Provincial Congress

A provincial congress was an extralegal representative assembly formed in ten of the thirteen British colonies in North America between 1774 and 1776, as colonists organized self-government outside royal authority in the lead-up to the American Revolution. Modeled on the lower houses of the existing colonial assemblies, provincial congresses grew out of committees of correspondence and committees of safety formed to coordinate resistance to Parliament's taxation and other measures, on the colonial argument that the colonies had no representation in Parliament and so could not lawfully be taxed by it. As royal government collapsed in each colony, its provincial congress typically evolved into, or was replaced by, a provisional government that went on to draft the colony's first state constitution.