[13] One of the vessels sent to stop smuggling was the schooner Gaspee. Having run aground in Narragansett Bay (June, 1772), she was boarded by a party of men in eight boats and burned. The Virginia legislature appointed a "committee of correspondence," to find out the facts regarding the destruction of the Gaspee and "to maintain a correspondence with our sister colonies." This plan of a committee to inform the other colonies what was happening in Virginia, and obtain from them accurate information as to what they were doing, was at once taken up by Massachusetts and other colonies, each of which appointed a similar committee. Such committees afterward proved to be the means of revolutionary organization. Read Fiske's American Revolution, Vol. I, pp. 76-80.
[14] Parliament had given the company permission to do this. The company had long possessed the monopoly of trade with the East Indies, and the sole right to bring tea from China to Great Britain. Before 1773, however, it was obliged to sell the tea in Great Britain, and the business of exporting tea to the colonies had been carried on by merchants who bought from the company.
[15] Read "The Tea Party" in Hawthorne's Grandfather's Chair.
[16] All the Intolerable Acts are referred to in the Declaration of Independence. See if you can find the references.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FIGHT FOR INDEPENDENCE BEGUN
LEXINGTON, 1775.—When the second Continental Congress met (May 10, 1775), the mother country and her colonies had come to blows.
The people of Massachusetts, fearing that this might happen, had begun to collect and hide arms, cannon, and powder. General Gage, the royal governor of Massachusetts and commander of the British troops in Boston, was told that military supplies were concealed at Concord, a town some twenty miles from Boston (map, p. 168). Now it happened that in April, 1775, two active patriots, Samuel Adams [1] and John Hancock, were at Lexington, a town on the road from Boston to Concord. Gage determined to strike a double blow at the patriots by sending troops to arrest Adams and Hancock and destroy the military stores. On the evening of April 18, accordingly, eight hundred regulars left Boston as quietly as possible. Gage hoped to keep the expedition a secret, but the patriots in Boston, suspecting where the troops were going, sent off Paul Revere [2] and William Dawes to ride by different routes to Lexington, rousing the countryside as they went. As the British advanced, alarm bells, signal guns, and lights in the villages gave proof that their secret was out.
[Illustration: JOHN HANCOCK'S BIBLE. Now in the Old Statehouse, Boston.]
[Illustration: ONE OF THE LANTERNS HUNG IN THE BELFRY. Now in the possession of the Concord Antiquarian Society.]