er the
surrender of Burgoyne; but the formation of the Federal Union would
certainly have been long postponed, and when we realize the grandeur of
the work which we are now doing in the world through the simple fact of
such a union, we cannot fail to see that such an issue would have been
extremely unfortunate. However this may be, it is clear that until the
connection with England was severed the thirteen commonwealths were not
united, nor were they sovereign. It is also clear that in the very act
of severing their connection with England these commonwealths entered
into some sort of union which was incompatible with their absolute
sovereignty taken severally. It was not the people of New Hampshire,
Massachusetts, and so on through the list, that declared their
independence of Great Britain, but it was the representatives of the
United States in Congress assembled, and speaking as a single body in
the name of the whole. Three weeks before this declaration was adopted,
Congress appointed a committee to draw up the "articles of
confederation and perpetual union," by which the sovereignty of the
several states was expressly limited and curtailed in many important
particulars. This committee had finished its work by the 12th of July,
but the articles were not adopted by Congress until the autumn of 1777,
and they were not finally put into operation until the spring of 1781.
During this inchoate period of union the action of the United States was
that of a confederation in which some portion of the several
sovereignties was understood to be surrendered to the whole. It was the
business of the articles to define the precise nature and extent of this
surrendered sovereignty which no state by itself ever exercised. In the
mean time this sovereignty, undefined in nature and extent, was
exercised, as well as circumstances permitted, by the Continental
Congress.

[Sidenote: The Continental Congress; its extraordinary character.]

A most remarkable body was this Continental Congress. For the
vicissitudes through which it passed, there is perhaps no other
revolutionary body, save the Long Parliament, which can be compared with
it. For its origin we must look back to the committees of correspondence
devised by Jonathan Mayhew, Samuel Adams, and Dabney Carr. First
assembled in 1774 to meet an emergency which was generally believed to
be only temporary, it continued to sit for nearly seven years before its
powers were ever clearly d