Knollenberg Bernhard. Growth of the American Revolution: 1766-1775

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Even more seriously discriminatory was a provision in the Quebec

Revenue Act providing that articles subject to duty, including rum, a

staple of the Indian trade, unless imported by way of the St. Lawrence

River, must be entered for duty at St. John’s, Quebec. Thus, a mer-

chant of, say, New York City, Philadelphia, or Baltimore engaged in

trade with the Indians on the Ohio, in territory now tentatively in-

cluded in the province of Quebec, must send his rum for customs entry

to a point over two hundred miles from his place of business, whereas

his competitor in Quebec or Montreal could make customs entry at a

customs house within a few blocks of his warehouse.⁴² This provision of

the Quebec Act was amended in May, ,⁴³ but by that time the Rev-

olutionary War had begun.



  

 

CALLS FOR A GENERAL CONGRESS

AND INSTRUCTIONS TO

THE DELEGATES



   K’   to the Boston Port Act reached

Boston May , .¹ Three days later, a Boston town meeting re-

solved that general agreement in the British North American colonies

to stop all imports from and exports to Great Britain and every part of

the West Indies “till the Act for Blocking up this Harbor be repealed the

same will prove the Salvation of North America & her Liberties.” The

moderator of the meeting, Samuel Adams, was instructed to send a

copy of this resolution, with a covering letter, to “all our Sister Colo-

nies.” The town also approved sending out a circular letter by the

Boston Committee of Correspondence (the establishment of which was

described in Chapter ) “to the other Colonies and the several Towns

in this Province...relative to shutting up this Harbour etc.”²*

On May , “Mr. Riviere” (Paul Revere) was speeding southwest-

ward with the resolution, Adams’ covering letter, and a letter from the

Boston Committee of Correspondence to correspondents in the chief

ports of the other colonies.³

The ﬁrst to respond to Boston’s appeal was Providence, Rhode Is-

land. On May , a Providence town meeting instructed the town’s

Committee of Correspondence to assure Boston that Providence con-

* David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American Responses to the Coercive Acts of  (Char-

lottesville: University Press of Virginia, ). [B.W.S.]

sidered all the colonies as “equally concerned” over “the present alarm-

ing conduct of the British Parliament” and that “a universal stoppage

of trade” would be the best method of securing relief. But the Commit-

tee added that the ﬁrst step should be the convention of a Congress of

representatives of the assemblies of the colonies in North America to

reach an agreement for united action⁴

—a project which had been sug-

gested by a number of writers during the past year.⁵

The next response was from Philadelphia. On May , a committee

of nineteen, chosen at a mass meeting held the day before,⁶ wrote the

Boston Committee that it had “reasons to think” the people of Penn-

sylvania would not favor a non-importation and non-exportation agree-

ment until an eﬀort had been made for “reconciliation and future har-

mony with our mother country” by the convocation of a general congress

“to state what we conceive our rights and to make a claim or petition of

them to his Majesty, in ﬁrm, but decent and dutiful terms, so as that we

may know by what lines to conduct ourselves in future....”⁷

New York City also rejected the Boston Committee’s proposal of an

immediate non-importation and non-exportation agreement. A com-

mittee of Correspondence (the so-called Committee of Fifty-One), cho-

sen at a mass meeting held in New York some days earlier,⁸ wrote the

Boston Committee on May , “We lament our inability to relieve your

anxiety by a decisive opinion. The cause is general and concerns a whole

Continent, who are equally interested with you and us; and we forsee that

no remedy can be of avail unless it proceeds from the joint act and ap-

probation of all....Upon these reasons we conclude that a Congress of

Deputies from the Colonies in general...ought to be assembled without

delay, and some unanimous resolution formed....Such being our senti-

ments it must be premature to pronounce any judgment on the expedi-

ent [non-importation and non-exportation] you have suggested....”⁹

Before Boston’s appeal reached Virginia, the Virginia House of Bur-

gesses, in session when news of the Boston Port Act reached Williams-

burg, immediately (May ) passed a resolve that the ﬁrst day of June,

the day on which the act was to take eﬀect, “be set apart, by the Mem-

bers of this House, as a day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer, devoutly

