Rappahannock Chapter Sponsors Commemoration & Public Reading of Historic Essex County Colonial Resolutions of July 9, 1774

On Monday, July 9, 2018, the Rappahannock Chapter of the Virginia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) held a well-attended Commemoration and Public Reading of the historic Essex County Colonial Resolutions on the Essex Courthouse steps.  This event was exactly two hundred forty-four years after hundreds of Essex citizens gathered at the same location at the County Courthouse Green on July 9, 1774 and unanimously adopted this series of resolutions.  The Essex Resolutions set forth County residents’ views on how colonists should defend against increasingly objectionable British actions that infringed upon many of their basic rights.  These Resolutions provided guidance on the positions that should be taken by Essex County’s representatives who several weeks later attended Virginia’s First Revolutionary Convention in August of 1774.  That Convention adopted strong limitations on trade with Britain and elected the colony’s delegates to the First Continental Congress that met in October 1774.  The Essex Resolutions of July 9, 1774 are an extremely well drafted statement of the County residents’ cutting-edge political views and show how they were at the forefront of colonial thought on citizen’s rights and the need to defend them.  
 
The Rappahannock Chapter’s event began with Chapter President Wright Andrews giving the audience the historical background regarding these Resolutions, followed by seven Essex County residents who are direct descendants of American Revolutionary War Patriots taking turns reading the various Resolutions aloud to the audience.  Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Carl Strock, Immediate Past Chapter President, then described key actions, including Essex County’s sending over a thousand bushels of local corn to help feed residents of Boston, where the British had closed the port, and how the follow-on Virginia First Revolutionary Convention  adopted provisions that the Essex Resolutions had advocated and elected the colony’s delegates to the First Continental Congress.
 
The text of the Essex Resolutions of July 9, 1774  is in the below PDF file.
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​Submitted by Wright Andrews

essex_county_colonial_resolutions.pdf
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