He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

“He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.” This charge against King George III deals with the assemblies in Massachusetts and Virginia that were moved to new locations away from the public records for reasons of “safety” (A User’s Guide to the Declaration of Independence: Site of America’s Founding, http://www.founding.com/declare/index.cfm ). In a broader context, it was one of the charges that referred to the king’s “attempts to destroy colonial legislative acts and powers” (William Raymond Smith, “The Rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence,” College English, Vol. 24, no. 4 (Jan, 1965): 306-309, 308, http://www.jstor.org ). By doing this, King George III not only prevented members of both of these assemblies from properly conducting any form of meeting, but he also prevented them from finding problems with his rule.
By moving the meetings away from the locations of the Public Records, King George III essentially took away the main resources that the assemblies had to conduct their meetings (A User’s Guide to the Declaration of Independence, http://www.founding.com/declare/index.cfm). The result of this was that they could not access the needed information to the issues that they intended to discuss and thus really could not do anything about them. At this period in time, there were a number of issues that many colonies had problems with. Yet because of their new location, these two assemblies could not gather enough facts to help produce proper arguments. Both Massachusetts and Virginia had problems with the Towshend Acts and took a stand against them (Dumas Malone, The Story of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Oxford Press, 1954), 18-19). By moving the two assemblies away from the Public Records, they would not have the necessary information to properly repute these acts.
Not only did these assemblies not have the Public Records that they needed to discuss acts, they also did not have the records of King George III’s actions. Without this information, it became much more difficult to discover any unwanted actions taken by King George III.
As stated earlier, these two assemblies were moved for reasons of “safety” (Ibid). In Massachusetts, particularly in Boston, there had been some recent acts of violence that had occurred. The most prominent act of violence was the Boston Tea Party which took place on December 16, 1773 (Malone, The Story of the Declaration of Independence, 29). Following this, there was an “attempt to remodel the government of Massachusetts Bay” (Malone, The Story of the Declaration of Independence, 29). One way to remodel the government would be to move assemblies to locations that were away from the Public Records in order to prevent them from finding facts that would lead to further acts of violence.

Alex Elkin