[It’s impossible to think about our ongoing 250th anniversary without engaging with the frustratingly Trumptastic American250 Commission, and I’ll write about such current events in my weekend post. But at the same time, I refuse to let that nonsense overshadow the complex and crucial histories themselves, so this week I’ll first AmericanStudy a handful of them!]
On three delegates who continued from the First Continental Congress, and two who joined.
As part of my January 2024 series on historic anniversaries, I highlighted a trio of lesser-known, telling delegates to the 1774 First Continental Congress. All three of those men—Connecticut’s Silas Deane, South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden, and Massachusetts’s Robert Treat Paine—continued to serve as delegates to the Second Continental Congress that began its work in May 1775 (about seven months after the First concluded), and do I’d ask you to check out that prior post (the first hyperlinked above) if you would, and then come on back for thoughts on two new delegates, from states I hadn’t addressed in that post.
Welcome back! I have to start by highlighting the still-impressive lesser half of one of my favorite Revolutionary couples: New Jersey’s Richard Stockton, husband to the badass writer, writing circle organizer, and activist Annis Boudinot Stockton (for a lot more on whom, see that hyperlinked post; as the rest of this paragraph will reflect, Richard wasn’t really lesser, and was indeed a perfect match for Annis). Like most of the delegates who were active in the Congress in 1776, Stockton signed the Declaration of Independence; but unlike any other, he ended up serving significant prison time for having done so, as he was captured from his home by British forces in late November and was jailed until late January. Every time I’ve written about the Framers (even when I’ve been critical of the mythmaking around them) I’ve tried to make clear how much of a genuine risk they were taking, with their own lives as well as in every other way; and no Continental Congress delegate embodies those very real risks more than Richard Stockton.
But I have to say that no new delegate to the Second Continental Congress embodies the differences between that gathering and the First Continental Congress more clearly than does the one and only Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had a very good reason for not having been part of the First Continental Congress, as he was still in England at the time, serving as an informal but impassioned ambassador for the colonial cause to the British government. By the time he returned home in early May 1775, the battles of Lexington and Concord had been fought and the Revolution was clearly underway (and indeed, that incipient Revolution was the major factor that brought Franklin back to the Americas). And the Pennsylvania Assembly wasted no time in unanimously voting for Franklin as the state’s delegate to the Second Continental Congress, a reflection not only of his significance to the community, but also and especially of the changing circumstances that made the work of the Second Continental Congress so much more urgent and crucial.
Next 250th anniversary post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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