Back near the wall was a man who, when the assembly stood at morning prayers, showed a half-head above his neighbors.  His face was broad, and he, too, had a profile.  His mouth was tightly closed, and during the first fourteen days of that Congress he never opened it to utter a word, and after his long quiet he broke the silence by saying, “Mr. President, I second the motion.”  Once, in a passionate speech, Lynch turned to him and pointing his finger said:  “There is a man who has not spoken here, but in the Virginia Assembly he made the most eloquent speech I ever heard.  He said, ’I will raise a thousand men, and arm and subsist them at my expense and march them to the relief of Boston.’” And then did the tall man, whose name was George Washington, blush like a schoolgirl.

But in all that company the men most noticed were the five members from Massachusetts.  They were Bowdoin, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Gushing and Robert Treat Paine.  Massachusetts had thus far taken the lead in the struggle with England.  A British army was encamped upon her soil, her chief city besieged—­the port closed.  Her sufferings had called this Congress into being, and to her delegates the members had come to listen.  All recognized Samuel Adams as the chief man of the Convention.  His hand wrote the invitations and earnest requests to come.  Galloway, writing to his friends, the enemy, said:  “Samuel Adams eats little, drinks little, sleeps little and thinks much.  He is most decisive and indefatigable in the pursuit of his object.  He is the man who, by his superior application, manages at once the faction in Philadelphia and the factions of New England.”

Yet Samuel Adams talked little at the Convention.  He allowed John Adams to state the case, but sat next to him supplying memoranda, occasionally arising to make remarks or explanations in a purely conversational tone.  But so earnest and impressive was his manner, so ably did he answer every argument and reply to every objection, that he thoroughly convinced a tall, angular, homely man by the name of Patrick Henry of the righteousness of his cause.  Patrick Henry was pretty thoroughly convinced before, but the recital of Boston’s case fired the Virginian, and he made the first and only real speech of the Congress.  In burning words he pictured all the Colonies had suffered and endured, and by his matchless eloquence told in prophetic words of the glories yet to be.  In his speech he paid just tribute to the genius of Samuel Adams, declaring that the good that was to come from this “first of an unending succession of Congresses” was owing to the work of Adams.  And in after-years Adams repaid the compliment by saying that if it had not been for the cementing power of Patrick Henry’s eloquence, that first Congress probably would have ended in a futile wrangle.

The South regarded, in great degree, the fight in Boston as Massachusetts’ own.  To make the entire thirteen Colonies adopt the quarrel and back the Colonial army in the vicinity of Boston was the only way to make the issue a success, and to unite the factions by choosing for a leader a Virginian aristocrat was a crowning stroke of diplomacy.