1-45.]
[Sidenote: It was not fully endowed with sovereignty.]
The Continental Congress was therefore not in the full sense a
sovereign body. A government is not really a government until it can
impose taxes and thus command the money needful for keeping it in
existence. Nevertheless the Congress exercised some of the most
indisputable functions of sovereignty. "It declared the independence
of the United States; it contracted an offensive and defensive
alliance with France; it raised and organized a Continental army; it
borrowed large sums of money, and pledged what the lenders understood
to be the national credit for their repayment; it issued an
inconvertible paper currency, granted letters of marque, and built a
navy." [6] Finally it ratified a treaty of peace with Great Britain. So
that the Congress was really, in many respects, and in the eyes of the
world at large, a sovereign body. Time soon showed that the continued
exercise of such powers was not compatible with the absence of the
power to tax the people. In truth the situation of the Continental
Congress was an illogical situation. In the effort of throwing off
the sovereignty of Great Britain, the people of these states were
constructing a federal union faster than they realized.
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