First Prayer of the Continental Congress - September 7, 1774

On the morning of September 7, 1774, the delegates of the First Continental Congress gathered in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia for what would become one of the most remembered scenes and consequential moments of the American founding.

Image Source: By Henry Samuel Sadd - https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006676690/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=155299143'

The First Continental Congress had convened for the first time only two days earlier, on September 5th, to coordinate a colonial response to the Coercive Acts. Twelve colonies sent men who barely knew one another as colleagues: Anglicans and Congregationalists, Quakers and Presbyterians, planters and lawyers, radicals and conservatives. They met in a modest brick hall built for Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Company, not yet knowing they were beginning a political experiment that would last far longer than the crisis that brought them there.

The Day Before: Two Debates That Defined the Room

Tuesday, September 6, was consumed by two arguments that revealed how fragile the gathering still was.

The first debate concerned power. How should the Congress vote? By colony, so that tiny Rhode Island counted as much as populous Virginia? Or by population and wealth?

Patrick Henry of Virginia rose and delivered the speech that has ever since been treated as a founding declaration of American identity. Government, he argued, was already dissolved. The old colonial landmarks no longer held.

The Congress ultimately resolved that each colony would have one vote, a pragmatic compromise rather than a complete embrace of Henry’s vision. But the sentence itself traveled. In a single stroke the Virginia orator named a common political people before that people fully existed.

The second debate was about prayer.

When Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts proposed opening the sessions with a prayer on September 6, 1774, it immediately sparked a sharp debate among the delegates of the First Continental Congress.

Key Points of the Debate

The core objection came from John Jay of New York and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina strongly opposing the motion. They argued that the delegates were too religiously divided to join in a single, cohesive act of worship.

The room, they noted, contained Episcopalians, Quakers, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. How could men so divided in worship join in the same act?

Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, a Congregationalist of firm evangelical convictions, cut through the difficulty. He was “no bigot,” he said, and “could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.”

Though a stranger in Philadelphia, he had heard that the Anglican clergyman Jacob Duché fit that description. Adams moved that Duché be invited for the following morning. The motion passed. President Peyton Randolph called on Duché that same day; the rector agreed, if his health permitted.

The two debates of September 6 thus framed the morning of the 7th: a claim of American unity spoken in political language, and a decision that religious difference need not prevent a common appeal to God.

Psalm 35 and an Unexpected Prayer

At nine o’clock on Wednesday, Duché appeared with his clerk “in his pontificals.” He read the established Episcopal morning prayers and then the psalter appointed for September 7: Psalm 35.

“Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.”

The timing seemed almost too exact. The delegates had just absorbed the rumor—later proved false—that Boston was under bombardment.

John Adams, writing nine days later to Abigail, captured the shock in the room, writing that the prayer was deeply moving and helped dissolve the political and religious tensions in the room. He noted that Reverend Duché read the Episcopal service for the day, which included Psalm 35.

He wrote:Adams added that Duché then, “unexpected to every Body,” left the printed liturgy and offered an extemporaneous prayer of roughly ten minutes. It asked God to look with mercy on “these our American States, who have fled to Thee from the rod of the oppressor,” to give the assembly “wisdom in Council and valor in the field,” and to restore “order, harmony and peace.” It closed in the name of Jesus Christ.

Likewise, Silas Deane (Delegate from Connecticut) writing to his wife Elizabeth the next day. Deane said the prayer was "worth riding one hundred miles to hear." Duché read the lessons of the day, "which were accidentally extremely applicable," then prayed without book "so pertinently, with such fervency, purity and sublimity of style and sentiment and with such an apparent sensibility of the scenes and business before us, that even Quakers shed tears." Deane praised Duché's delivery and eloquence and noted that the prayer brought many delegates to tears. He wrote that the service was performed with "such a fervor, correctness, and pathos of expression" that it left a lasting impression on everyone present, including the more stoic members of Congress.

Other observers recorded similar reactions. Delegates knelt. Some wept. Charles Thomson thought the psalm “wonderfully adapted to the circumstances of America.” The moment did not erase disagreements about resistance, voting, or reconciliation with Britain. It did, however, give a diverse and anxious assembly a shared language of dependence and a memory of common feeling at the very beginning of their work.

Congress later voted formal thanks for “the excellent prayer, which he composed and delivered on the occasion.”

When Duché knelt to pray, some delegates followed him to their knees while others remained standing with bowed heads. Later commemorative accounts of the morning, including language long associated with a Library of Congress description of Carpenters’ Hall, singled out George Washington among those who knelt. “Washington was kneeling there,” the traditional account says, “and Henry, Randolph, Rutledge, Lee, and Jay, and by their side there stood, bowed in reverence, the Puritan Patriots of New England.”

