Note 248 — Chapter I · (continued 2)

We have full reports of the Boston meetings. The newspapers give us the accounts of the earlier irregular conferences, and the town printed the reports of the first regular town meetings in The votes and proceedings of the freeholders and other inhabitants of the town of Boston, in town meeting assembled, according to law, the 5th and 18th days of Nov., 1773 (Boston, 1773). It was reprinted in London by Franklin, with a preface. The call of the committee for the later meetings exists in Mr. Bancroft's collection, in the handwriting of Joseph Warren (Frothingham's Warren, 255), and was circulated in broadside. The reports of the meetings of Nov. 29th and 30th exist in the original minutes in the handwriting of William Cooper among the papers in the Charity Building in Boston, and have been printed by Dr. Green in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. (xx. 10, etc.). The prepared record was printed in a broadside dated Dec. 1, 1773, and a copy is preserved in the Boston Public Library. It represents the meeting as called "for consulting, advising, and determining upon the most proper and effectual method to prevent the unloading, receiving, or vending the detestable tea sent out by the East India Company, part of which has just arrived in this harbor." Hutchinson wrote from Milton, Nov. 30, to his son, one of the consignees of the tea, who had taken refuge in the Castle, that the proclamation, warning the meeting to dissolve, which he had just sent into Boston, might "possibly cause [him] to take [his] lodging at the Castle also" (P. O. Hutchinson, i. 94). The full report of these meetings was also printed in the Boston newspapers, and particularly in the Boston Gazette of Dec. 6th, whose report was reprinted in one of Poole's Mass. Registers, and in the Boston Journal, Dec. 15, 1849.