Hats flying in the rain

What happened

By the spring of 1776 Pennsylvania was the great holdout. Its Assembly, malapportioned and run by Quakers, proprietary men and the Philadelphia financiers under John Dickinson, had told its delegates in Congress to oppose independence. On 15 May Congress, urged on by John and Samuel Adams, resolved that the colonies should form governments of their own, and the Pennsylvania radicals saw their chance. Philadelphia's mechanics, artisans and militia associators, with professors and doctors and a few merchants for leaders, called a mass meeting for the morning of 20 May in the State House yard. It poured. A stage was knocked together on the spot, and Colonel Daniel Roberdeau took the chair. John Adams, who watched, wrote that he read out the resolve of Congress and the soaked multitude greeted it with three cheers and hats flying. Rothbard counts nearly five thousand people, and says the meeting denounced the Assembly as holding its authority from the king and elected by too few, and called for a constitutional convention. The conservatives raised a meeting of their own the next day. It did not hold, and by June the old Assembly was declared abolished and a convention was summoned. Adams called it the first town meeting he had ever seen in Philadelphia, conducted with great order.