As late Burgesses for Norfolk ... we heartily concur ... with the Committee of Correspondence, and propose to attend at the time appointed. [Signatures of the ex-burgesses for the County.]
[The meeting was held at the appointed time (Force, IV, 1, 518), and adopted ten resolutions—directing "our late Burgesses" to attend the Williamsburg Convention on August 1; to try to secure a "general association" there for the Colony of Virginia, "against all importations and exportations (medicines excepted) to and from Great Britain"; to try to extend such association against every part of the colonies which should refuse to accept the measure; and to secure the appointment in each County of Virginia of a Committee "of respectable men ... to prevent any breach of such ... Association as may be adopted.">[
129. Typical Virginia County Instructions to Delegates to the First Provincial Convention
Force has preserved records of meetings in thirty-one Virginia counties, to appoint and instruct delegates to the Provincial Convention called for the 1st of August. Many of these sets of instructions rank as great state papers, quite equal in logic, rhetoric, and statesmanship to the documents put forth by the Continental Congress three months later at Philadelphia. The Fairfax County resolutions, which are given in about a third part below, seem to have been in exceptional degree the model for the resolutions adopted by the August Convention, which, in turn, with the same Fairfax document, must have been before the committees of the Continental Congress which drew up the famous documents issued by that body.
Brief extracts from a few other Virginia county resolutions follow the main document (a), to show the drift of feeling in certain plain matters. When the exact location in Force is omitted, to save space, it can readily be found from the index to that work.
Virginia Counties appoint Delegates to the First Virginia Convention
a. Westmoreland County (Virginia) Resolutions
Force, American Archives, Fourth Series, I, 437, 438.
At a respectable Meeting of the Freeholders and other Inhabitants of the County of Westmoreland, assembled on due notice, at the Court House of the said County, on Wednesday, the 22d of June, 1774.