George Washington and the “Spirit of Association”

Filed with the correspondence in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress are six printed copies of an agreement to boycott British goods that Washington, then a Virginia burgess representing Fairfax County, brought to his constituents to sign. The agreement, crafted by the colony’s House of Burgesses (the lower house of Virginia’s colonial legislature) and a group of merchants, was signed and printed by them in Williamsburg on June 22, 1770. The burgesses and merchants called their agreement an “association,” and they included a detailed list of the imported goods they planned to do without.

Washington took these copies and wrote out a pledge at the bottom of each for his constituents to sign. In the pledge he noted that the American colonies were at an “alarming and critical juncture.” This was the crisis created by the passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767. Charles Townshend was Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the four Townshend Acts asserted British control over the colonies. One of them, the Townshend Revenue Act, taxed glass, paint, white lead (which was used in paint), tea, and paper. For American colonists, these taxes, which were imposed by Britain’s Parliament rather than by the colonists’ own elected legislatures, represented “taxation without representation.” (Across the Atlantic, an exasperated King George III remarked to his prime minister that “whether the laying a Tax was deserving all the Evils that have arisen from it, I should suppose no man could allege that without being thought more fit for Bedlam than a Seat in the Senate.”)

The 1770 association was the House of Burgesses’s second attempt to boycott British goods. The first, drafted by George Mason and presented to the burgesses by George Washington, was adopted by them on May 18, 1769. Washington compared the 1769 and 1770 associations: “A New Association is formd much upon the old Plan, but more relax’d; to which the Merchants then in Town acceded—Committees in each County are to be chosen to attend to the Importations, & see if our Agreements cannot be more strictly adhered to.”

Over the more than 250 years since Washington’s six copies of the 1770 association were printed in Williamsburg, they have taken on new meanings. Created to serve in the moment, they are now historical artifacts. There is no shortage of documentation of the American colonies’ pre-revolutionary boycotts, but taken as objects, these have special, evocative qualities. They were printed on large sheets of paper that appear, from surviving creases, to have been folded into quarters, probably so they could fit into Washington’s pockets or saddlebags as he rode through Fairfax County visiting his constituents to get their signatures. The signatures themselves are relics of these visits and sources of information about the signers. The 267 men who signed were a select group of Fairfax County residents: free white men who were eligible to vote. In a time and place where there were no public schools, only five of this group signed with an X. Signing with an X was an indicator of illiteracy, so this was a relatively educated group. In 2024, the absence of women and enslaved people among the signers stands out. When the burgesses, merchants, and Fairfax voters agreed to refrain from purchasing British imports, it was often the politically voiceless people who took up the slack, making at home what free and prosperous people could no longer buy from abroad.

The list of things these prosperous Virginia households agreed to give up in 1770 is a record of the things they regularly bought. The stuff they felt they could not live without and therefore chose not to boycott is also telling. The length, specificity, and inconsistency of the list (it doesn’t seem very relaxed, despite what Washington said) probably reflect the competing interests of the group that produced it in what must have been a divisive and difficult debate. They boycotted wine, spirits, cheese, candles, pickles, beds, carriages, and “India goods of all sorts,” except for spices. “Silks of all sorts” were forbidden but, confusingly, sewing silk and netting silk were allowed. Women’s hats and bonnets were allowed, and so were bridles, but no boots or saddles could be imported. They also agreed not to import people intended as slaves, or purchase any who had been imported, but only after November 1 when the harvest was presumably over. Enslaved people who had been “twelve months upon the continent” were excepted.

Towns like Williamsburg provided an opportunity for rural Virginians to shop, and the burgesses, on their periodic trips into town, took advantage of it. In 1769, when Washington went to Williamsburg to attend the House of Burgesses, his neighbor, the Virginia statesman George Mason, asked him to buy two pairs of gold earrings for his “little Girls,” seven-year-old Mary and nine-year-old Sarah. He carefully specified that they should be “made at Wmsburg.” Washington bought the earrings and recorded the purchase in his ledger. Washington’s ledger doesn’t show where he bought the earrings, but an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette offers a possibility: William Geddy, a Williamsburg goldsmith, had for sale “a neat assortment of COUNTRY MADE GOLD and SILVER WORK, which he will sell reasonably, for cash: likewise a small, but neat assortment, of imported JEWELLERY (ordered before the association took place).”

Ultimately, the effort to convince Virginians to give up their imported goods was less than successful. In December 1770, noting the poor turnout at a meeting of “Associators,” Virginia’s governor wrote Britain’s secretary of state that the “Spirit of Association” was “cooling every day” and predicted that it would “come to nought.” Little did they suspect how the “spirit” would develop over the next few years.

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“For American colonists…” For background on the Townshend Acts see Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence, Volume 1: Forming Thunderclouds and the First Convention, 1763-1774, A Documentary Record, ed. William J. Van Schreeven and Robert L. Scribner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 52-54. For the text of the June 22, 1770, association, with background information, see pages 78-84, and Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1770-1772, ed. John Pendleton Kennedy (Richmond, VA: The Colonial Press, E. Waddey Co., 1906), xxvi-xxxi, online. The Townshend Revenue Act is “An Act for Granting Certain Duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America,” Acts and Laws of His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts Bay … (Boston: Printed by Richard Draper and Green and Russell, 1767), 535-542.

“the old Plan…” For the text of the May 18, 1769, association see Van Schreeven and Scribner, Revolutionary Virginia, 72-77.

“to buy…” John Mason, The Recollections of John Mason: George Mason’s Son Remembers his Father and Life at Gunston Hall, ed. Terry K. Dunn (Mason Neck, VA: Gunston Hall, 2012), 73.

“Virginia’s governor wrote…” Journals of the House of Burgesses, xxi.