250 and Counting

Like so many people who lived in upstate New York in the Revolutionary era, David Woods was an immigrant from Ireland when he came over with his family in 1775. New York was unusual compared to the other colonies in that the overwhelming percentage of the population was immigrants; as a result it became a bit of an enclave for people from the UK and the Netherlands, so Woods blended in well. As a...

When the folks in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, heard about the events at Lexington and Concord a month earlier, they were quite incensed. So much so that they decided they were going to declare independence from Britain. Maybe. Maybe not. Tune in as Mike explains the controversy. The post May 20, 1775: The Mecklenburg Declaration appeared first on 250 and Counting .

Baltimore has a lot of historic pride in its street names. Nearly all of them can be traced back to an historic figure or event: Key Highway, named after Francis Scott Key. (Also the Key Bridge, but we’re all still sad about that.) Fort Avenue, leading to Fort McHenry. And while I’m at it, McHenry Street, about two miles from the fort. The town also has John Street, Eager Street and Howard Streets...

People seem to have an inherent need to excuse their own unfortunate behaviors. One of the most common is to point to someone else breaking a rule and making it about them. Or, in the case of most of the battles of the early American Revolution, the colonists seemed always to be the aggressor, making their actions strictly an act of self-preservation. But what happens when you’ve captured all thei...

Is it just me or does Daniel LeRoy look a lot like actor Richard Kind? Daniel LeRoy was born in upstate New York and started to put together a pretty good settlement, but an unfortunate choice on his part caused him to lose it all. So he moved west and rebuilt his life and, by most accounts, it’s reasonable to say that he did rather well in the Michigan Territory, and in the State after that area...

While the Declaration of Independence was still about 15 months away, a small community in the far western reaches of Pennsylvania decided not to wait around for it to happen, and they took matters into their own hands. The Hanna’s Town Resolves was probably the most direct challenge to British rule to date, if you don’t count the stuff that involved shooting. Unfortunately, in the end the entire...

The Second Continental Congress has only been convened for about five days and things are already heating up for them. Delegates are still arriving. Lexington and Concord has upset their original plans so they’re making alternate plans. And even the alternate plans they made five days ago are being amended. And then Virginia comes in with some crazy idea about Independence? Will the madness never...

The Thirteen Colonies didn’t have a lot in the way of a navy to help them with their battles, especially not against perhaps the biggest and best navy ever up until then. What they did have was people who were willing to act in lieu of a navy. Some of them did it out of sheer patriotism, and others were a little more mercenary about it. Specifically, privateers. Now, “privateers” sounds a little l...

Dr. Lyman Hall gets a little name recognition because he was a strong supporting character in the play/film 1776, but he was more involved in the Revolution than that. While Georgia (eventually) sent five delegates to the Continental Congress, Hall was one of the three who regularly attended and signed the Declaration of Independence. For instance, he ensured that food and medicine got to Colonial...

A fort was built at Crown Point in 1730 by the French. The British attacked it twice before the French finally destroyed it in 1759. That same year the British began building a new fort for defending against the French. In 1773 it was partially destroyed in a fire. Since nobody had seriously threatened the area in thirteen years, the British didn’t really care and chose to keep a skeleton staff of...

When the Second Continental Congress convened, they spent a little time with the formalities of going over credentials and establishing some ground rules. But right after that, they got right down to business. They knew that they were going to move into a wartime footing immediately. They also knew that they wanted to operate in an “official” capacity, so they took the time to review, on the recor...

Mike has done a pretty good job of covering the basic story in today’s episode, so I thought I’d spend a minute with you on the cover art. This image, which had to be cropped to fit the parameters of podcast art, is called a “conjectural work”, because it was created many years later based on accounts of people who were there. I’ve also seen the phrase “idealized depiction,” but I think “conjectur...

When it comes to the War of 1812, Baltimore and the Fort McHenry get to eat for free for a long time, because they get most of the good stories: the star-spangled banner and Francis Scott Key, the battle at North Point, the Shot Tower being briefly the highest structure in America, and so on. But there was a lot of fighting going on elsewhere, particularly in upstate New York, around the Great Lak...

