#OTD 250 years ago, Continental Congress convened that Friday morning June 7, 1776 in the Pennsylvania State House. Delegates waded through reports about the compensation due a ship owner whose sloop was impressed into military service and about defective gunpowder produced by a local mill.
Then, with neither thunderclap nor fanfare, Richard Henry Lee stood and introduced Virginia’s resolution on independence, declaring the colonies “free and independent states … absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown.” Over the next month Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee and their allies in Congress would work to persuade the undecided and unwilling that the most consequential act of political self-determination the Atlantic world had yet witnessed was, in truth, the only choice that now made sense. It was no longer a question of whether the colonies would be free, but only whether that generation would have the steel to claim and defend independence. They did.
Congress adopted Lee’s resolution for independence on July 2, 1776, and after Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris settled the question by force and diplomacy, now came the difficult work of achieving for all the new world of unalienable rights our founders envisioned.
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