HCC: AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE WAR

The Historical Crisis Committee convenes in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, as the Second Continental Congress assembles in the shadow of Lexington and Concord. Delegates will sit as representatives of the thirteen colonies — members of the Continental Congress, commanders of the nascent Continental Army, agents dispatched to the courts of Paris and Madrid, and the political leaders tasked with binding a rebellion into a republic. The question before them is no longer whether to resist the Crown, but on what terms — and at what cost — that resistance becomes a war for independence.

The committee will engage with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the appointment and supply of the Continental Army, the financing of a war without a treasury, the cultivation of foreign alliances in the courts of France and Spain, and the management of a fractious coalition of colonies whose interests rarely align. Crisis updates will draw on the archival record of the Revolutionary War — battlefield reports, intercepted correspondence, diplomatic dispatches, and the political pressures of the home front.

HCC is a committee for delegates drawn to the architecture of state-building under fire, who recognise that a revolution is won not only on the battlefield but in the courts, the treasuries, and the foreign chanceries that decide whether it ever had a chance.