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A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875
Journals of the Continental Congress --PREFATORY NOTE
The record of reports from the Secretary of Congress is continued from the year 1785, when the Committee of the Week was discontinued, and the business usually referred to that Committee, committed to the Secretary.
The increasing difficulty in obtaining a full attendance of delegates necessitated some alterations in the machinery of Congress to take up the otherwise cumbersome slack. The methods devised by the Secretary to keep a complete record of the proceedings of the Congress under these conditions were not always successful, nor do they now permit the record to be followed clearly to the end, in all cases. The additional record-book, which Thomson opened for his reports as Secretary, was continued to the expiration of the Congress and is as necessary for the complete journal as the Committee, despatch, and other collateral journal records which Thomson created from time to time.
The Congress of 1786 found its principal difficulties in the settlement of the vast number of claims created by the war and the flood of accounts which demanded liquidation. Currency, the Treasury, Indian affairs, public lands, and the annual nightmare of levying and collecting State quotas pressed in upon Congress with increasing weight but, through it all, the delegates showed a comprehension and understanding of the crying necessity of formulating a stronger and more efficient governmental machine and this fundamental realization slowly developed, from out of the fog of partisan struggles, experiences which had value for the Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia the next year and in the struggle to adopt the Constitution itself the year following.
Charles Pinckney's speech of August 16 is from a manuscript in Thomson's writing (now in the Charles Thomson Papers), purchased by the Library of Congress in 1930, which also includes some memoranda of remarks and proceedings in the Committee of the Whole in August. The Notes of Debates by William Samuel Johnson are in the William Samuel Johnson Papers in the Library of Congress.
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As in the case of the two preceding volumes, a subvention by Mr. William Evarts Benjamin of New York provided for the editorial and other work necessary for the preparation of copy for the printer. The proofs have been read by Dr. J. Franklin Jameson, Chief of the Division of Manuscripts. The index, like that of the two preceding volumes, has been made by Miss Maud G. Sites.
Joan C. Fitzpatrick.
Herbert Putnam,
Librarian of Congress.
November 1933.
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