Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/420

410 town voted "that a committee of safety and correspondence be appointed, to correspond with committees of other towns, . . . and to watch over the safety of the people of this town, and to give immediate alarm so that a regular meeting may be called whenever any infringement of their rights shall be committed by any person or persons under color and pretence of authority derived from any officer of the United States." This extravagant measure, evidently intended to recall the memory of 1776, was quickly imitated by the town of Gloucester, which, January 12, formally approved the Resolutions passed at Bath, voted an address to the general court, and appointed a committee of public safety. These first steps went so far that other towns could not easily keep pace with them, and were obliged to fall behind. The scheme of appointing everywhere town-committees of public safety to organize combined resistance to the national government, was laid aside, or fell to the ground; but the town-meetings went on. In the county of Hampshire, a public meeting of citizens, January 12, announced "that causes are continually occurring which tend to produce a most calamitous event,—a dissolution of the Union;" and January 20, a meeting at Newburyport, in Senator Pickering's County of Essex, voted—


 * "That we will not aid or assist in the execution of the several embargo laws, especially the last, and that we