250 and Counting

We’ve mentioned the Willett family in prior episodes. They were a prominent family at the east end of Long Island, and in what we’d now call the Queens portion of New York City, at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of much else between the two. There are some landmarks around Long Island that have the Willet (the other ‘t’ dropped off somewhere in history) name att...

Peter Tondee and his wife Lucy ran Tondee’s Tavern in Savannah, Georgia. It was quite the location for revelry and such, and it was a popular meeting place up until it burned down in 1796, along with most of that city. Nowadays there’s a plaque in the side of the building where Tondee’s once stood. And on this day in 1775, the Sons of Liberty got together to throw the King a litt...

The Gunpowder Incident, Part 1 The Gunpowder Incident, Part 2 The Gunpowder Incident, Part 3 (OK, we lied then about it ending) It’s been nearly two months since the Gunpowder Incident started, and the entire time, the Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, has been trying to keep things from getting out of hand. He might— might —have succeeded, had something not happened on this day in 1775. The pos...

Silas Deane was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Connecticut, and by most accounts he did a decent job of it, although he did lose his position after a dispute with Roger Sherman. He stuck around Congress anyway, helping however he could. The following year he went to France as a secret delegate to drum up support for the Colonies. Unfortunately when he returned he was accused of financ...

Joseph Warren is definitely one of the unsung heroes of the American Revolution. We last heard from him on March 5, when he did his You Are There routine describing the events of the Boston Massacre at a memorial event (in fact, we used the same cover art). Today he’s more of the guy with the common sense solution: “Hey, instead of having a whole bunch of little militias fighting this...

When I was a kid learning about the American Revolution, we somehow got it in our heads that Hessians were some kind of Super Troopers, practically undefeatable and certainly not to be trifled with. And to a certain extent, that was true. Hessians were professional soldiers, that is, they were mercenaries. What’s more, they were well-trained and well-paid. But still in the long run, they wer...

With all the talk of our good relationships with Canada possibly going awry in the light of tariffs being levied [or not] against that country, it’s interesting to recognize that there was, in fact, a genuine relationship established before the Colonies broke away from England. It started in 1774, and continues on this day in 1775, and there’s one more attempt in the works. But for the...

As we noted a couple of days ago, the Continental Congress had its share of delegates who wanted to take one more crack at reconciliation. To that end they’d begun working on the Olive Branch Petition, though it wouldn’t be ready to send to Britain for several more weeks. So when a letter came in from Lord North to one of the delegates, and the letter offered its own form of reconcilia...

By all accounts, Nathan Cutler was an effective lawyer and legislator, as his frequent returns to the Massachusetts Legislature, and later the Maine House of Representatives, will attest. And when a governor of the State of Maine died, he was able to step into the role until the term of office expired. Cutler could have probably remained Governor, but he’d turned down positions before, so it...

Some of what you’ll be hearing today will have overlap with yesterday’s episode, but we all have shorter memories, we read in an article…uh, somewhere. But in the long run, that’s okay, because context is everything, and it’s important to understand what a big deal this particular incident was against the bigger picture. The post May 28, 1775: The Battle of Chelsea Cr...

Not to be confused with Chelsea of Battle Creek, who has worked for a famous cereal company for 28 years. (We may have made that up.) Lexington and Concord was the first “official” battle of the American Revolution, but at best it was a draw: Patriots took a bunch of losses, soldier-wise, but the British were forced to retreat under fire the entire time, and they wound up mostly seques...

Despite everything that had already happened, there was still a sizeable chunk of the Second Continental Congress who thought that some form of reconciliation with England was possible. Under their logic, the fact that there had been fighting at Lexington and Concord should have provided King George with ample proof that his policies were unpopular, and maybe he could back off on them a little bit...

Sometimes it’s kind of tough to bring an image to life through an audio podcast, but we thought it was important enough that you needed to see it somehow. It’s oftentimes hard for us to understand just how wild the Thirteen Colonies were back in the day. In 1775, New York City was roughly a square mile of the southern tip of Manhattan. Where today’s Wall Street is was literally a...

Even though he was President of the Second Continental Congress when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 (whoops…spoiler alert), it’s entirely possible that John Hancock would be just one more guy who signed the document, except for the fact that he signed his name so large. His signature is so large and so well-known that you can say to someone “Give me your John...

New Jersey has been pretty quiet since the Lexington and Concord fighting took place. But no more: today they came back…with a vengeance! The post May 23, 1775: New Jersey Gets Into the Act appeared first on 250 and Counting .

Up until now, New Hampshire has been rather quiet when it came to resisting British rule. But today was the day that “Live Free or Die” was more than a motto for their license plates, which had yet to be invented. New Hampshire already had militias, of course, but they had a much broader range of available men from whom to choose. In addition, they organized themselves into a tight fig...

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 Ho...

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 al...

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...

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 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...

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”...

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 Colonia...