On this day 250 years ago at the Philosophical Hall in Philadelphia a meeting of
a number of persons to consider what steps might be necessary to take, on the dissolution of government . . . concluded to call a convention with speed; to protest against the present Assembly’s doing any business in their House until the sense of the Province was taken in the Convention to be called.
Following this meeting the Committee of Inspection and Observation of the City of Philadelphia issued “a general call” for a meeting of “the inhabitants of the City and Liberties . . . in order to take the sense of the people.”
Pennsylvania’s royally authorized Assembly was conservative and did not support Independence. The Committee was acting in accordance with the Continental Congress’s resolution of the previous day and was calling for the dissolution of the Assembly and its replacement by a convention of the people.
Sources: Remembrancer of Christopher Marshall at 80-81; “The Adoption of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776”, Paul Leicester Ford Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Sep. 1895), pp. 426-459 accessed at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2139954
The Philosophical Hall is adjacent to Independence Hall and you can visit it in Philadelphia today. https://www.amphilsoc.org/visit-museum#paragraph-214
On this day 250 years ago in Williamsburg, Virginia, according to the Virginia Gazette, “a continental union flag was displayed upon the Capitol” to signify Virginia’s independence from Great Britain. The Continental Union flag, also known as the “Grand Union” flag, had been first raised over the flagship of the Continental Navy in December 1775 by John Paul Jones and over the Continental Army encampment in Cambridge, Massachusetts starting January 1, 1776. This flag has the thirteen red and white stripes of the modern American flag but includes the British Union Jack where the stars for each state would later go. The Continental Union Flag flies over Colonial Williamsburg still today.
On This Day In The Revolution 