250 and Counting

Lachlan McIntosh was inadvertently responsible for a world record that stood for several years. In 1776 and 1777, McIntosh got into a bitter dispute with the Speaker of the Georgia Provincial Congress, a man named Button Gwinnett. It began when McIntosh succeeded Gwinnett as commander of Georgia’s Continental Battalion. Both men were Patriots but they were part of differing factions in the I...

Horatio Gates did move up quickly through the ranks, and partially because he knew George Washington well, but it was also because he had a pretty good handle on getting things done. As an Adjutant General, Gates was the man who ran the administrative side of the Continental Army, and is now thought of as the US Army’s first Adjutant General. He handled a lot of the logistics of keeping reco...

Jonathan Trumbull was first and—for a while—the only Colonial Governor to support the American Revolution. (Most of the other colony leaders either didn’t hold that title, or remained quiet, as if hedging their bets.) Througout the Revolution, Trumbull supported the troops in general and George Washington in particular, and was often a close advisor to Washington on military matters. So it w...

Thomas Stone was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress who served with strict instuctions to “arrive at a happy settlement and lasting amity” with the Mother Country. What’s more, he and his fellow delegates were told not to vote for any proposition that declared independence. Fortunately, just a few days before Richard Henry Lee put forth the resolution for Independence...

It may seem as though a large number of men were suddenly being appointed as South Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress, but in fact they weren’t all new appointees. Some of them had already been delegates and were re-appointed. It’s also worth noting that while many of them were supporters of Colonial rights, they were also under instruction to oppose motions for independenc...

William Henry Drayton was born in 1742 on his family’s plantation just outside of Charleston. The plantation was dedicated to growing rice. In 1764 he married Dorothy Golightly. In the early 1770s he was a Loyalist and enjoyed some of the perks that came with it. Then in 1774 he wrote a pamphlet supporting a Continental Congress and lost all his government jobs. That, go figure, radicalized...

North Carolina’s Orange County Regiment went through a lot of change in a very short amount of time. First they were divided, then reabsorbed into a different group, all in the span of about two weeks. Fortunately things stablilized for them then, but the resulting Hillsborough District Brigade of militia saw a lot of action over the next several years in the Carolinas and in Georgia. By the...

When Henry Knox wrote to George Washington apologizing for getting to Noweich,Connecicut so late, he had a pretty good excuse: he spent a bunch of money on hiring people to move materials down; and those people had trouble getting the job done. But then Henry Knox also tells the story of leaving the caravan briefly to look at Newport RI and determine whether it’s defensible. Imagine how he f...

If nothing else, the tenacity of the Continental Congress has to be admired, because sending a delegation to Canada, especially after the recent New Year’s Eve disaster in Quebec , and then the “ who knows how well it went ” trip in March, was a sign of either eternal optimism or an inability to get the hint. It was probably a little of Column A and a little of Column B. At any r...

It seems like only a year ago we were marking the date the war began at Lexington and Concord , and how it became Patriots’ Day. So we’re here once again: the battle ended with the British retreating into the city of Boston, and holding siege there for the better part of a year, until Washington was given several cannons brought down from Fort Ticonderoga, which vastly improved his sho...

When you have seven ships and you encounter a single ship belonging to the enemy, the Battle of Block Island teaches us that it’s still possible to be overconfident. Some people tried to frame the Battle of Block Island as a draw, but those people really weren’t paying attention. The HMS Glasgow took some damage, but far more damage was done to the ships that engaged her: The Cabot had...

One of the things I really appreciate about reading documents from this era is just how polite they were; George Washington’s letter to the NY Committee of Safety, when you read between the lines is an admonition wondering if that august body had lost their damn minds. One of the best examples of this is the Declaration of Independence itself. As Aaron Sorkin describes it in an episode of Th...

