What happened
The resolution was a means to an end, and the end was Nova Scotia. A week earlier Congress had received a petition from inhabitants of Passamaquoddy asking to be admitted "into the association of the North Americans," and on 2 November it appointed a committee of five to consider it. The five were Silas Deane, John Jay, Stephen Hopkins, John Langdon, and John Adams.
The committee's plan was an expedition. It called for two battalions of Marines drawn from the army General Washington commanded outside Boston, each of 500 privates, each divided into ten companies of 50. The reason given for that structure was practical: "that in fitting out any ship of War one of these Companies would compleatly man a small Vessell and two of them make a large Proportion of Marines for the largest."
The plan set a date. The battalions would march from Cambridge to Newburyport or Portsmouth and rendezvous on 1 December with ships and three months' provisions. On the afternoon of Friday, 10 November, Congress accepted the committee's report and passed the resolution the Corps still reads aloud every year.
The text matters, because most Marines know only its first line. It resolved "That two Battalions of marines be raised, consisting of one Colonel, two Lieutenant Colonels, two Majors, and other officers as usual in other regiments." It required "that particular care be taken, that no persons be appointed to office, or inlisted into said Battalions, but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea when required." It named them the first and second battalions of American Marines and counted them against the strength of the army before Boston.
A third resolution passed the same day left the expedition itself in Washington's hands. Hancock sent the resolves to Cambridge for the general's comment.
Washington's answer, dated 19 November and placed before Congress on 27 November, was no. He agreed to send two men to Nova Scotia for intelligence and called the rest impractical. His army was in the middle of a reorganization, and the maritime requirement meant the men "must be picked out of the whole army, one from this Corps, one from another," which would weaken every unit they came from. He suggested raising the battalions instead in New York and Philadelphia, "where there must be now numbers of Sailors unemployed?"
Congress dropped the expedition. The official history records that the idea "was abandoned and not heard again until late the following year." Congress did not drop the Marines. On 28 November it commissioned Samuel Nicholas a Captain of Marines, and the chronology notes that his commission "was confirmed prior to that of any other officer of the Continental naval service."
Nicholas was a Philadelphia Quaker born in 1744, the only son of a blacksmith. He had been admitted to the Schuylkill Fishing Company in 1760 and helped found the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club, which put him in the company of the Morrises, the Whartons, and the Cadwaladers. The official history says his prewar occupation is not definitely known, with "unsubstantiated indications that he was an innkeeper."
There were Marines before there was a resolution. The oldest surviving Continental Marine record is a payroll for the Enterprise on Lake Champlain that starts on 3 May 1775, and the first written mention of American Marines describes eight Connecticut Marines escorting money to Albany on 25 May. The chronology's estimate for the whole war is between 12,000 and 15,000 Marines of all kinds, Continental, state, and privateer.
What is less known
The Tun Tavern is where the Corps says it was born, and the History Division's own account of the Continental Marines is careful about it. Its biographical note on Robert Mullan says that "several published accounts, nearly all undocumented," credit the Tun as the principal rendezvous of the Continental Marines, that a Thomas Mullen was listed as its proprietor in 1770, and that one record book credits Robert Mullan with owning it. The note's conclusion is conditional: if Thomas and Peg Mullan were Robert's parents, the Tun "may well have been the Marine rendezvous."
What is documented is narrower and later. In 1776, when Congress raised four Marine companies for the new frigates, Captain Robert Mullan "established a rendezvous at his inn, Tun Tavern on the east side of South Water Street," and his lieutenants recruited from there as far as Lancaster and Kent County, Maryland. Among the men Mullan enlisted were two Black Marines, Isaac Walker and a man recorded only as "Orange Negro," who "received the same pay and allowances as the white enlisted man."
The birthday is also younger than the Corps. The Corps has celebrated 10 November officially only since 1921, when the observance was fixed on the date of the resolution.
The reading
The mission that created you will not be the mission that keeps you.
Congress wrote two things into the resolution. It wrote a purpose, which was Nova Scotia, and it wrote a standard, which was men "so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea when required." The purpose was dead in seventeen days. The standard is the reason there was anything to send to sea the next spring.
I lead Marines in a Reserve unit, and I've never known a unit whose mission outlived the next reorganization. Requirements arrive from above, get renamed, and leave. What stays is whatever the unit decided about who gets in and what they have to be able to do.
That is the useful part of the founding. The men who wrote the resolution did not know the expedition would be cancelled before the rendezvous date. They still wrote the entry standard as if the organization would outlast the reason for it, and it did.
The standard was also specific: men who could serve to advantage by sea when required, which is a test a recruiting officer can apply to one person at a time. A standard you cannot apply to one Marine on one day is a preference.
Leading that way has a cost. A standard that outlives its mission looks like waste to the people who pay for training time, and you'll be asked, more than once, why you still require something nobody is currently asking for. Holding it costs hours you could spend on the tasking of the month, and it costs the argument every time.
The alternative is to build for the current mission only, which is faster and feels responsive. It produces a unit that has to be rebuilt every time the purpose changes, which in the Reserve happens about as often as the commanding officer does. This argument comes back on Day 351, where the Corps has the same fight over what it is for.
The question
Which requirement does your section still enforce because of a mission it no longer has? Before your next drill weekend, decide whether it is a standard worth keeping or a habit nobody has questioned, and tell the Marine it lands on hardest which one it is.