The Fairfax Resolves

For the next two weeks, the committee wrote the document that became known as the Fairfax Resolves. The composition of this committee and the precise authorship of the resolves remains unclear. Many historians believe that George Mason was the principal author. Parts are written in his style and the only surviving copy is in Mason’s handwriting.¹ Some evidence also suggests that the resolutions were drafted by a committee that included Mason, Washington, and others.² Regardless of who wrote them, though, the voters of Fairfax County approved these resolutions at a meeting in the local courthouse on July 18, 1774.

The Fairfax Resolves were a collection of twenty-four resolutions. They began with two main ideas. The first resolution stated that the earliest British colonists who settled in North America had carried with them the constitutional rights of British subjects. The second resolution noted “that the most important and valuable” feature of Britain’s constitution was “the fundamental Principle” that no one could be governed by laws to which they had “not given their Consent, by Representatives freely chosen by themselves.” ³

The fifth resolution concluded that Parliament’s recent actions (later known as the “Intolerable Acts”) were “incompatible with the Privileges of a free People,” and would lead the colonists to suffer in “Slavery and Misery.”⁴ The Fairfax Resolves represented an escalation of Virginia’s protests because they rejected Parliament’s authority to legislate for the colonies.⁵ A veiled threat also lurked near their end. If the King pushed the colonists “to a State of Desperation,” resolve twenty-three reminded him that “from our Sovereign there can be but one Appeal.”⁶ With grievances unanswered, desperate colonists might turn to violence.

The Fairfax Resolves were, first and foremost, a response to the Tea Crisis unfolding in the British empire. They called for Virginians to collect funds to help Boston’s poor, who would suffer from the closure of the city’s harbor. They also suggested that Virginians should refuse any further dealings with the British East India Company and should burn the tea they owned. But in a gesture that reflected an elite planter class’s respect for private property, they also offered to help repay the East India Company for the tea dumped into Boston harbor. ⁷

The Fairfax Resolves echoed other colonists’ calls for an intercolonial congress to make a “Plan for the Defence and Preservation of our common Rights.” But they didn’t wait for this congress to assemble. Nine of the twenty-four resolutions detailed a plan for new economic sanctions on Britain. Those who signed onto these resolutions agreed to consume less, produce more, and import only necessary items from Britain. But if their protests were not addressed by the next year, the Fairfax Resolves suggested “that all Exports of Produce” from the colonies to Britain “shou’d cease.” After the current crop of tobacco, they would “not plant or cultivate” more. These policies were popular among Virginia elites because of plummeting tobacco prices and rising debts. ⁸

This was not Virginia’s first boycott. Five years earlier, the “Virginia Association,” also authored by Mason, had tried to pressure Parliament to soften its colonial policies. But merchants widely ignored this agreement. Perhaps as a result, the Fairfax Resolves included clear enforcement rules. Local committees would require merchants to take an oath to uphold the agreement. They would provide a certificate to those who took the oath and would advertise the names of those who refused. Signatories would shun anyone who rebuffed the boycott.⁹ The strictness of these rules reflects the revolutionaries’ ambitions. If they could wield the colonies’ full economic power, they hoped Parliament might relent.

The Fairfax Resolves’ seventeenth resolution stated, “no Slaves ought to be imported into” the colonies during their “present Difficulties and Distress.” It further declared that the signatories hoped to see “an entire Stop for ever put to such a wicked cruel and unnatural Trade.”¹⁰ While Mason, Washington, and other Fairfax County elites were all enslavers, they were also coming to view the slave trade as a threat to Virginia’s social order. In 1765, Mason had complained to Washington about “the Introduction of great Numbers of Slaves” into Virginia. Elite Virginians feared that a growing enslaved population would spark widespread slave revolts. They also hoped that ending the slave trade would reduce debt, raise the value of enslaved people already in Virginia, and end the oversupply of tobacco that was driving down prices.¹¹

In attempting to end the importation of enslaved people, elite Virginians could seek the moral high ground while also serving their own interests. Virginia’s colonial government repeatedly tried to reduce the number of enslaved people being trafficked into the colony. But the British government rejected these actions. In 1772, the House of Burgesses complained to King George III that the slave trade, “a trade of great Inhumanity,” was endangering “the very Existence of your Majesty’s American Dominions.”¹² Drawing on these sentiments, the Fairfax Resolves’ boycott of imported Africans aimed both to punish Britain and protect white Virginians.

Dozens of Virginia counties passed resolutions during the Tea Crisis. But the Fairfax Resolves were the most detailed, radical, and influential of them. One of the earliest colonial texts to reject Parliament’s authority over the colonies, they are often considered to be a landmark text in Virginia’s road to revolution. ¹³

The Fairfax Resolves provided a template for future resistance. When the First Virginia Convention opened in August, Washington brought the Fairfax Resolves with him to Williamsburg. The delegates adopted a plan for economic resistance to Parliament that included many features of the Fairfax resolutions. Once the colonists elected representatives to a Continental Congress, Virginia’s leaders pushed for an intercolonial system of economic resistance based on the Virginia’s convention’s resolutions.¹⁴ The Fairfax Resolves thus laid the groundwork for the Continental Association of 1774, the most far-reaching system of boycotts during the American Revolution.¹⁵ Echoing from the banks of the Potomac to Williamsburg to Philadelphia, the Fairfax Resolves played an important, but often forgotten, role in America’s road to independence.