Mercy Otis Warren doesn’t get nearly enough love in our history books, and barely enough of it here, besides. Having said that, our episode a little over a year ago was a fun little tribute. Mercy Otis Warren was a playwright, a pamphleteer and a poet before, during and after the Revolution. Some of her plays were thinly veiled attacks on the British. She was self-taught and pretty brilliant...

The Fourth North Carolina Regiment got into some interesting battles, but in retrospect it feels as though they didn’t get a ton of love from the Army in general. (My delaying the show notes probably doesn’t do anything for their ego either, but I was so tired that I was practically hallucinating. But I didn’t want to delay the episode drop, and I didn’t want to do meaningl...

When Abigail Adams wrote her “remember the ladies” letter on March 31, she wasn’t just filling the page with anything that came into her head. Abigail Adams was quite intelligent and John treated her as an intellectual equal, seeking out her counsel on many matters. This in an era in which such things are rare. (And shame on us for giving it short shrift.) This also means that Jo...

When George Washington arrives in New York, things aren’t quite the way he’d like them to be, but he doesn’t really have time to worry about that. Construction of Fort Defiance had already begun, and before long the building of Fort Stirling would commence. Even though they were outmanned and outgunned, Washington was going to make sure that if a British victory were to happen in...

The Halifax Resolves was the first official action in which Independence from Great Britain was actually called for and approved. I have to admit that in earlier years, when driving up and down Interstate 95, when I got to Halifax County in North Carolina, I’d see a sign saying that this county is “Where the Spirit of Independence Was Born.” And this didn’t make a lot of se...

While there were a lot of smaller things going on on this day in 1776, there are typically multiple things going on for any given day. We often have to make choices regarding what we’re going to concentrate on, and don’t think we don’t feel a twinge of regret when we spot something else that happened on thus-and-such a date and had a moment of “Man, I wish we’d done t...

The construction of Fort Defiance in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn made perfect sense. That part of the peninsula sticks out into New York Harbor and provides an excellent view of anything that might be sailing in or out. Red Hook comes from the Dutch Roode Hoek , “hoek” translating to “point”, which can still be seen in modern-day maps. The whole area, what we now call...

We need your love! Don’t forget to share this show with your friends. Likewise, share it with your enemies; maybe they’ll become your friends as a result. The Lees were a very prominent family in Virginia, connected to most major events in that era of American History. So it makes sense that Francis Lightfoot Lee sees American Independence on the horizon, and that it was Richard Henry...

Esek Hopkins wasn’t just the Commander In Chief of the Continental Navy; he was the only Commander In Chief of the Continental Navy. As we noted just a day ago, the navy was disbanded shortly after the war (sold off, you may recall) until a few years later, when the US Congress decided we needed a US Navy and we had to start all over again. In the 1760s he was a merchant who once took on a s...

Captain John Barry was commanding the Lexington , looking for Lord Dunmore’s fleet when they more or less stumbled on the HMS Edward off the coast of the Virginia Capes. By most accounts the battle went on for two hours and included the Edward trying to lure the Lexington into the capes, though it’s not clear why. Possibly there was some help there in the form of other ships or land-ba...

We’ve mentioned a few times that boycotts and import restrictions didn’t have a huge impact on the British economy. After all, the British Empire was huge and America just didn’t have the financial clout to make such things hurt. The real issue, many Britons thought, was that America had the impudence to act at all. How dare these mere colonists think that they can behave in such...

The war was less than a year old, but heroes were already beginning to emerge, as we learn from contemporary writings. The arrival of George Washington in Providence, RI, was considered a big event each time he came through. In fact, it was such a big deal that the website for Stephen Hopkins’ house in Providence notes that “George Washington was a guest here. Twice.” I suppose t...

To say the Washington left the Longfellow House is putting the cart before the horse, because Washington was in it before Longfellow. The house originally belonged to John Vassall Jr, a Loyalist who had the good sense to get out of town when the shooting started. From July 16, 1775 until this day in 1776, Washington occupied it as his home and his headquarters. In 1791 Washington’s apothecar...