The Boston Committee of Correspondence was a group of twenty-one men charged with one job: write down what the British government was doing to the colonies, and mail it to every other town in Massachusetts. James Otis was the first chair. Sam Adams wrote most of the early letters. Joseph Warren, Benjamin Church, and Thomas Cushing carried the load. Their first product, the Boston Pamphlet of 1772, was three documents bound together: a statement of colonial rights, an enumeration of British infringements on those rights, and a letter asking each town to respond with its own list of grievances and its own committee.
The pamphlet went to all 260 towns in Massachusetts. Within ninety days, more than eighty of them had formed their own committees and written back. Within sixteen months, every one of the thirteen colonies had a committee. Virginia copied the Boston model in March 1773. Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson sat on the Virginia committee.
The committees did not have legal authority. The royal governors, when they noticed, denounced them. But they were the only mechanism in North America that allowed an apothecary in Charleston to know within three weeks what a printer in Worcester thought about a tax in Newport. They were the network that made a continental response to British policy possible. When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, every delegate who arrived in Philadelphia had been corresponding with every other delegate's town for at least a year.
Three things, mostly.
First, they shared facts. When the customs board in Boston seized John Hancock's sloop Liberty in 1768, the Boston committee documented the seizure, the witnesses, the testimony, the legal pleadings, and the response of the customs officers, and mailed the package to every town. Local merchants in Salem and Marblehead and Plymouth knew the details inside two weeks. They could see the pattern. They could see that what was happening to Hancock would happen to them next, and they could plan accordingly.
Second, they coordinated response. The non-importation agreements of 1768-1770 and the response to the Tea Act of 1773 worked because every committee in every port had been corresponding for years about which goods were taxed, which merchants were complying with the boycott, and which merchants were breaking it. The Boston Tea Party was not a spontaneous riot. It was a coordinated logistical operation executed by men who had been preparing for it through nine months of letters.
Third, and most important, they built trust at distance. When the First Continental Congress convened at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, fifty-six delegates walked into a room where most of them had never met a man from another colony in person. They had been reading each other's letters for two years. John Adams of Massachusetts had been corresponding with Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina since 1773; when Gadsden walked in, Adams already knew his positions on naval defense, his temperament under pressure, and his standing with the Charleston merchants. Patrick Henry of Virginia, meeting Adams for the first time, was already a known quantity. Adams wrote in his diary that Henry was "the completest speaker I ever heard." Within the first week of debate, Henry stood up and said the line that has been quoted ever since: "The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian, but an American." That sentence was not rhetoric. It was a description of what the committees had actually built.
The trust was practical, not sentimental. A merchant in Newport who needed to know whether his Boston counterpart was solvent could write to the Boston Committee and have an answer within ten days, with the Committee's reputation behind it. A traveler from Williamsburg arriving in Philadelphia carried a sealed letter of introduction from the Virginia Committee, and the Pennsylvania Committee honored it on sight. A printer in Worcester deciding whether to extend credit to a Connecticut paper supplier could ask the Hartford Committee for a reference. The committees did, at the scale of a continent, what a Masonic lodge or a merchants' guild had done at the scale of a town: they made it possible to extend trust to a stranger because someone you respected had already extended it first.
The network had no center. Boston was first because Sam Adams started it, but Boston had no authority over Williamsburg or Charleston. Letters moved laterally, copied and forwarded by every committee that received them. A dispatch from London written by Arthur Lee, the Virginia agent posted in England, would land in Boston, get copied by the Boston Committee, mailed to Newport and Hartford and New York, copied again, and reach Charleston within five weeks. Every committee read the same intelligence in roughly the same window. There was no editor, no chairman of the whole, no single person who could be arrested to break the system. That was the design. The British knew the committees existed. They never figured out how to stop them.
The committees had no constitution and no central office. Their structure emerged from town meeting practice and ran on three tiers.
The town committee. The base unit. A town meeting elected between five and twenty-one men to serve at the pleasure of the town. They were merchants, ministers, lawyers, printers, ship captains, and a few small farmers. Boston elected twenty-one. Marblehead elected nine. Worcester elected fifteen. The committee met in the back room of a tavern or in a meeting house, on its own schedule, and answered to the town that elected it. Sam Adams was reelected to the Boston committee at every town meeting from November 1772 until the Crown dissolved Massachusetts civil government in 1774. He held no salaried office. He was a malt inspector by trade, intermittently insolvent, and the most consequential political organizer in the English-speaking world for those eighteen months.
