In the autumn of 1774, long before anyone could imagine a “President of the United States,” a group of men gathered in Philadelphia and improvised a government. They did not call it that, not yet. They called it a Congress, a meeting of colonies that still—at least officially—claimed loyalty to George III. They were petitioners, not revolutionaries, or so they told themselves. Inside the long, echoing hall where they met, the air was thick with tobacco smoke and unease. No one knew whether this gathering would end in reconciliation, arrest warrants, or something no one had words for yet. At the front of the room, in a chair that had no constitutional definition but immense symbolic weight, sat a lawyer from Virginia with a grave face and a body already beginning to fail him. His name was Peyton Randolph, and for a few tense weeks he was as close  ...