The Assembly had been in session but three days when several overzealous young men broke into the magazine to take out some of the arms. They stumbled against a cord which had been attached to a gun pointed at the entrance, which went off wounding two of them. This aroused the people to action, and the next day at noon an angry crowd, among them several Burgesses, entered the magazine and carried off about 400 stand of arms. A committee of the House of Burgesses persuaded the people to return the arms, and then set a military guard around the magazine. "So the custody of the magazine and public stores is thus wrested out of the hands of the Governor," complained Dunmore.[35]
At the opening of the Assembly the Governor began by urging the acceptance of the resolutions which Lord North had pushed through Parliament in February, as the basis for reconciliation. These resolutions promised that if any colony would raise of its own authority the cost of its own government, Parliament would not tax that colony. In other words, if the Americans guaranteed to pay into the hands of the King's Governors funds sufficient to make them independent of the Assemblies, Parliament would not take their money from them to do so. The Burgesses must have been indignant when Dunmore told them that he had strong hopes a consideration of this offer would bring to an end the disputes with the mother country.[36]
The reply of the Burgesses, which was almost certainly written by Jefferson, is notable because of the clearness with which it exposed the unconstitutionally of the British position. They had viewed the proposal with pain and disappointment, for it merely changed the form of oppression without lightening its burden. "The British government has no right to intermeddle with the support of civil government in the colonies. For us, not for them, has government been instituted here.... We cannot conceive that any other legislature has a right to prescribe either the number or pecuniary appointment of our officers." The claim of Parliament of the right to tax the people of the colony had no precedent. Even the act of 1680 giving the King a perpetual revenue was passed, not by Parliament, but by his Majesty "with the consent of the General Assembly."[37]
The Burgesses were not willing to purchase exemption from an unjust taxation by saddling the people with a perpetual tax to be disposed of by the King or Parliament. "We have a right to give our money as the Parliament does theirs, without coercion.... It is not merely the mode of raising, but the freedom of granting our money for which we have contended, without which we possess no check on the royal prerogative."
Upon receiving assurance that no harm was intended his family, Dunmore had brought them back to the Palace. But on June 8, before daybreak, he, Lady Dunmore, the children, his secretary, and some of the servants stole out and went on board the Fowey. "My house was kept in continued alarm and threatened every night with an assault," Dunmore explained. "Surrounded as I was by armed men ... and situated so far from any place where men-of-war can approach, ... I could not think it safe to continue in that city."[38]
The Assembly urged the Governor to return, but he refused. So on the night of June 24, a large body of men forced their way into the Palace by bursting open a window, and carried off several hundred stand of arms which had been kept in the hall. Some days later another group entered the building, went from room to room breaking into cabinets, and carried off arms of various sorts.[39]
And now Williamsburg became an armed camp. Bands of horse and foot, in uniforms and each company displaying their distinctive badge flocked in. Some of them lodged in the Capitol, the cavalry encamped on the Palace Green.[40] One wonders whether these men knew that a century earlier Nathaniel Bacon had assembled his men on or near this spot, or whether any of them realized that they had fought for the same cause as they, the cause of liberty?
With Dunmore on the Fowey and the Assembly in Williamsburg, the remainder of the session was rather futile. There was renewed bickering over the removal of the powder, the Burgesses drew up a long address to the Governor criticizing his administration, and accusing him of misrepresenting conditions in Virginia in one of his letters to the Earl of Dartmouth. The Assembly adjourned on June 24, until October 12, and on that date, when only thirty-seven members showed up, adjourned again until March 7, 1776. This time less than a fourth of the Burgesses attended, and immediately adjourned to May 6, when several members met, "but did neither proceed to business nor adjourn, as a House of Burgesses." And so died the Virginia Assembly after more than a century and a half of existence, in which it had fought and won the good battle for liberty. It now remained for other bodies to defend and preserve that liberty for future generations.[41]
Even while the Assembly was in session the government, in reality, had passed into the hands of the conventions and the committees of safety. As early as December, 1774, Dunmore wrote that the royal government had been "entirely overthrown." "There is not a justice of peace in Virginia that acts except as a committeeman. The abolishing of the courts of justice was the first step taken, in which the men of fortune and pre-eminence joined equally with the lowest and meanest. The General Court ... is in much the same predicament."[42] All that was needed to take the government completely out of the hands of the Governor and the Assembly was an executive head. And this was supplied by the third convention which met in Richmond in July, 1775, by the appointment of a "general committee of safety."
To this body were appointed some of the ablest men in the colony—Pendleton, George Mason, John Page, Richard Bland, Thomas Ludwell Lee, and others. It was given almost dictatorial powers, for it had the supervision of military affairs, appointing officers, collecting supplies, and naming paymasters; it corresponded with the county committees, arrested Loyalists, held inquiries.[43]