A period of quiet followed until the assembly and the governor got into a debate over the theoretical rights of the colonists. To spread the results of this debate, Samuel Adams devised the “committees of correspondence,”[69] which kept the towns of Massachusetts informed of the controversy in Boston. This furnished a model for the colonial committees of correspondence, which became the most efficient means for revolutionary organization. They created public opinion, set war itself in motion, and were the embryos of new governments when the old were destroyed. The first provincial committee that met with general response from the other colonies was appointed by Virginia, March 12, 1773, to keep its assembly informed of the “_Gaspee_ Commission.”[70] The _Gaspee_ was a sort of revenue-cutter which, while too zealously enforcing the Navigation Acts, ran aground (June 9, 1772) in Narragansett Bay. Some Providence men seized and burned the vessel, and the British government appointed a commission to inquire into the affair.[71] The commission met with universal opposition and had to report failure. From this time on the chain of events that led to open rebellion consists of a series of links so plainly joined and so well known that they need only the barest mention in this brief introduction to the actual war. The British government tried to give temporary aid to the East India Company by permitting the heavy revenue on tea entering English ports, through which it must pass before being shipped to America, and by licensing the company itself to sell tea in America.[72] To avoid yielding the principle for which they had been contending, they retained at colonial ports the threepenny duty, which was all that remained of the Townshend revenue scheme. Ships loaded with this cheap tea came into the several American ports and were received with different marks of odium at different places. In Boston, after peaceful attempts to prevent the landing proved of no avail, an impromptu band of Indians threw the tea overboard, so that the next morning saw it lying like seaweed on Dorchester beach.