The Colonies Come Together

Twelve of the Colonies sent delegates to Carpenters’ Hall, a brick building in central Philadelphia. Georgia declined to participate, wary of alienating the British as it faced threats from nearby Native American nations. East Florida and West Florida, then in the hands of the British, also did not participate. 

Fifty-six delegates arrived in total, including George Washington and John Adams from Virginia and Massachusetts, respectively. Though the delegates were galvanized by the injustice of the Intolerable Acts, many still considered themselves loyal subjects of the British crown. Joseph Galloway, a Pennsylvania delegate, even submitted a formal Plan of Union to create a colonial Parliament alongside the British Parliament. He implored his fellow delegates to make clear “that the Colonies hold in abhorrence the idea of being considered independent communities.” The plan was voted down but by a narrow margin, an indication of how many delegates still believed the relationship with Britain could be saved.

While the atmosphere of the first meeting was collegial, it was also suffused with uncertainty. The Congress itself was seditious, and the idea of a common cause was far from settled. While Virginia delegate Patrick Henry declared himself “not a Virginian, but an American,” others were unsure of what that might mean. And religious differences almost derailed the proceedings until an Anglican clergyman managed to deliver a broadly acceptable prayer. (John Adams later wrote to his wife, Abigail, that seeing delegates from different colonies react to it was unexpectedly moving: It “filled the Bosom of every Man present.”)

As the sessions unfolded, delegates like Samuel Adams, a key organizer of the Boston Tea Party, pushed for firm resistance to British overreach, while moderates like John Dickinson, one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania and Delaware, thought reconciliation should still be the goal.

The two competing camps finally struck a deal, known as the Articles of Association, which organized a sweeping boycott of British goods, meant to be enforced locally by committees of inspection. But the articles stopped short of fully declaring independence.

In towns across the Colonies, ordinary citizens suddenly found themselves policing one another’s consumption of British products. Merchants who violated the boycott could be publicly named in newspapers or confronted by neighbors. Even Thomas Jefferson wasn’t exempt—the Virginian had to defend an order of 14 pairs of imported sash windows, claiming they were purchased before the boycott was announced.

Tea, the ultimate symbol of polite society, became politically charged—and refusing it became shorthand for supporting revolution. For women, whose social authority centered on the household, that refusal turned a daily ritual into political action. In 1768 a letter to the editors of a Boston paper urged readers to abandon the “fatal Stream” of tea, and clothing also became a symbol of one's political loyalties, as some women rejected imported silks and luxuries in favor of simpler, homespun fabrics.

On October 14, 1774, the Continental Congress drafted 10 resolutions—via a committee that included John Jay, the future first chief justice of the Supreme Court—that asserted colonial rights while reaffirming loyalty to the king. Crucially, the Congress determined to reassemble if the British ignored its demands. There solutions, called the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, asserted that the colonists had rights granted in part by the “immutable laws of nature,” and insisted Parliament had no authority to tax colonists without giving them fair representation.

The resolutions also outlined fundamental rights, including trial by a jury of one’s local peers and the right to peaceably assemble, along with the illegality of Britain keeping a standing army “in times of peace, without the consent of the legislature of that colony.” The “inhabitants of the English colonies of North America,” the document stated, are “entitled to life, liberty, and property.”

As the delegates departed on October 26, agreeing to reconvene the next year, they didn’t yet realize that they had created the foundation of the American project.

When the Second Continental Congress assembled on May 10, 1775, fighting at Lexington and Concord had finished less than a month prior, marking the battlefield start of the American Revolution. Delegates were now faced with a new problem: How would they manage a war against Britain, a nation to which they were still nominally loyal? The Journals of the Continental Congress show a body immediately thrust into the open-ended work of war. On the subject of arms, delegates wrote, “We shall lay them down when Hostilities shall cease on the Part of the Aggressors, and all Danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.”

Delegates left farms and practices in New England, Virginia, and elsewhere to spend the summer in bustling, humid Philadelphia, where the reality of the Congress was less than grand. They spent long days and nights arguing and negotiating, with no clear sense of when it would end. Philadelphia’s sweltering weather only made matters worse.

