RALEIGH – Before the United States had a Congress, North Carolina had a Congress – and last week it celebrated its 250th anniversary.
To be clear, North Carolina had a 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.
But by the early 1770s, the House of Commons – which levied taxes and approved revenues from the provincial treasury – was frequently at odds with the royal governors. It is worth recalling that the British Parliament had repeatedly attempted to impose taxes on the American colonists, which provoked widespread opposition. When a group of radicals disguised themselves and dumped an entire cargo of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, Parliament responded with a series of bills known as the “Intolerable Acts” to bring Bostonians to heel.
This backfired. Rather than subjugating Massachusetts and isolating it from the rest of the colonies, the Intolerable Acts generated sympathy for sullen Bostonians. Committees of community leaders from across North America spread messages of support for Massachusetts and defense of the sole authority of colonial legislatures to impose taxes on their citizens.
Some local communities met in person. In a previous column, I described one such gathering in Salisbury. On August 8, 1774, about two dozen Rowan County leaders issued what became known as the Rowan Resolves. Among their provisions was a call for North Carolina counties and townships to send delegates to a statewide meeting—which would in turn convene a general assembly of delegates representing all of the American colonies.
And that’s exactly what happened. First, on August 25, 1774, 71 delegates from all but a handful of North Carolina towns met in the then capital of New Bern. For three days, they discussed the crisis and passed their own resolutions, including an agreement to stop importing goods from Britain and to stop exporting tobacco, tar, turpentine, and other North Carolina products to Britain.
In addition, the members of this First Provincial Congress voted to establish a Continental Congress. North Carolina residents instructed their three delegates to this body – William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, and Richard Caswell – to vote for “such measures as they shall deem expedient to accomplish the object of securely establishing the rights of Americans.”
As far as I know, the meeting at New Bern was the first meeting of a representative body in America to bear the name “Congress.” Massachusetts, South Carolina, and other colonies later formed their own congresses in 1774, and of course the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia on September 5, just days after the conclusion of the First Provincial Congress of North Carolina at New Bern.
If we associate the word “Congress” with the birth and preservation of American freedom — and I admit that this relationship feels more theoretical than actual at the moment — then North Carolina can rightly claim to be once again “First in Freedom.”
But who came up with the term anyway? I couldn’t find any North Carolina citizen who called the New Bern assembly of delegates a “provincial congress.” What I did find was a letter dated July 7, 1773, to Thomas Cushing, a prominent Boston lawyer and longtime speaker of the Massachusetts legislature.
Cushing’s correspondent, an American printer and diplomat living in England at the time, praised the written condemnations of British tyranny by committees of colonial leaders. “It is natural to suppose, as you do, that if the oppression continues, a Congress may arise from this correspondence,” wrote Cushing’s friend. “Nothing would alarm our Ministers more; but if the Colonies consent to hold a Congress, I do not see how it could be prevented.”
Did the letter writer in question, Benjamin Franklin, plant the terminological seeds that gave rise to the First Provincial Congress of North Carolina and the First Continental Congress of the United States? That sounds quite right.
John Hood is a board member of the John Locke Foundation. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
