250 and Counting

Once the preamble to Congress’ resolution had been written and unanimously approved back on May 15 , it really was just a matter of when , rather than whether , America was going to formally declare itself as a separate state from England. The hardest part was getting all the ducks in a row, as the expression goes. The biggest reason that independence hadn’t already been declared is th...

When the Third NY Provincial Congress convened on this day, chances are that nobody really got their hopes up. By this point, that body had already met a few times, so it was generally known where they stood when it came to the Independence Question. And sure enough, when they sent delegates to the Continental Congress, they sent those delegates with instructions to oppose Independence. Rather tha...

Early in the war, it became apparent that the treatment of prisoners was going to be a very lopsided affair. British soldiers were treated humanely and with dignity. American soldiers…not so much. As we noted last August , when Americans were captured they weren’t treated as prisoners of war but rather as criminals who didn’t deserve dienity. During the course of the war, over 80...

Simon Fraser was born in Hoosick, New York, which is close to where New York’s border meets with those of Vermont and Massachusetts. He was the youngest of eight children. He moved to Montreal when he was 14 and worked with his uncles in the fur trade, apprenticing to the North West Company the following year. Now, the North West Company had already commissioned someone to find a river route...

Captain enlisted in the Continental Army not long after the battles at Lexington and Concord. He was commissioned as a Captain and immediately put to work capturing British ships. One of the more surprising things about the battle between the USS Franklin is not so much the victorious outcome, which was starting to feel a little bit of a foregone conclusion at this point, or that the ships moving...

About that title: I regret nothing. Dennis Pennington gets a lot of well-deserved attention for his political work in Indiana, but the fact is that what he did affected the entire Northwest Territory, which also includes most of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota east of the Mississippi River. He was also instrumental in the anti-slavery movement in that area, first supporting like-...

Amos Eaton, a co-founder of the Renssalaer School (later Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute) in Troy, NY, managed to flip scientific thinking on its head. He believed in having students learn through experimental demonstrations: let them apply the science in the field and then break it down later in the lab. This flew directly in the face of the traditional liberal arts tradition, which involved the...

If the name Henry Knox sounds familiar to you, give yourself a prize. Knox was the man in charge of the Noble Train of Artillery , in which large amounts of ordinance were taken from Fort Ticonderoga and transferred to Boston. The presence of the new guns, with greater range than either side had at that point, led to the British finally evacuating the city a relatively short time later. But by thi...

I have to admit that this small chunk of history has me a little confused, because if you’re going to vote on a resolution, shouldn’t you have the wording of that resolution in place? But the Second Continental Congress did vote on May 10 , and now they’ve written a Preamble to the Resolution, largely drafted by John Adams. And from many angles, it looks like a formal break from...

Thomas Jefferson gets most of the credit for writing the Declaration of Independence, but Thomas Jefferson’s background clearly informed his writing of that document. That’s what Mike talks about in today’s episode. In this space I’d like to tell you a little about Declaration House. The building was newly erected at the time Jefferson rented out a room from its builder, a...

Few people outside of Georgia know who Jett Thomas was, and everybody’s kind of okay with that. Thomas was instrumental in ensuring that major buildings in Athens (Ga.) and Milledgeville were constructed specifically to support education and jurisprudence, and as a result two towns and an entire county are named after Jett Thomas today. Now, that’s validation. About the Federal Road: t...

Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, was France’s Foreign Minister from 1774 to 1787 during Louis XVI’s reign. France was still salty about having lost the Seven Years’ War. On this side of the pond we refer to it as the French and Indian War, but this was a global affair that took place mostly in Europe. France and Austria took on Great Britain and Prussia, and a few other natio...

Ugh. Before I tell you any more about The Grove, I have to take care of a couple of corrections. If you’ve listened to the episode already, you might be a little confused about Mike telling you that you’d be in Nova Scotia. Obviously he got his Halifaxes crossed. Second, after I’d completed today’s episode and finished all the post-production stuff, I discovered that Willie...

You may remember a couple of the Colonies chose to endorse independence without necessarily declaring it . This suggested that a formal declaration from the Colonies as a whole was likely imminent. You may also remember that motions by the Second Continental Congress needed to be voted on unanimously in order to pass, so they could “speak as one voice.” To that end, the Congress recomm...

Artemas Ward was the man left in charge of things when Washington made his trek to New York, so you know that this was a man that Washington trusted. As a result they corresponded with one another frequently. So it only makes sense that once in a while, the two would write to one another on the same day, and this was one of those days. Washington wrote to Ward his concern that the British would re...

The HMS Roebuck was a ship that tangled with the Americans numerous times. One advantage that she had over other British ships was a relatively shallow draught (vertical distance between keel and waterline), which proved helpful when it came to navigating some of the shallower waters off the American coast. The HMS Roebuck had already had an encounter just south of today’s events back in Mar...

Abigail Adams had some thoughts when it came to arbitrary power, and how fragile it is. But you get all that from the episode itself. Instead, here in the show notes, I’m going to point out that I’m the one who took the photo used for today’s cover art. The painting hangs at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and because they keep it relatively dim there, you can see the refle...

The advantage of having a large military force, as the British did, is that they were able to concentrate on multiple places at once with experienced soldiers. So while they had one group getting ready to move in on New York, they had others preparing to take on the southern states. Enter Sir Peter Parker and Lord George Cornwallis, who arrived in North Carolina on this day. Parker and Cornwallis&...

Given the fact that Valentine Efner (sometimes spelled “Effner”) skipped so many roll call votes in Congress, it’s a wonder he ran for Representative in the first place. We have to think that Efner was an informal kind of representative, and being in the rarefied air of Congress had him missing the farm life, to which he returned immediately after his term of office had ended. PS...

May 4th is Rhode Island Independence Day, marking the date that one of our smallest states became the first of the Original Thirteen Colonies to declare its independence from Great Britain. Almost. Here—as the late, great Paul Harvey would say—is the rest of the story. All of the colonies were required to sign oaths of allegiance to King George III, or whoever was in charge at the time. On May 4,...

George Washington was good at what he did because he’d studied military discipline, among other things. He read a lot about tactics and famous battles, and the importance of a well-trained army, and then he would meet with veterans and engage with them to learn what they thought. During the Seven Years’ War he asked to use some of those techniques with the men under his command. Someti...

We’ve noted before that France had been helping the United Colonies for a little while, using gray markets and go-betweens in order to give themselves some plausible deniability. Britain and Spain were both a little salty about having been beaten by Britain in the past, so they were only too happy to have somebody else fighting them while they stood by and watched. And in the long run it did...

When it comes to breaking away from England, there are a lot of “Firsts” involved. Just a few weeks ago, delegates from North Carolina are the first in the Continental Congress to have the authority to vote for Independence–as long as someone else proposes it first. Today, Massachusetts Bay becomes the first to declare itself independent from Britain, largely for financial reason...

Reverend Samuel Cooper has an interesting item in his family history. His grandfather was Samuel Sewall, a judge in the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was involved with the Salem witch trials in 1692-3. Now, to be fair, Sewall did apologize for his part in that bit of foolishness, and he’s also known for writing an essay in 1700 criticizing slavery. As far as Cooper himself, he was an act...

It was called the Bayley Hazen Road, named after the two engineers who worked on it, and it was an attempt to make it easier for troops and equipment to get from New England to Canada. Prior attempts to move materiel were fraught with sickness and the need to navigate various forms of terrain, including waterways and deep mud, which made the journey so much longer that it wasn’t practical an...