If you’re like me, you’ll hear a less-common name from history and have yourself a moment of “Wait…I should know that name, but from where…?” William G. Weld was one of those names, but it turns out that William wasn’t necessarily the famous one here; it’s just that he was a direct ancestor of so many other people named Weld. Listen in and learn about the patriarch of a family of merchants and pol...

Joseph Wanton was elected governor of Rhode Island in 1769, and every year he was re-elected to the position. By all accounts he did a good job and looked out for his constituents. Then came the events at Lexington and Concord. Wanton wasn’t a Loyalist, but he did think that a war with England wouldn’t be especially productive, and when the General Assembly thought that it was time to raise an arm...

First, I think we need to address the elephant in the room that Mike brought up during this episode: Winona Ryder comes third out of four; Katharine Hepburn and Saoirse Ronan are way ahead. And let’s just pretend June Allyson didn’t happen. Mary Sherwood is one of those authors who, it appears, was fated to fade into obscurity after dying despite the huge popularity they enjoyed in life. It still...

Alexander McNair wasn’t especially well-educated, but he became a judge and a governor of a territory and then that same area when it became a state, so he must have had something going on besides high-level friends. Then again, as governor, he wasn’t able to get a ton of stuff done, and when his term ended he took on a Federal job just for the money. So, for a guy who spent so much time in the “S...

As we noted a few days ago, both Payton Randolph and George Washington managed to quell a couple of militia-based riots which would have resulted in the torching of the Royal Governor’s mansion. Both of those riots came from Fredericksburg. What nobody counted on, however, was that militia from other parts of Virginia had the same idea to march on Williamsburg and wreak a little havoc. They were l...

More often than not, items that appear in the Bill of Rights derive directly from actions that the British took at one time or another in the past. Ban guns, will you? Here’s a nice Second Amendment. Ban free speech? Here’s your First Amendment. And so on. Today’s edition could be considered a Part Two to the events of April 16, when the Massachusetts Spy had to pack up shop and hightail it out of...

Rachel Walker Revere was Paul Revere’s second wife. When he married her, he’d only been a widower for a few months, so clearly she made a big impression on him, especially since they remained together until her death in 1813 (one year after the portrait in today’s artwork was painted), and he didn’t remarry after that. Rachel was a very supportive wife to Paul, by most accounts, but she was also w...

Wellll….ordered to be destroyed. But it didn’t happen. Oddly, it was also quite susceptible to the foibles of weather, so when the British took South Carolina back five years later, it was assumed that the garrison had been destroyed on purpose, but nobody knows for sure. The post May 1, 1775: Invasion of Quebec, and a Fort is Destroyed appeared first on 250 and Counting .

Nova Scotia could have been the fourteenth state, except we ruined it for them over the whole fishing rights thing. And then when push came to shove, they decided that rebellion wasn’t for them, and they sent troops down to Boston to help the British there. Ain’t that a kick in the head! The post April 30, 1775: The Fourteenth Colony appeared first on 250 and Counting .

Jonathan Trumbull was one of only two men to serve as governor of a Colony and of a State. (Nicholas Cooke of Rhode Island was the other.) This, to us, gives him a kind of air that perhaps he could be trusted by all parties to act appropriately. And when push came to shove, Trumbull found himself in the position of having to support the Colony rather than the crown, as you’ll see in today’s episod...

The war was hot in Massachusetts, but it was still cold elsewhere. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t rebellious activity going on, since by this point everyone knew what was going on up north. It manifested itself in different ways. In Maryland, it appeared that Patriots were straight-up lying to the Royal Governor in order to deprive the British troops of some of their arms and gunpowder sto...

Josiah Quincy—who we’ve talked about before; remember that portrait?—would have been one of the more prominent men we speak of when we use venerated tones about the Founding Fathers, had it not been for the fact that he died just as the war was getting started. The post April 26, 1775: Josiah Quincy II Dies at Sea appeared first on 250 and Counting .