| Reading Guide for Week 8 | |
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Tuesday Tryon County (NY) Committee of Safety (1775) In autumn 1774 the First Continental Congress concluded its deliberations by, among other things, uu rging the formation of committees in every community in the rebellious colonies. It did not provide much guidance about the procedures by which such committees might be formed, nor about the kinds of division of labor or qualifications and skills such committee members might ideally possess and undertake. There was a precedent for this, sort of: the committees of correspondence formed starting in 1772 with the task of coordinating colonial responses to imperial actions during intervals when colonial assemblies or provincial congresses were not in formal session. These committees tended to draw from a political elite with at least legislative experience. However, the local committees had to tap into a much broader pool of white men below the elite, and became a kind of political training ground, with consequences into the future. State Constitutions (1776-1784) On May 10, 1776, even before issuing a declaration of independence, the Continental Congress issued a resolution (the work of John Adams) urging the rebellious colonies to draft constitutions in turn in order to create some kind of legal foundation for their generally improvised and extralegal provincial congresses, in the place of the colonial assemblies that had been shut down and the imperial officials that had been banished. These constitutions would amount to declarations of independence in their own way. They would not be uniform, except insofar as they were rooted in longstanding British political traditions of “liberty.” They also would be rooted in political traditions particular to each British North American colony. For instance, Connecticut and Rhode Island did not bother to draft any constitutions, and instead retained their colonial charters since they were not royal charters and already granted what seemed to be a reasonably satisfactory amount of independence. The eleven other rebellious colonies did, between 1776 and 1784, draft constitutions, each one something of an improvisational experiment in its own right. With consequences into the future. |