Page "Elbridge Gerry" Paragraph 3

Gerry was from an early time a vocal opponent of Parliamentary efforts to tax the colonies after the French and Indian War ended in 1763, and won election to General Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay ( its legislative assembly ) in May 1772.

There he worked closely with Samuel Adams to advance colonial opposition to Parliamentary colonial policies.

He was responsible for establishing Marblehead's committee of correspondence, one of the first to be set up after that of Boston.

In 1773 he resigned from the Marblehead committee over the virulently negative response the townspeople had to the hospital for treating smallpox he set up on Cat Island.

Adams convinced Gerry to reenter politics after the Boston Port Act closed that city's port, and Marblehead became a port to which relief supplies could be delivered.

Gerry was elected to serve on the Massachusetts Provincial Congress when the American Revolutionary War broke out, where he used his merchant connections to see that the Continental Army besieging Boston was supplied.