250 and Counting

Copy of a letter sent in April 1776 by Washington to the Continental Congress. via Library of Congress. George Washington was a prolific letter writer, and as such he also tended to receive a great number of letters. We have to day three missives sent to George Washington on this day in 1776. (Pardon my brevity for this episode; as I write this my wife has spent the better part of the day in the h...

This appears to be a colorized print taken from a monument relief. This is actually Washington’s Council of War from shortly before the Battle at Monmouth. George Washington was a good leader in the sense that he knew what his troops needed, but he was also a good leader because he sought the counsel of others before making decisions. Washington would call a Council of War before he made big...

Samuel Adams in 1772, painted by John Singleton Copley. via Wikimedia Commons and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Samuel Adams made a point of telling his second cousin John Adams that he didn’t have a lot of time to write. Then he cranked out 570 words of worries about the language in the New Hampshire constitution, which had been ratified ten days earlier. Then the next day he tacked on...

Correspondence from Charles Thompson, Secretary to the Second Continental Congress, to George Washington. via Library of Congress. As George Washington’s aide-de-camp, Joseph Reed was privy to a lot of things on his Commander-in-Chief’s mind. And it shows in the level of prose that Washington uses when writing to Reed, because it’s much less formal. Compare that to the letter he...

Portrait of John Maugridge Snowden, Third Mayor of Pittsburgh. From the Snowden Family Collection via Wikimedia Commons. What can I say about John M. Snowden that I didn’t tell you about in the episode itself? The truth is, he’s not a well-documented man, nor is his family, even though (as I noted) his wife was an advisor to George Washington for awhile. I can note that I foreshortened...

Prudence Park on Prudence Island, from a 1930s-era postcard. Via Wikimedia Commons. Prudence Island, in the Narragansett Bay off Rhode Island, didn’t have a lot of strategic value to anyone. What it DID have was livestock, and the British were hard-pressed to get supplies, especially for Boston, which had been under siege since mid-April. And, as Mike notes during the episode, neither army w...

Portrait of Julia Stockton Rush by Charles Willson Peale, painted in 1776. Sure, most of the episode is about Benjamin Rush, but who would YOU rather look at? Right. Although she was quite young when she married Benjamin Rush, Julia Stockton was probably as brilliant and opinionated as her husband was. Not long after they married on this day in 1776, Benjamin was appointed Surgeon General to his f...

The original cover of Common Sense. via Wikimedia Commons. Okay, so here’s the thing about Common Sense : It’s not as though Thomas Paine came up with prose so extraordinarily clear that everyone suddenly smacked their foreheads and said, “My God! Independence! Of COURSE!” In fact, many people thought Common Sense was crazy, and others considered it an incitement to the all...

A miniature portrait of Josiah Martin, artist unknown, circa 1775. Josiah Martin was the last Royal Governor of North Carolina, and while he spent the first few months of the job in New York, he probably wouldn’t have a reputation as an especially bad governor if he hadn’t been hampered so much by circumstances that were in place before he got the job. There were money issues that his...

Portrait of John Burgoyne c. 1766, by Joshua Reynolds. Via the Frick Collection. Mike wasn’t kidding when he said that, had it not been for his part in the Revolution, John Burgoyne would be best known as a playwright. He wrote several plays, most of them quite successful. Interestingly enough, the play Mike cites today is not often listed among his oeuvre . So we get the feeling that &#8220...

Portrait of Jonathan Trumbull and his wife Faith, painted by his son John Trumbull, 1778. via New York Public Library. There are many letters between George Washington and Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull. Presumably something as simple as proximity to another leader was attractive to both of them, especially in an age where letters took several days to go a hundred miles. We have to presume...

Oil painting of William Moultrie, who was a General when this was painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1782. From a strategic standpoint, Charleston Bay was probably much more attractive to the British than Boston Harbor was. The northern harbor was more open to the sea, there were a bunch of small islands to navigate around, and the weather could get quite treacherous. Meanwhile in South Carolina,...

The manuscript for the first New Hampshire constitution. Via New Hampshire Secretary of State social media account. It’s fun to say that the New Hampshire Constitution was the first time that an American commonwealth constitution, and that several of the others quickly followed, as though a dam had broken. But the fact is, the various colonies were putting together their own constitutions at...

