250 and Counting

While Benjamin Franklin departed for France on this day, actually having Franklin in France wouldn’t happen until early December. Remember, he was traveling by ship and it took a few weeks to cross the Atlantic Ocean. What’s more, as Mike mentions, it would take him over a year to secure the support that we needed. In fact, I cheated a little on the artwork, which depicts Franklin pres...

King George III offered up some naval incentives throughout 1776. Seamen who enlisted would get bonuses depending on their level of experience, but the Royal Navy wasn’t above impressing sailors into service, either. However, it’s also worth noting that King George also put some disincentives out there as well. For instance, in November of 1776 he forbade British mariners and seafaring...

White Plains today is the county seat of Westchester County, the county that directly abuts New York City to the north and connects it to the mainland. But back when the Dutch started settling in the area, starting at the south end of Manhattan, the region was being used for farming by the Weckquaeskeck tribe of the Wappingers, and was called “Quarropas” by those people. (And I knew Mi...

Holding the show to two minutes exactly (because we also have a few radio listeners) sometimes makes it tough to tell the whole story of the rules behind en taille , or entail. Because, you see, en taille doesn’t just refer to land in Virginia; it refers to all property. And that includes slaves. And Jefferson, who was absolutely a slave owner (he inherited a little over 50 slaves when he wa...

Oddly enough, having an episode about the Battle of Mamaroneck is one of those times when it pays to have grown up in New York. I saw that note in our common research document, then I clocked the date and said to myself, “No way is Mike going to know how to pronounce that.” So I gave him a little coaching. We’ve done this before, with each of us having to coach the other on pronu...

Calling George Izard a “Nepo Baby” might be laying it on a little bit thick, but it’s pretty clear he came from some privileged people. His mother was Alice DeLancey. She was the niece of New York Governor James DeLancey and a descendant of Stephanus Van Cortlandt and Gertrude Schuyler. And if you’re paying attention as you move around New York, you’ll realize that th...

The Delaware Assembly was ahead of most other states in our fledgling nation, in part because they’d declared independence before anyone else. Back in June, as you may remember , Delaware declared its independence simultaneously from Britain and from Pennsylvania, of which it was considered a part. (This is why Pennsylvania is the only one of the thirteen colonies to be entirely landlocked,...

Before I get into the events of New Rochelle, I have to confess that I’m kind of hating today’s artwork, and it’s not even published yet. Well, if I have to look at it then so do you. They can’t all be gems. The Battle at Pell’s Point had the Continental Army putting up more resistance than any reasonable British general should expect, so General Howe knew that reinfo...

The Battle of Pell’s Point, also known as the Battle of Pelham, was an important battle of the Revolution that doesn’t get the attention that so many others get, largely because of the When and Where of the battle, and the fact that it wasn’t a huge win or loss for either side. What it did do, however, was provide some cover and distraction from the fact that Washington was still...

When Washington’s Council of War (with a single exception) determined that sticking around New York City was a bad idea, the next step was deciding which way to go, and how to go about it. To a certain extent, the decision was made for them, because the British had pretty well sewed up the Hudson River, which meant that getting across and into New Jersey stealthily would be problematic. The...

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...