The Continental Congress
is the first and forgotten government of the United States It
sprang up in 1774 in response to the first of the Coercive Acts,
the British closure of Boston Harbor. The Congress attempted to
coordinate the activities of what were still thirteen British
colonies to preserve their rights as Englishman. It did so without
any formal grant of powers, no charter, no Articles of Confederation,
no Constitution. It did not lead the colonists into armed conflict
with Great Britain. The militia at Lexington and Concord did that
in April of 1775. The Congress' greatest accomplishments were
the appointment of George
Washington as Commander-in-Chief
of the forces besieging Boston, the adoption of the Declaration
of Independence of July 4, 1776, and the creation of the flag
of the United States. With the Declaration promulgated, the Continental
Congress now had to coordinate the activities of thirteen independent
states as they fought the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.
The difficulties of trying to fight
a war with a non-empowered national government were obvious, and
the Congress began to develop "Articles of Confederation
and Perpetual Union" while it considered the Declaration.
The Congress proposed the Articles to the states the following
year. However, the Articles would not take effect until every
state ratified and that did not happen until 1781, the same year
as the American-French victory at Yorktown and the effective end
of the Revolutionary War. (The peace treaty was not signed until
1783.) This meant that the Continental Congress had to fight the
war without formally granted powers.
It is not surprising that
the Continental Congress was too weak to provide a continuous
supply of food, clothing, shelter, and munitions to the Army:
it lacked the power to tax. The suffering of the American soldiers
at Valley Forge and Morristown can be attributed to the weakness
of the Continental Congress. George Washington, a proud man, had
to repeatedly plead for more supplies. He wrote from Valley
Forge:
"I am now convinced, beyond
a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes
place in that line, this Army must inevitably be reduced to
one or other of these three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse,
in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can;
rest assured Sir this is not an exaggerated picture . . ."
What is surprising is that the charter
that followed, the Articles of Confederation, did little more
than codify practices of the Continental Congress. The new Congress
under the Articles was so similar to the old that many writers
refer to both with the same term, the Continental Congress. At
this site, we will distinguish between the two — referring
to the first as the Continental Congress and its successor as
the Confederation Congress or the Congress of the Articles of
Confederation.
"Continental Colors" or
the "Grand Union" flag |
1777 United States flag |
With the Declaration, a flag was needed to
represent the united effort of the thirteen newly independent
states. George Washington, the new commander, and John Paul Jones,
the naval hero, had used the flag of the United Colonies, thirteen
stripes for the thirteen colonies but with the Union Jack in the
upper left hand section to represent continued loyalty to Great
Britain. This flag is some times called the "Continental
Colors" or the "Grand Union" flag. Again, independence
required a change and on June 14, 1777, Congress adopted a new
flag, the first flag of the United States:
"Resolved, That the flag of the
thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and
white: that the union* be thirteen stars, white in a blue field,
representing a new constellation."
The final contribution of the Continental
Congress is that it provided the first national government experience
for James Madison. George Washington, hoping for a better Congress,
put a call for better members. Virginia sent Madison in 1780,
and he served in the Continental Congress until 1781 when it was
succeeded by the Confederation Congress and he moved to that body.
He returned to Virginia in 1784 a national leader.
*The "union" is the
section in the upper left or inner corner of the flag. The term
"canton" also can be used with this meaning.
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