his life, as did more than 400 other Tryon County revolutionaries.Footnote ⁴⁹

Lancaster’s committeeman—and the community they led—fared better. Most of the Lancaster County Committee members who resigned in May 1775 returned to the committee and continued to direct the war effort in the county, with lawyer and founding member Jasper Yeates becoming its chair from November of 1775 until the committee dissolved in 1777. Even after they ceded much of their independent authority to the state of Pennsylvania in late 1776, under Yeates and his fellow committeemen the revolutionary cause took such root in Lancaster that the town became one of the primary destinations for British prisoners of war to be kept safe from escape until exchanged, and in September of 1777 Lancaster City even became the temporary capital of the incipient United States, hosting the Continental Congress for several weeks after British troops forced the body to abandon Philadelphia. In the years to follow, many members of the committee went on to hold offices in the new revolutionary states of Pennsylvania and the United States. George Ross, an ironmonger who had served on the committee at its inception and resigned and rejoined after the popular coup of June 1775, was selected in 1776 to be a Pennsylvania representative to the Continental Congress and in July signed the Declaration of Independence. James Burd became an officer in the Continental Army, leading one of Lancaster’s battalions and helping to recruit soldiers through the end of 1775. His son-in-law and committee chair, Jasper Yeates, also continued to serve throughout the war and afterwards rose to become a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court during the 1790s. These men did not abandon the revolution when their committees’ efforts proved wanting; rather, they used the experience to ensure the success of the revolution in other roles.Footnote ⁵⁰

That popular revolutionary governments could not both maintain a semblance of legal order and still effectively organize for war was abundantly apparent by the end of 1775. Again and again, the façade of legal tradition—essential as it was for legitimation of these new governments—fell to popular enthusiasm, loyalist resistance, and the increasing demands that a widening war placed on local resources. As the local committeemen’s experiences demonstrate, in the face of these obstacles the committees that had acted with such care for moderation and conciliation at the Revolution’s outset resorted to increasingly authoritarian methods of governing, coercing, and intimidating their neighbors rather than issuing legal—or legalistic—orders and resolves. This dictatorial turn resulted in a loss of legitimacy in the eyes of these neighbors and steadily degraded these bodies’ effectiveness as governing entities. Still, this did not cause early committeemen to despair of the revolutionary cause. Rather, it demonstrated the need for a new source of legal legitimacy, one that did not depend on the legal culture of the old colonial regime or ambiguous notions of the ancient British constitution. It is not a coincidence that, during the tumultuous summer of 1776, a gathering of Pennsylvania’s local committee leaders—the “Provincial Conference” that met in Philadelphia from June 18 through June 25—played a critical role in overcoming the provincial assembly’s recalcitrance to instruct the state’s Congressmen to support a break with Great Britain. Long, hard experience had taught local committeemen, more than any other members of the revolutionary cohort, the dangers of a lawless government, and they proved the most enthusiastic supporters of independence.Footnote ⁵¹