On this day in 1774, delegates from twelve of the Thirteen Colonies gathered at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress. Georgia did not send anyone. The Pennsylvania State House stood available and grander, but the delegates took the smaller hall belonging to the city's carpenters' guild — a building put up by men who worked with their hands, lent to men who had come to argue.

The first business was not liberty but arithmetic. How should a congress vote? By colony, so that Rhode Island counted as much as Virginia; or by population and wealth, which nobody present could measure with any confidence, there being no census to consult. They settled on one colony, one vote, and recorded that the arrangement was not to be taken as a precedent. Precedent, of course, is exactly what it became.

They chose Peyton Randolph to preside and Charles Thomson to keep the minutes, though Thomson was not a delegate at all. Somebody usually isn't. Forty years of watching committees has taught me that the person holding the pen tends to outlast the people holding the floor.