Conciliatory Resolution - Receipt and Rejection By Congress

Receipt and Rejection By Congress

The Continental Congress did eventually receive the Conciliatory Resolution in the form of a communication from the assembly of New Jersey on May 26, 1775, and, perhaps for a number of reasons (not limited to the early successes of the Revolution), released a report (written by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee in committee after they had finished with other papers including the declaration of causes, which explains the delay between the receipt of the Resolution and the release of the report on it), dated July 31, 1775, rejecting it:

The Congress took the said resolution into consideration, and are, thereupon, of opinion, That colonies of America are entitled to the sole and exclusive privilege of giving and granting their own money....To propose, therefore, as this resolution does, that the monies given by the colonies shall be subject to the disposal of parliament alone, is to, propose that they shall relinquish this right of enquiry, and put it in the power of others to render their gifts ruinous, in proportion as they are liberal....The proposition seems also to have been calculated more particularly to lull into fatal security, our well-affected fellow-subjects on the other side the water, till time should be given for the operation of those arms, which a British minister pronounced would instantaneously reduce the "cowardly" sons of America to unreserved submission. But, when the world reflects, how inadequate to justice are these vaunted terms; when it attends to the rapid and bold succession of injuries, which, during the course of eleven years, have been aimed at these colonies; when it reviews the pacific and respectful expostulations, which, during that whole time, were the sole arms we opposed to them; when it observes that our complaints were either not heard at all, or were answered with new and accumulated injuries; when it recollects that the minister himself, on an early occasion, declared, "that he would never treat with America, till he had brought her to his feet," and that an avowed partisan of ministry has more lately denounced against us the dreadful sentence, "delenda est Carthago;" that this was done in presence of a British senates and being unreproved by them, must be taken to be their own sentiment, (especially as the purpose has already in part been carried into execution, by their treatment of Boston and burning of Charlestown;) when it considers the great armaments with which they have invaded us, and the circumstances of cruelty with which these have commenced and prosecuted hostilities; when these things, we say, are laid together and attentively considered, can the world be deceived into an opinion that we are unreasonable, or can it hesitate to believe with us, that nothing but our own exertions may defeat the ministerial sentence of death or abject submission.