Congress votes: these colonies are free and independent states
By the summer of 1776, the Second Continental Congress had been running a war for a year without formally saying why. On July 2, delegates adopted Richard Henry Lee's resolution declaring independence. Two days later, on July 4, they agreed unanimously to Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and John Dunlap's Philadelphia print shop began running off copies that night. Public readings followed on July 8 in Philadelphia, Easton, and Trenton.
This was the moment the Congress stopped petitioning the Crown and started building a country. The same body that had begged George III for reconciliation in the Olive Branch Petition now declared thirteen colonies a sovereign nation, sent diplomats to France for recognition, and began drafting the Articles of Confederation. Every American institution since traces its authority back to this vote.
QWhy did most delegates sign the Declaration nearly a month after July 4?
The famous engrossed parchment copy, the one with John Hancock's oversized signature, wasn't ready for most delegates to sign until August 2, 1776. Congress had approved the text on July 4 and Dunlap's printed broadsides went out that night, but the formal signing ceremony came weeks later once the document had been copied out in careful script. Benjamin Rush, writing to Adams decades afterward in 1811, remembered the room falling into what he called 'pensive and awful silence' as men stepped forward to sign a document that, if the war went badly, amounted to a death warrant for treason.
QHow did one Georgia delegate end up debating independence without a vote?
Lyman Hall arrived in Philadelphia representing St. John's Parish in Liberty County, one section of Georgia pushing for independence ahead of the rest of the colony. He took part in debates but Congress withheld his vote until all of Georgia formally endorsed the Congress, which didn't happen until July 1775. Georgia had skipped the First Continental Congress entirely the year before, making it the last of the thirteen to join the cause it would eventually vote to separate from Britain.
QWhat forced the Congress to relocate twice while running the war?
British troop movements chased Congress out of Philadelphia entirely. During the winter of 1776-77 delegates convened in Henry Fite's tavern in Baltimore, and by September 1777 they'd relocated again to York, Pennsylvania. A government conducting foreign diplomacy, directing an army, and drafting the nation's first constitution was, for stretches of its own founding, operating out of a tavern and a small Pennsylvania town rather than the hall where independence was declared.
