American Political History

In the spring of 1754, a twenty-two-year-old Virginia lieutenant colonel named George Washington marched a few hundred men into the Ohio wilderness to make good his colony’s claim to a fort the French had already seized — and instead lit the fuse of a world war. This is the story of his first command: the all-night march through the rain to a hidden ravine; the fifteen-minute skirmish at Jumonvill...

In May 1754, a Philadelphia printer cut a snake into pieces and told his fellow colonists to join, or die. That summer, as the first shots of a world war crackled in the Ohio woods, the colonies were summoned to Albany to repair their fraying alliance with the Iroquois — and an old Mohawk leader named Hendrick stood up and told them the brutal truth about themselves: rich, populous, and “like wome...

In 1737, three runners set off through the Pennsylvania woods in a rigged footrace that stripped the Lenape of a million acres — and the men who lost their homeland were never once asked. This is the story usually told as a swindle. It is really something older: the story of the powerful deciding the fate of the weak between themselves, and informing them afterward. From the Walking Purchase and t...

In 1745, an army of New England farmers, fishermen, and shopkeepers — not one of them a trained soldier — sailed six hundred miles north to do the impossible: take Louisbourg, the strongest fortress in North America, the Gibraltar of the North. They had no horses, almost no siege guns, and no idea what they were doing. What they had was a merchant for a general, a fortress rotting from a mutiny wi...

It started with a pickled ear in a jar, held up before the House of Commons — and it ended by quietly destroying the one colony built to be different. When England went to war with Spain in 1739, General James Oglethorpe marched south to take St. Augustine and shut the door that had been pulling enslaved people out of the English colonies for fifty years. He failed — broken at dawn outside Fort Mo...

Before dawn on September 9th, 1739, a man named Jemmy led twenty enslaved Africans against a store on the Stono River, took the guns off its shelves, and turned south for Spanish Florida and the freedom the King of Spain had promised any slave who could reach it. It was the largest slave revolt in the mainland colonies, and it would be answered by the harshest slave code they had yet written. This...

By 1738 the colony of Georgia is five years old and bleeding settlers across the river to South Carolina — because Georgia, alone in British America, forbids slavery, rum, lawyers, great estates, and gives its people no assembly and no vote at all. This episode is the story of that experiment under strain: the bicultural interpreter, Mary Musgrove, the one person the colony could not survive witho...

A generation after the Yamasee War nearly destroyed it, South Carolina has become something new on the American mainland: the first colony where the enslaved outnumber the free two to one — a Caribbean-style slave society grown rich on rice and living in permanent dread of its own people. And sixty miles south sits the one thing that can crack it open: Spanish Florida, where the King of Spain has...

France built the opposite of Carolina. Where the English ran their frontier through free-lance traders who cheated and enslaved the nations they lived among, the French in Louisiana learned the languages, kept the sacred calumet, and held their thousand-mile colony together with alliances instead of arms — a wiser empire, run by Bienville, the man who studied the people he could not afford to lose...

South Carolina had won its battles and was still losing its war. Eight months after the Good Friday massacre, the colony was ringed, starving, and unable to finish a fight it could not afford to lose — and its survival came down to three hundred men marching into the mountains to ask an alliance of the Cherokee, a people who owed them nothing and had already killed Carolina’s soldiers once. This e...

South Carolina in 1715 was not a colony of farms — it was a trading firm with a coastline, running the largest deerskin and Indian-slave operation in English America through a web of rough men who lived alone in the native towns. Its closest ally, the Yamasee, had been its sharpest slaving partner for a generation — until the deer thinned, the captives ran out, and the debt came due, collectable u...

John Lawson knew the Tuscarora better than almost any Englishman alive. He had walked their country, written the finest book yet penned about the native peoples of Carolina, and recorded, in plain words, that the Indians treated the colonists better than the colonists treated them. He was also the surveyor whose maps drew the settlers onto Tuscarora land — and in September 1711, the Tuscarora made...

