White House: The Story of America: The Second Continental Congress

And our sacred honor.

The tensions with Great Britain had begun to grow in 1763, and they decided to get involved in ruling the colonies more. But the colonies, which had been around for about 150 years at the time, They elected their people, they had town halls, they governed themselves, they thought. And so the tensions start to grow and they worsen. By the time of the First Continental Congress, it's 1774, and they didn't really have a way to appoint such a Congress because they had these colonial legislatures, but the king was abolishing them. So they had to write and they had to talk when they could get together in person.

And so what happened was it grew out of these conversations that they had. Just certain leading individuals got appointed by various means, various numbers of them. In the beginning, from 12 of the 13 colonies, Georgia didn't send anybody at first. So Georgia is absent from the First Continental Congress in the fall of 1774. Then in, uh, 1775, Georgia did have somebody.

At the second one. They were all there now. Why did that change? Well, because things were intensifying. The British were beginning to use force, an organized force.

The colonists used some force back at them. Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Lexington and Concord. There's fighting going on. And so these people get together. They don't, for the most part, know each other.

They may have corresponded. They'd never met, most of them. And they start figuring out what to do. And it's very important to remember that they are representative. That is to say, they come from a place, from a colony, and they represent the people in the colony.

Now, there's various ways they have of being able to claim that. In some sense or another, they are elected from all of them. But it's important to them. That they be elected. They don't come because they're well-born.

They don't claim that they come because they're rich. They don't claim to be able to be empowered to come because they got an army behind them. They are representatives, and of course that ties to the doctrine of consent of the governed. And they get together and they start talking, and there's a lot of talk, and there's a lot of different opinions. They get together in the State House in Philadelphia.

Today we call that Independence Hall. But they get together and they start talking and they talk and talk and talk and they argue and argue and argue. John Adams was incredibly important in this thing because he was an early guy who thought we need to build a country.

And so they argued themselves around to independence. And that happens in July of 1776. Means they worked on it for almost a year before they came around to that. And they voted for it. They understood that that was a very grave step because it's treason.

And these debates are wonderful to read 250 years ago. Many of them suffered from taking the risk. There's a story. Apocryphal, but it's too good not to repeat. Maybe it's even true.

A representative by the name of Harrison is said to have said to another representative, "I'm going to have an easier time of it than you. I'm much heavier, and when they hang us, I'll die quicker." They were worried about that. There was soldiers in the field looking for them to arrest them, take them to England in some cases on charges of treason, which is a hanging offense. This interplay of war and deliberation is a very remarkable thing because they do form an army in the Second Continental Congress. They took down certain British statues and melted them into bullets.

They were getting ready to fight. And that's a contrast between these arguments about whether it's right to fight, what justifies our fighting. See, these people were very ambitious people. There's an ambition to do a great thing, to be a founder. And higher than that is an ambition to do a great thing right or not do it at all.

What should we fight to produce? What will we do after this? Those arguments are rich and interesting and historic, I think, and unprecedented.

Lincoln says very beautifully, a standard maxim for a free society always to be striven for, always to be sought after, never to be wholly attained. We fall short even today. We have to be moderate in pursuing that perfection because we should know we'll never get it, but we should always keep it in mind and always strive for it. The record of the Second Continental Congress is a deliberation about that from people risking their lives, and many of them lost their lives. So that's the story of the first great American legislature.

It did write the Articles of Confederation, and we did live under it for about 11 years, but it also set in motion the steps that led to the Constitutional Convention that wrote the greatest constitution for a free people ever written. And it wrote, above all else, the Declaration of Independence, which is surely one of the greatest political acts in human history.