[59] H. B. Grigsby, The Virginia convention of 1776.
[60] Virginia Gazette, Purdie, May 17, 1776.
ESSAY ON SOURCES
Any political history of Virginia in the colonial period must be based chiefly on the documents in the British Public Record Office. During many months of work in this office the author made more than eight hundred pages of notes and transcripts which he has used freely in the writing of this volume. The notations CO1-3, CO5-1318, etc., in the footnotes all refer to the Public Record Office.
It is especially fortunate that these documents have been preserved, since of the copies left in Virginia, when there were copies, most have been destroyed. Among the scores of manuscript volumes on Virginia in the Record Office, thirty-two are devoted to the correspondence of the Board of Trade, seventeen to the correspondence of the Secretary of State, twenty-two to Entry Books, letters, commissions, warrants, etc., for the period from 1680 to the American Revolution alone.
In this vast collection are found the instructions to governors; memorials concerning the clergy, the revenue, the College of William and Mary; addresses of the Assembly to the Throne; reports of special agents of the Crown; accusations against governors; nominations to office; the journals of the Council and of the House of Burgesses.
During the second half of the nineteenth century William Noel Sainsbury, Assistant Keeper of the Records, made no less than twenty volumes of abstracts of these documents, which have been deposited in the Virginia State Library. They cover the long period from the founding of the colony to 1730. The McDonald Papers, also transcribed from the documents in the Public Record Office, and also deposited in the Virginia State Library, parallel the Sainsbury abstracts, but they are fuller and give some papers overlooked by Sainsbury. The author spent the summer of 1908 in Richmond to study these papers, but they merely whetted his desire to see the original collection. So June, 1910, found him in the chilly old building off Chancery Lane, London, immersed in the musty but fascinating mass of documents.
Virginia historians today no longer have to make the journey across the Atlantic, for the United States Government has had transcriptions made of the papers relating to our colonial history for the Library of Congress. Moreover, the journals of the House of Burgesses and the journals of the Council have been published. Many other documents in the Public Record Office have been published in part or in full in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, and in historical magazines.