The Boston Tea Party was as sensational as if it had sprang from the brain of a Paris Jacobin in the French Revolution. It created excitement among the American Colonists from Portsmouth to Charleston. Six more of the Colonies enrolled Committees of Correspondence, Pennsylvania alone refusing to join. In every quarter American patriots felt exalted. In England the reverse effects were signalized with equal vehemence. The Mock Indians were denounced as incendiaries, and the town meetings were condemned as "nurseries of sedition." Parliament passed four penal laws, the first of which punished Boston by transferring its port to Salem and closing its harbor. The second law suspended the charter of the Province and added several new and tyrannical powers to the British Governor and to Crown officials. On September 5, 1774, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia. Except Georgia, every Colony sent delegates to it. The election of those delegates was in several cases irregular, because the body which chose them was not the Legislature but some temporary body of the patriots. 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. He wrote as viciously as he spoke. "Damn that Adams," said one of his enemies. "Every dip of his pen stings like a horned snake." Patrick Henry, being asked when he returned home, "Who is the greatest man in Congress," replied: "If you speak of eloquence, Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina is by far the greatest orator; but if you speak of solid information and sound judgment, Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on that floor." The rumor had it that Washington said, he wished to God the Liberties of America were to be determined by a single Combat between himself and George. One other saying of his at this time is worth reporting, although it cannot be satisfactorily verified. "_More blood will be spilled on this occasion_, if the ministry are determined to push matters to extremity, _than history has ever yet furnished instances of_ in the annals of North America." The language and tone of the "Summary View"--a pamphlet which Thomas Jefferson had