of the congress, and this position was one of great dignity and considerable influence, but it was not essentially different from the position, of any of the other delegates.  There were no distinct executive officers.  Important executive matters were at first assigned to committees, such as the Finance Committee and the Board of War, though at the most trying time the finance committee was a committee of one, in the person of Robert Morris, who was commonly called the Financier.  The work of the finance committee was chiefly trying to solve the problem of paying bills without spending money, for there was seldom any money to spend.  Congress could not tax the people or recruit the army.  When it wanted money or troops, it could only ask the state governments for them; and generally it got from a fifth to a fourth part of the troops needed, but of money a far smaller proportion.  Sometimes it borrowed money from Holland or France, but often its only resource was to issue paper promises to pay, or the so-called Continental paper money.  There were no federal courts,[4] nor marshals to execute federal decrees.  Congress might issue orders, but it had no means of compelling obedience.

[Footnote 2:  Except for a few days in December, 1776, when it fled to Baltimore; and again from September, 1777, to June, 1778, when Philadelphia was in possession of the British; during that interval Congress held its meetings at York in Pennsylvania.]

[Footnote 3:  See my Critical Period of American History, pp. 112, 271, 306]

[Footnote 5:  Except the “Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture,” for an admirable account of which see Jameson’s Essays in the Constitutional History of the United States, pp. 1-45.]

[Sidenote:  It was not fully endowed with sovereignty.] The Continental Congress was therefore not in the full sense a sovereign body.  A government is not really a government until it can impose taxes and thus command the money needful for keeping it in existence.  Nevertheless the Congress exercised some of the most indisputable functions of sovereignty.  “It declared the independence of the United States; it contracted an offensive and defensive alliance with France; it raised and organized a Continental army; it borrowed large sums of money, and pledged what the lenders understood to be the national credit for their repayment; it issued an inconvertible paper currency, granted letters of marque, and built a navy.” [6] Finally it ratified a treaty of peace with Great Britain.  So that the Congress was really, in many respects, and in the eyes of the world at large, a sovereign body.  Time soon showed that the continued exercise of such powers was not compatible with the absence of the power to tax the people.  In truth the situation of the Continental Congress was an illogical situation.  In the effort of throwing off the sovereignty of Great Britain, the people of these states were constructing a federal union faster than they realized.  Their theory of the situation did not keep pace with the facts, and their first attempt to embody their theory, in the Articles of Confederation, was not unnaturally a failure.