First Congress met in North Carolina

Before the United States had a Congress, North Carolina had a Congress — and this week marks its 250th birthday.

Now, just to be clear, North Carolina had representative government long before 1774. Its bicameral colonial legislature consisted of an upper chamber, a royal council appointed by the Crown, and a lower chamber, the elected House of Commons.

By the early 1770s, however, the Commons — which levied taxes and appropriated revenue from the provincial treasury — was in frequent conflict with royal governors. Recall that the British Parliament tried repeatedly to impose taxes on American colonists, provoking widespread resistance. After a group of radicals donned disguises and dumped an entire shipment of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor on Dec. 16, 1773, Parliament responded with a series of bills, collectively known as the Intolerable Acts, to bring the residents of Boston to heel.

This backfired. Rather than subduing Massachusetts and isolating it from the rest of the colonies, the Intolerable Acts generated sympathy for the surly Bostonians. Committees of community leaders from across North America circulated messages of support for Massachusetts and defenses of the colonial legislatures’ sole authority to levy internal taxes on their citizens.

Some local communities convened in person. In a previous column, I described one such gathering in Salisbury. On Aug. 8, 1774, some two dozen leaders of Rowan County issued what became known as the Rowan Resolves. Among its provisions was a call for North Carolina’s counties and municipalities to send delegates to a province-wide meeting — which would, in turn, call for a general meeting of delegates representing all the American colonies.

That’s precisely what happened. First, 71 delegates from all but a handful of North Carolina localities convened on Aug. 25, 1774 in what was then the capital, New Bern. Over three days, they discussed the crisis and issued their own set of resolutions, including an agreement to stop importing goods from Britain or exporting tobacco, tar, turpentine, and other North Carolina products to Britain.

Furthermore, the members of this First Provincial Congress voted to endorse the formation of a Continental Congress. The North Carolinians instructed their three delegates to this body — William Hooper, Joseph Hewes and Richard Caswell — to vote for “such measures as they may deem prudent to effect the purpose of describing with certainty the rights of Americans.”

As far as I can determine, the New Bern meeting was the first such meeting of any representative body in America bearing the name “Congress.” Massachusetts, South Carolina, and other colonies created their own congresses later in 1774, and of course the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia on September 5, just a few days after the conclusion of North Carolina’s First Provincial Congress in New Bern.

To the extent we associate the word “Congress” with the birth and preservation of American liberty — I grant that the relationship feels more theoretical than actual at the moment — North Carolina can rightly claim in this case to be, once again, “First in Freedom.”

But who came up with the term in the first place? I’ve been unable to identify any one North Carolinian as responsible for naming the body of delegates in New Bern the “Provincial Congress.” What I did find was a letter sent on July 7, 1773 to Thomas Cushing, a prominent Boston attorney and longtime speaker of the Massachusetts legislature.

Cushing’s correspondent, an American printer and diplomat residing in England at the time, praised the written condemnations of British tyranny issued by committees of colonial leaders.

“It is natural to suppose, as you do, that if the oppressions continue, a Congress may grow out of that Correspondence,” Cushing’s friend wrote. “Nothing would more alarm our Ministers; but if the Colonies agree to hold a Congress, I do not see how it can be prevented.”

Did the letter-writer in question, Benjamin Franklin, plant the terminological seed that sprouted into North Carolina’s First Provincial Congress and America’s First Continental Congress? Sounds about right.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history.