Historic US Marine Corps portrait of Samuel Nicholas, their first Commandant. Artist and date of creation unknown. Although he held the title “Captain of Marines” at this point, Samuel Nicholas was the first officer commissioned to the Continental Marines (later the US Marine Corps), and by tradition is therefore considered to be the first Commandant of the Marines. Hey, are YOU going...

A 1913 painting of the Continental Congress in session, by John Ward Dunsmore. This is supposed to be the moment that John Adams recommends George Washington to lead the Continental Army. I couldn’t find any images of Lord Drummond, at least not the correct Lord Drummond. It was called “A Plan of Accommodation,” and it had been in the works for most of the previous year before Lo...

The Mount Riga Ironworks Furnace in Salisbury, CT. There was more than one furnace at this location; this is the surviving one. It’s on the National Register of Historic Locations and a lovely place to visit if you’re in the northwest corner of the state. The Mount Riga Iron Furnace isn’t an especially unique artifact on the east coast of the US. In fact, as someone who lives in...

“Incident in the Burning of Norfolk,” engraving, artist unknown. Originally appeared as an illustration in Cassell’s History of the United States in the late 1870s. Happy New Year to you! The burning of Norfolk was the follow-up to the Battle of Great Bridge and the Patriot occupation of that town. Colonel Howe probably overplayed his hand with this one, and the consequences were...

The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec (detail), by John Trumbull, 1786. Montgomery was struck in the head by grapeshot, so it probably wasn’t nearly as tidy as this. While hindsight is very much a 20/20 vision, it’s still worth exploring why the Battle of Quebec went so poorly for the American side: While General Montgomery was clever enough to attack during a storm,...

Back on October 8 , the Continental Army determined that Blacks were no longer to be permitted to enlist, and that existing soldiers would not be allowed to re-enlist. But on this date, George Washington changed his mind. Was he suddenly an abolitionist? Not a chance. He owned slaves until the day he died. This was a more pragmatic decision. It was borne of the fact that he and his staff suddenly...

The Pine Tree Flag, which was the ensign of the Massachusetts State Navy. There are a few variations of this, because the original was destroyed by the British. While the Massachusetts Naval Militia was pretty much wiped out in 1779 ( oops, spoiler alert ), it wasn’t the end of a state-based Navy for Massachusetts. Massachusetts began to rebuild, but in 1780 a new state constitution was adop...

The plaque in Carpenters Hall, commemorating the table where the Secret Committee met with Julien Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir. You’ll remember I mentioned Samuel Adams in this space a couple of days ago, as a member of the Continental Congress, and as a member of several committees, most of them related to defense. He was almost certainly at the heart of the events of today that took plac...

Yeah, I cheated and used the same image from last week. While he didn’t use a rattlesnake, Benjamin Franklin was the guy who came up with the original “Join or Die” snake image [ right ]back in 1754. (At least most people give him credit for it.) It was based in a superstition that if you cut up a snake into pieces and then reassembled those pieces before sunset, the snake could...

Portrait of Samuel Adams, 1772. by John Singleton Copley – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Wikimedia Commons Most of us have a pop culture view of the American Revolution period, and some of us go so far as to have some idea of what happened via the 1970 film 1776 . Oddly enough, that movie has both a ton of accuracy with its facts (but not necessarily in the right order), and a ton of dram...

Cover art for December 25, 1775: A portrait of Major General Howe, artist unknown. From the book A brief history of the North Carolina troops on the Continental establishment, by: Charles Lukens Davis & Henry Hobart Bellas, published 1896. The Battle of Great Bridge may be over, but its effects linger on. Lord Dunmore, the former Royal Governor of South Carolina, communicated to General Robert...

Joseph Warren conferring with Israel Putnam before the battle at Bunker Hill, at which Warren was killed. Mike’s pretty much covered the story of the capture of a British ship in the episode, so I’m going to tell you a little bit about Joseph Warren, who (you may recall) was killed at the battle of Bunker Hill. Warren became a doctor early in his career, and he also became a Patriot be...