The contrast mattered in a hall still uneasy about Anglican forms. Washington, an Anglican vestryman from Virginia, dropped to his knees in the manner of his church. Many New England Congregationalists, unaccustomed to kneeling in public worship, stood. The 1848 painting by Tompkins Harrison Matteson, engraved by Henry S. Sadd as The First Prayer in Congress, fixed that image in American memory: Washington among the kneeling figures, other delegates bowed or standing, Duché at the desk in clerical robes.

Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_first_prayer_in_Congress_-_painted_by_T.H._Matteson_;_engraved_on_steel_by_H.S._Sadd._LCCN2006676690.jpg

Notable Founders Present That Morning

That morning, included a remarkable concentration of future American leadership.

It was an extraordinary room: two future presidents, a future chief justice, the future commander-in-chief, the future author of the motion for independence, and the principal organizers of colonial resistance, all listening to the same psalm on the same anxious morning.

George Washington, Virginia — future commander of the Continental Army and first president
Patrick Henry, Virginia — orator of the previous day’s “I am not a Virginian, but an American” speech
Peyton Randolph, Virginia — president of the Congress
Richard Henry Lee, Virginia — arrived September 6; later mover of independence
Benjamin Harrison, Virginia — later signer of the Declaration
Edmund Pendleton and Richard Bland, Virginia
John Adams, Massachusetts — future diplomat and second president
Samuel Adams, Massachusetts — the man who broke the deadlock over prayer
Thomas Cushing and Robert Treat Paine, Massachusetts
John Jay, New York — future first chief justice of the United States
James Duane, Philip Livingston, Isaac Low, and William Floyd, New York
Roger Sherman, Silas Deane, and Eliphalet Dyer, Connecticut
Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward, Rhode Island
John Rutledge and Edward Rutledge, South Carolina, along with Christopher Gadsden, Thomas Lynch, and Henry Middleton
Caesar Rodney, Thomas McKean, and George Read, Delaware
William Livingston, New Jersey — later wartime governor
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Robert Goldsborough, and Thomas Johnson, Maryland
Joseph Galloway, Thomas Mifflin, John Morton, Edward Biddle, and other Pennsylvania delegates
Charles Thomson, Pennsylvania — secretary of Congress, though not a voting delegate

Not every name later attached to the Revolution was in Carpenters’ Hall on September 7. Benjamin Franklin was still in England. Thomas Jefferson was not a delegate. John Hancock would not take a seat until the Second Continental Congress. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania had not yet arrived. The North Carolina delegation was still on the road.

What Followed

Congress adjourned that day until Monday. In the weeks that followed it adopted the Suffolk Resolves, framed a declaration of rights, created the Continental Association to enforce a boycott, and petitioned the king. Duché continued to open sessions and was later named the first chaplain of Congress. In 1777, after the British occupied Philadelphia, he wrote George Washington urging that the Declaration of Independence be withdrawn; he then fled to England. The later apostasy does not erase the effect of September 7, 1774. The men who heard him that morning judged the prayer by what it did in the room, not by what its author would later become.

The scene in Carpenters’ Hall has been painted and reprinted ever since. Matteson’s canvas remains the image most Americans know: Washington on his knees, Henry and the Virginia circle nearby, New Englanders standing in reverence, Duché praying over a body that had not yet declared independence but had already begun to act as if it were one people. The letters of Adams and Deane confirm the core of it. The later tradition supplied the most enduring detail—that the tall Virginian who would command the army was among those who knelt.

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First Prayer of the Continental Congress - September 7, 1774

On the morning of September 7, 1774, the delegates of the First Continental Congress gathered in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia for what would become one of the most remembered scenes and consequential moments of the American founding.

The Day Before: Two Debates That Defined the Room

Tuesday, September 6, was consumed by two arguments that revealed how fragile the gathering still was.

The first debate concerned power. How should the Congress vote? By colony, so that tiny Rhode Island counted as much as populous Virginia? Or by population and wealth?

Patrick Henry of Virginia rose and delivered the speech that has ever since been treated as a founding declaration of American identity. Government, he argued, was already dissolved. The old colonial landmarks no longer held.

The Congress ultimately resolved that each colony would have one vote, a pragmatic compromise rather than a complete embrace of Henry’s vision. But the sentence itself traveled. In a single stroke the Virginia orator named a common political people before that people fully existed.

The second debate was about prayer.

When Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts proposed opening the sessions with a prayer on September 6, 1774, it immediately sparked a sharp debate among the delegates of the First Continental Congress.

