Continental Congress Convened: Colonies Unite

Fifty-six delegates from twelve of the thirteen American colonies gathered at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, convening the First Continental Congress in response to the Intolerable Acts that Britain had imposed on Massachusetts after the Boston Tea Party. The delegates included George Washington, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and John Jay, a collection of political talent that would later fill the highest offices of a nation that did not yet exist. Georgia, the only absent colony, needed British military protection against Creek and Cherokee raids and could not afford to antagonize London. The Intolerable Acts, Parliament's punitive response to the destruction of tea in Boston Harbor, had closed the port of Boston, revoked Massachusetts's colonial charter, and allowed royal officials accused of crimes to be tried in England rather than by colonial juries. The legislation was intended to isolate Massachusetts and intimidate the other colonies into compliance. The opposite happened. Colonies that had been reluctant to challenge British authority saw in the Intolerable Acts a precedent that threatened all of their chartered rights. The Congress debated two competing visions over seven weeks. Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania proposed a Plan of Union that would have created an American parliament operating alongside the British one, a conciliatory approach that came within a single vote of adoption. The more radical delegates, led by the Adams cousins from Massachusetts and Patrick Henry from Virginia, pushed for economic warfare. The Congress ultimately adopted the Continental Association, a comprehensive boycott of British goods enforced by local committees of inspection that became, in practice, the first organs of revolutionary self-government. The First Continental Congress did not declare independence. Most delegates still hoped for reconciliation and framed their demands as a restoration of rights they believed were guaranteed by the British constitution. But the enforcement mechanisms they created, the committees and conventions that policed the boycott, built the organizational infrastructure of revolution. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord seven months later, the Second Continental Congress had a framework of colonial cooperation already in place.