Page 57 - JM Book 9/2020

Thursday, June 27, 1776
The delegates were uncomfortable. It had been a hot day in the congressional chamber. Meeting behind closed doors and windows, with the outside temperature reaching eighty-two degrees and no fresh air circulating inside the room, the delegates complained that the large room was unbearable.
The congressional business began when President John Hancock asked Congressional Secretary Charles Thomson to read a letter from General Charles Lee, Commander of the Southern Continental Army.
Charles Thomson had served as secretary of the Continental Congress since the first Congress convened on September 5, 1774. After his mother died in 1739, the eleven-year old Charles emigrated from Ireland to America with his father and two brothers. His father died at sea, and the three boys were separated when they arrived in the colonies. He became a teacher and a leader in the revolutionary movement in Philadelphia.
General Lee had also sent a letter to Congress from Governor John Rutledge, the recently elected governor of the new state of South Carolina. The two letters provided Congress with alarming information about the presence of the British fleet anchored off the Charleston Harbor.
Members of Congress were aware that British Major General Sir Henry Clinton had sailed from Boston in January, and had anchored off the North Carolina coast. They also knew that Clinton’s forces had increased in number when a British fleet of twenty ships arrived that carried several thousand Redcoats.
But, they did not know until they heard Lee’s and Rutledge’s letters read that General Clinton and the British fleet were now anchored off the coast of Charleston, America’s fourth largest city. They also learned from Governor
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