In the weeks following the closing of the First Continental Congress, American Whigs were not simply focused upon the fraught question of how the British administration would respond to the initiatives of the Congress. Even more crucial for the Congress was the suspense concerning ordinary Americans: would they accept the Association? would they embarace as their own the many communications of the Congress? Every colony except Georgia and New York held a convention to review the acts of the Congress and accept or reject them. All the 11 colonies who held meetings accepted the resolutions of the Congress and set about implementing the Association. The Pennsylvania Convention was held at the end of January and featured 107 delegates from 10 counties. James Wilson gave a speech that conceptualized what seven months of meetings, which culminated in the meeting of the Congress, had accomplished. In the eloquent syntheticizing language of the young Philadelphia lawyer from Scotland, the Whig network that has emerged from the meetings of the First Congress had resulted in an immaterial object of inestimable value. This image allows us to think of the way a "chain of freedom" can, paradoxically, both bind and liberate.

"That the sentiments of every individual concerning that important object, his liberty, might be known and regarded, meetings have been held, and deliberations carried on in every particular district. That the sentiments of all those individuals might gradually and regularly be collected into a single point, and the conduct of each inspired and directed by the result of the whole united, county committees-- provincial conventions--a continental congress have been appointed, have met and resolved. By this means, a chain—more inestimable, and, while the necessity for it continues, we hope, more indissoluble than one of gold—a chain of freedom has been formed, of which every individual in these colonies, who is willing to preserve the greatest of human blessings, his liberty, has the pleasure of beholding himself a link."*

*Wilson, "A Vindication of the American Colonies," in American Eloquence: A Collection of Speeches and Adresses, edited by Frank Moore, 1901, I:70.