The colony committee. When Virginia copied the Boston model in March 1773, it did so through the House of Burgesses rather than a town meeting. The Burgesses appointed an eleven-man committee with Peyton Randolph as chair and Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Harrison among its members. By the end of 1773, eight colonial assemblies had created standing committees of correspondence at the colony level. These colony committees corresponded both downward to the town committees inside their colony and laterally to the colony committees of the other twelve. They were how an apothecary in Charleston received word, within three weeks, of what the Massachusetts House had voted in Boston.
The continental layer, when it became necessary. The First Continental Congress in September 1774 was not a permanent body. It was a working session of fifty-six delegates appointed by the colony committees, charged with producing a coordinated response to the Coercive Acts. It met for fifty-one days at Carpenter's Hall, agreed to the Continental Association (a binding non-importation and non-exportation agreement to be enforced by local committees of inspection in every county), and dissolved. The Second Continental Congress in May 1775 took on a different role only after the events at Lexington and Concord changed the situation. For the entire pre-1775 period, the network was bottom-up. Towns formed committees. Colonies coordinated. Continental action was an emergent property of the correspondence, not a charter granted from above.
That structure mattered. It meant that arresting Sam Adams would not break the network. It meant that dissolving the Massachusetts House, which the Crown did in June 1774, did not stop Massachusetts from sending delegates to Philadelphia, because the towns kept electing committees regardless. It meant that a quiet apothecary in Annapolis whose name the Crown had never heard could become, within ninety days of joining his county committee, one of two dozen people in Maryland who knew exactly what the customs board in Boston was doing and exactly which Maryland merchants would refuse the next shipment of taxed tea.
The committees were not staffed by aristocrats. The famous names on the rosters (Adams, Jefferson, Henry, Lee) sat alongside men whose biographies are now footnotes, and the footnotes are the point.
Paul Revere, who carried the Suffolk Resolves from Boston to Philadelphia in September 1774, was a silversmith and a part-time dentist. He had taught himself engraving from a borrowed manual. Joseph Warren, who chaired the Boston committee after Otis was beaten unconscious by a customs officer in 1769, was a doctor running a free clinic out of his house on Hanover Street. Christopher Gadsden of Charleston started as a ship's purser, made his money as a wharf operator, and sat on the South Carolina committee because he could read a bill of lading faster than anyone else in the colony. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who eventually signed every founding document the country has, started life as a shoemaker in Stoughton, Massachusetts, and learned law by reading at his cobbler's bench. Silas Deane of Connecticut was the son of a blacksmith. Caesar Rodney of Delaware ran a wheat farm and had a face disfigured by skin cancer that he covered with a green silk scarf. None of these men had been to Britain. Most had not been to college. They were operators in their towns who happened to be willing to write letters.
The letters themselves had a particular voice. Sam Adams to James Warren, March 1773: "Where there is a Spirit of Liberty, there will always be found great Numbers ready to seal it with their Blood." Joseph Warren to Sam Adams, after the Boston Massacre verdict in 1770: "We have suffer'd the Soldiery to be quartered in the Town. We have suffer'd them to murder our Brethren. We have suffer'd the Court to acquit them. There is a limit." Patrick Henry to Richard Henry Lee, 1774: "I am not pleased with the present temper of our House. They are too cautious. The crisis demands men who can think six months out." Thomas Cushing of the Boston committee to Arthur Lee in London, 1773: "Send us everything. Even the gossip. Especially the gossip. We are governed by men who do not believe we are paying attention."
The voice was direct, factual, and patient. The committees did not write manifestos. They wrote reports. They told each other what had happened, who did it, what it cost, and what to watch for next.
To understand the seizure, start with the man who owned the ship. John Hancock was thirty-one years old in June 1768 and the wealthiest man in Massachusetts. His uncle Thomas Hancock had built the House of Hancock into the largest mercantile firm in Boston, holding Crown contracts to supply British troops during the French and Indian War. When Thomas died childless in 1764, John inherited the entire concern at age twenty-seven. The estate was valued at roughly seventy thousand pounds, an amount that put Hancock among the richest men in British North America and the single richest man in New England. He owned a fleet of ships trading the London-Boston-West Indies triangle. He lived in a stone manor on Beacon Hill with a deer park behind it. He had spent 1760 and 1761 in London on his uncle's business, attended the coronation of George III, dined with the leading merchants of the City, and returned home in tailored English clothing he wore for the rest of his life.
