ALEXANDRIA, Va. – Two years before the Declaration of Independence, a group of men gathered at a courthouse in Alexandria and wrote something nearly as consequential.
On July 18, 1774, George Washington, George Mason and 23 other prominent Fairfax County citizens convened at the courthouse on Market Square — the same block that stands at the center of Old Town today — and approved a document called the Fairfax Resolves. Drafted primarily by Mason and championed by Washington, the resolutions were among the most forceful colonial rejections of British authority written before the Revolution, according to Historic Alexandria.
The Resolves declared that the British Parliament had no right to tax the American colonies, no right to govern their internal affairs, and no legitimate claim of supreme authority over colonial life. They stopped short of calling for independence — that would come two years later — but they laid the intellectual groundwork for it with unusual clarity and force. Among the 24 articles: a call to boycott British goods, a defense of the right to trial by jury, and a declaration that the colonists were entitled to all the rights of Englishmen…