to all the colonies for the recovery and establishment of their just rights and liberties, civil and religious, and for the restoration of union and harmony with Great Britain. They then appointed five delegates1 to meet the representatives of the other colonies in congress at Philadelphia, in the succeeding September.

These examples were at once followed by the other colonies. In some of them, the delegates to the Continental Congress were appointed by the popular branch of the legislature, acting for and in behalf of the people; in others, they were appointed by conventions of the people called for the express purpose, or by committees duly authorized to make the appointment.2 The Congress, styling themselves "the delegates appointed by the good people of these colonies," assembled at Philadelphia on the 5th of September, 1774, and organized themselves as a deliberative body by the choice of officers and the adoption of rules of proceeding. Peyton Ran

1 Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, Robert Treat Paine, James Bowdoin, and John Adams.

2 The delegates in the Congress of 1774 from New Hampshire were appointed by a Convention of Deputies chosen by the towns, and received their credentials from that Convention. In Rhode Island, they were appointed by the General Assembly, and commissioned by the Governor. In Connecticut, they were appointed and instructed by the Committee of Correspondence

for the Colony, acting under authority conferred by the House of Representatives. In New York, the mode of appointment was vari

ous.

In the city and county of New York, the delegates were elected by popular vote taken in seven wards. The same persons were also appointed to act for the counties of West Chester, Albany, and Duchess, by the respective committees of those counties; and another person was appointed in the same manner for the county of

dolph of Virginia was elected President, and Charles Thompson of Pennsylvania Secretary of the Congress.

No precedent existed for the mode of action to be adopted by this assembly. There was, therefore, at the outset, no established principle which might determine the nature of the union; but that union was to be shaped by the new circumstances and relations in which the Congress found itself placed. There had been no general concert among the different colonies as to the numbers of delegates, or, as they were called in many of the proceedings, "committees" of the colonies, to be sent to the meeting at Philadelphia. On the first day of their assembling, Pennsylvania and Virginia had each six delegates in attendance; New York had five; Massachusetts, New Jersey, and South Carolina had four each; Connecticut had three; New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Maryland had two each. The delegates from North Carolina did not arrive until the 14th.1

As soon as the choice of officers had taken place,1 the method of voting presented itself as the first thing to be determined; and the difficulties arising from the inequalities between the colonies in respect to actual representation, population, and wealth, had to be encountered upon the threshold. Insuperable obstacles stood in the way of the adoption of interests as the basis of votes. The weight of a colony could not be ascertained by the numbers of its inhabitants, the amount of their wealth, the extent of their trade, or by any ratio to be compounded of all these elements, for no authentic evidence existed from which data could be taken.2 As it was apparent, however, that some colonies had a larger proportion of members present than others, relatively to their size and importance, it was thought to be equally objectionable to adopt the method of voting by polls. In these circumstances, the opinion was advanced, that the colonial governments were at an end; that all America was thrown into one mass, and was in a state of nature; and consequently, that the people ought to be considered as represented in the Congress according to their numbers, by the delegations actually present. Upon this principle, the voting should have been by polls.

But neither the circumstances under which they were assembled, nor the dispositions of the members,

1 The President and Secretary appear to have been chosen viva voce, or by a hand vote. Adams's Works, II. 365.

2 Adams, II. 366.

John

3 This opinion, we are told by Mr. Adams, was advanced by Patrick Henry. See notes of the debate, in Adams, II. 366, 368.

permitted an adoption of the theory that all government was at an end, or that the boundaries of the colonies were effaced. The Congress had not assembled as the representatives of a people in a state of nature, but as the committees of different colonies, which had not yet severed themselves from the parent state. They had been clothed with no legislative or coercive authority, even of a revolutionary nature; compliance with their resolves would follow only on conviction of the utility of their measures; and all their resolves and all their measures were, by the express terms of many of their credentials, limited to the restoration of union and harmony with Great Britain, which would of course leave the colonies in their colonial state. The people of the continent, therefore, as a people in the state of nature, or even in a national existence as one people standing in a revolutionary attitude, had not then come into being.

The nature of the questions, too, which they were to discuss, and of the measures which they were to adopt, were to be considered in determining by what method of voting those questions and measures should be decided. The Congress had been called to secure the rights of the colonies. What were those rights? By what standard were they to be ascertained? By the law of nature, or by the principles of the English Constitution, or by the charters and fundamental laws of the colonies, regarded as compacts between the crown and the people, or by all of these combined? If the law of nature alone was to determine their rights, then all

allegiance to the British crown was to be regarded as at an end. If the principles of the English Constitution, or the charters, were to be the standard, the law of nature must be excluded from consideration. This exclusion would of necessity narrow the ground, and deprive them of a resource to which Parliament might at last compel them to look.1 In order, therefore, to leave the whole field open for consideration, and at the same time to avoid committing themselves to principles irreconcilable with the preservation of allegiance and their colonial relation to Great Britain, it was necessary to consider themselves as an assembly of committees from the different colonies, in which each colony should have one voice, through the delegates whom it had sent to represent and act for it. But, as if foreseeing the time when population would become of necessity the basis of congressional power, when the authority of Parliament should have given place to a system of American continental legislation, they inserted, in the resolve determining that each colony should have one vote, a caution that would prevent its being drawn into precedent. They declared, as the reason for the course which they adopted, that the Congress were not possessed of, or able to procure, the proper materials for ascertaining the importance of each colony.2

It appears, therefore, very clear, that an examina

1 See the very interesting notes of their debates in Adams's Works, II. 366, 370-377.

VOL. I.

3

2 Journals, I. 10.