On this day 250 years ago, the town meeting of Brookline, Massachusetts, resolved

that if the Hon. Congress Should for the Safety of the American Colonies, Declare them Independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain, that we said inhabitants will Solemnly engage with our Lives and fortune to support them in the measure.

The Brookline town meeting also elected John Goddard “to Serve for and Represent said Town in [the] Great & General Assembly” of Massachusetts. Goddard had been “appointed by the Commander in Chief, Wagon Master General to the army of the twelve united Colonies” and had managed the wagons and horses and oxen used in the fortification of Dorchester Heights in March 1776.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Goddard_House

On this day 250 years ago in Philadelphia, an estimated 4000 people attended a meeting in the statehouse yard in Philadelphia (in front of today’s Independence Hall). The meeting

unanimously voted that the instructions [against Independence] of the assembly to the delegates in Congress ought to be repealed; that the present assembly was unfit to frame a new government; that that body had no right to execute the resolves of Congress; that the present government [of Pennsylvania] was not competent to the present conditions

and with only one person dissenting, the meeting adopted the “Protest” drafted on May18 that renounced and protested against the “authority and qualification” of the Pennsylvania Assembly.

Furthermore, the meeting resolved that a provincial convention be chosen “by the people” to form a new government for Pennsylvania. The 4000 attendees of this meeting included many landless people who were not eligible to vote and they were intent on having a voice in selecting the new government.

Sources: “The Adoption of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776”, Paul Leicester FordPolitical Science Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Sep. 1895) at pp. 426-459 accessed at https://doi.org/10.2307/2139954; https://www.jstor.org/stable/2139954; Hogeland at 98