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Before there was a Congress of the United States, formally recognized in Article I of the Constitution, there was "the United States in Congress assembled," better known as the Continental or the Confederation Congress. The delegates, many of the most renowned figures in their respective colonies, first met at Philadelphia in September 1774 as an extra-legal body summoned to coordinate colonial resistance. A second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, three weeks after civil war erupted at Lexington and Concord. That event transformed the quasidiplomatic assembly of 1774 into a national government, and so it remained, through thick and thin, for richer and poorer (mostly poorer), until its evident "imbecility" in the mid-178Os led to the Federal Convention of 1787.
Congress was never more popular than it was at the start of the Revolution. In 1774 and 1775, it was often hailed as "the collected wisdom" of America; its decisions were compared to the "laws of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not" (as the Book of Daniel noted). As members of a revolutionary presidium, the original delegates had to balance their own skeptical assessment of British intentions with the knowledge that many colonists would support independence only as a last alternative. Within Congress, militant delegates such as Samuel and John Adams of Massachusetts and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia had to find common ground with more prudent men of business, such as Robert Morris and John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and James Duane and John Jay of New York. The British commitment to a policy of military repression made this possible. When Congress resolved on independence in early July, it did so knowing that Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of that fact would meet with the general approval of the delegates' constituents.
THE END OF "SUNSHINE PATRIOTISM"
Releasing the Declaration closed the great period of "sunshine patriotism," as Thomas Paine soon called it. Almost immediately, British battlefield victories in the area around New York City ushered in a new phase of the revolutionary conflict. In December, the enemy's advance across New Jersey sent Congress into a secure exile in Baltimore. There it finally realized that its military commander, George Washington, had been right to argue that short-term enlistments and reliance on the patriotism of the officer corps...