Sept. 5, 1774—Angered by a deteriorating relationship
with the mother country, representatives from 12 of the 13 British colonies in
North America convened in the First Continental Congress in
Philadelphia, taking a long but still not inevitable step towards the American Revolution.
Georgia, the lone holdout among the colonies, sent no
delegates to the Congress because it needed royal troops to defend against
attacks by Native Americans—underscoring the vulnerability that partly
motivated Parliament’s increasing resort to taxation over the prior decade.
The delegates gathered in Carpenters’ Hall,
home of what today remains, 300 years after its establishment, the oldest craft
guild in the United States.
The congress came together in solidarity with Boston,
which for the last several months had been punished by the administration of British
Prime Minister Lord North for the Boston Tea Party protest of taxation without
representation.
The Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts in
the colonies) had ignited further protest by closing Boston Harbor until
restitution was made for the dumped tea; abrogating the colony’s longtime
charter; allowing British officials charged with capital offenses to be tried
in England instead; and gave all colonial governors the right to requisition unoccupied
buildings to house troops.
Parliament’s crackdown not just on the colonists’
exports but also their attempts at manufacturing led the delegates to debate
how to implement a boycott of British goods.
Two days after the congress opened, Rev. Jacob Duché delivered an invocation--beginning a tradition of prayer in Congress that continues to this day. The delegates must have felt the necessity of it continually, because For much of the time before adjourning on
October 26, they debated endlessly without moving much business.
They were
hamstrung from the outset because, as the first time the colonies had gathered
for common action, no rules existed even for governing the proceedings.
But the divisions among them were not just deep, but
multiple, involving splits:
*between large and small colonies;
*among loyalists seeking an accommodation with
Britain, radicals like the Adamses of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of
Virginia who were concluding that independence was inevitable, and a more
cautious group that wanted to see how events transpired;
*among speakers who had operated within the political
environments of their own colonies but were unused to cooperating with others
outside them.
Pennsylvania conservative Joseph Galloway, attempting
to ward off passage of a resolution calling for boycotting British goods,
outlined a “Plan of Union” in which any legislation would require approval by
both Parliament and an intercolonial assembly.
At first, it appeared that Galloway’s plan would
carry. But opinion shifted when the congress received the Suffolk Resolves
transported from Massachusetts by Paul Revere. Patriotic leaders, circumventing
the royal governor’s recent ban on town meetings, had gathered in Suffolk
County and passed a set of resolutions calling on colonists to ignore the
Intolerable Acts, elect militia officers, and conduct weekly drills to defend
themselves.
Reconsidering their position on Galloway’s plan, the Philadelphia
delegates now rejected his belief that Parliament had the inherent right to tax
and govern the colonies. Just before it adjourned, the Continental Congress created
a Continental Association that called for a ban on all trade between
America and Great Britain of all goods, wares or merchandise.
Nobody who has witnessed the self-interested dickering
and nitpicking over proposals that has occurred in our Congress should be surprised
to hear that something like the same situation obtained 250 years ago in Philadelphia.
While seemingly far-reaching—it involved not just a
ban on importing British goods but also African slaves and tax-bearing commodities
from elsewhere in the world—even this ended up watered down by individual
colonies’ demands (e.g., Virginia received the right to sell its tobacco for
one more year, and South Carolina was permitted to ship rice, one of its most
important exports, to Britain).
More significant, though, the delegates left the door
open for further action. They agreed to wait to see how Britain reacted, and if
there was no improvement in Lord North’s dealings with the colonies, to
reconvene the following year.
Ultimately, it was Lord North’s stubbornness in
treating the colonies like errant children that forced them to band together.
Great Britain’s refusal to compromise led to armed
resistance at Lexington and Concord the following April, and the resumption of
delegate business at the Second Continental Congress, only this time with a
more drastic—though still not irrevocable—task at hand: how to organize armed
resistance to the harsh new measures imposed from across the Atlantic without
their content.
The First Continental Congress was notable both for
who attended and who did not. Among the latter who would serve on the committee
assigned to draft the Declaration of Independence nearly two years later:
Benjamin Franklin, making a last-ditch attempt for reconciliation between the Crown
and the colonies, and Thomas Jefferson, who, though too sick to travel to
Philadelphia late in the summer of 1774, managed to complete A Summary View
of the Rights of British America, a tract so acclaimed for its eloquence
that it would lead him to be chosen to write the Declaration.
Among those who did attend the Congress: two future
military leaders, George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, and,
from New Hampshire, John Sullivan, the son of Irish Catholic immigrants, who
became a brigadier general in the army.
One name that stuck out for me, from New Jersey,
sounded awfully familiar, and that indeed turned out to be the case: Stephen Crane, great-great grandfather of the great American novelist famous for The
Red Badge of Courage.
