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Mar 1, 2024 · The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence and established the United States, established the Continental Army and Navy, secured an alliance with France, and adopted the short-lived Articles of Confederation.
Notable new arrivals included Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania and John Hancock of Massachusetts. Within two weeks, Randolph was summoned back to Virginia to preside over the House of Burgesses; Hancock succeeded him as president, and Thomas Jefferson replaced Randolph in the Virginia delegation. [3]
- Britain and The Imperial Crises
- Taxation Without Representation
- The First Continental Congress
- Second Continental Congress
- Fighting For Reconciliation
- Common Sense, Divided Loyalties
- Declaration of Independence
- Waging The War
- The Articles of Confederation
- Treaty of Paris
Throughout most of colonial history, the British Crown was the only political institution that united the American colonies. The Imperial Crises of the 1760s and 1770s, found England saddled with crippling debt, incurred in large part by wars such as the French and Indian War. The British government responded by increasing taxes on the American col...
In response to the violence of the Boston Massacre of 1770 and new taxes like the Tea Act of 1773, a group of frustrated colonists protested taxation without representation by dumping 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773 – an event known to history as Boston Tea Party. Colonists continued to coordinate their resist...
On September 5, 1774, delegates from each of the 13 colonies—except Georgia, which was fighting a Native American uprising and was dependent on the British for military supplies—met at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress to organize colonial resistance to the Intolerable Acts (or Coercive Acts) recently passed by the ...
As promised, Congress reconvened at Independence Hall in Philadelphia as the Second Continental Congress on May 10, 1775–and by then the American Revolutionhad already begun. The British army in Boston had met with armed resistance on the morning of April 19, 1775, when it marched out to the towns of Lexington and Concordto seize a cache of weapons...
Although the Congress professed its abiding loyalty to the British Crown, it also took steps to preserve its rights by dint of arms. On June 14, 1775, a month after it reconvened, it created a united colonial fighting force, the Continental Army. The next day, it named George Washington as the new army’s commander-in-chief. The following month, the...
For over a year, the Continental Congress supervised a war against a country to which it proclaimed its loyalty. In fact, both the Congress and the people it represented were divided on the question of independence even after a year of open warfare against Great Britain. Early in 1776, a number of factors began to strengthen the call for separation...
In the spring of 1776, the provisional colonial governments began to send new instructions to their congressional delegates, obliquely or directly allowing them to vote for independence. The provisional government of Virginia went further: It instructed its delegation to submit a proposal for independence before Congress. On June 7, Virginia delega...
The Declaration of Independence allowed Congress to seek alliances with foreign countries, and the fledgling U.S. formed its most important alliance early in 1778 with France, without the support of which America might well have lost the Revolutionary War. If the Franco-American alliance was one of Congress’s greatest successes, funding and supplyi...
Congress’s inability to raise revenue would bedevil it for its entire existence, even after it created a constitution, known as the Articles of Confederation, to define its powers. Drafted and adopted by the Congress in 1777 but not ratified until 1781, it effectively established the United States as a collection of 13 sovereign states, each of whi...
Congress’s final triumph came in 1783 when it negotiated the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Revolutionary War. The Congressional delegates Franklin, Jay and Adams secured a favorable peace for the U.S. that included not only the recognition of independence but also claim to almost all of the territory south of Canada and east of the Mississ...
Benjamin Franklin returned from London in May, 1775, and was quickly drafted as one of the Pennsylvania delegates to the second Continental Congress. Franklin's plan for a government for a united colonial confederation was read in Congress on July 21, 1775, but was not acted upon at that time.
Nov 9, 2009 · During the American Revolution, he served in the Second Continental Congress and helped draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776. He also negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris that...
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Sep 3, 2024 · Voting was postponed while some of the delegates worked to convince others to support independence, but a committee of five men was assigned to draft a document of independence: John Adams (MA), Benjamin Franklin (PA), Thomas Jefferson (VA), Roger Sherman (CT), and Robert R. Livingston (NY).
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Sep 15, 2024 · New members of the Second Congress included Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. John Hancock and John Jay were among those who served as president. The Congress “adopted” the New England military forces that had converged upon Boston and appointed Washington commander in chief of the American army on June 15, 1775.
