- List of delegates to the Continental Congress
The
Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from theThirteen Colonies that became the governing body of theUnited States during theAmerican Revolution . The "Biographical Directory of the United States Congress " lists 343 men who attended the Continental Congress, along with another 90 who were elected as delegates but never served. ["Biographical Directory of the United States Congress ", 40–44.] The Congress met from 1774 to 1789 in three incarnations.The
First Continental Congress , which met briefly inPhiladelphia in 1774, consisted of 56 delegates from twelve of theThirteen Colonies that would become the United States. [Burnett, "Continental Congress", 32.] Convened in response to theCoercive Acts passed by the British Parliament in 1774, the delegates organized an economic boycott of Great Britain in protest and petitioned the king for a redress of grievances.By the time the
Second Continental Congress met in 1775, shooting in theAmerican Revolutionary War (1775–1783) had begun. Moderates in the Congress still hoped that the colonies could be reconciled with Great Britain, but a movement towards independence steadily gained ground. Congress established theContinental Army (June 1775), coordinated the war effort, issued a Declaration of Independence in July 1776, and designed a new government in theArticles of Confederation , which were ratified in 1781.The ratification of the Articles of Confederation gave the Congress a new name: the
Congress of the Confederation , which met from 1781 to 1789. The Confederation Congress helped guide the United States through the final stages of the war, but in peacetime the Congress declined in importance. Under the Articles, the Confederation Congress had little power to compel the individual states to comply with its decisions. Increasingly, delegates elected to the Congress declined to serve, the leading men in each state preferred to serve in state government, and the Congress had difficulty establishing aquorum . When the Articles were replaced by theUnited States Constitution , the Confederation Congress was superseded by theUnited States Congress .__TOC__
Delegates who attended
The following table shows the names of the delegates who at some point attended the Continental Congress. Because a delegate did not necessarily take his seat in Congress in the same year that he was elected, nor did he necessarily stay for the duration of his term, there are slight discrepancies in the sources regarding the years of service for some delegates. Only those years that the delegate actually attended Congress are shown on the table. All data is from the "Biographical Directory of the United States Congress", except where entries been corrected using more detailed sources, particularly the "
American National Biography ".The table also indicates (with an X) which delegates signed the
Articles of Association (1774), theUnited States Declaration of Independence (1776), theArticles of Confederation (1778–1781), and theUnited States Constitution (1787). The first three documents were created by Congress, and so all signers were necessarily delegates; the United States Constitution was signed at a special convention outside of Congress, and its signatories were not all current or former members of Congress.John Dickinson has two entries on the table because he served as a delegate from both Pennsylvania and Delaware. The person who most frequently attended Congress was not a delegate: he was
Charles Thomson , who served as secretary throughout Congress' existence.Elected but did not attend
This table shows those who were elected as delegates to the Continental Congress but never attended a session. All data is from the "Biographical Directory of the United States Congress".
Notes
References
*"
American National Biography ".
*"Biographical Directory of the United States Congress ". Washington D. C., 1989.
*Burnett, Edward Cody. "The Continental Congress". New York: Norton, 1941.
*"Dictionary of American Biography ".
*Purcell, L. Edward. "Who Was Who in the American Revolution". New York: Facts on File, 1993. ISBN 0-8160-2107-4.External links
* [http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/cdocuments/hd108-222/delegates.pdf List of delegates] from the "
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress "
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