Fireworks! Parades! Shows! Future U.S. President John Adams, who was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, said that Americans should have all of these things to celebrate the Declaration of Independence. Adams was jubilant when the Congress voted to declare independence from Great Britain. It had been a long journey for the Congress to agree to separate from their mother country. And it would be a still longer journey before the fight was over. Many of the most important decisions for the new United States of America were made by the members of the Second Continental Congress during the first eighteen months it met in Philadelphia. This is the story of those eighteen months.