er he had gone to receive clerical orders;
and I was informed afterwards by Peyton Randolph, that it had procured
me the honor of having my name inserted in a long list of proscriptions,
enrolled in a bill of attainder commenced in one of the Houses of
Parliament, but suppressed in embryo by the hasty step of events, which
warned them to be a little cautious. Montague, agent of the House of
Burgesses in England, made extracts from the bill, copied the names, and
sent them to Peyton Randolph. The names I think were about twenty,
which he repeated to me, but I recollect those only of Hancock, the
two Adamses, Peyton Randolph himself, Patrick Henry, and myself.*
The convention met on the 1st of August, renewed their association,
appointed delegates to the Congress, gave them instructions very
temperately and properly expressed, both as to style and matter; **
and they repaired to Philadelphia at the time appointed. The splendid
proceedings of that Congress, at their first session, belong to general
history, are known to every one, and need not therefore be noted here.
They terminated their session on the 26th of October, to meet again on
the 10th of May ensuing. The convention, at their ensuing session
of March '75, approved of the proceedings of Congress, thanked their
delegates, and reappointed the same persons to represent the colony
at the meeting to be held in May: and foreseeing the probability that
Peyton Randolph, their president, and speaker also of the House of
Burgesses, might be called off, they added me, in that event, to the
delegation.

* See Girardin's History of Virginia, Appendix No. 12. note.
** See Appendix, note D.

Mr. Randolph was according to expectation obliged the chair of Congress,
to attend the General Assembly summoned by Lord Dunmore, to meet on the
1st day of June,1775. Lord North's conciliatory propositions, as they
were called received by the Governor, and furnished the subject for
which this assembly was convened. Mr. Randolph accordingly attended, and
the tenor of these propositions being generally known, as having been
addressed to all the governors, he was anxious that the answer of our
Assembly, likely to be the first, should harmonise with what he knew to
be the sentiments and wishes of the body he had recently left. He feared
that Mr. Nicholas, whose mind was not yet up to the mark of the times,
would undertake the answer, and therefore pressed me to prepare it. I
did so,