Samuel Adams of Boston sent a circular letter to each of the Colonies asking for help. Food, fuel, and money came pouring in.
All that Summer, Boston, suffering, impoverished Boston, lay upon every loyal American heart. Each province, county, city, town, neighbourhood, sent its contribution.
Windham, Connecticut, began the work of relief, and sent in, with a cordial letter of applause and sympathy, “a small flock of sheep.” Two hundred and fifty-eight sheep was Windham’s notion of a small flock!
New Jersey soon wrote that she would be glad to know which would be more acceptable to a suffering sister, cash or produce. “Cash,” replied Boston, “if perfectly convenient.”
Massachusetts farmers supplied grain by the barrel and bushel. The Marblehead fishermen forwarded “two hundred and twenty-four quintels of good eating-fish, one barrel and three-quarters of good olive oil”—with money to boot.
North Carolina promptly sent two sloop-loads of provisions. South Carolina’s first gift was one hundred casks of rice.
And Baltimore Town contributed three thousand bushels of corn, twenty barrels of rye-flour, two barrels of pork, and twenty barrels of bread.
Virginia!—there seemed to be no end to Virginia’s gifts!
And as the cool season approached, the farmers could be more liberal. Flocks of fat sheep and droves of oxen, together with hundreds of cords of wood, grain, and money in plenty, helped to relieve the suffering town. From New York they came, and from Maryland, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, from the three counties on the Delaware, and from every little mountain-town in New Hampshire and Vermont.
As for Canada, from cold and remote Quebec came some wheat, and from Montreal a hundred pounds sterling.