Committeemen: Local Government and the Popular Politics of Revolution

Over the spring and summer of 1775, revolutionary committees in small towns and rural communities took charge of the revolutionary movement. In the chaos that followed the battles of Lexington and Concord, thousands of farmers, lawyers, ministers, shopkeepers, and artisans all over British North America reluctantly took up the reins of power in their communities. Exercising emergency civil powers, they established a rudimentary form of revolutionary government in place of the ousted colonial regimes. Local committeemen organized and equipped vast new revolutionary armies, collected taxes, drove out perceived enemies, and maintained what semblance they could of legal procedure. By the end of 1775, the local committees had succeeded in establishing a fragile but effective revolutionary authority that supplanted imperial government in all but a few isolated pockets of the thirteen now-former colonies.

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