250 and Counting

Anyone who’s been to Boston in the modern day has a hard time recognizing that the city of Boston was just the segment in the top center of the map. The area called Boston Neck is clearly marked at the bottom left, and wasn’t part of the city. The Continental Army’s line ran about where the blue line ends. (The blue line is modern-day Washington Street.) It was the city having th...

Sometimes when we research these shows we learn stuff that doesn’t have a lot to do with history—not directly—but is interesting nonetheless, and does have some historical impact. Hurricanes would be one of those things. On the east coast of the US, we pretty much take them for granted as a weather phenomenon. They’re definitely scary and destructive, and oftentimes the damage comes af...

Nothing beats the speed of gossip, and apparently the Virginia Gazette on this day had plenty of it to share. A few of the stories were quite serious, relating to events in both Virginia and Massachusetts. They closed out with a local story that had a more humorous edge to it…though it’s likely that the people involved had a hard time seeing the humor in it all. PS Why is there a pictu...

The cover art for today’s episode may be one of the most famous art pieces depicting an event of the American Revolution, and it happened under the Liberty Tree, which is clearly marked here. This event, the tarring and feathering of Loyalist John Malcolm, took place about 18 months earlier and shows Malcolm already tarred and feathered, and now he’s having (also marked) tea poured int...

The HMS Rose was a 20-gun ship of the Royal Navy, built in 1757. When hostilities broke out between the Colonies and the Crown, the Rose was tasked with preventing smuggling off the coast of Connecticut and (especially) Rhode Island. She spent the first few years of the Revolution in Narragansett Bay, in the Long Island Sound, in the Hudson River and down to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The Ros...

George Washington was a very good general and a disciplined soldier, but the fact that his men weren’t…well, that worried him a lot. He had a huge number of soldiers with him at Cambridge for the Siege of Boston. But since the British were so bottled up in the city, there weren’t many things for them to do other than patrol and keep an eye open for any possible moves the British...

As farfetched as it sounds today, considering the need to invade and occupy Canadian territory was considered important early in the war effort, largely because the colonies in the Great White North had been treated a little more favorably by Parliament. Therefore they were more likely to lean on the Loyalist side of things. In making the decision to do so, however, there were lots of things to co...

Frederick Graff feels like one of those guys who gets so little credit for what he did, you wind up feeling pretty badly for him. But the fact is, if not for him, over three dozen cities in the US wouldn’t have adequate water systems. So good on Frederick! Hoist your favorite beverage in his honor! (Though, in this case, it really should be water.) The post August 27, 1775: Frederick Graff a...

Rhode Island has been proactive about the war effort ever since the events at Lexington and Concord. And one thing you’re going to learn today is just how much coastline there is to Rhode Island, and why having a navy was important to them. But it’s important to get an outsider’s view of things, and this wasn’t necessarily the Continental Congress’ viewpoint. It took...

Today we take a look at two letters composed today: The first was an account of the activities around the Battle of Bunker Hill, from the time they were assigned to protect the hill, to the time they were finally defeated by the British—because they were out of ammunition. In the other letter, Thomas Jefferson composes a letter to a fellow Virginia politician in which he writes very specific prose...

Fraunces Tavern is an historic landmark and the oldest and most historic bar in New York City. That’s what it says on their website, so. At various points in its history, Fraunces Tavern served as a headquarters for George Washington, a venue for peace negotiations with the British, and housing federal offices in the Early Republic. The building is still open to the public ( there’s a...

When the Olive Branch Petition arrived in England, its contents hardly even mattered. There were elements of Parliament who were strongly disposed toward punishing the Colonies, and punishing them hard. The folks who were still pro-American were dwindling in number, because of the way it could affect their political futures. In short, the King had decided what he thought, and how he was going to h...

Things were heating up all over, but it was still especially prevalent in the northeast. This time around, problems are cropping up in New Hampshire. The HMS Scarborough was designated to keep the peace by patrolling the mouth of the Piscataqua River, but when relations broke down between the British and the colonists there (and with good reason), when the ship ran out of supplies they had to re-l...

We have two events taking place on this day. First, Rhode Island allows the death penalty for certain activities at sea. Next, word goes out that the Continental Army is in need of supplies…lots of supplies. It’s looking like General Washington isn’t seeing an end to the Siege of Boston anytime soon. The post August 21, 1775: Rhode Island Cracks Down appeared first on 250 and Cou...

Lots of prominent early Americans weren’t Americans to begin with. For instance, the first President of the United States who was actually born in the United States would be Martin Van Buren, our eight president. But while most of these folks were born on the North American continent, the subject of today’s episode was not. He was born in Bermuda. So while George Tucker was still a Bri...

In 1681, John Dryden said in his poem “Absalom and Achitophel”: Beware the fury of the patient man. I hear ya, Dryden, because that’s how I operate. And apparently George Washington operated the same way, because he initially took the high road, assuming that rumors about how American prisoners were being treated were just that, and giving General Gage the benefit of the doubt. B...

James Elliot was born in 1839 (like the stone says over there), in Massachusetts. Later on he became a legislator for the state of Vermont, which was neither a state nor even a colony when he was born; it was still disputed territory between New York and New Hampshire. Although Elliot was too young to participate in the American Revolution, his political fortunes waxed and waned…but mostly w...

Philip Schuyler served as a delegate from New York to the Continental Congress until June 1775 when he was appointed a major general to the Continental Army. We’ll hear more about him as we start to delve into the Invasion of Quebec later this year. Schuyler was on his way to Saratoga, NY when he got word that the tribes of the Six Nations—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Tusscaroras, Onondagas, Cayuga...

Just a couple of days ago we told you about the efforts on the part of the Continental Congress to get around its own rules in order to provide Washington’s army with the materials they needed to maintain the Siege of Boston. This time around, John Adams takes steps to do what he needs to do without running afoul of the Intolerable Acts. It’s like the legal equivalent of the obnoxious...

We do seem to be spending a lot of time with George Washington this week. It stands to reason, though: Washington was a very busy guy at this time, what with getting his army organized. That meant finding the men who were smart and reliable, to get the ones who weren’t into fighting shape. It also meant figuring out what resources he had and what he needed. What we’re learning is that...

There’s an episode of The West Wing in which Leo McGarry explains how, several years earlier, the President wanted to meet the Dalai Lama. The problem was that China was strongly opposed to such a meeting, so they arranged for an “accidental” meeting between the two: Set up a low-level meeting with someone else and leave the door open. The President wanders by, “Hey, how ya...

As you may recall, several months ago some members of the Continental Congress thought it was important to make one last effort to reconcile with Britain before things got worse. So they composed the Olive Branch Petition and sent it off to England. Transit times being what they were then, the petition took several weeks to get to its destination. In the meantime, things got worse. So when the Oli...

One thing that you can’t say about George Washington is that he was a slacker. He was constantly communicating with people, whether it was the orders of the day, making plans to organize his army, or writing letters. And Washington was absolutely prolific at writing letters. In this case, he’s writing to a Rhode Island merchant, thanking him for the advance notice of an incoming shipme...

While today is perhaps the earliest documented instance of George Washington expressing concern for his captured troops, it certainly wouldn’t be the last. For years he worried about this, largely because the British didn’t always consider the Continental Army to be a genuine army, nor did they consider themselves to be “at war” with America; instead this was some kind of p...

It’s peculiar, sometimes, how we know a lot of stuff about famous people, but we don’t often know much about their relatives. Sometimes we don’t realize that they even existed, John Adams had two brothers, one of whom died on this day in 1775. He wasn’t famous, but he did have some involvement with the Siege of Boston until illness struck. Something like that must have made...