From Congress to Independence, 1774–76

Reconciliation Was Still the Goal in 1774

When delegates from twelve colonies (Georgia stayed away) gathered at Philadelphia in September 1774, almost none of them wanted independence. They wanted the Intolerable Acts repealed and the constitutional relationship of 1763 restored. The shift from that goal to the Declaration of Independence took less than two years and was anything but predictable. Battlefield events, the king’s response and a single forty-page pamphlet all played a role. The lesson’s central skill is causation: showing why a movement that began by petitioning the Crown in 1774 ended up rejecting the Crown altogether in July 1776.

The First Continental Congress, 1774

The First Continental Congress sat at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia from 5 September to 26 October 1774. Fifty-six delegates attended, including conservatives like John Dickinson and Joseph Galloway who hoped for reconciliation, and radicals like John Adams and Patrick Henry who already suspected war was coming. The Congress did three things. First, it issued a Declaration of Rights and Grievances objecting to the Intolerable Acts and to taxation without representation, but explicitly accepting Parliament’s right to regulate trade. Second, it set up the Continental Association: a colony-wide non-importation, non-consumption and (from September 1775) non-exportation boycott of British trade, enforced by local committees of inspection. Third, it agreed to meet again in May 1775 if grievances were not resolved. The mood was firm but cautious. Galloway’s plan for an American Parliament under the Crown was rejected by a single vote, but only just — reconciliation was still on the table.

Lexington, Concord and the Second Congress, 1775

The next ten months hardened the conflict. On 19 April 1775 General Thomas Gage sent 700 redcoats from Boston to seize a colonial arms cache at Concord. Massachusetts militia met them on Lexington Green and at Concord Bridge. By the time the British column straggled back to Boston, 73 of its men were dead and 174 were wounded. The Massachusetts militia laid siege to Boston the next day. When the Second Continental Congress reconvened at Philadelphia on 10 May 1775 it was already a wartime government. It appointed George Washington commander-in-chief of a Continental Army on 15 June 1775. It also tried one last gesture of reconciliation: the Olive Branch Petition of July 1775, which addressed George III directly and asked him to call off his ministers. The king refused even to receive it and in August declared the colonies in rebellion. By December 1775 Parliament’s Prohibitory Act stopped trade with the rebellious colonies and authorised the seizure of American ships — in effect putting the colonies outside the king’s protection. Many colonists later said that this was the moment they accepted that independence was inevitable.

Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’, January 1776

In January 1776 the English-born radical writer Thomas Paine published a forty-page pamphlet called ‘Common Sense’. It sold around 120,000 copies in three months and perhaps 500,000 over the year — in a colonial population of roughly 2.5 million. Paine did three things no previous patriot writer had done. He attacked monarchy itself rather than the king’s ministers, calling George III the ‘Royal Brute of Britain’. He framed independence as common sense rather than radical revolution — America was a continent, not a province. And he wrote in plain English aimed at farmers, sailors and tradesmen rather than lawyers and assemblymen. Paine made the case that no constitutional reform within the empire could solve the colonies’ grievances, because the problem was the system, not the personalities. Within months, colonial assemblies began authorising their delegates at the Second Congress to vote for independence.

Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence

On 7 June 1776 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved a resolution at the Second Congress ‘That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.’ A drafting committee of five — John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston and the thirty-three-year-old Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson — was appointed to write a justification. Jefferson did most of the writing. His draft argued that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that George III had broken that contract, and that ‘all men are created equal’ with rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. On 2 July 1776 Lee’s resolution passed; on 4 July 1776 the Congress approved Jefferson’s amended Declaration of Independence. Eighteenth-century broadside printers had it in every colonial newspaper within weeks.