On Oct. 14, 1774, the First Continental Congress issued a declaration defending liberty and rights for the inhabitants of the American colonies. Almost two years before declaring independence, the Revolutionaries were already laying the groundwork for a new nation’s founding principles.
The American Revolution was not a sudden or unforeseen outbreak or reaction to a momentary issue or a single instance of tyranny. It was the result of decades of rights violations from the British monarchy and the British Parliament. Years before the shot heard around the world on Lexington Common in 1775, or the Declaration of Independence in 1776, liberty-loving colonists were trying to find a diplomatic or military solution to their endless problems with Great Britain.
By 1774, many Americans had already undergone years of frustrating petitions to Parliament or suffered from the taxation, jury violations, forced soldier quartering, and other misdeeds of the British government. The Boston Tea Party was the famous protest of 1773 in Boston, followed by the harshly punitive Intolerable Acts in 1774, which spurred the formation of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
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On September 6, according to Constitution.org, the delegates voted for a committee "to state the rights of the Colonies in general, the several instances in which these rights are violated or infringed, and the means most proper to be pursued for obtaining a restoration of them.”
Philadelphia merchant and lawyer Joseph Galloway — who would later side with the Loyalists during the Revolution — had tried to come up with a very conservative compromise that would not risk the colonies breaking with the British Empire, according to Constitution.org. The First Continental Congress rejected Galloway's approach and instead on October 14 unanimously approved the Declaration and Resolves on Colonial Rights. New Hampshire's Maj. John Sullivan wrote the first draft. Sullivan would go on to be a major general in the Continental Army and governor of his home state.
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Sullivan's draft is too lengthy, of course, to quote in full here, and you can read it at Constitution.org. But I did want to highlight the most crucial part of the document, an insight into the revolutionaries' attitude in 1774, less than a year before open battlefield hostilities began:
"Resolved, N.C.D. 2 1. That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property, and they have never ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.
Resolved, N.C.D. 2. That our ancestors, who first settled these colonies, were, at the time of their emigration from the mother-country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects, within the realm of England.
Resolved, N.C.D. 3. That by such emigration they by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights, but that they were, and their descendants now are, entitled to the exercise and enjoyment of all such of them, as their local and other circumstances enable them to exercise and enjoy.
Resolved, 4. That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council: and as the English colonists are not represented, and from their local and other circumstances, cannot properly be represented in the British Parliament, they are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in their several provincial legislature...Resolved, N.C.D. 5. That the respective colonies are entitled to the common law of England, and more especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage, according to the course of that law.
Resolved, 6. That they are entitled to the benefit of such of the English statutes as existed at the time of their colonization; and which they have, by experience, respectively found to be applicable to their several local and other circumstances.
Resolved, N.C.D. 7. That these His Majesty's colonies, are likewise entitled to all the immunities and privileges granted and confirmed to them by royal charters, or secured by their several codes of provincial laws.
Resolved, N.C.D. 8. That they have a right peaceably to assemble, consider of their grievances, and petition the king; and that all prosecutions, prohibitory proclamations, and commitments for the same are illegal.
Resolved, N.C.D. 9. That the keeping a standing army in these colonies, in times of peace, without the consent of the legislature of that colony, in which such army is kept, is against law.
Resolved, N.C.D. 10. It is indispensably necessary to good government, and rendered essential by the English constitution, that the constituent branches of the legislature be independent of each other..."
There are a number of differences, obviously, between these resolutions and the Declaration of Independence, the biggest being that the above resolutions did not explicitly aim at rejecting British rule, but rather claimed the rights of English citizenship. Later, too, Revolutionaries like George Washington and Thomas Paine would take care to emphasize that America would welcome many nationalities and ethnicities, not just Englishmen. But while the Declaration and Resolves on Colonial Rights had its differences from the Declaration of Independence, the former certainly paved the way for the latter. And in this year of America's 250th birthday, we should strive to understand all the events that led up to our independence 250 years ago.