to implore the divine interposition for averting the heavy Calamity



    

which threatens destruction to our Civil Rights and the Evils of civil

War, [and] to give us one heart and one Mind ﬁrmly to oppose, by all

just and proper means, every injury to American Rights....”¹⁰

Lord Dunmore, royal Governor of the colony, retaliated by promptly

dissolving the House.¹¹ But the next day (May ) the members of the

dissolved House met at the Raleigh Tavern and passed resolutions de-

nouncing the Boston Port Act as “a most dangerous attempt to destroy

the...rights of all North America” and calling for a boycott of all East

Indian products except saltpeter and spices.¹² They also directed the

House’s Committee of Correspondence to write the similar committees

of other colonies proposing an annual intercolonial congress to delib-

erate on “those general measures which the united interests of America

may from time to time require.”¹³

By the time the Boston circular letter reached Williamsburg, most

members of the dissolved House had left for home. But Peyton Ran-

dolph, member for Williamsburg and Speaker of the House, was able

to collect twenty-ﬁve of the former members. They published a broad-

side inviting all members of the dissolved House to meet in Williams-

burg on August  to discuss adoption of non-importation and possible

non-exportation, and, in the meanwhile, to collect “the Sense” of their

respective counties.¹⁴

Nearly all of Virginia’s sixty-one counties and its three boroughs re-

sponded to this letter by sending at least one delegate (chosen in nearly

all cases from the members of the recently dissolved House) to the pro-

posed provincial convention.¹⁵ Furthermore, over half of the county

conventions passed resolutions for guidance of their delegates.¹⁶

Particularly notable were the bold and comprehensive resolutions

attributed to George Washington’s neighbor and friend, George Ma-

son, adopted by the convention of Fairfax County presided over by

Washington.

Denouncing the “system formed and pursued by the British Min-

istry to introduce an arbitrary Government into His Majesty’s Ameri-

can Dominions,” the resolutions proposed “a Congress of Deputies

from all the Colonies to concert a general and uniform plan for the de-

fence and preservation of our common rights, which should include the

stoppage of imports, with a few speciﬁed exceptions, of goods shipped



 

from Great Britain or Ireland after September , , and of all exports

to Great Britain after November , , until Parliament repealed the

Boston Port Act and all acts “for raising a revenue from the people of

America without their consent...taking away our trials by jury and or-

dering persons upon criminal accusations to be tried in another county.”

Furthermore, since the stoppage of exports to Great Britain would dis-

able the people of the colonies from paying their debts, “no judgments

should be rendered by the Courts in the said Colonies for any debt” if

non-exportation were agreed upon.¹⁷

The resolutions of Westmoreland County, in which Richard Henry

Lee was the leader, were in some respects even stronger. They proposed

the stoppage without delay of all imports from or exports to Great Brit-

ain and the West Indies until the Boston Port Act and all British acts

levying taxes on the colonies were repealed; and that “the gentlemen of

the law” should not bring or pursue any actions for debt as long as the

proposed “non-exportation agreement subsists....”¹⁸

On June , the Connecticut House of Representatives likewise pro-

posed a general congress, and authorized its Committee of Correspon-

dence, previously established pursuant to the proposal of the Virginia

House of Burgesses (described in Chapter ) to appoint delegates to the

congress.¹⁹

Twelve days later, the Rhode Island General Assembly resolved that

“a Convention of Representatives from all the Colonies ought to be

holden in some suitable place; as soon as may be...,” and chose the

colony’s two outstanding political leaders, former Governors Stephen

Hopkins and Samuel Ward, to represent the colony.²⁰

The project for a general congress was ﬁnally²¹ brought to a head on

June , when the Massachusetts House of Representatives instructed

its Speaker, Thomas Cushing, to write the Speakers of the Assemblies

of the other British colonies in North America inviting them to send

delegates to a congress to assemble at Philadelphia on September .²²

Cushing immediately carried out this instruction.²³

The Massachusetts House elected as its own delegates Cushing him-

self, a Boston merchant and for many years one of the town’s four repre-

sentatives in the House;²⁴ Samuel Adams, another of the Boston rep-

resentatives, of whom more, later; his second cousin, John Adams,



    