Key Points of the Debate

The core objection came from John Jay of New York and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina strongly opposing the motion. They argued that the delegates were too religiously divided to join in a single, cohesive act of worship.

The room, they noted, contained Episcopalians, Quakers, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. How could men so divided in worship join in the same act?

Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, a Congregationalist of firm evangelical convictions, cut through the difficulty. He was “no bigot,” he said, and “could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.”

Though a stranger in Philadelphia, he had heard that the Anglican clergyman Jacob Duché fit that description. Adams moved that Duché be invited for the following morning. The motion passed. President Peyton Randolph called on Duché that same day; the rector agreed, if his health permitted.

The two debates of September 6 thus framed the morning of the 7th: a claim of American unity spoken in political language, and a decision that religious difference need not prevent a common appeal to God.

Psalm 35 and an Unexpected Prayer

At nine o’clock on Wednesday, Duché appeared with his clerk “in his pontificals.” He read the established Episcopal morning prayers and then the psalter appointed for September 7: Psalm 35.

“Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.”

The timing seemed almost too exact. The delegates had just absorbed the rumor—later proved false—that Boston was under bombardment.

John Adams, writing nine days later to Abigail, captured the shock in the room, writing that the prayer was deeply moving and helped dissolve the political and religious tensions in the room. He noted that Reverend Duché read the Episcopal service for the day, which included Psalm 35.

Congress later voted formal thanks for “the excellent prayer, which he composed and delivered on the occasion.”

Notable Founders Present That Morning

That morning, included a remarkable concentration of future American leadership.

It was an extraordinary room: two future presidents, a future chief justice, the future commander-in-chief, the future author of the motion for independence, and the principal organizers of colonial resistance, all listening to the same psalm on the same anxious morning.

What Followed

Our Mission

First Prayer of the Continental Congress - September 7, 1774

On the morning of September 7, 1774, the delegates of the First Continental Congress gathered in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia for what would become one of the most remembered scenes and consequential moments of the American founding.

The Day Before: Two Debates That Defined the Room

Tuesday, September 6, was consumed by two arguments that revealed how fragile the gathering still was.

The first debate concerned power. How should the Congress vote? By colony, so that tiny Rhode Island counted as much as populous Virginia? Or by population and wealth?

Patrick Henry of Virginia rose and delivered the speech that has ever since been treated as a founding declaration of American identity. Government, he argued, was already dissolved. The old colonial landmarks no longer held.

The Congress ultimately resolved that each colony would have one vote, a pragmatic compromise rather than a complete embrace of Henry’s vision. But the sentence itself traveled. In a single stroke the Virginia orator named a common political people before that people fully existed.

The second debate was about prayer.

When Thomas Cushing of Massachusetts proposed opening the sessions with a prayer on September 6, 1774, it immediately sparked a sharp debate among the delegates of the First Continental Congress.

Key Points of the Debate

The core objection came from John Jay of New York and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina strongly opposing the motion. They argued that the delegates were too religiously divided to join in a single, cohesive act of worship.

The room, they noted, contained Episcopalians, Quakers, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists. How could men so divided in worship join in the same act?

Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, a Congregationalist of firm evangelical convictions, cut through the difficulty. He was “no bigot,” he said, and “could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country.”

Though a stranger in Philadelphia, he had heard that the Anglican clergyman Jacob Duché fit that description. Adams moved that Duché be invited for the following morning. The motion passed. President Peyton Randolph called on Duché that same day; the rector agreed, if his health permitted.

The two debates of September 6 thus framed the morning of the 7th: a claim of American unity spoken in political language, and a decision that religious difference need not prevent a common appeal to God.

Psalm 35 and an Unexpected Prayer

At nine o’clock on Wednesday, Duché appeared with his clerk “in his pontificals.” He read the established Episcopal morning prayers and then the psalter appointed for September 7: Psalm 35.

“Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.”

The timing seemed almost too exact. The delegates had just absorbed the rumor—later proved false—that Boston was under bombardment.

John Adams, writing nine days later to Abigail, captured the shock in the room, writing that the prayer was deeply moving and helped dissolve the political and religious tensions in the room. He noted that Reverend Duché read the Episcopal service for the day, which included Psalm 35.

Congress later voted formal thanks for “the excellent prayer, which he composed and delivered on the occasion.”

Notable Founders Present That Morning

That morning, included a remarkable concentration of future American leadership.

It was an extraordinary room: two future presidents, a future chief justice, the future commander-in-chief, the future author of the motion for independence, and the principal organizers of colonial resistance, all listening to the same psalm on the same anxious morning.

What Followed

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