Episode Details

In September 1774, 56 men from twelve colonies rode to Philadelphia and sat down together for the first time, strangers and rivals trying to discover whether they were anything more than twelve separate colonies. This is the story of the First Continental Congress: Patrick Henry declaring himself no longer a Virginian but an American; Samuel Adams quietly outmaneuvering the conservatives at every turn; and Joseph Galloway making the last serious case for staying inside the empire, a case voted down by a single colony and then struck from the record. It is also where the Loyalist voice begins, in Galloway’s ruin and in a Westchester farmer’s warning that he would rather be devoured by a lion than gnawed to death by lawless committeemen. By the time the delegates went home, they had built a boycott with teeth, a network of committees that became a second government, and a bill of grievances against the Crown. Nothing was settled. The question was whether it would come to petitions or to powder.