The First Continental Congress Gathers: September 5, 1774
- Catholic Textbook Project
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This text comes from our book, The American Venture.
If Parliament had been content to punish Boston alone, it may have been able to keep other colonies from joining the city in opposition to the British government. But among the Coercive Acts was one very objectionable one that removed the right of the Massachusetts people to elect many public officials. This Massachusetts Government Act said these officials were to be appointed by the royal governor. The same day Parliament passed this act, it approved the Administration Act for “the impartial administration of justice in the cases of persons questioned for any acts done by them in the execution of the law, or for the suppression of riots and tumults.” Under this act, British officials held to have committed capital crimes, including murder, could not be tried in Boston, where Parliament thought they would receive no fair trial. Instead, their trials would be moved to another colony or England. Angry Bostonians condemned this measure as the “Murder Act.”
With the passing of these Coercive Acts—called the “Intolerable Acts” in the colonies—outrage against Parliament spread from Boston into the Massachusetts countryside, and thence to the other colonies. Outside of New England, from New York to South Carolina, colonial leaders called for taking a stand with Massachusetts against “tyranny.” When the royal governor of Virginia dissolved the House of Burgesses for its resolve to stand with Massachusetts, the burgesses gathered at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg and called for the formation of a Continental Congress to represent all the colonies. Soon, other colonies joined Virginia, and the Continental Congress was set to convene in September 1774.
In the meantime, Parliament adopted a measure that its American colonists thought very intolerable. This act, called the Quebec Act, was not directed at the thirteen Atlantic-seaboard colonies but, as the name suggests, at Quebec. The act guaranteed to the French in Quebec the freedom to practice their Catholic faith and allowed them to govern themselves by French rather than English laws. Just as bad to the colonists, it extended the southern border of Quebec to the Ohio River, cutting off the Ohio Country and lands to the west from English settlement. British colonists were appalled that a Protestant king would tolerate the Catholic Church anywhere in his domain. Propagandists warned that the act might be the first move to force them to follow “tyrannical” French law and convert to the Catholic Church. Alexander Hamilton of New York worried that “a nation of Papists and slaves” threatened the liberties of English America. Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty spread the rumor that George III was himself secretly thinking of becoming Catholic.
In this heightened spirit of anger, fear, and foreboding, America’s English colonists awaited the convening in Philadelphia of what would prove to be a momentous gathering—the Continental Congress.
The First Continental Congress
The congress that gathered in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, was divided between those who wanted to remain loyal to the British parliament and king and those who favored more radical solutions. Congress agreed that it had genuine grievances against the mother country and that it should seek for a redress of such grievances—but it was not clear on what basis it should demand redress. Should it appeal to the British Constitution, to the longstanding and customary rights of the English (trial by jury, no taxation without representation, etc.)? Should it say that Parliament was violating the rights given in the charters that established the colonies? Or should it invoke what Liberal thinkers called “natural law”?
In a Declaration and Resolves issued on October 14, 1774, Congress appealed to all of these. “The inhabitants of the English Colonies in North America,” said Congress, hold their rights “by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.” The colonists, said the declaration, “are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.” It then argued that Americans are guaranteed all the constitutional rights of Englishmen, especially since they “by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights” by their emigration to America. It vehemently protested the Quebec Act because it established “the Roman Catholick [sic] Religion” in Quebec and erected a “tyranny there, to the great danger, from so great a dissimilarity of Religion, law, and government, of the neighboring British colonies.”
Before its members returned home, Congress decided on peaceful means to resist Parliament—a compact called the Association, which would make sure that no one imported goods from Great Britain, exported goods there, or consumed British products. But even though forming the Association was not an act of war, it was not without violence. Committees of Safety, appointed by Congress, used threats and violence to enforce the Association. And events did not wait on Congress’s wishes. News came from Massachusetts that on April 18 and 19, 1775, colonial militia had fought—and defeated—British Redcoats at Lexington and Concord. Soon, contingents from other colonies joined the Massachusetts militia, laying siege to the British in Boston. Then, in May 1775, came the news that colonial forces under Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allan had taken British Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, in New York.
While Arnold and Allan were assaulting Fort Ticonderoga, another colonial gathering, the second Continental Congress, had gathered in Philadelphia. The delegates (who included John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington of Virginia) saw they faced a certain war with the mother country and that they therefore needed an army. Congress designated the colonial troops around Boston as the provisional army of the United Colonies and made Washington the army’s commander-in-chief. Though Congress insisted it did not seek independence from Great Britain, it was beginning to function as if it were the government of an independent nation.
