The First Continent Congress was not known for taking radical measures. When it met in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1774, it first rejected the plan but was forwarded by Pennsylvania representative Joseph Galloway, Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Galloway favored a “solid political union” between the colonies and Britain as the best way to pass the trade disputes and other grievances put forward by the colonies. He foresaw this as a Constitutional arrangement whereby the colonies could have a formal voice in British policy.
Galloway’s plan was well thought-out and made a certain amount of sense. He buttressed it with the argument that the alterative of an extended boycott of British goods by the colonies would be “too gradual” to help Boston, and in Mary Beth Norton’s summary, non-exportation “would be unacceptable to most colonists.”
The proceedings of the First Continental Congress were kept semi-secret, so it is impossible to say with precision why Galloway’s proposal failed, but failed it did. The Virginians Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry led the opposition to the plan and carried enough of the Congress’s sentiment that the Galloway plan was either defeated or indefinitely tabled. The Congress then took up John Jay’s plan to use commercial weapons—some combination of boycott and non-exportation. What emerged from this—though we don’t know exactly how—was the “Continental Association.” Today’s commemorative date, October 20, 1774, marked the formal adoption of the Continental Association.
It was signed by all the members of the Congress, including Galloway and his faction, though Galloway called it “too warm & indiscreet.”
Others recognized that the tissue of boycotts and non-exportations was a fragile instrument and could come back to discredit the patriot cause. Charles Thomson’s minutes of the proceeding recorded the comment:
Every possible precaution should Now be taken, on the one hand to prevent wicked & desperate Men, from breaking through, & defeating it wither by Fraud, or Force, and on the other to remove as farr as possible every Temptation to, or Necessity for the Violation thereof.
This continued the boycott on imports of the East India Tea Company’s wares and created locally elected committees across the colonies to enforce the rules and publicly identify and condemn “the enemies of American liberty.” The intended tool of enforcement was not mob violence but community pressure and ostracism.
While the Continental Association drew attention to itself as an economic action, its larger significance came in the form of what we would now call community organizing. All those small bodies of officials elected by their neighbors drew their legitimacy from the First Continental Congress, which reciprocally conferred deeper legitimacy on the Congress itself—a body with no authority under the British Crown or Parliament. Moreover, all those little committees united colonists in face-to-face groups grounded in a grievance against the British and loyalty to one another in a bond felt to be morally compelling.
Without fully realizing it, the First Continental Congress, in adopting the Continental Association, created the infrastructure for the American Revolution.
Today, of course, we have very little of this grassroots self-government left. Where it crops up, the federal government quickly mows it down again. Self-government is always a threat to those who have spent their lives aggregating power in the name of the people and whose continued good fortune and prosperity depend on the people not noticing.
Art by Beck & Stone
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
