Delegate to the Continental Congress: Selection, Duties, and Voting

A delegate to the Continental Congress was a representative chosen by one of the thirteen American colonies, and later the states, to sit in the revolutionary legislature that coordinated the colonial response to Britain and eventually built a national government. Delegates served across three overlapping bodies: the First Continental Congress in 1774, the Second Continental Congress beginning in 1775, and the Confederation Congress that operated under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 until the new federal government took over in 1789.¹ They declared independence, raised an army, negotiated foreign alliances, and drafted the country’s first two founding documents, all while working under legal authority that was often improvised and always contested.

How Delegates Were Chosen

There was no uniform selection process. Colonial legislatures were the usual source, but the method turned on local politics and on whether the royal governor would let the assembly meet at all.¹

When governors blocked official action, extralegal bodies stepped in. New Hampshire’s governor stopped the Assembly from acting, so a Provincial Congress meeting in Exeter picked the delegates. Massachusetts’s House of Representatives met in Salem without Governor Thomas Gage’s sanction. Virginia used a convention of county representatives after the royal governor dissolved the House of Burgesses. New York’s delegates were selected by a “Committee of 51” combining merchants’ and mechanics’ committees and then confirmed by county committees. Pennsylvania’s Assembly initially ignored a counties’ convention and made its own appointments. In South Carolina, a Charleston convention of 104 delegates chose the representatives, then rushed ratification through the Commons House to secure funding before the lieutenant governor could shut it down.² At least 469 town, county, assembly, and convention meetings fed into the selection of delegates for the First Congress alone.

Under the Articles of Confederation, the rules were finally codified. Article V required that delegates be “annually appointed in such manner as the legislature of each state shall direct.” Each state could send between two and seven delegates, states retained the power to recall any delegate and send a replacement, and no person could serve more than three years out of any six.³

Who Could Serve

In practice the delegates came from a narrow slice of colonial society: propertied white men, many of them lawyers, planters, and merchants. Twenty-nine of the fifty-six delegates to the First Continental Congress had already served on a committee of correspondence.² No women, enslaved people, or Indigenous people served.

Women were excluded through the legal doctrine of coverture, which treated a married woman and her husband as a single legal person. Because married women could not own property, sign contracts, or keep their own wages, and because voting rights ran through property, most women were shut out of political participation at every level. Abigail Adams urged her husband John to “remember the ladies” and warned that women would not consider themselves bound by laws in which they had “neither a voice, nor representation.” John Adams grouped women with children, apprentices, and enslaved people as “dependent” persons whose interests were assumed to be represented by male protectors.⁴ Enslaved people were defined as property, not property holders, and were excluded entirely. Even among free men, property qualifications limited who could vote for or serve as a delegate. New Jersey’s 1776 constitution was unusual in referring only to voters as “they” and requiring “fifty pounds proclamation money clear estate,” a phrasing that let some single women who met the property threshold vote, though most other states specified “male” or “freemen.”⁵

Under the Articles, delegates were also barred from holding any other office under the United States that carried a salary or fees.³

What Delegates Did

Service went far beyond casting votes. The Congress ran on committees, and delegates were pulled into drafting, diplomatic, military, and administrative work. The First Congress produced three foundational documents in seven weeks: a Declaration and Resolves asserting rights to “life, liberty and property,” Articles of Association imposing a boycott of British goods, and a Petition to King George III bypassing Parliament.⁶⁷

The Second Congress became a wartime government. It created the Continental Army, sent George Washington to Massachusetts as its commander, made a final reconciliation attempt with the Olive Branch Petition on July 8, 1775, and then, after the King refused to receive it, moved toward independence.¹ Richard Henry Lee introduced the resolution for independence on June 7, 1776, and Congress appointed a drafting committee of five — Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman — before approving the final Declaration on July 4.⁸

Two standing committees handled sensitive foreign work. The Committee of Secret Correspondence, established November 29, 1775, and led by Benjamin Franklin, ran transatlantic communication, intelligence, and clandestine arms negotiations with France.⁹ A separate Secret Committee, created two months earlier, procured military supplies covertly, using foreign flags on vessels and agents abroad to track British ammunition stocks.¹⁰ Delegates were also sent on diplomatic missions: Silas Deane went to France in April 1776, and in September 1779 Congress appointed John Adams to negotiate peace with England.¹

The Congress had a presiding officer titled “president.” Peyton Randolph of Virginia held it first; John Hancock served through the independence period from May 1775 to October 1777, followed by Henry Laurens, John Jay, and Samuel Huntington. The president ruled on parliamentary questions, managed official correspondence, and met with foreign dignitaries. The role did not include appointing committees, taking independent action, or controlling votes.¹¹

