Page:Journal of the First Congress of the American Colonies (1765).djvu/8

 vidioua to name even the Crugers, the Livingstone, the Sehuylers, the Clintons, the Van Rensselaers, and others, from the mass of the deserving, except as mere specimens representing the spirit that pervaded. The more this subject is investigated, the more obvious will become the fact, that the American Revolution was essentially a wider dilfused, a more general impulse, enlisting not only a greater number of distinct communities, independent of each other, than had hardly ever been so associated before, but that the proportion of individual, personal participation, a participation in which individual judgment was called into requisition, and individual respomibility incurred, had seldom been equalled. It was no momentary impulse-no burst of passion. A cool, deliberate process, year alter year in progress, interrupted at every stage by respectful, unanswerable, and therefore unanswered, remonstrances. When every expedient, short of resistance, had been tried, over and over, resistance itself was tried, without an attempt to assert independence. When the last drop was drained from the cup of suffering, short of humilvhtzlon, the whole American people were ready, (Torie excepted,) with 'Declarations of Independence# rather than take one drop from the cup of s-ulnniuion. Americans had not to learn to be freeman.

"Not only have the different Colonies each its claim to distinction, in asserting the rights of freeman on that occasion, in language and in mode, which commands the admiration of all impartial historians, but every County, Town and Hundred of every colony had champions pressing to the front rank in' a cause which all regarded as involving their own and their oountry's freedom. A purer or fuller current of well-asserted Rroars or MAN never flowed from press and forum than that stmggle witnessed.”

The proposal for holding a Congress of Delegates from the respective Colonies, was made by the corresponding committee of the New York Assembly, (appointed in October, 1'/64,) and was repeatedly agitated in the different legislatures. At length the Assembly of Massachusetts issued a circular letter, proposing the first Tuesday of October, 1765, as the day of their meeting, at the city of New York. To this the other colonies assented, and on that day (or rather on the first Monday,) the proposed Congress commenced their session, the Journal of whose proceedings is subjoined.