Henry Laurens – President of the Continental Congress (1777–1778)

In the hard winter of 1777, when the wind off the Susquehanna cut through wool and warmed breath froze to mustaches, a cluster of men in borrowed rooms tried to keep a country alive with ink. Philadelphia had fallen to the British; Congress had fled first to Lancaster for a day and then to York, a market town that suddenly found itself hosting the nearest thing to a national government. The delegates slept above taverns and stores. Their desks were scarred pine laid with quills and candle stubs; their letters went out under the constant threat of interception; their meals were bowls of stew and whatever could be spared from farms already exhausted by requisition. It was there, far from the marble fantasies of later generations, that a tall, formal South Carolinian with a face ...