# Second Continental Congress The **Second Continental Congress** was the governing body that ran the American Revolution. Convening in Philadelphia on **May 10, 1775** — three weeks after the fighting began at Lexington and Concord — it was never designed to be a government at all. The delegates had been sent to coordinate a protest against imperial policy, the way the First Continental Congress (1774) had. But war had already broken out, and over the next six years this ad hoc assembly of colonial delegates became, by necessity, the de facto national government of thirteen rebelling colonies: it raised an army, printed money, conducted diplomacy, declared independence, and drafted the first framework of the United States. ## Why it's here The vault's [[OG Resistance Hub]] frames the founding generation as the "original resistance" — the first Americans to insist that legitimate power flows from the consent of the governed rather than a crown. The Second Continental Congress is the **institutional bridge** in that story: the point where protest hardened into self-government. The individual founders the vault tracks — [[John Adams]], [[George Washington]], [[John Hancock]], [[Benjamin Franklin]], [[Thomas Jefferson]] — all pass through this body, and their scattered pages have long name-dropped it without a target to link to. This page is that target. It is also the origin of a through-line the vault follows into the present. The Declaration this Congress adopted asserts "that all men are created equal" — the founding proposition that Heather Cox Richardson (and this vault) traces forward to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in 1863 and to present-day fights over who counts as an equal citizen. The Second Continental Congress is where that proposition was first put to a vote and signed. ## From protest to war government The First Continental Congress had adjourned in October 1774 having agreed to reconvene in May 1775 if colonial grievances remained unaddressed. By the time delegates gathered on May 10, 1775, blood had been shed at Lexington and Concord (April 19), and militia had bottled up the British army in Boston. The Congress was now managing a war it had not started and could not stop. Its first great act was military. On **June 14, 1775**, it voted to adopt the New England militia besieging Boston as the **Continental Army**, and the next day, **June 15, 1775**, it unanimously named [[George Washington]] its commander-in-chief — a deliberate choice of a Virginian to lead a largely New England force, binding the colonies together. Washington's later decision to resign that commission at war's end, rather than exploit it, is the moment the [[OG Resistance Hub]] treats as the founding refusal of one-man rule. Even as it made war, the Congress made one last bid for peace. In **July 1775** it adopted the **Olive Branch Petition**, a direct appeal to King George III professing loyalty and asking him to broker reconciliation. The king refused even to receive it and in August declared the colonies in open rebellion — closing the door on any settlement short of independence. ## Declaring independence Through late 1775 and early 1776 the mood shifted from reconciliation to separation, propelled by Thomas Paine's pamphlet *[[Common Sense]]* (January 1776), which made the case for independence in language ordinary colonists could read and repeat. In Congress, [[John Adams]] became the relentless floor advocate for a formal break. The decisive sequence came in the summer of 1776. On June 7, Virginia's Richard Henry Lee introduced a resolution "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." After weeks of debate, Congress adopted the **Lee Resolution on July 2, 1776** — the actual legal act of independence (the vote Adams predicted future generations would celebrate). Two days later, on **July 4, 1776**, it adopted the **[[Declaration of Independence]]**, the document explaining and justifying that decision, largely drafted by [[Thomas Jefferson]]. As President of the Congress, [[John Hancock]] signed first, in the outsized hand that made his name a synonym for a signature. ## Governing the war For the duration of the [[Revolutionary War]], the Second Continental Congress *was* the national government — improvising authority it had never been granted. It: - **Ran the war effort** — appointing generals, setting strategy in broad terms, and struggling to supply and pay the Continental Army it had created. - **Financed the rebellion** — issuing "Continental" paper currency (which inflated so badly it spawned the phrase "not worth a Continental") and borrowing from France and the Netherlands. - **Conducted diplomacy** — sending [[Benjamin Franklin]] and others abroad, culminating in the 1778 alliance with France that turned the war. - **Held the coalition together** — with no power to tax and no authority to compel the states, it governed by persuasion and requisition, a structural weakness that would define the years to come. ## Drafting the Articles — and giving way The same body that governed the war also wrote the first framework meant to outlast it. Congress adopted the **[[Articles of Confederation]] on November 15, 1777**, and sent them to the states for ratification. That process dragged on for years, snagged on disputes over western land claims; Maryland, the final holdout, ratified only after Virginia ceded its claims, and the Articles took effect on **March 1, 1781**. With ratification, the Second Continental Congress formally became the **Confederation Congress** — the same institution operating under a written constitution rather than improvised authority. That successor government, deliberately weak by design, proved unable to tax, regulate commerce, or enforce its own laws, and its failures drove the movement that produced the [[Constitutional Convention]] of 1787. In the vault's [[Articles of Confederation]] page, that weakness is read as the "historical proof case" for what happens when anti-government ideology becomes governing philosophy — a warning label attached to the confederation the Second Continental Congress bequeathed. ## The tension worth keeping straight The Congress that declared "all men are created equal" was made up of men who, by their own era's definition, meant white male property-holders — and many of them, including Jefferson and Washington, enslaved people. The vault does not treat this as a footnote. The founding proposition was radical *and* hypocritically bounded, and both facts are load-bearing: the equality clause was broad enough that later generations — abolitionists, Lincoln at Gettysburg, the civil-rights movement — could hold the country to a promise its authors had not fully meant. That gap between the words and their original reach is exactly the through-line the vault tracks from 1776 forward. ## Related - [[Declaration of Independence]] - [[Revolutionary War]] - [[Articles of Confederation]] - [[Constitutional Convention]] - [[George Washington]] - [[John Adams]] - [[John Hancock]] - [[Thomas Jefferson]] - [[Benjamin Franklin]] - [[Common Sense]] - [[OG Resistance Hub]]