<P> During the Stamp Act Crisis the following year, New York formed a committee to urge common resistance among its neighbors to the new taxes . The Province of Massachusetts Bay correspondents responded by urging other colonies to send delegates to the Stamp Act Congress that fall . The resulting committees disbanded after the crisis was over . </P> <P> Boston, whose radical leaders thought it was under increasingly hostile threats by the royal government, set up the first long - standing committee with the approval of a town meeting in late 1772 . By spring 1773, Patriots decided to follow the Massachusetts system and began to set up their own committees in each colony . Virginia appointed an eleven - member committee in March, quickly followed by Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and South Carolina . By February 1774, eleven colonies had set up their own committees; of the thirteen colonies that eventually rebelled, only North Carolina and Pennsylvania had not . </P> <P> In Massachusetts, in November 1772, Samuel Adams and Dr. Joseph Warren formed a committee in response to the Gaspée Affair and in relation to the recent British decision to have the salaries of the royal governor and judges be paid by the Crown rather than the colonial assembly, which removed the colony of its means of holding public officials accountable to their constituents . In the following months, more than one hundred other committees were formed in the towns and villages of Massachusetts . The Massachusetts committee had its headquarters in Boston and under the leadership of Adams became a model for other Patriot groups . The meeting when establishing the committee gave it the task of stating "the rights of the colonists, and of this province in particular, as men, as Christians, and as subjects; to communicate and publish the same to the several towns in this province and to the world as the sense of this town ." </P> <P> In March 1773, Dabney Carr proposed the formation of a permanent Committee of Correspondence before the Virginia House of Burgesses . Virginia's own committee was formed on March 12, 1773 . Its members were Peyton Randolph, Robert Carter Nicholas, Richard Bland, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Edmund Pendleton, Patrick Henry, Dudley Digges, Dabney Carr, Archibald Cary, and Thomas Jefferson . </P>

The committee of correspondence was formed in boston for which purpose