Eight Weeks Before Philadelphia

On April 12, 1776, the town of Halifax, North Carolina had fewer than a thousand residents. Most people in Britain had never heard of it. Most people in the other colonies hadn't either. But the Fourth Provincial Congress meeting here that day did something no other official government body had done: they voted to instruct their delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for independence. Eight weeks later, on June 7, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia introduced the formal motion in Philadelphia. On July 4, the Congress voted. North Carolina had already answered the question.