The Continental Congress appears in these excerpts not as a subject in its own right but as a recurring reference point in episodes about George Washington, the Bill of Rights, Chinese restaurants and Thomas Paine. The excerpts describe it as the government that ran American affairs during the Revolution and under the Articles of Confederation, as a body George Washington distrusted, and as the first institution to draw thirteen otherwise independent provinces together. No excerpt describes its founding, its membership, its procedures or its dissolution in any detail.
The Congress as wartime government
In the episode on George Washington, Thomas Fleming says Washington had seen the nightmare that happened when the Continental Congress ran the government for so many years from 1774 to 1787, and that with no check on it, it was just a disaster George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). Fleming describes the Congress creating committees to handle new problems — “pretty soon they had 3,000 committees, and they had to have a committee to keep track of the committees” — and says Washington had to put up with this for eight years during the Revolution, treating the Congress with great respect but not respecting it to any great extent. Bob Zadek’s framing in that episode places the Congress in the same period, describing Washington as trying to make up his mind whether to attend it and risk the reputation he had achieved as general of the armies during the Revolution, a detail Fleming attributes to something Washington wrote to a friend George Washington Was Our Guest (2011).
Fleming also ties the Congress to the army’s supply problems. He says that at first the Congress hired the commissaries and other people who bought ammunition for the army, but that they appointed so many total disasters that during the Valley Forge period Washington and Hamilton sat down and wrote what amounts to the first state paper, a 20,000-word document that Fleming says was a complete overhaul of the army’s relationship to Congress George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). Under the new arrangement, Fleming says, the army would choose the commissaries and quartermaster people and hire responsible and reliable men. Fleming recounts that five congressmen came to Valley Forge, that one congressman who hated Washington said they were going to rap a demigod over the knuckles, and that Washington handed them the paper and then took the head of the committee to dinner and walked with him in the snow, after which the congressman became Washington’s biggest advocate.
Washington’s distrust and the case for a strong president
In the same episode, Fleming describes the year before the Constitutional Convention, when James Madison visited Mount Vernon repeatedly and discussed with Washington what kind of government the country needed. According to Fleming, Washington hammered into Madison’s head that they had to have a strong president and could not let Congress run the country, because of what Washington had seen under the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1787 George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). Fleming says Washington insisted during the Convention, in the Virginia delegation’s discussions, on “one man” rather than a three-man presidency, on election by the people rather than by Congress, and on a presidential veto of acts of Congress that could not be overridden. Bob Zadek’s response in the excerpt is an approving aside, and the surrounding discussion is framed by Zadek as being about money and politics; the guest’s remarks about the Congress arise as historical illustration rather than as the episode’s topic.
A caller named Carl, from Mill Valley, California, raises a book he calls the Budget of George Washington and says Washington did everything on spec during the Revolutionary War, invoicing for boat, powder, muskets and tents and trying to pay his men George Washington Was Our Guest (2011). Fleming corrects the framing: Washington kept track of his expenses throughout the war and handed in an expense account at the end, but it was not his budget, since the Congress paid for everything the army bought. Fleming adds that the Congress was printing paper money without any taxes to back it up, and that within about three years people were saying it was not worth a Continental, meaning a Continental dollar, and the money was just waste paper. Zadek says Washington refused a salary but was scrupulous about being reimbursed for expenses; Fleming agrees as to the legitimate expenses and distinguishes them from ammunition, which the army bought.
The Confederation and the Convention
In the episode on the Bill of Rights, Carol Berkin describes the Articles of Confederation as the first Constitution and as a sort of league of friendship that could not really hold the country together Carol Berkin on The Bill of Rights No One Wanted (2016). She says the men at Philadelphia believed that if they did not act, France and Spain and England would divide the country up, or there would be civil wars between competing states; that commerce was a mess because there was no overall commercial policy; that there was no army to protect the borders; and that there was no money to pay the debts the federal government had incurred — debts she traces to the Continental Congress and then the Confederation government, incurred to fight the Revolution. She says the Convention’s aim was a government with the power to tax, to regulate commerce and to create a uniform currency. Berkin’s account of the Convention itself concerns George Mason’s proposal for a statement of the people’s liberties and rights and Roger Sherman’s response that the Constitution gave no power to infringe on rights and that the matter was left to the states; in that exchange the Continental Congress figures only as the prior government whose debts the new one had to confront.
The first connection among the provinces
Harlow Unger, in the episode on Thomas Paine, says that in America the provinces that later became states were all independent politically and had nothing to do with each other, and that until the First Continental Congress the governors and rulers of each province did not know each other and had no connections Thomas Paine: Apostle of Liberty (2021). He calls them thirteen independent political units with very few ties, aside from occasional trade ties such as New Jersey’s need to import and export through New York’s or Philadelphia’s ports, both of which taxed the goods. Unger’s point is that this was not a cohesive society until Paine wrote Common Sense, which circulated across what would become the country. In that account the First Continental Congress marks the moment before cohesion, not the instrument of it.
Across episodes:
The Continental Congress is touched on in four episodes — the Washington episode, the Berkin episode on the Bill of Rights, the Chin episode on Chinese restaurants and the Unger episode on Thomas Paine — and the excerpts show no development in how it is treated. It is invoked in each case as background to another subject: as the government Washington distrusted, as the predecessor whose debts the Convention addressed, as a date marker in Bob Zadek’s almanac segment, and as the first body to bring the provinces into contact.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Continental Congress first met beyond Fleming’s range of 1774 to 1787, where it met, who its members or presiding officers were, or what powers it claimed. They do not describe the Second Continental Congress as distinct from the first, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation’s drafting or ratification, or how the Congress ended. No excerpt states what the Constitution’s specific provisions concerning the Congress are, and the Bill of Rights discussion concerns the Convention and ratification rather than the Congress that preceded them.