This spring and summer marks the beginning of national commemorations for the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution. In fact, as I write this, the U.S. Army is preparing for a (controversial) military parade to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the army’s founding, Flag Day, and President Trump’s birthday. While some argue that these celebrations are undemocratic and others that they embody the spirit of patriotism, one previous anniversary that passed this October embodies many of the contradictions that shaped both the American Revolution and the constitutional republic that the Revolution’s victors established in the 1780s: the Continental Association from the First Continental Congress.
The Continental Association was a charter agreed to by delegates from twelve of Britain’s American colonies (Georgia did not participate in the First Continental Congress). It instituted a colonial boycott of British goods to protest Parliament’s Coercive Acts, four punitive laws Parliament imposed upon Massachusetts as punishment for the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. This boycott included both a nonimportation agreement and clauses ending all commerce between British and colonial companies and businesses.
Some historians have posited that this charter actually represented a proto-government for the fledgling colonial rebellion since it established rules for economic coordination and represented the most unified colonial effort, up to that point in 1774, to resist British policy. To me, this claim is rather dubious. The colonists had unified prior to 1774 to resist British taxation, as they did during the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765, and signing a wide-ranging non-importation and boycott agreement is not the same as establishing a government. This was a form of resistance modeled on other forms of subject-to-Crown protest in the Anglo-Atlantic world. In fact, the non-importation agreement modeled various mercantile protests colonists adapted between 1765 and 1773 to pressure Parliament to end taxation. This agreement, spurred by the perceived severity of the Coercive Acts, was just more coordinated and centralized than others that preceded it.
One new element of the Continental Association, however, was its inclusion of an enforcement mechanism. Cities, towns, and counties were tasked with forming committees of inspection from the ranks of local Patriot subjects who would police their neighbors and arraign them in hearings, or use other forms of social pressure, to win their compliance with the Association’s non-importation and no-trade agreement. Now, the Continental Association, as historian Mary Beth Norton notes in her work 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, stipulated that committees of inspection could only publish the names of noncompliant colonists to call them out and pressure them to abide by the Association’s rules. Nevertheless, that is not what happened. Informants reported on their neighbors and some committees of inspection, full of zealous Patriots, vented their grievances against Parliament on their own Loyalist neighbors, especially in colonies with high concentrations of Patriot sympathizers. Holger Hoock, in his work Scars of Independence, notes how committees of inspection were illiberal institutions that trampled on the ideas of the rule of law or civil liberties in order to coerce compliance. In Connecticut, for instance, local Loyalists were shipped to an old copper mine in the town of Simsbury and imprisoned in dank darkness as punishment. In other places, merchants who ignored the Association, Loyalists who bought British goods, and Anglican clerics who prayed for the King were harassed, sometimes tarred and feathered, and, in quite a few cases, fled. Maya Jasanoff’s work Liberty’s Exiles documents these incidents as the first of many moments of internecine conflict that eventually resulted in Loyalists fleeing the new United States as refugees of the British Empire after 1783. Whether the delegates at the Continental Congress intended it or not, the Continental Association became an institutional tool for policing and crushing dissent against the Patriots’ political cause.
The effects of the Continental Association on everyday life in the Colonies, the way that it politicized all commercial relations and forced colonial subjects to take a side in the constitutional dispute raging between the political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, represented a watershed moment in the colonies’ path towards revolution. Although, it is an important caveat that none of the delegates who agreed to the Association thought they were initiating a struggle for independence. Remember, the war between the Colonies and Britain lasted for a full year before the Second Continental Congress declared independence from Britain.
Instead, the Continental Association’s significance derives from the contradictions at the heart of America’s struggle against Britain. First, the Continental Association demonstrated how the contingent experiences of resistance had started to forge a colonial sense of identity and purpose amongst American colonists. This policy of economic warfare (for lack of a better term) came in reaction to events that, to that time, only affected the colonists of Massachusetts. For much of the preceding 150 years, each British colony in North America had acted as its own entity, with a loose sense of English-ness uniting Britain’s roughly 26 North American territories (don’t forget the Caribbean!) during times of war. The Coercive Acts and the Continental Association changed that: elites from twelve colonies had decided that enough was enough and that colonists needed to unite and resist British taxation and punitive laws as one. Moreover, the fact that each colony sent delegates to the First Continental Congress, chosen from amongst the colonies’ subjects, built on the tradition of representative government in many of the colonies. Without being too proscriptive, it is possible to see the seeds of later American constitutional republicanism in both the First and Second Continental Congress.
Yet, there’s another reason the Continental Association is significant today, too. Its measures to force compliance, even if its official rules only permitted the names of noncompliant colonists to be publicly shared, speak to the undercurrent of illiberal political action that shaped both the Revolutionary War and American politics since then. Loyalists were not afforded the freedom of speech and their actions, disobeying a technically illegal compact, came with steep social, economic, political, and physical consequences. Any student of American history will know that American civil disobedience also has had a tenor of riot and unrest to it as well. For every group of ladies like those in Edenton, North Carolina, who committed themselves to the Patriot cause, there were also Loyalists who had their homes destroyed, their children harassed, or became the victims of violence (tarring and feathering is brutal).
The tension that arises from this history is how we, as citizens today, can respect the arguments and real courage of Patriotic colonists for representative government and resisting British control while simultaneously noting that some of our Patriotic forebears inflicted an intimate tyranny upon their neighbors and friends in the name of resisting British tyranny. It arises frequently in our contemporary political disputes where a fair and correct critique that a group of citizens directs against their local, state, or the federal government is also accompanied by citizens’ illegal actions that assault life, liberty, or property. Or, when the substance of a protest is erroneous or despicable, yet those protesting either have their right to free speech curtailed beyond the limits of the law or commit acts of violence themselves only to receive clemency from their partisan allies in government, such as Patriot accusers who took their actions too far never facing legal consequences for harassing or assaulting Loyalists. It raises several important questions about the duties of citizenship and the limits of our rights, including this one: in a constitutional republic, with a representative democracy that guarantees equal rights before the law, how should we, as citizens, treat dissidents to our political causes even if those causes require justifiable resistance to legal authority?