250 and Counting

The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry that was first created by King George I in 1725. It’s typically bestowed by a monarch based on the advice of His/Her Majesty’s government. When General William Howe received his order, there was a single class called the Knight Companion. However, in 1815 this class was discontinued in favor of three separate classes...

By the time Charles Lee returned to duty, the Continental Army in New York was in a sad state of affairs. Many men had been injured or deserted. Supplies were low. Ammunition was low. Morale was low. And the British were up in the Bronx, gearing up for…something, who knows what. Lee had, of course, missed all the action in Brooklyn and Manhattan, so he brought a new perspective to the table....

Charles Lee was born in Great Britain and only came to British America in 1773, when he purchased an estate in western Virginia. It wasn’t his first time in America; he’d fought for the British in the French and Indian War and married the daughter of a Mohawk chief. Lee was injured in 1758 during an attack on Fort Ticonderoga. The following year he was part of the capture of Fort Niaga...

The Battle of Split Rock is really just a continuation of the Battle of Valcour, and a lot of it takes place in a location called Button Mould Bay (or Buttonmold Bay). So why is it called the Battle of Split Rock? That’s a fine question. On the western shore of Lake Champlain, just north of Button Mould Bay, is a formation called Split Rock Mountain. It rises sharply from the lake to an alti...

The Battle of Throgs Neck, or Throg’s Point, or a number of other names, was part of a move intended to trap Washington’s forces through flanking them from the north while Washington concentrated on the troops already in front of him on Manhattan Island. Washington did anticipate that this might happen, and sent American troops that way, but part of the problem that he had was that the...

The Battle of Valcour Island didn’t really take place on the island; rather it was in Valcour Bay, a strait between New York and Valcour Island, in Lake Champlain. After the failed invasion of Quebec the Continental forces retreated south to Fort Ticonderoga, at the south end of Lake Champlain. As they retreated they destroyed materiel they couldn’t use and left it behind in the relati...

The town created by Henry Shultz turned out to be as ephemeral as the man himself. Don’t go looking for Hamburg, South Carolina, because you’ll be sorely disappointed. At best what remains is a ghost town, unoccupied since 1929 after several floods came through. Perhaps the most notable one was in 1911, after which nearby cities built levees to protect themselves, but there wasn’...

It took a month to figure it out, but the British ship movement up the Hudson River was a sign that they’d finally decided how they were going to implement their plans. Rather than concentrating on New York City, which was going to be problematic because George Washington’s troops were pretty dug in over in Harlem Heights, Admiral Howe made the choice that ran closer to the original pl...

There are several names for the battle about to happen here, depending on how you view the geography; Battle of Throgs Neck, Battle of Throgs Point, Battle of Pells Point and believe it or not that isn’t even half of the total names given to this one conflict. After George Washington’s successful defense of Harlem Heights, which was a good place to be from a defensive standpoint, the C...

Before I tell you a little bit about the First Virginia General Assembly of 1776 (which I do have to differentiate with a date, so it’s not confused with the First Virginia General Assembly of 1619), I wanted to spend a moment on the show’s cover artwork. For some reason it was in putting today’s art together that I noticed the strong similarity between today’s artwork and...

We’ve talked so much about Silas Deane that I don’t have much new to share in this space, so I’ll tell you a little about his house. The house in today’s cover art was completed in 1769. It’s located in Wethersfield, Connecticut. The facade is asymmetrical because there was a porch at one time. Deane designed the house specifically to impress people and to project an...

The cover art for today’s episode is the historical marker for Bergen Neck Fort, in Bayonne, New Jersey. As someone who was born and raised on the other side of the East River, it’s supposed to be my duty to bust on New Jersey and say something like “there’s nothing interesting going on in Bayonne” and I’d mostly be right, but I will note that Mercer Park, just...

War bonds have been a thing since literally the beginning of the country. In this particular case, Britain had spent a few years taking as much hard currency (that is, gold and silver) from America as they could, which left us in a pretty bad state when it came to having something to back our money. The coin used for today’s cover art was actually a Continental Dollar, which was designed by...

The New Jersey Seal looks like a complicated and maybe convoluted project on its surface, but when you take a closer look, it becomes clear that in fact a lot of thought went into it and many of the individual pieces do tie together. New Jersey statutes are pretty specific about the Great Seal. Title 52, §2-1 reads: The great seal of this state shall be engraved on silver, which shall be round, of...

Thomas Jefferson, after many months in Philadelphia, finally got to return home today. One of the things that puzzled me early on in this podcasting project was the relative fluidity of the membership of the Continental Congress. People came in, people went out, and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. There didn’t appear to be a set schedule to it, and there were often periods in which...

Thomas Mifflin was the Continental Army’s first Quartermaster General, and he was replaced by someone who just couldn’t get the job done, so he was asked to return to the position. He was good at the Quartermaster duties, but he really preferred to be on the front lines. Oddly enough, though, when the soldiers at Valley Forge went through all their hardships, it was Mifflin who got the...

Mount Vernon, the mansion along the Potomac River in which George Washington lived, was originally built by his father when George was two years old. At that time, however, it was a rather modest house. Washington’s half-brother Lance lived in the house until his death in 1752. After a year or two, George leased out the property, but he did not own it outright until 1761. He did, however, ex...

When you only have two minutes to get the point across, you sometimes lose some of the nuances. This is a rundown of the second letter discussed today: Abigail Adams penned a poignant letter to her husband, John Adams, who was still serving in the Continental Congress but hoping to get home as soon as his replacement arrived. This correspondence highlights the immense psychological and economic st...

As I mentioned a few days ago , when Pennsylvania drafted its constitution and then voted on it, not everybody involved was on board with the idea. In June 1776, The Pennsylvania Provincial Conference resolved “that the present Assembly of the Colony is ‘not competent to the exigencies of affairs’ and that a Provincial Convention ought to be called for inaugurating a form of Colo...

In putting this episode together, I realized that I used this same image of Edward Rutledge back in the September 9 episode . However, I neglected to put the information for the image in the alt text. And that’s something I do try not to overlook. On the other hand, I was still hopped up on cold medication, so there’s that. And before I forget, I mentioned the censure of Esek Hopkins d...

The Continental Congress, in the wake of Washington’s recent letter, finally realized that they weren’t going to be able to defeat the British on their own. Some outside assistance would be needed. So on this day in 1776, they appointed a three-man commission to undertake a diplomatic mission to France, seeking money, arms and other materials. France, as we’ve mentioned before, w...

Back in April, Mike and I had the opportunity to visit the Massachusetts Historical Society, and we were able to spend some time with the man whose job it is to curate, analyze and organize the papers of the Adams family. Not just John and Abigail, but their descendants and maybe a few ancillary branches of the family. At one point in the conversation I said to him, “It seems like John and A...

George Washington was a practical man, and he realized that without a standing army, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the British. Sure, it’s good to have motivated people who are passionate about the cause, but when they have setbacks, they’re more likely to bail out, and that’s exactly what he was facing once the dust began to settle from his losses in New York. Many of...

The Dominguez-Escalante Expedtion was an effort to find an over-land route from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Monterey, California. Their journey took them north across the Colorado Plateau to Utah Lake Valley, which was a peculiar route at first, until you realize that they started with a route taken by Juan Rivera in 1765. Atanasi Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante were born in Mexico City an...

For a long time the debate about what Nathan Hale said before he was hanged was whether he said “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country” or “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” In more recent years, it’s emerged that what he said is probably lost to history, since contemporary accounts aren’t especially clear about it. Mo...