When modern Americans call themselves patriots, they are evoking a sentiment that is 250 years old.

In September 1774, nearly two years before the Declaration of Independence, delegates from 12 of the 13 Colonies gathered in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They quickly hammered out a political, economic and cultural program to unify the so-called “Patriot” movement against British rule.

As a Smithsonian curator who studies American identity, I explore the often forgotten ways that the First Continental Congress mobilized an unprecedented number of Colonists behind shared commitments. Most important, perhaps, they established critical terms by which contemporaries measured patriotism – and identified nonpatriots – through the early years of revolution.

The delegates met to address an immediate crisis. Great Britain’s Parliament had recently imposed a series of measures explicitly meant to punish the Colonies for the Boston Tea Party’s destruction of tea in Boston Harbor.

The so-called Intolerable Acts forcibly closed the port of Boston, radically curtailed the representative branches of the Massachusetts government and provided for quartering of troops in any of the Colonies without consent from their legislatures.

Taken together, these measures “threaten Destruction to the Lives, Liberty, and Property, of his Majesty’s Subjects in North America,” wrote the delegates to the Congress. They rapidly proposed “the most speedy, effectual, and peaceable Measure” they could imagine to counter the British punishments – a “Non-importation, Non-consumption, and Non-exportation Agreement,” called the “Continental........

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