For most of the early 1760s, Hancock was the Crown's best customer in Boston. He paid more in customs duties than almost any merchant on the wharf. His firm's books were largely transparent. He had every economic reason to remain a London-aligned man and no obvious reason to become an opposition figure. The Stamp Act of 1765 changed his arithmetic. By 1766 he was funding the Sons of Liberty. By 1768 he was Sam Adams's partner in fact if not in name. Contemporaries said it directly: Sam Adams wrote the letters and John Hancock paid for the postage. Hancock continued to wear his lavender coats and gold-laced waistcoats and to live in the manor on Beacon Hill. The visual was deliberate. He wanted Boston to see that the wealthiest merchant in the colony had thrown in with the resistance, and he wanted London to see it too.
That is why the customs board chose his ship. Seizing a marginal smuggler in Marblehead would have been a routine customs case. Seizing the Liberty at Hancock's Wharf, in the middle of a working afternoon, with marines from a Royal Navy frigate, was a message. The Crown was telling the merchant class of Boston that wealth, paperwork, and prior service to the Crown would not protect them. If the customs board could take the Liberty, it could take anything. That is also why the committees moved so fast in response. They understood the message exactly.
Sam Adams was the older man and the more political. He was born in 1722, fifteen years before Hancock, the son of a Boston brewer and maltster who had served in the Boston town meeting and the Massachusetts assembly. The Adams family had its own grievance against the Crown. In 1741, when Sam was nineteen, the British Parliament dissolved the Massachusetts Land Bank, a colonial currency scheme that his father had helped organize. The dissolution wiped out most of the family's fortune and made the directors personally liable for the bank's outstanding notes. The senior Adams spent the rest of his life in litigation against the Crown's claim on the family's property and died still in dispute. His son inherited the dispute and the brewery. He ran the brewery into the ground within a decade. He was a Harvard graduate, class of 1740, and an indifferent businessman whose actual gift was political organization. In the 1750s he served as a Boston tax collector, where he became locally famous for failing, on principle, to collect from neighbors who could not pay. He left office with thousands of pounds in arrears that the town eventually wrote off. By 1765 he was the most influential figure in the Boston town meeting and the de facto opposition leader of the Massachusetts House.
Adams and Hancock encountered each other through the Boston town meeting circuit in the early 1760s. Boston was a small enough place that the two men knew of each other long before they worked together; Hancock's uncle Thomas had been a fixture of mercantile Boston, and Sam Adams had been a fixture of political Boston, and the two circles overlapped at every committee, parade, and funeral. The bridge between them was the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March of that year, Sam Adams was the lead political organizer of the Boston response, and the response needed money: for printers, for couriers, for the mob (which in eighteenth-century Boston was a paid quasi-militia under the management of a shoemaker named Ebenezer Mackintosh, not a spontaneous crowd), and for the legal defense of anyone arrested. Hancock, newly in possession of the largest fortune in the colony, was the obvious source. Adams cultivated him deliberately. Within twelve months Hancock had been elected to the Boston board of selectmen. Within twenty-four months he had been elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where Sam Adams served as clerk and effectively ran the agenda. The pattern was set. Adams provided the politics. Hancock provided the money and the public face. Neither of them could have done what they did alone.
They worked together for the rest of Hancock's life, with one major falling out in the 1780s and a reconciliation before Hancock's death in 1793. The most famous moment of the partnership came on the night of April 18, 1775, when the two of them were sleeping at the parsonage in Lexington and Paul Revere rode in to warn them that British regulars were marching out from Boston to arrest them and to seize the militia stores at Concord. They left Lexington in the small hours of April 19. According to the tradition, as the dawn broke and the sound of musket fire from Lexington Common reached them on the road, Sam Adams turned to Hancock and said, "What a glorious morning for America." The line is probably embellished. What is certain is that within hours of that conversation, Hancock was a fugitive with a price on his head, and his entire commercial empire was in jeopardy. He lost most of it during the war. He served as President of the Second Continental Congress when the Declaration of Independence was signed in July 1776, and he signed his name large enough that, as the tradition has it, he wanted King George to read it without his spectacles. He served nine terms as Governor of Massachusetts. He died at fifty-six, having spent most of his fortune on the cause, leaving an estate a fraction of what he had inherited. He understood from the beginning that he was spending the money on something other than profit. He spent it anyway. That is the model.
