Essay #3: First Continental Congress

[9/29 note: You said to leave you a note in class, but I didn't get time to write one, so I'm including it here. I don't know if this applies to me, too, or just Sarah, but I feel like the prompt was vague and I may have been graded down for interpreting it differently. You said in your comment that I was supposed to discuss the position of the radicals in the pretext. I did not do this because I saw the prompt as meaning "explain what persuasive techniques the radicals used to get their points across" instead of "explain what the opinions of the radicals were and why." Therefore, my background information was about the reasons for the Continental Congress and I included the descriptions of the opinions in later chapters. The essay still might still deserve the grade that you gave it, but I would appreciate the second look because the prompt did not say we had to discuss it a certain way. In case you still don't like it, I'm putting my revises thesis in this note. I didn't change it in the essay because it would not make sense with the rest of it.
My revised thesis: The radicals were the most persuasive and effective in achieving their goals because their view made the most sense. They wanted to separate because the British government was imposing taxation without representation as well as the "intolerable acts" and because the war had already started.]

The people of America might still be living in colonies if not for the eloquent arguments of John Adams. Following the French and Indian War, the British government began to create a series of new laws that limited the colonists’ freedom. One of these was the Tea Act, which was created in 1773 to give the British a monopoly on the American tea business. The colonists’ response came in the form of the Boston Tea Party, in which they dumped the contents of 342 chests of tea from a British ship into the ocean. The enraged British government passed a series of acts to restrict colonial freedom – particularly in Massachusetts – that came to be known by colonists as the “Intolerable Acts.” Colonists met in Philadelphia at the First Continental Congress to respond to this and broke into three groups: radicals, moderates, and conservatives. Of these, the radicals were by far the most effective in creating persuasive arguments and achieving their goals. They were severely outnumbered in the beginning, but they ended up guiding the actions of the colonies through the continental congress because they gave good arguments and used logic to point out the problems of the British government’s relationship with the colonies.

Most representatives at the First Continental Congress held opinions that differed from those of the radicals. Many of them, including George Washington of Virginia and John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, were moderates. Moderates were the complete contrast to radicals in that they wanted to avoid taking any real action against Britain. Although they agreed that there were problems between Britain and the colonies, they maintained that the problems could be resolved and the relationship could be fixed without separating or taking action to remove British authority. The moderate opinion was held by certain colonists for a long time, but the congress eventually came to the decision that something had to be done. The recent problems were proof of the rocky relationship with Britain and the moderates offered no solution, so the people of the Congress were easily swayed by other arguments.

The second group formed was the conservatives, including John Jay of New York and Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania. They, like the radicals, believed that action was required against the British government, but did not favor the idea of separating. Instead, they wanted to recreate the situation in the colonies from before the French and Indian War. Joseph Galloway proposed a plan called the Galloway plan, which would restore the relationship between the colonies and the British crown to what it essentially was before 1763, but with one major change: the colonies would have a “grand council” that would be given the power to veto British acts. This plan was almost passed, but was defeated by only a few votes. Eventually, the radicals began to win over the rest of the representatives and they chose to take more severe action.

There were twice as may Americans opposed to or indifferent to the idea of independence than there were those who favored it. The same was true of the representatives when the First Continental Congress began. However, John Adams of Massachusetts gave very eloquent arguments in favor of separation and managed to sway quite a few people to his ideas instead of those of Galloway or the moderates. The radicals used ideas from Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America in their arguments. They pointed out the reasons why Britain should not have authority to tax the colonies and that each colony had its own individual legislature, none of which were related to that of Britain. The arguments were persuasive and the radicals managed to barely defeat the Galloway plan in favor of their own. They were not able to convince the other representatives of separating, but they did manage to convince them to take more extreme action than had been suggested by the moderates or the conservatives. They created the Declaration of Resolves, which declared the “Intolerable Acts” null and void and recommended that colonists obtain weapons and form militias. It also recommended a boycott of all British imports and even called for the establishment of “associations” in every colony to make sure that people enforced the boycott. The radicals won the debates and eventually convinced the others to help them to reach their goals. They did not declare independence at the First Continental Congress, but they started on the path to it and managed to gain support from those who had originally disagreed completely.

Of the three groups of people at the First Continental Congress, the radicals definitely took the most important steps to achieving their goals by creating the most persuasive arguments. The moderates did not offer a plan that would help to fix the situation between the colonists and the British crown. The conservatives created a plan, but it was defeated because their arguments could not beat those of John Adams. The radicals created logical and eloquent arguments and eventually managed to sway opponents onto their side. They were severely outnumbered in the beginning, but their style of debate brought opponents onto their side and allowed them to create the Declaration of Resolves. The First Continental Congress was the colonists’ first step to the radicals’ goal of independence.