250 years ago today

They met in Philadelphia, at Carpenters’ Hall, on a hot September day.

Fifty-six men from as far north as New Hampshire and as far south as South Carolina.

Lawyers. Farmers. Millers. Merchants.

And revolutionaries.

Perhaps not at first. Not on that day in 1774, exactly 250 years ago today, when the First Continental Congress met and the credentials of the delegates were read to those assembled.¹

From New Hampshire, Nathaniel Folsom and John Sullivan. From Massachusetts, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine. From Rhode Island, Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward. Connecticut, the first to answer the call to send delegates, sent Silas Deane, Eliphalet Dyer and Roger Sherman.

From New York, John Alsop, Simon Boerum, James Duane, William Floyd, John Haring, John Jay, Philip Livingston, Isaac Low and Henry Wisner. From New Jersey, Stephen Crane, John De Hart, James Kinsey, William Livingston and Richard Smith. From Pennsylvania, Edward Biddle, John Dickinson, Joseph Galloway, Charles Humphreys, Thomas Mifflin, John Morton, Samuel Rhoads and George Ross. Delaware, which later became the First State by being the first to ratify the Constitution, sent Thomas McKean, George Read and Caesar Rodney. From Maryland, Samuel Chase, Robert Goldsborough, Thomas Johnson, William Paca and Matthew Tilghman.

From Virginia, Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Edmund Pendleton, Peyton Randolph and George Washington. From North Carolina came Richard Caswell, Joseph Hewes and William Hooper. From South Carolina, Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Lynch, Henry Middleton, Edward Rutledge and John Rutledge.

Charles Thomson of Pennsylvania served as secretary, and an Episcopal minister, Rev. Jacob Duché, as the chaplain.²

No, they may not have been revolutionaries on that day.

But — in the end — they championed the rights of the New World colonists against the British crown.

Leading the fight for independence.

For Americans like The Legal Genealogist, this is cool stuff. History writ large.

Finding the records from 250 years ago?

Fortunately, that’s cool too. Thanks to the American treasure, the Library of Congress.

You want the Journals of the Continental Congress? Check out the collection of the same name: Journals of the Continental Congress, part of the Library’s bigger collection, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774 to 1875.

In the Library’s Digital Collections, there’s the collection Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774 to 1789.

You want a more personal view? Check out the collection Letters of Delegates to Congress (available online here for the time being) — 26 volumes that include “all the documents written by delegates that bear directly upon their work during their years of actual service in the First and Second Continental Congresses, 1774-1789, as well as some diaries, public papers, essays, and other documents.”

These document what happened, starting that fifth day of September 250 years ago, when those 56 delegates took the first steps on the journey that became the United States.

And so it began…

Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “And so it began…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 5 Sep 2024).

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