The charts on the right help to explain the difficult decision that the First Congress faced on the quesiton of how each colony should vote. Although the Congress, after a difficult debate between those large colonies, which advocating voting weighted by population and/or wealth, and small colonies, which favored voting by colony, the Congress finally decided to accommodate the smaller states by allocating one vote to each colony. (See Protocols of Liberty, 208-211) But this did not mean that the delegation of each colony had equal influence over the deliberations. The charts on the right help explain why this is so. If one compares the proportion of population and imports and exports from each colony, one will discern one factor that assured the powerful influence of Virginia and the southern states within the First Congress. A signficant plurality of the wealth generating exports to Britain were garned by the four southern colonies: Virginia and Maryland (56%) and the Carolinas ($25%) account for a total of 81% of all North American exports to Britain. This gave these four states emormous weight in setting the agenda for the First Congress. When they were united in measures with New England--as they almost always were--the four southern colonies and the four New England colonies accounted for 69% of the white population of North America and 88% of the exports to Great Britain.

But, the one colony-one vote rule gave gave the four middle Atlantic colonies the power to block any actions that they opposed. In addition, they had their own sources of power and influence in North America. Pennsylvania and New York provided the two largest ports for the importing of goods from Britain and Congress was meeting in one of those ports, Philadelphia. The more moderate and accommodationist political views of the four middle colonies meant that they could use their voting power to block measures they considered too "warm" or offensive to the legimate political prerogatives of the mother country.