On this day 250 years ago at Fort Chambly in Canada, Brig. Gen. John Sullivan and his officers held a council of war and concluded that “we are driven to the sad necessity of abandoning Canada” because the men were “lifeless” suffering from “small-pox, famine and disorder.” The Continentals burned the forts at Chambly and St. John’s that they had captured in the Fall of 1775 and boarded boats to Isle Aux Nois, eleven miles south of Chambly on the Richelieu River. In addition to the Continental Army soldiers, the families of several Canadians who had enlisted in the Continentals joined the retreat as refugees, including Charlotte de La Saussaye Hazen, wife of Col. Moses Hazen, and Charlotte Riverain Antill, wife of Lt. Col. Edward Antill , and their two children. Theotist Paulint, wife of Captain Antoine Paulint (who had immigrated from France to Canada), later recorded that her husband “took his family me his wife & four children and abandoning his Land & house & all his property he could not carry went to St. John where we embarked in a” bateaux for New York.

Source: Mayer, Congress’s Own at 66-67.

On this day 250 years ago in Philadelphia, a “provincial conference of committees,” with delegates from each county committee of inspection in Pennsylvania, was held. As its first order of business the next day, the conference resolved unanimously that “the present Government of this province is not competent to the exigencies of our Affairs,” and called for a Provincial Convention “for the express purpose of forming a new Government in this Province, on the authority of the People only.” Next the conference extended the vote to every man of twenty-one years of age, who had been one year in the colony and had paid taxes, provided

he should take the following test, or oath of affirmation:
I, , do declare that I do not hold myself bound to bear allegiance to George the Third, King of Great Britain, etc., and that I will not by any means, directly or indirectly, oppose the establishment of a free government in this province by the convention now to be chosen; nor the measures adopted by the congress against the tyranny to be established in these colonies by the court of Great Britain.

Sources: Paul Leicester Ford, “The Adoption of the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776”, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Sep. 1895) at 448-49, accessed athttps://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2139954.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3Ac02e65801bed23e5fa4a42d0eaf29aad&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1; https://www.carpentershall.org/pages/pennsylvania-from-colony-to-state