On the afternoon of June 10, 1768, the customs board in Boston seized the sloop Liberty at Hancock's Wharf. The ship belonged to John Hancock. The official charge was that Hancock had unloaded madeira wine the night before without paying the duty. The actual cause was that Hancock was the most visible smuggler in Boston and the customs commissioners, newly empowered under the Townshend Acts, wanted to make an example of him. The Royal Navy frigate HMS Romney, which had been waiting in the harbor for exactly this moment, towed the Liberty out from the wharf and anchored her under the Romney's guns.
Three things made the Liberty seizure something other than a routine customs case. First, the customs commissioners did not seize the cargo and adjudicate the charge. They seized the entire vessel, an asset worth roughly seven hundred pounds, on a duty dispute over wine worth about thirty. The seizure was not proportionate to the alleged offense. It was punitive. Second, the customs commissioners knew Hancock could not get a jury trial. The Townshend Acts had moved customs cases to vice-admiralty courts staffed by Crown-appointed judges with no jury. Hancock would have to defend his vessel in front of a single judge whose salary was paid out of the fines he levied. Third, the seizure was carried out by armed marines from a Royal Navy warship, in full view of the Boston waterfront, on a working afternoon. The signal was deliberate. Any merchant who failed to pay any duty could lose any asset, decided by a court that did not answer to him, enforced by soldiers that did not answer to his town.
The town responded that night. A crowd dragged the customs commissioners' pleasure boat up Boston Common and burned it. The commissioners fled to Castle William in the harbor and refused to return. But the more important response was on paper. The Boston committee (this was four years before Sam Adams formalized the network, but the same men were already in motion) collected and published the depositions: the warehouse foreman, the dock workers, the night watchman, the captain of the ship that had off-loaded with the Liberty, the customs officer who admitted that the inventory in his report did not match what the marines had actually seized. They sent the package to every port town from Portsmouth to Charleston. Within six weeks, every merchant in British North America with a transatlantic exposure knew the customs board had taken a seven-hundred-pound vessel for a thirty-pound duty dispute, that the trial would happen in front of a paid judge with no jury, and that the marines who carried out the seizure had taken inventory that did not match the customs report. The merchants drew the obvious conclusion. They organized the non-importation agreements of 1768 to 1770 immediately afterward. The Liberty case is what taught a continent of merchants what was now possible.
Hancock won his case eventually, in November 1768, on a technicality. By that point, it did not matter. The committees had used the Liberty seizure to teach every port what the new regime looked like. The customs board kept the ship. They armed her, renamed her, and used her as a revenue cutter. In July 1769, a crowd in Newport, Rhode Island, boarded her, ran her aground, and burned her to the waterline. The committees in Newport, Boston, and Providence corresponded for weeks afterward about the boarding party, the legal exposure, and how to make sure the Crown could never identify the men involved. None of them ever were.
The state has not seized any housing in Seattle by writ. There has been no Royal Navy frigate in Elliott Bay. The mechanism is different. The pattern is the same. Private property is being expropriated through cost transfer and through the deliberate funding of the legal apparatus on the opposite side.
Consider what a Seattle apartment owner now pays for, that a Seattle apartment owner did not pay for in 2015. The owner pays for graffiti abatement on building exteriors that the city used to clean and now does not. The owner pays for security patrols, fencing, and lighting in alleys and on sidewalks the city has functionally abandoned. The owner pays for bio-hazard cleanup on doorsteps and stairwells that used to be the responsibility of the public health department. The owner pays for legal counsel to evict tenants whose nonpayment is now subsidized by city- and state-funded tenant defense organizations, while the owner has no parallel publicly funded defense for himself. The owner pays property tax surcharges that fund homelessness services contracted to nonprofits whose policies make the alley problem worse, not better. The owner pays for the cost of building habitability standards that are enforced against him by an inspector whose office is paid for, in part, by the same property tax he is paying. None of these costs were on the operating statement of a Capitol Hill apartment building in 2015. All of them are on the operating statement now. The transfer was not voted. It happened administratively, line by line, agency by agency, ordinance by ordinance.
The other side of the ledger is more direct. The City of Seattle and King County fund tenant legal defense funds, eviction defense organizations, and harm reduction nonprofits with budgets that have grown roughly tenfold since 2017. The same dollar that the property owner pays into the King County treasury comes out, three months later, as a retainer paid to an attorney whose job is to delay the property owner's lawful eviction of a nonpaying tenant. The owner is funding the attorney suing him. He is funding both sides of the case, and he is the only side paying for his own.
