This heading without text is the last entry in D/JA/24.

After a week in Braintree JA resumed his seat, 28 Dec., in the Massachusetts Council, which was sitting in Watertown. A payroll record in the Council Papers (M-Ar: vol. 164) indicates that he attended sixteen days between then and 24 Jan., the day before he set out once more for Congress, and was paid £5 10s. 10d. for travel and services. His work on committees was as intense as it had been in Congress; see the Council Journal for this session as printed in Force, Archives , 4th ser., 4:1219–1312. One of his committee assignments led to a very characteristic composition from JA's pen, a proclamation “By the Great and General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay,” dated 23 Jan. 1776 and designed to be read “at the opening of the several Courts of Justice through this Colony, and at Town-Meetings” (Ford, Mass. Broadsides, No. 1973, with facsimile facing p. 272; MS in M-Ar: vol. 138; see Council Journal, Force, Archives , 4th ser., 4:12–46, 1268–1270; Mass., House Jour. , 1775–1776, 3d sess., p. 189–92). Others took him to headquarters in Cambridge for consultations with Gen. Washington and formal councils of war. His surviving correspondence with Washington, together with the Council Journal, shows that he was repeatedly at headquarters in January, and the next entry in the Diary records that he dined with a party of officers, including the commander in chief, and their ladies at Cambridge on the day before he started for Philadelphia.