Philadelphia

Philadelphia and the American Revolution: The City Where a Nation Was Forged

Philadelphia was, by any reasonable measure, the most important city in Revolutionary America. At the time of the American Revolution in the 1770s, it was the largest city in Colonial America, and was second only to London in the British Empire, with a population between 34,000 and 38,000 people. It was a cosmopolitan hub of commerce and intellectual life, and the place where the most consequential political decisions of the era were debated, drafted, and declared. No other American city can claim to have hosted the First Continental Congress, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitutional Convention. No other city served as the de facto national capital for most of the war, endured a prolonged British occupation, and still emerged as the seat of the new republic's government. To understand the American Revolution, one must reckon with Philadelphia — not as a backdrop, but as an active participant in the drama of independence.

Long before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Philadelphia had established itself as a center of colonial resistance and political thought. The city that William Penn had founded in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in religious tolerance had, by the 1770s, grown into a thriving metropolis. By 1774 Philadelphia, with a population approaching 25,000, had surpassed Boston as the western hemisphere's largest port, and was, indeed, the second largest city in the English-speaking world. To its advantages of size and wealth were added those of location, midway between the northern and southern colonies, and political moderation. Its wharves handled trade from across the Atlantic, its printing presses churned out newspapers and pamphlets that shaped public opinion from Massachusetts to Georgia, and its State House — the building we now call Independence Hall — served as the gathering place for colonial leaders who dared to challenge the authority of the British Crown. That State House was a red brick building, built between 1732 and 1753, designed in the Georgian style by Edmund Woolley, an English-born architect, and Andrew Hamilton, a Scottish-born lawyer who also served as the attorney general of Pennsylvania. The building was completed piecemeal through 1753, when its tower and steeple were finished and the State House bell — later known as the Liberty Bell — was hung. Built to be the Pennsylvania State House, the building originally housed all three branches of Pennsylvania's colonial government. At the time of its construction, it was among the most ambitious public buildings in the thirteen colonies. Its association with events and ideas of outstanding universal significance led to its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.

Philadelphia's role as an incubator of revolutionary ideas predated the crisis of the 1770s. In 1767 and 1768, the wealthy Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson published his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, a series of twelve essays arguing that Parliament had the authority to regulate colonial trade but not to raise revenue from the colonies through taxation. The Letters were reprinted in virtually every colonial newspaper — within a month of their appearance, nineteen of the twenty-three English-language newspapers in the colonies had published some or all of them — and earned Dickinson the title "Penman of the Revolution." Benjamin Franklin saw to their publication in London, where they were read by Edmund Burke and even translated into French, earning praise from Voltaire. According to many historians, nothing matched their impact on colonial opinion until the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776. Dickinson's Letters did not call for independence — he remained a voice for reconciliation — but they established the intellectual framework that many colonists would use to justify resistance to British taxation.

The crisis that brought delegates from across the colonies to Philadelphia began in earnest in 1774. After the famous Boston Tea Party, where colonists protested taxation without representation by destroying a large shipment of tea, the British Parliament passed a series of laws collectively known as the Intolerable Acts.

The Coercive Acts, passed by the British Parliament in 1774 to punish the city of Boston for the Boston Tea Party, put the Massachusetts government under direct British control, closed the port of Boston, and increased British troops there. In response, Adams and 55 other delegates journeyed all manner of distances by foot, horseback and carriage to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress.

Georgia, in dire need of the services of British regulars to fend off incursions of Creek Indians on its borders, did not send a delegation.

The delegates gathered on the morning of September 5 at Philadelphia's City Tavern, near Benjamin Franklin's home. John Adams recorded in his diary that "the Delegates all met at the City Tavern, and walked to the Carpenters Hall, where they took a View of the Room." The group of colonial luminaries didn't meet in Independence Hall. Instead, delegates met next door in Carpenters' Hall, which had just been constructed. The State House was already occupied by the Pennsylvania provincial assembly.

The hall was designed by Robert Smith in the Georgian style based on both the town halls of Scotland, where Smith was born, and the villas of Palladio in Italy.

The Library Company of Philadelphia, housed on the second floor, was offered to the First Continental Congress, thus making it the first library of Congress.

The credentials of the various members were read, and Peyton Randolph of Virginia was elected chairman, or president, and Charles Thomson of Pennsylvania secretary.

Franklin had remained in England, and he would deliver a petition from the First Congress to King George III in late 1774.

After about seven weeks of debates, the group agreed to a boycott of British goods within the colonies as a sign of protest, spelled out in the Articles of Association. In addition to the boycott, the Articles called for an end of exports to Great Britain in the following year if the Intolerable Acts weren't repealed.

A separate document, now called the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, stated the group's objections to the Intolerable Acts, listed the rights of the colonists, and itemized objections to British rule beyond the Intolerable Acts.

By the time the delegates left Philadelphia, on October 26, 1774, they had a decisive plan that would create the first shared economy among the Colonies.

The First Continental Congress also made plans to convene a second Continental Congress in May 1775 to continue the work started in Philadelphia if the Intolerable Acts remained in force.

When the Second Continental Congress convened, the situation had changed dramatically. The Congress began convening in present-day Independence Hall in Philadelphia, on May 10, 1775