lawyer of Braintree and Boston;²⁵ Robert Treat Paine, a lawyer of

Taunton and one of his town’s representatives in the House; and James

Bowdoin, a Boston capitalist and former member of the provincial

Council, who, alone of the ﬁve, declined to serve.²⁶ All of them were

Harvard graduates;²⁷ all had been born and lived in or within forty

miles of Boston.²⁸

Even before the proposal of the Massachusetts House for an inter-

colonial meeting reached Maryland, a convention of delegates from all

the counties of that colony, meeting at Annapolis on June –, chose a

strong delegation, headed by Matthew Tilghman, Speaker of the Mary-

land Assembly, three other of its leading members (Thomas Johnson, Jr.,

William Paca, and Samuel Chase), and Robert Goldsborough, a former

member, to attend any intercolonial congress that might be called.²⁹

The Virginia Convention, which assembled at Williamsburg on Au-

gust , chose an outstanding delegation to the proposed intercolonial

Congress: Peyton Randolph, Speaker of the dissolved House of Bur-

gesses, and six other of its leading members

—Richard Henry Lee,

George Washington, Benjamin Harrison, planters; and Richard Bland,

Patrick Henry, and Edmund Pendleton, lawyers. It also adopted spir-

ited resolutions relating to the Congress, including resolutions for an

agreement not to import anything except medicines from Great Britain

after November , , and not to export anything whatsoever to Great

Britain after August , , unless colonial grievances were redressed

by that date.³⁰

The other thirteen colonies, except Georgia, also sent delegates,

chosen in one way or another, to the Congress.

Those from Pennsylvania were chosen by the regular Assembly (un-

der pressure from a provincial convention, described in the ﬁrst appen-

dix to this chapter); those from New Hampshire, New Jersey, Delaware,

and North Carolina by conventions;³¹ and those from Connecticut by

a Committee of Correspondence authorized by the resolution of the

Connecticut House quoted earlier in this chapter.³²

In South Carolina, the delegates were chosen initially by a mass

meeting in Charleston on July – but were conﬁrmed by the provin-

cial assembly a few weeks later.³³

In Georgia, eﬀorts were made to secure the election of delegates to



 

the proposed Congress, but without success,³⁴ nor is this surprising,

since Georgia, relatively new and sparsely populated, was still heavily

dependent on Great Britain. The Governor and other chief provincial

oﬃcials were paid from funds voted by Parliament,³⁵ and its people re-

lied largely for protection against Indian incursions on the inﬂuence of

the Southern Indian Department, supported and controlled by the

British government.³⁶

In New York, the proceedings for the election of delegates to the

Congress and the composition of the delegation were strikingly diﬀerent

from those in the other colonies represented at the Congress. The elec-

tion of the delegates was initiated not by the New York Assembly nor

its Speaker, but by the New York City Committee of Fifty-One. And of

the delegates chosen

—Isaac Low, John Alsop, Philip Livingston, James

Duane, John Jay, John Haring, Henry Wisner, and Simon Boerum

—

only Boerum was a member of the Assembly.

(The long, bitter struggle for political hegemony in New York be-

tween the so-called Livingston and De Lancey parties which was largely

responsible for this peculiarity is discussed in the second appendix to

this chapter.)*

Among the delegations not previously mentioned, the one from

South Carolina, consisting of Thomas Lynch, Henry Middleton,

John Rutledge, his young brother, Edward Rutledge, and Christopher

Gadsden, was particularly distinguished. But the delegations from

the remaining six

—Joseph Galloway, Samuel Rhoads, Charles Hum-

phreys, Thomas Miﬄin, John Morton, George Ross, and Edward

Biddle of Pennsylvania; Eliphalet Dyer, Silas Deane, and Roger Sher-

man of Connecticut; William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, and Richard

Caswell of North Carolina; Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean, and

George Read of Delaware; John Sullivan and Nathaniel Folsom of New

Hampshire; and William Livingston, James Kinsey, John Dehart,

Stephen Crane, and Richard Smith of New Jersey

—also were com-

posed of men well known at least in their respective colonies and sev-

eral of them more widely.³⁷



    

* Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York,

– (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). [B.W.S.]