How Voting Worked

Each colony, and later each state, had exactly one vote, regardless of how many delegates it sent or how many people it represented. A colony with two delegates carried the same weight as one with seven.¹² Delegations voted as blocs and worked from instructions issued by their home legislatures, which meant that on major questions a delegate’s personal view could be overridden by an order from home. For much of 1776, several delegations were under strict instructions to vote against independence, and the sequence of independence votes tracked new instructions arriving from state authorities rather than any change of heart in Philadelphia.¹³

Under the Articles of Confederation, major decisions — declaring war, entering treaties, coining money, setting defense expenses — required nine of the thirteen states, and amendments to the Articles required all thirteen. No amendment to the Articles was ever ratified.³

Protections and Pay

Article V of the Articles gave delegates protection from arrest during attendance and travel, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace, and guaranteed that their speech and debate in Congress could not be questioned in any court.¹⁴

Pay was another matter. Delegates were compensated by their own states, not by Congress, and practices varied dramatically.³ At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Pennsylvania paid its delegates nothing (they all lived in or near Philadelphia), Virginia paid $6 per day, and Delaware paid roughly $6 per day. New York did not reimburse its delegates until nearly a year after the convention closed, and Georgia did not pay its delegates until a special appropriation in February 1789. Wealthy members like Robert Morris did not need a per diem; others fronted their own travel and lodging and hoped for reimbursement. John Langdon of New Hampshire personally advanced money so his delegation could attend at all.¹⁵

Delegates Worth Knowing

The Congress held a striking concentration of figures who shaped what came next. John Adams sat in both the First and Second Congresses, pushed for independence, negotiated Dutch loans, and helped negotiate the 1783 Treaty of Paris before becoming the second president. Thomas Jefferson joined the Second Congress and drafted the Declaration of Independence at 33. Benjamin Franklin was the oldest member, ran the Committee of Secret Correspondence, and secured the French alliance that carried the war.¹⁶

Roger Sherman of Connecticut helped draft the Declaration and the Articles of Confederation, and later devised the Great Compromise on congressional representation at the Constitutional Convention.¹⁷ John Jay presided over the Congress in 1778–1779, joined Adams and Franklin in negotiating the Treaty of Paris, and co-authored The Federalist Papers.¹⁶ George Washington sat as a Virginia delegate in the First Congress but left in 1775 to command the Continental Army and did not return to legislative service.

How the Role Ended

The Continental and Confederation Congresses were, by design, limited. They operated first without any written constitution and then under one that hobbled central authority on purpose. Delegates functioned more like ambassadors from sovereign states than legislators in the modern sense: they served at the pleasure of their state legislatures, voted as state blocs, and could be recalled at any time. Congress could not tax, could not regulate interstate commerce, and had no standing military or courts to enforce its decisions.³¹⁸

By the mid-1780s, calls for reform led to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Many former Continental Congress delegates attended, though Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Samuel Adams either declined or were not selected.¹⁹ The Constitution replaced the Confederation Congress with a bicameral legislature, an independent executive, and a federal judiciary. The Confederation Congress held its final session in New York in March 1789, and the new Congress under the Constitution convened the following month, ending the delegate role as the revolutionary era had defined it.²⁰

1
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. The Continental Congress, 1774–1781
2
University of California, Santa Barbara. Protocols of Liberty, Chapter 5: First Gathering
3
National Constitution Center. Articles of Confederation
4
National Humanities Center, America in Class. Abigail Adams and “Remember the Ladies”
5
Museum of the American Revolution. How Did Women Gain the Vote? The Promise of 1776 for Women
6
American Battlefield Trust. Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress
7
National Constitution Center. On This Day: The First Continental Congress Concludes
8
National Archives. Declaration of Independence
9
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. The Committee of Secret Correspondence
10
Defense Intelligence Agency. Secret Committees
11
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives. Presidents of the Continental Congress
12
National Archives. Articles of Confederation
13
Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. What Factors Finally Pushed the Second Continental Congress to Declare Independence
14
GovInfo. Articles of Confederation, Article V
15
Statutes and Stories. Delegate Compensation at the Constitutional Convention, Part I
16
The White House. The Founding Fathers
17
ConstitutionFacts.com. About the Founding Fathers
18
Lumen Learning. The Articles of Confederation
19
National Archives. America’s Founding Fathers
20
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives. Continental and Confederation Congresses