The First Continental Congress Meets in Philadelphia

In answer to the Coercive Acts, the colonies chose delegates to a general congress, which first met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774. The Office of the Historian at the State Department notes that every one of the thirteen colonies except Georgia sent delegates, and that merchants had been reluctant to join a boycott without agreed terms and a means of enforcing them, so the Congress was called in part to set those terms.

On October 14, 1774, the Congress adopted a declaration of rights and grievances. It held that the colonists, by the laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution and their charters, were entitled to life, liberty and property, to trial by a jury of the vicinage, and to assemble and petition the king. Because they were not and could not properly be represented in Parliament, it claimed for their own provincial legislatures a free and exclusive power of legislation in all cases of taxation and internal polity, while consenting to acts of Parliament genuinely confined to regulating external commerce. It named as violations of colonial rights a list of revenue and admiralty acts passed since the last war, the three Massachusetts acts of 1774, the Quebec Act and the act for quartering soldiers.

On October 20, under its president, Peyton Randolph, the Congress adopted the Continental Association. It bound the colonies to import no goods from Great Britain or Ireland after December 1, 1774, to stop using East India tea after March 1, 1775, and, if the acts were not repealed, to export nothing to Great Britain, Ireland or the West Indies after September 10, 1775, except rice to Europe. Enforcement was placed in committees to be chosen in every county, city and town, which would publish the names of violators. The State Department history adds that the Congress sent addresses to the people of Great Britain, the colonies and Quebec and a petition to the King, and agreed to meet again on May 10, 1775. By then fighting had begun, and that second Congress would grow into the governing body of the United States until the Articles of Confederation took effect in 1781.