The economic outcome is identical to the Liberty seizure. An asset is taken without proportionate process. The taking is enforced by an apparatus the owner cannot remove and cannot vote out. The cost of contesting the taking is borne entirely by the owner, while the contestant on the other side is paid out of the owner's own taxes. The vice-admiralty court of 1768 has been replaced by a county housing court, a city hearing examiner, an administrative law judge at the WSHFC, an arbitrator at the state Human Rights Commission, and a federal monitor at HUD. None of those forums seat juries from the owner's neighborhood. None of them pay the owner's costs when he wins. The seizure is slower. It is administrative rather than military. The output is the same: assets transferred, owners disciplined, dissent atomized.
This is what the Boston committee meant by "what is happening to him will happen to you next, and you should plan accordingly." The Washington Committee of Correspondence is the mechanism for circulating that warning across thirty-nine counties before the cost transfer becomes irreversible.
Washington has thirty-nine counties. It has approximately five hundred incorporated cities and towns. It has 1,500 named neighborhood and business associations. None of them compare notes systematically about what the state, the county, or the federal government is doing to them.
The Department of Revenue restructured the B&O tax in 2025 in a way that hit small businesses harder than large ones. Every business owner in Washington learned about it from their own accountant, alone, in their own quarter. DOR collects $179 million per year in penalties, and there is no statewide registry of who paid what penalty for what filing error. The 2025 session passed twenty new or increased taxes. There is no shared archive of how each tax is being interpreted, audited, and enforced across the state.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority spent over a billion dollars on regional homelessness response between 2020 and 2025. The City of Seattle Human Services Department contracts with hundreds of nonprofit providers, with budgets that move from one fiscal year to the next without any centralized public scoreboard tracking what the contracts produced. The Washington Health Care Authority pays Medicaid claims through a third-party administrator that almost no provider has been independently audited against.
The pattern is consistent. The state and the county act in coordination. The towns and the businesses and the property owners act alone. Each is fighting its own audit, its own permit denial, its own contract loss, its own neighborhood encampment, with no idea that the same thing is happening to its counterpart eighty miles away. The information asymmetry is the entire game. The committees of 1772 were the first system in American history that solved it. We propose to solve it again, in Washington, in 2026.
The Burnham Civic Committee of Correspondence is a working network of operators, owners, attorneys, accountants, journalists, and elected officials who agree to do four things.
Document. When a member encounters an act of state, county, or federal overreach, they write it down. Date, agency, action, dollar amount, statute or rule cited, name of the public official involved. They send it to the Committee.
Distribute. The Committee compiles entries weekly and circulates them to every member. Members read what is happening in other counties before it happens in theirs.
Coordinate. When the same agency is doing the same thing to multiple members, the Committee organizes a coordinated response. Records requests, legal challenges, legislative testimony, and public records publication move together rather than separately.
Build trust. Members know each other by name and by record. The Committee functions as a reference network for legal, financial, and operational counsel that does not rely on industry trade associations whose interests overlap with the agencies they should be challenging.
The Committee is not a 501(c)(3). It does not solicit donations. It does not run programs. It does not lobby. It is a correspondence network, in the original sense of the word. Its only product is shared information, distributed in time to be useful.
The first archive will cover the Department of Revenue, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, the Washington Health Care Authority's Foundational Community Supports program, the City of Seattle permitting and human services contracts, and the major nonprofit providers receiving state and federal pass-through funds. Other agencies will be added as members raise them.
Washington has thirty-nine counties. The Committee of Correspondence is built to match. Each county forms a county committee of three to nine members, drawn from the operators, attorneys, accountants, journalists, and elected officials in that county who have direct experience with state, county, or federal overreach. Each county committee names one representative to the Washington Standing Committee, which has thirty-nine seats. The Standing Committee elects a Chair on a rotating one-year basis, with the chairmanship moving by region so that no single county or city dominates the network.
The structure is bottom-up by design, on the 1772 model. Burnham Civic does not appoint county committees. Burnham Civic vouches for the founding member in each county and provides three things and only three things: an archive (a single shared system of record for documented agency action, searchable by member), a distribution function (weekly intelligence to every member, organized by region and by agency), and a coordinator who handles the mechanics of moving paper between counties. The coordinator role is the modern equivalent of what Sam Adams did for the Boston committee. He was not the chairman. He was the scribbler. He turned the committee's deliberations into letters that other towns could read and other towns could trust.
