Delegates from twelve colonies gather at Carpenters' Hall; Georgia stays home
By the summer of 1774, Massachusetts was living under martial punishment. Parliament's Intolerable Acts had shut the port of Boston, gutted the colony's charter government, and quartered troops among its people, in retaliation for the Tea Party of the previous December. On September 5, delegates from twelve colonies (Georgia sent no one) filed into Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia and elected Peyton Randolph of Virginia president. It was the first time the colonies had organized a joint political body of their own.
This was the first time delegates chosen by the colonies' legislatures, committees of correspondence, or the people themselves sat as one body and acted as one, the organizational rehearsal for the Congress that declared independence two years later. The rules they wrote that week, and the habit of colonies negotiating as equals rather than subjects, became the working template for the government the colonies would soon build.
QHow steep was the drop in British imports after the colonies launched their boycott?
Imports from Britain collapsed by 97 percent in 1775 compared to the year before. The Continental Association, signed by the delegates, had set December 1, 1774 as the start date for the boycott, and colonies backed it with committees of observation and inspection in every locality to catch violators. The Congress also planned a second squeeze: if Parliament still refused to repeal the Intolerable Acts, the colonies would stop exporting goods to Britain after September 10, 1775. The numbers show the boycott worked, hitting British merchants hard enough to matter in Parliament's later calculations.
QWhich colonies outside the original thirteen got a personal invitation to join the cause?
Before adjourning, Congress sent letters inviting Quebec, Saint John's Island, Nova Scotia, East Florida, and West Florida to send delegates to the next meeting, alongside Georgia, which had skipped the first session entirely. None of these five accepted. Quebec's French Catholic population and recent conquest by Britain made common cause with English Protestant colonists unlikely, while the Floridas and Nova Scotia depended heavily on British military and trade protection. The invitations reveal that the delegates in 1774 were not yet picturing thirteen colonies as a fixed, final set. They were still testing how far the resistance could reach, from Quebec to the Floridas.
QWhat split the delegates before they ever got to voting on a boycott?
Two factions showed up with opposite instincts. Joseph Galloway, John Dickinson, John Jay, and Edward Rutledge wanted to pressure Parliament into rescinding the Acts through negotiation, hoping reconciliation was still possible. Patrick Henry, Roger Sherman, Samuel Adams, and John Adams pushed instead for a hard statement of colonial rights and liberties, treating the moment as bigger than one set of punitive laws. Galloway himself later proposed a plan for an American parliament under the Crown, an idea the Congress ultimately rejected. The tension between these camps ran through the fall's debates, and it split delegates along lines that would separate loyalists from patriots in the years ahead.
