Seven Fine Fellows from Virginia

By 1774, Americans from Maine to Georgia had been for a decade reading
and endorsing Virginians’ bold words, but few knew the men who
wrote them. The First Continental Congress, to be held that fall, would be their introduction, as few Virginia leaders were personally acquainted with their northern brethren.

The Old Dominion had not been able to send a delegation to the Stamp Act Congress in 1766, where many other colonial leaders had met in person for the first time. So the gathering of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, organized in response to Parliament’s passage of the Intolerable Acts, was an opportunity for those expressing the bold words to persuade delegates from their fellow colonies to initiate bold action.

Eighteenth-century Virginia gentry — like their counterparts in Maryland and South Carolina — were more likely to have visited London or Edinburgh than Boston, New York or Philadelphia. Richard Henry Lee, like many sons of wealthy Southern plantation owners, had been schooled in the British Isles.

A few Virginians had made brief treks north. George Washington was a young and ambitious provincial militia officer when he ventured up the coast to Boston in 1756. Peyton Randolph briefly visited Philadelphia and New York when asked to help resolve a boundary dispute in 1769. Richard Bland, a planter and politician, and Patrick Henry spent a few nights in Manhattan to attend a meeting in 1770.

Few northern congressmen, on the other hand, had ever visited the Chesapeake or the Carolinas.

With the Congress slated to convene Sept. 5, delegates gathering in the City of Friends expressed avid curiosity about the Virginians. Henry and Lee were described as the Demosthenes and Cicero of America, respectively. South Carolinian statesman Thomas Lynch circulated the story of Washington’s offer to raise an army and march for the relief of Boston. And John Adams described his encounter with Randolph, Bland, Lee and Benjamin Harrison — the first Virginia delegates to arrive — at a tavern on the Friday before Congress met.

“These Gentlemen from Virginia appear to be the most spirited and consistent of any,” Adams noted.

“Harrison said he would have come on foot rather than not come. Bland said he would have gone, upon this Occasion, if it had been to Jericho.”

The rest of the Virginia delegation — Washington, Henry and Edmund Pendleton — rode together from Mount Vernon, reaching Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon.

The following morning, the delegates met at a tavern and made two decisions about housekeeping matters that signaled their views on more substantive issues. They snubbed the conservative speaker of the Pennsylvania legislature, Joseph Galloway, who offered the State House (now known as Independence Hall) as a meeting place — choosing instead to meet in the nearby Carpenters’ Hall, a guildhall of the city’s artisans. It was there that the delegates elected Peyton Randolph as their presiding officer and gave him the title of “president.”

Their selection of a secretary sent a more pointed message. Charles Thomson was “highly agreeable to the Mechanics and Citizens in general,” Silas Deane wrote to his wife, “but mortifying to the last Degree to Mr. Galloway and his Party.” John Adams noted that the new secretary was “the Sam. Adams of Phyladelphia” and no friend of Galloway.

All 12 colonies that sent delegates to Philadelphia agreed that Parliament had no authority to tax or legislate for the American colonies — a position Virginians had taken since the Stamp Act Crisis and which Georgia later endorsed, too. Opinions were divided over the constitutionality of the Navigation Acts (which dated to 1651 and 1660), but everyone could agree about demanding the reversal of British measures enacted since 1763.

The main thing Americans sought from the First Continental Congress was an effective intercolonial boycott to force Parliament to rescind its recent taxes and punitive measures. Economic sanctions had worked against the Stamp Act and, to a lesser degree, against the Townshend Acts of 1767 and 1768.

Virginians had learned some lessons from those earlier boycotts. At the First Virginia Convention convened in August, the House of Burgesses resolved to stop importing goods from England. This became the model for the Continental Association enacted by Congress on Oct. 20, 1774.

Important as this boycott was — especially to Bostonians suffering from British closure of their port — many Virginia delegates had more ambitious hopes for the Congress. Debates on major issues happened throughout the session as Congress juggled simultaneous deliberations about the various measures it eventually adopted or abandoned.

Only a few embraced Galloway’s plan for a union of the colonies as a means toward reconciliation with Great Britain — a plan that historians recognize as America’s last and best chance for a negotiated settlement with Great Britain. Galloway’s proposal was discarded in October.

“All the men of property supported the motion,” Galloway later claimed, “while the republican party strenuously opposed it.”

In fact, although Virginians and their colleagues assuaged Galloway’s pride to help keep Pennsylvania in the fold, his dream of a colonial union under the umbrella of Parliament had no hope of success. It was expunged from the permanent journal of the congress and, within a year, Galloway emerged as one of America’s most prominent Tories.

Pennsylvania congressman Joseph Reed utterly refuted Galloway’s distinction between men of property and “republican” rabble. “There are some fine fellows come from Virginia,” Reed told his brother-in-law, a New Jersey colonial official. “The Bostonians are mere Milksops to them. They are the capital men of the colony both in fortune and understanding.”

Delaware congressman Caesar Rodney agreed: “More Sensible, fine fellows you’d Never Wish to See,” he reported to his brother. “The Bostonians who...have been Condemned by Many for their Violence, are Moderate men, When Compared to Virginia.”

Most of the delegates had come to agree with the vision of the imperial constitution that Richard Bland had articulated for Virginia a decade earlier: The king was the lynchpin of the empire. Parliament’s imperial authority extended only to the regulation of trade. In all other respects, Parliament and the colonial assemblies comprised separate legislatures on either side of the Atlantic. The attempts to impose taxes in the colonies that began with the Stamp Act were unconstitutional.

