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The Second Continental Congress produced the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. Another part of its legacy is the legislative branch we know today. But is Congress living up to the aspirations of that era? Here's NPR congressional reporter Sam Gringlas.
SAM GRINGLAS, BYLINE: At the National Archives, visitors stream into its rotunda to view the country's most cherished documents. Oh, my word, a tank-topped tourist says, getting his first look at the declaration. In a vault a few floors above, I meet archivist Jane Fitzgerald.
JANE FITZGERALD: So I've pulled a few of the rough journals.
GRINGLAS: These are the journals of the Second Continental Congress. They kept meticulous records in neat cursive, like the entry for June 11, 1776, when a committee was appointed to draft the declaration.
FITZGERALD: (Reading) Mr. Thomas Jefferson, Mr. John Adams, Mr. Benjamin Franklin...
GRINGLAS: Fitzgerald flips ahead to...
FITZGERALD: July 2, 1776.
GRINGLAS: ...When the Congress voted for independence.
FITZGERALD: (Reading) That these united colonies are and of right, ought to be free and independent states.
GRINGLAS: Fitzgerald says these logbooks show this early assembly at work, slowly coalescing around independence. Archivist Jay Wyatt unpacks another faded document.
JAY WYATT: You are looking at handwritten amendments to the Bill of Rights.
GRINGLAS: Wyatt says the Bill of Rights was the seminal product of that first session of the U.S. Congress. On these pages, you can see a through line between the Continental Congress and its modern descendant.
WYATT: The end product has the consent of the people, and that is, I think, an idea that is put forward in the Declaration, and it is worked and refined until you get to the Bill of Rights.
GRINGLAS: Yale University historian Joanne Freeman says the trajectory between these two bodies was not a given. At first, people's colonies, in many ways, felt like their countries.
JOANNE FREEMAN: Southerners seem to dress very loudly. The Northerners all seem like sticks in the mud, and they're all dressed in brown.
GRINGLAS: When the Continental Congress convened, it was more like a temporary union of allies responding to crisis. But the war required raising money and dealing with foreign powers. The Congress struggled to meet those demands but did represent glimmers of a fledgling government. And though its delegates were not popularly elected, they did encourage town halls for regular people to debate independence.
FREEMAN: Now, would Congress have acted without them? Probably. But one of the things that was very different is that the public came first and foremost.
GRINGLAS: Freeman says this moment also previewed what role a Congress could serve.
FREEMAN: It's in that clashing and negotiating that you get something bigger than any one person or any one state.
GRINGLAS: Much of this early clashing took place at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Today, it's in Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle's district. Boyle thinks the founders would be dismayed by today's divided politics. That's one reason he's organizing a bipartisan congressional visit today to Independence Hall.
BRENDAN BOYLE: From the most conservative Republican to the most progressive Democrat, to return to the room where it all began and remind ourselves that we are the inheritors of this great tradition.
GRINGLAS: Boyle says Congress is not always succeeding at safeguarding that inheritance, as the legislative branch has ceded so much authority to the president.
BOYLE: Our Founders would be surprised and alarmed that this current Congress has not jealously guarded its prerogatives.
GRINGLAS: I met Boyle in the Capitol rotunda to gaze up at the iconic John Trumbull painting. It shows the Second Continental Congress receiving the draft declaration.
BOYLE: I feel awe and I feel pride. And I also feel a certain burden to live up to what those Founders intended 250 years ago.
GRINGLAS: Boyle says Congress is facing all kinds of questions about what the country needs, but he says other generations have wrestled with these questions, too, and have still kept pushing closer to the ideals of the Revolution.
Sam Gringlas, NPR News, Washington.
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