This news was soon known at Pittsburgh, and rapidly spread through the adjacent country; and it was clear that in the proceedings to be taken at Parkinson's Ferry the question of resistance or submission must be definitively settled.

On August 14, 1794, the convention assembled; two hundred and twenty-six delegates in all, of whom ninety-three were from Washington, forty-nine from Westmoreland, forty-three from Allegheny, thirty-three from Fayette, two from Bedford, five from Ohio County in Virginia, with spectators to about the same number.
Parkinson's Ferry, later called Williamsport, and now Monongahela City, is on the left bank of the Monongahela, about half way between Pittsburgh and Red Stone Old Fort or Brownsville.

Brackenridge pictures the scene with his usual local color: "Our hall was a grove, and we might well be called 'the Mountain' (an allusion to the radical left of the French convention), for we were on a very lofty ground overlooking the river.

We had a gallery of lying timber and stumps, and there were more people collected there than there was of the committee." In full view of the meeting stood a liberty pole, raised in the morning by the men who signed the Braddock's Field circular order, and it bore the significant motto, "Liberty and no excise and no asylum for cowards." Among the delegates, or the committee, to use their own term, were Bradford, Marshall, Brackenridge, Findley, and Gallatin.

Before the meeting was organized, Marshall came to Gallatin and showed him the resolutions which he intended to move, intimating at the same time that he wished Mr.Gallatin to act as secretary.