The most notable persons missing from the delegations were John

Hancock, politically indispensable at home,³⁸ Benjamin Franklin, who

was in England, and John Dickinson. The last, however, on his election

to the Assembly six weeks after the Congress opened, was immediately

added to the Pennsylvania delegation.³⁹ “A Shadow, tall but slender as

a Reed, pale as ashes,” yet looking “as if the Springs of Life were strong

enough to last many Years,” to quote John Adams’ description of him,

Dickinson promptly (October ) joined the Congress⁴⁰ and, as we shall

see in Chapter , played a prominent part in its subsequent proceedings.

Except for most of the delegates from New York and Sullivan of New

Hampshire, all ﬁfty-ﬁve members of the Congress (as the delegates de-

cided to call their meeting) were currently or had been members of the

representative Assemblies of their several colonies. Nine of them were

currently or had been Speaker.⁴¹ Nearly half of the delegates were law-

yers: most of the others were farmers, planters, or businessmen. (A list

of the delegates, with the principal occupation of each, is given in the

third appendix to this chapter.)

Edward Rutledge, youngest of the delegates, was not quite twenty-

ﬁve, Hopkins, the oldest, was sixty-seven;⁴² most of them were middle-

aged. Though several were born in colonies other than where they now

resided,⁴³ all were born in America. None of the delegates was Catholic;

but six of the Protestant denominations

—Church of England, Presby-

terian, Congregational, Quaker, and Baptist

—were represented.⁴⁴

Hopkins had been a delegate to the Albany Congress of , and

Dyer, Philip Livingston, Morton, McKean, Rodney, John Rutledge, and

Gadsden to the Stamp Act Congress of ;⁴⁵ but the great majority

would now for the ﬁrst time be attending an intercolonial gathering.

If British ministers consulted persons in London familiar with the

colonies represented at the congress, they must have learned how little

truth there was in the frequent depiction of the leaders of the colonial

opposition as agitators of ambiguous character having everything to

gain and little or nothing to lose by a revolution. For nearly all the del-

egates were prosperous businessmen, planters, farmers, or lawyers of

outstanding position in their respective colonies.⁴⁶

Indeed, the only delegate who ﬁtted into the picture of unprosper-

ous agitator of ambiguous character was Samuel Adams. There is evi-



 

dence that he was hard-up,⁴⁷ had possibly been guilty as charged of em-

bezzling public funds,⁴⁸ and certainly had spent a large part of his time

for many years in agitating against British measures threatening colo-

nial liberty.⁴⁹

All the colonies except New York represented at the Congress passed

resolutions or gave instructions to guide or restrict their delegates.⁵⁰

Most demanded repeal of the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Gov-

ernment Act, and all British acts levying taxes for revenue on the colo-

nies, but as to other grievances and the method or methods to secure

relief, they disclosed a wide diversity of opinion.



    

 

UNIFYING AND DIVISIVE

ELEMENTS IN THE CONGRESS



  to the Congress, with possibly a few exceptions,

apparently were united in the conviction that Parliament’s claim

of right to tax the colonies as it pleased struck at the very root of colo-

nial liberty and that the Congress must take some action beyond mere

petitioning in order to secure the abandonment of this claim.

The prevailing feeling was well expressed by George Washington,

not long after his election as one of Virginia’s delegates to the Congress.

Replying to letters from an old friend and neighbor, Bryan Fairfax, urg-

ing that the Congress conﬁne itself to petitioning for redress,¹ Washing-

ton wrote:

“As...I observe or think I observe that government is pursuing a

regular plan, at the expence of law and justice, to over-throw our con-

stitutional rights and liberties, how can I expect any redress from a

measure which has been ineﬀectually tried already? For, Sir, what is it

we are contending against? Is it paying the duty of three pence per

pound on tea because burthensome? No, it is the right only we have all

along disputed, and to this end we have petitioned his Majesty in as

humble and dutiful manner as subjects could do....

“The conduct of the Boston people could not justify the rigor of their

[Parliament’s] measures [against Boston] nor...require an act to de-

prive Massachusetts Bay of their charter or to exempt persons from trial

in the place where oﬀences were committed....Are not all these things

self evident proofs of a ﬁxed and uniform plan to tax us? If we want