Alexandria, Virginia: Crossroads of Revolution

Long before the first shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, the prosperous tobacco port of Alexandria, Virginia, was already shaping the intellectual and political currents that would carry a collection of colonies toward independence. Situated on the western bank of the Potomac River, just a few miles downstream from the plantation estate of Mount Vernon, Alexandria occupied a unique position in the Revolutionary story—not as a battlefield, but as a crucible of ideas, a staging ground for resistance, and the hometown of the man who would come to embody the American cause itself. To understand the Revolution as something more than a series of military engagements is to understand places like Alexandria, where the war was debated in taverns, organized in parlors, funded by merchant capital, and felt in the daily rhythms of colonial life.

Alexandria's significance in the broader imperial struggle actually predates the Revolution by two decades. In April 1755, the elegant stone townhouse of the Scottish-born merchant John Carlyle became the site of a war council convened by Major General Edward Braddock, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America. Braddock arrived in Alexandria with 1,200 British troops and selected Carlyle House as his headquarters, moving in with his aides for three weeks.

On April 15, 1755, Braddock met with five colonial governors—Horatio Sharpe of Maryland, Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia, James De Lancey of New York, William Shirley of Massachusetts, and Robert Hunter Morris of Pennsylvania —to discuss the financing of the expedition against the French and their Native allies in the Ohio Valley. It was at this meeting that Braddock first proposed taxing the colonies to pay for their own defense—a suggestion that the colonial governors rebuffed but that planted a seed in the imperial imagination. The failed Braddock expedition, in which a young Virginia militia colonel named George Washington distinguished himself amid catastrophic British defeat, exposed both the vulnerabilities of British military strategy in North America and the growing competence—and confidence—of colonial officers. Carlyle himself was appalled by the arrogance and expense of the British officers quartered in his home, writing to his brother that "the General and his Aid De Camps... took everything they wanted, and paid nothing." That resentment, simmering among Alexandria's merchant class, would not dissipate in the years that followed. It would deepen. Carlyle went on to serve as one of the original trustees of Alexandria, the commissary for the Virginia militia during both the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War, and a justice of the peace for Fairfax County.

By the early 1770s, Alexandria had grown into one of the most commercially vibrant towns in Virginia, its wharves crowded with ships carrying tobacco, wheat, and flour to markets across the Atlantic world. Its leading citizens—men like John Carlyle, William Ramsay, and the planter-politician George Washington—were deeply enmeshed in the transatlantic economy and acutely sensitive to the parliamentary taxes and trade restrictions that threatened their livelihoods. That sensitivity had already found concrete expression: as elsewhere in the colonies, the imposition of excise taxes on items such as glass, paper, and paint caused furious debate in Virginia over the rights of the colonists. In June 1770, Alexandrians John Carlyle, Robert Adam, and Thomas Kirkpatrick met with other members of the Virginia legislature in Williamsburg to respond to the Townshend Acts, and all the delegates signed a new non-importation agreement.

The various concessions to merchants in the revised association gained the support of many traders in places like Alexandria, and in Fairfax County more than 330 people signed the agreement —though enforcement proved uneven across the colony, and Virginia was the last colony to officially abandon nonimportation in 1771.

When Parliament passed the Coercive Acts in 1774, punishing Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party by closing Boston Harbor and stripping the colony of self-governance, Virginians recognized the threat to their own liberties. Alexandrians formed a local committee of correspondence in 1774, and on behalf of the organization, John Carlyle and John Dalton informed the Bostonians that they were "deeply interested in the fate of their city now suffering the scourge of oppression." But solidarity with Massachusetts took its most potent form at the Alexandria courthouse that summer. On July 5, 1774, Washington and other Fairfax County freeholders met in Alexandria to appoint a committee to draft a statement that would, as Washington described it, "define our Constitutional Rights." The committee wrote a draft that was, in all likelihood, primarily the work of George Mason. Mason and Washington met at Mount Vernon on July 17 and revised the resolutions. The following day in Alexandria, the Fairfax Resolves were endorsed in a meeting of freeholders chaired by Washington.

The Fairfax Resolves were the longest, most detailed set of resolutions written by disaffected Virginians in the summer of 1774. They asserted the fundamental constitutional rights of the colonists and called for a union of the colonies to protest the usurpation of these rights. Among other grievances, the Resolves protested British overreach regarding taxation and representation, judicial powers, and trade and commerce. The strategies to counter British oppression included nonimportation and nonexportation agreements and a continental congress to plan for a common defense of the colonists' rights.

The resolutions rejected the British Parliament's claim of supreme authority over the American colonies. More than thirty counties in Virginia passed similar resolutions in 1774, "but the Fairfax Resolves were the most detailed, the most influential, and the most radical." Notably, the Resolves went further than those of other counties when they called for the colonies to unite and permanently abolish the slave trade, arguing this practice was forced on them by Britain as a way to keep the colonies dependent on the British Empire. In a remarkable demonstration of intercolonial solidarity, more than 200 municipalities and churches donated goods, food, and money to besieged Bostonians between 1774 and 1776. Fairfax County residents sent 273 pounds sterling, 38 barrels of flour, and 150 bushels of wheat to their northern neighbors.

The ideologies and resistance strategies within the Fairfax Resolves influenced the Virginia Convention in August and the First Continental Congress in September 1774.

When the Virginia Convention met in August 1774, they agreed to their own association, which superseded the suggestions contained in county resolves. This association was heavily influenced by the Fairfax Resolves, which were broadly encompassing, logically organized, and forcefully written. The Virginia Convention also elected delegates to the First Continental Congress, which met in September 1774 and used the Virginia Association as the template for its own Continental Association. Through the Fairfax Resolves, Alexandria's courthouse became one of the places where the intellectual architecture of American resistance was most carefully constructed.

Even as the political crisis deepened, Alexandrians began preparing for the possibility of armed conflict. George Mason chaired a meeting of the gentlemen and freeholders of Fairfax County on September 21, 1774, and pressed for the formation of the Fairfax Independent Company of Volunteers, a militia organized "for the Purpose of learning & practicing the military Exercise & Discipline." This was an audacious and extralegal step—