More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Through the medium of the Committees of Correspondence, Samuel Adams and his compatriots had created what was, in essence, an extralegal, colony-wide network of communication that threatened to preempt the old hierarchical form of government.
By the first week in May the news had spread south to Georgia and west across the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. When a group of frontiersmen camped on the middle fork of Elkhorn Creek heard about the militiamen’s deaths in Massachusetts, they decided to name their outpost for the historic event. That is why what was then a part of Virginia is known today as Lexington, Kentucky.
For most Americans in 1776 this was largely a rhetorical flourish, a claim of innate equality that did not apply to women and enslaved African Americans. But as the years unfolded and the words of the Declaration acquired a renewed and largely unanticipated relevance, many Americans began to realize that the work of the Revolution was far from over.
