Continental Congress | First edition, first issue, of the journal of the first Continental Congress

Continental Congress

Journal of the Proceedings of the Congress, held at Philadelphia, September 5, 1774. Philadelphia: Printed by William and Thomas Bradford, at the London Coffee House, 1774

8vo (193 x 121 mm). Woodcut circular vignette on title of the seal of the Congress with twelve hands supporting a column with a liberty cap on top and the Magna Carta at its base, surrounded by the motto Hanc Tuemer, Hac Nitimur; lacking half-title, title-page shaved at head and extended, second page numeral chaved, some browning nad spotting throughout. Modern half brown morocco over nineteenth-century marbled boards.

First edition, first issue, of the journal of the first Continental Congress. This scarce first issue was published several months before the second, prior to the inclusion of Gage’s letter to Peyton Randolph and the Congress’s petition to the King (neither of which had yet been issued) on pages 133–144.

Committees of Correspondence, responding to the Intolerable Acts passed by Parliament in the wake of the Boston Tea Party, resolved to hold a Continental Congress in June of 1774. Delegates from twelve colonies (none from Georgia) gathered in Philadelphia in the fall. It included many of the most distinguished men in America: Samuel and John Adams, Roger Sherman, John Jay, Joseph Galloway, John Dickinson, Richard Henry Lee, George Washington, Edmund Pendleton, and Henry Middleton, among others.

The Journal of the first Continental Congress, describes meetings from 5 September to 20 October 1774. The Congress succeeded in taking numerous important steps. On 14 October, they adopted a Declaration of Rights, and agreed to an Association governing imports and exports and boycotting British goods. They also drafted and sent an Address to the People of Great Britain and another Address to the Inhabitants of the Province of Quebec.

REFERENCE:

Evans 13737; ESTC W20577; Howes J263; Reese, Revolutionary Hundred 20