Nevertheless, the Congress numbered some of the men who were actually and have remained in history, the great engineers of the American Revolution.

Samuel Adams and John Adams went from Massachusetts; John Jay and Philip Livingston from New York; Roger Sherman from Connecticut; Thomas Mifflin and Edward Biddle from Pennsylvania; Thomas McKean from Delaware; George Washington, Patrick Henry, Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton, and Richard H.Lee from Virginia; and Edward and John Rutledge from South Carolina.

Although the Congress was made up of these men and of others like them, the petitions adopted by it and the work done, not to mention the freshets of oratory, were astonishingly mild.

Probably many of the delegates would have preferred to use fiery tongues.

Samuel Adams, for instance, though "prematurely gray, palsied in hand, and trembling in voice," must have had difficulty in restraining himself.