The five regional clusters. Counties are organized into five regions for routine correspondence. Members read everything from their own region weekly, everything from the state monthly, and everything cross-region when the Standing Committee flags a pattern. Total: thirty-nine counties, thirty-nine seats, five regional chairs.
Central Sound (5 counties). King, Pierce, Snohomish, Kitsap, Thurston. The metro core. These are the counties where the largest concentration of state agencies, regional authorities, and contracting nonprofits operate. Most documented overreach in 2024 and 2025 came from this cluster. King County alone accounts for an estimated forty percent of statewide volume.
North Sound and Olympic Peninsula (6 counties). Whatcom, Skagit, Island, San Juan, Clallam, Jefferson. Coastal and border counties. Cross-border commerce, ferry districts, federal land issues, and tribal compact friction are the dominant patterns here.
Southwest (9 counties). Mason, Grays Harbor, Pacific, Wahkiakum, Lewis, Cowlitz, Clark, Skamania, Klickitat. Timber, lower Columbia, the Vancouver metro. Largely rural with one metro anchor. Historic patterns of state preemption on land use, timber harvest, and environmental review.
Columbia Basin (9 counties). Yakima, Benton, Franklin, Kittitas, Chelan, Douglas, Grant, Adams, Okanogan. The agricultural core. Tri-Cities and Wenatchee are the metro anchors. Water rights, agricultural labor regulation, irrigation district policy, and the state's posture toward Hanford and the Columbia federal nexus run through here.
Eastern (10 counties). Spokane, Whitman, Lincoln, Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield, Asotin, Stevens, Ferry, Pend Oreille. The Spokane metro plus the wheat country and the northeast corner. A different tax base, different agency relationships, and the only cluster where the Idaho border creates a meaningful comparison case for cost-of-doing-business benchmarking.
Each county committee runs on its own schedule. The Standing Committee meets quarterly, in person, rotating between Olympia, Spokane, and one of the regional anchor counties. The full network convenes once a year for an annual review. The first founding members in each county will be named over the course of 2026; counties will go live in the order their founding members are confirmed. Burnham Civic publishes a county-by-county status board so members and observers can see where the network has filled in and where the gaps remain.
The historical model needs a financier and a public face. Sam Adams could not have done what he did without John Hancock, and not primarily for the money. Hancock's value to the Boston committee was that he was visibly wealthy, visibly successful inside the existing system, and visibly willing to put his name and his property on a list the Crown would read. He gave the resistance the one thing it could not buy: standing.
The Washington Committee of Correspondence needs the same figure. We are looking for a Washington resident, an operator or owner or family principal, whose name and balance sheet are large enough that the state's apparatus already knows who they are. Someone who has already been on the receiving end of an audit, a permit denial, a contract loss, or a regulatory campaign they recognize as part of a pattern. Someone willing to be named publicly as the founding underwriter of the network, and willing to commit at a level that allows the committee to operate at the scale of thirty-nine counties without depending on grant cycles, membership fees, or political donations.
The job is not to write checks indefinitely. The job is to be the first name. Hancock was the first name. Once he had signed on, the merchants of New York and Philadelphia and Charleston could see that the venture was serious, that the people running it were the people who had actually built things, and that the cause was worth the risk to a man who had a great deal to lose. The first signature is what made every signature after it possible.
If you are that person, or you know that person, write to operations@burnhamcivic.org. Confidentiality on request through the introductory conversations. The eventual public commitment is a feature, not a bug. The point is for the state to see exactly who has thrown in.
Membership is by invitation. The Burnham Civic vouches for entrants. There is no fee. There is no public roster. Members can identify themselves publicly if they wish; many will not. The minimum commitment is one documented submission per quarter and willingness to reply when another member asks for context on something happening in your sector.
If you have been the target of a state or county action that you believe is part of a pattern, or if you have institutional knowledge about how an agency operates that other operators could use, write to us.
Tell us who you are, what you do, and what pattern you have seen. Confidentiality on request.
John Adams, writing to his cousin Samuel late in life, said that the American Revolution was complete in the minds of the people fifteen years before any blood was spilled at Lexington. He meant the committees. He meant the years of letters traveling between Boston and Williamsburg, Philadelphia and Charleston, Savannah and Portsmouth, in which a continent of strangers became colleagues and then countrymen. He meant the slow accumulation of shared knowledge about a government that was not on their side.
The committees did not predict what would happen in 1776. They made it possible to recognize when it arrived.