Henry Middleton – Second President of the First Continental Congress (1774)

On a humid afternoon in the fall of 1774, when the air in Philadelphia still held a faint memory of summer, the delegates to the First Continental Congress returned from dinner to find that something had shifted. Peyton Randolph, the Virginian who had presided over their sessions with grave, measured calm, was gone—summoned back home by illness and obligations. The chair at the front of the hall was suddenly vacant, and with it the fragile center of their improvised national politics. The men from New England, the middle colonies, and the southern tidewater looked around at one another, aware that however much they clung to the language of loyal subjects, they were doing something new and dangerous. They needed someone to step in, if only for a short while, to keep  ...