In 1702 the governor of Carolina took an army south to seize the oldest city in America — and came home in disgrace, his ships burned, his name ruined, beaten by a fort made of seashell. Two years later James Moore went back to Spanish Florida with fifty Carolinians, a thousand Creek warriors, and a different kind of war in mind. This episode follows the assault on Florida: the failed siege of St....

Four hundred miles from the coast, an English trader winters in a town that will never see an English soldier — selling guns, buying deerskins and human beings, the farthest reach of a colony into a continent it cannot control. This is the world the southern wars were fought in: a borderland where three empires pressed against the most powerful nations in the South, and where none of them gave the...

In October 1690, a Boston man stood blindfolded before the governor of New France and gave him one hour to surrender Canada — to an army that belonged not to England, but to a single colony. This is the story of the first time the American colonies fought a war handed to them from across an ocean, and what it revealed about them. King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War fell on a sprawling, quarrel...

In the late summer of 1684, a French royal army sat starving on the shore of Lake Ontario — and an Onondaga orator walked into its camp and dictated terms to the king’s governor. That was the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Five Nations: the most powerful nation on the continent, courted by both the French and the English and commanded by neither. This episode traces how five nations on a handful of r...

On a frozen leap-day morning in 1704, a French and Native war party came over the palisade of a sleeping Massachusetts town, and New England’s most famous minister woke to find warriors in his house and his pistol misfiring in his hand. This is the raid on Deerfield — the burning, the three-hundred-mile march to Canada where Reverend John Williams watched his world taken apart one person at a time...

The Dominion of New England did not fall because the colonies resisted it. It fell because the king who built it lost his throne in a single winter. This is the finale of By What Authority: the Glorious Revolution told from the imperial side, where it actually happened. James the Second, a Catholic king of a Protestant country, tried to suspend the law by royal decree — and found, when his son was...

In 1670 a London jury was locked up without food, water, or heat and ordered to convict a young Quaker named William Penn. They refused — and the ruling that followed made the independence of juries a foundation stone of the fair trial. Penn knew, in his own body, what arbitrary power felt like: the admiral's son thrown out of Oxford, disowned, jailed in the Tower, where he swore his prison w...

In 1659 a woman stood on the gallows on Boston Common with a rope around her neck — and was cut down alive at the last moment, by a reprieve her son had ridden to win. She was Mary Dyer, condemned for being a Quaker who would not stay away. The next spring she walked back into Boston knowing it would kill her, to break an unjust law by forcing them to enforce it. This is the story of the idea she...

In 1683, in a colony that had never held an election, under an Irish Catholic governor appointed by a Catholic duke, New York — of all colonies — wrote down a sweeping charter of English liberty: a Charter of Liberties declaring that no man could be taxed without the consent of his own representatives, and that those rights were a possession, not a gift from any king. Within three years it was dea...

For six years Edward Randolph tried to collect the king's customs in Boston, and for six years the city beat him — every ship he seized returned by a colonial court, every smuggler acquitted by a jury of his friends. Randolph wrote it all down and sent it home, with a conclusion that sharpened each year: Massachusetts did not believe England had the right to command it. In the winter of 1685...

There was a man in London who knew more about America than almost anyone alive, and who never crossed the ocean to see it. William Blathwayt sat in the Plantation Office at Whitehall, where the English empire arrived as paper — customs returns from Barbados, militia counts from New York, the tobacco out of Virginia, all of it landing on one clerk's desk to be read, filed, and turned into the...

In 1681, the king's own customs collector stood trial for treason in New York — charged by the colony's merchants with levying war on free Englishmen, for the crime of collecting the duties his sealed commission ordered him to collect. The richest harbor in English America belonged outright to the Duke of York, brother and heir to the king. He had a governor, a fort, a garrison, and a co...

England planted the colonies. The Dutch carried the goods — and kept the profit. By 1640 Dutch trade was double England's, run on three inventions no one could match: the first public bank, the first publicly traded company, and a cargo ship built to beat the tolls. Virginia tobacco, West Indies sugar, New England timber, all of it moving in Dutch hulls. This is the problem that built an empi...