Congress blamed the unhappy situation of North America on the “ruinous system of colony administration” adopted by the British since 1763 — a system seemingly calculated to impose tyranny throughout the entire British empire. Although willing to petition George III in the forlorn hope that he might reverse the policies of his ministers, most delegates quietly regarded this gesture as merely a show of moderation.

Far more important was the substantive contribution that Virginia’s delegation brought to Carpenters’ Hall — its model for what became the Continental Association.

A month earlier in Williamsburg, the Virginia convention had adopted a comprehensive plan of economic sanctions. Unless Parliament repealed all of the oppressive measures it had imposed since 1763, Virginia would begin a ban on imports from Great Britain on Nov. 1, 1774, followed by a complete suspension of trade with Great Britain a year later.

Congress made some minor adjustments to Virginia’s plan. Its Continental Association set the dates a month later than Virginia’s deadlines and the ban on the consumption of tea from supplies already on hand was slightly more generous than Virginia’s. And because imperial regulations had always permitted the export of South Carolina rice directly to Europe, Congress made an exception for that commodity in the interest of inter-colonial unity.

The Congress of 1774 brought America’s provincial leaders together in far-reaching conversations about the political and military future of the colonies. Together they sought the resolution of American grievances and a restoration of the pre-1763 imperial system, but the Virginians and their colleagues agreed with John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who advised a friend after Congress adjourned that “War is unavoidable unless there be a quick Change of British Measures.”

Although the delegates hoped for peace while arming for war, several consequences of the First Continental Congress were revolutionary.

First, simply by meeting together, this Congress created an institutional alternative to the king and Parliament, unlike the Stamp Act Congress, which had met briefly in 1766 and then dispersed. Before they adjourned on Oct. 26, 1774, the delegates pledged to meet again in May 1775 if Parliament failed to redress American grievances.

Second, Virginia’s example made the Continental Association much more effective than the thwarted response to the Townshend Duties. The nonimportation program of 1769-1771 had relied upon enforcement by the merchants of Philadelphia, Boston and New York, whose rivalries and distrust thwarted the effort. Virginia’s plan created committees within every county to enforce the economic boycott by requiring oaths of compliance from all residents, including merchants. This policy — illustrated in the satirical engraving titled “The Alternative of Williamsburg” — helped encourage and enforce Virginia’s remarkably unanimous popular resistance to British measures.

The partnership between local committees, the House of Burgesses, and the colony’s revolutionary conventions cemented Virginia’s political unity. In addition to their economic impact, the local committees and oaths of compliance formed in response to the Continental Association encouraged the remarkable shift in public allegiance from the king to Congress between 1774 and 1776.

Early in the 1760s, George III and his ministers had tacitly accepted the prospect of imposing Parliamentary taxation and legislation on America by military force — and neither the king nor his chief ministers from George Grenville to Lord North wavered from that outlook. The king’s reaction to the news that the First Continental Congress was rallying to the support of the beleaguered Bostonians came as no surprise to his ministers — the colonies were “in a State of Rebellion.” His majesty’s secretary of state for American affairs, Lord Dartmouth, was equally blunt. Upon reading the full text of the Continental Association, Dartmouth declared that “every one who had signed it was guilty of Treason.”

By 1774 the accusation of treason was something that all the fine fellows of the Virginia delegation had heard many times before. By the year’s end, however, the renewed partnership between America’s two oldest and most influential colonies was nudging all 13 toward the brink of revolution. Thanks in no small measure to the Virginians at the First Continental Congress, the British attempt to isolate New England had instead united the colonies in a broad plan of political resistance, economic boycott and military preparedness. 

Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress represented 130 years of legislative experience in the House of Burgesses, in addition to their service as county justices, vestrymen and militia officers.

Richard Bland, 64 years old in 1774, began representing Prince George County in the House of Burgesses in 1742. Educated at William & Mary, Bland authored several important essays and pamphlets defending Virginia’s constitutional liberties. He died in October 1776.

Benjamin Harrison, 48, represented Charles City County in the House of Burgesses beginning in 1766. Educated at William & Mary, Harrison would later sign the Declaration of Independence and serve as governor of the commonwealth in the 1780s. He died in April 1791.

Patrick Henry, 38, began representing Hanover County in the House of Burgesses in 1765. Educated by his father, a graduate of the University of Aberdeen, Henry would be elected as the first governor of the commonwealth in June 1776. He died in June 1799.

Richard Henry Lee, 42, represented Westmoreland County in the House of Burgesses beginning in 1758. Educated at Wakefield Academy in Yorkshire, Lee was elected as one of Virginia’s first senators in 1789. He died in 1794.

Edmund Pendleton, 53, began representing Caroline County in the House of Burgesses in 1752 after studying law with a local attorney. In 1779 he became the presiding justice of Virginia’s supreme court of appeals. He died in October 1803.

Peyton Randolph, 53, was educated at William & Mary and appointed king’s attorney for Virginia in 1748. Elected to the House of Burgesses that same year, he served as its speaker beginning in 1766. Randolph led the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress and was elected its president but suffered a stroke while in Philadelphia and died Oct. 22, 1775.

George Washington, 42, began serving in the House of Burgesses in 1758. Educated in local schools and trained as a surveyor, Washington pursued a military career during the French and Indian War. He led the American forces to victory in the Revolution and in 1789 became the first president of the United States. He died in 1799.