One of the delegates’ first major moves was to establish the Continental Army and appoint George Washington as its commander–in-chief. The choice was strategic, since Washington, as a Virginian, could help frame the fight as a struggle shared by people across the American Colonies, rather than a New England-specific rebellion. He appeared at the Congress in full military uniform, with John Adams declaring him to be a man of “great Talents and excellent universal Character.”

Even as a larger war seemed inevitable, the Congress made one final attempt at securing peace. A document known as the Olive Branch Petition was written directly to King George III. But any hope of reconciliation was firmly extinguished when the king refused to receive or formally respond to the petition. Almost simultaneously, King George declared the Colonies in rebellion.  

Congress had no choice but to operate less like a protest body and more like a cohesive government. It did so without a formal constitution, improvising authority as needed. Committees handled foreign affairs, military logistics, and finance. Clerks kept meticulous records, now preserved online by the Library of Congress, of each day’s proceedings, recording resolutions and actions on everything from how many riflemen should be part of each regiment to how or whether blankets could be obtained for the troops. But paying for the war proved especially difficult. Without the power to tax, the Congress authorized the issue of paper currency—called continentals—that quickly lost value, with soldiers joking that their pay was “not worth a Continental.” The inability to manage fiscal affairs cast doubt on the Congress’s power to become fully responsible for management of the Colonies. 

Meanwhile, the question of what independence might look like—and whether or not it was appealing to people in the Colonies—continued to evolve. Many delegates, including John Dickinson and John Jay, remained hesitant to commit to an independent America well into 1776. 

Washington, though, was an adept leader, and to the world’s surprise, American fighters held their own against a wealthier, more powerful, and more organized Britain.  

The publication of Common Sense by Thomas Paine reframed the conflict in stark, accessible terms. The English-born Paine, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, dismissed the idea of monarchy as inherently flawed, and argued that independence was both logical and necessary.  

The pamphlet spread rapidly, read aloud in taverns and meetinghouses in New York and Charleston and Baltimore, reaching audiences far beyond the political elite. Especially popular was Paine’s challenge to the idea of hereditary monarchy, which appealed to those weary of King George III and his constantly shifting whims.

By the summer of 1776, the Congress was ready to act. A committee was appointed to draft a declaration, with Thomas Jefferson taking the lead. Jefferson worked quickly and deftly, linking the ideals of the Enlightenment to the practical grievances of colonists. Benjamin Franklin reportedly made small but key changes to the text, refining Jefferson’s phrasing and tone.

The vote for independence came on July 2, followed by the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. At least one Delaware delegate initially voted against the resolution, and the iconic images of a single dramatic moment when all the members put pen to paper together are a later invention—some delegates, John Adams included, did not actually sign until early August.

Recognizing the need for a more formal government structure that could survive beyond the war (and beyond the individual members who made up the group), the Congress set itself to the task of drafting the Articles of Confederation in 1777.  Ratified in 1781, these documents created a blueprint: America, the Congress decided, would be a loose union of states with a weak central government. The idea was that Pennsylvania was to do what benefited Pennsylvania and New Hampshire to operate for New Hampshire, while collectively standing in opposition to foreign powers when needed. The Congress itself retained authority over war and diplomacy but, in this moment of resistance to tyranny from a far-off king, did not give itself total control over the governance of the new nation, particularly regarding levying taxes. These limitations on itself were deliberate—how, after asking colonists to throw their collective lot in with an idea as wild as self-determination, could the Congress then impose a system that, to the average citizen of Vermont or New Jersey, would feel much the same as the tyranny of England?

The achievements of the Continental Congress were many, and yet more bold still was how it operated. It functioned without a clear legal foundation, relying on cooperation between members whose interests weren’t always aligned. 

‎Through a mix of sheer will and skilled negotiations, the Congress maintained enough unity to sustain a war effort and secure independence.  

By the time the Second Continental Congress gave way to the government  established under the Articles of Confederation, it had transformed a loose collection of Colonies into a functioning, if imperfect, union. It shepherded that union through protest, war, and independence—not by a single decisive break, but in a series of incremental steps, often improvising along the way. 

The Continental Congress did not begin with a clear vision of nationhood, but it evolved into one. What started as a meeting to coordinate resistance became, over time, the de facto governing body of a new nation. The plan the delegates sketched and refined in Philadelphia was immediately put to the test as battles raged on across the Colonies and, later, as the American experiment officially began.