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Congress began as a meeting
A meeting, not a parliament
Congress had a history before 1776. The Albany Congress met in 1754 and the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, and the word meant a meeting, closer to a diplomatic gathering than a legislature. The Continental Congress was their successor. It was not a parliament and was not sovereign at first.
Filling the power vacuum
Royal authority was collapsing and there was no anarchy, which frightened them more than anything. Into the vacuum of power stepped provisional bodies and pre-revolutionary committees created to handle the issues of the moment. People who opposed the Revolution saw them as taking on illegal authority. They gradually assumed those powers because they had to.
The states improvise
The states improvised too. Pennsylvania had a plural executive at one point because of worries about executive power and annual elections, and it did not work. Its first constitution was a very liberal one, while Maryland's was quite conservative. The colonies were largely independent of each other, much like the European Union at first, and they expected their constitutions to be amended.
How did the Albany Congress end?
Benjamin Franklin proposed the Albany Plan of Union in 1754, which would have joined the colonies under a general government with a president appointed by the crown. Delegates from seven colonies approved it. The colonial assemblies rejected it, and so did the crown. Franklin published his Join, or Die cartoon in the Pennsylvania Gazette that same year.
How did Congress get its powers during the war?
Congress had no written grant of authority at first, so it acted by resolution. In June 1775 it created the Continental Army and appointed George Washington to command it. The Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1776 and 1777, gave it a formal frame, but they took effect only after every state ratified. Maryland was the last to do so, in 1781.
Why did Pennsylvania try a plural executive?
Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution replaced the governor with a Supreme Executive Council of elected members, and it gave the legislature a single chamber. Benjamin Franklin presided over the convention that wrote it. Critics at the time objected that the arrangement left no one clearly in charge. Pennsylvania replaced it in 1790 with a constitution that created a governor and a two-house legislature.
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