Footnotes of a Republic

Episode 12 — The Gunpowder Incident (April 1775) Days after Lexington and Concord, Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore secretly orders Royal Marines to remove the gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine onto a British warship. Patrick Henry marches on Williamsburg with militia to demand compensation; the crisis is defused when Dunmore pays Henry for the powder. But Dunmore also threatens to free ensla...

Episode 11 — The Suffolk Resolves (September 1774) A convention of Suffolk County delegates meeting at Dr. Samuel Williams's house in Milton declares the Coercive Acts unconstitutional, calls for a complete halt to trade with Britain, and urges the colonies to organize their militias. Drafted by Joseph Warren with John Adams's help, the Resolves are endorsed unanimously by the First Contin...

Episode 10 — The Powder Alarm (September 1774) Three weeks before the First Continental Congress, General Gage sends troops to seize the provincial gunpowder at Somerville. Word spreads at extraordinary speed; by the next day 4,000–20,000 militiamen from Massachusetts and Connecticut are marching on Boston. No shots fired, the British keep the powder — but the speed and scale of the response terri...

Episode 9 — The Philadelphia Tea Party (December 1773) When the tea ship  Polly  arrives, ~8,000 armed Philadelphians line the wharves and a delegation persuades the captain to turn around without unloading a single chest. No tea is destroyed, no property damaged — but the message to Parliament is unmistakable. Philadelphia's restraint makes Boston's destruction look more violent by contra...

Episode 8 — The Pine Tree Riot (April 1772) Angry New Hampshire settlers drag Deputy Surveyor John Sherburn from his bed, beat him, tar and feather him, ride him out of town on a rail, and force him to resign. The mob is protesting the British "Broad Arrow" policy that reserved the largest white pines for Royal Navy masts. One of the first violent anti-British protests in the northern co...

Episode 7 — The Gaspee Affair (June 1772) Rhode Island colonists led by Providence merchant John Brown row out to HMS  Gaspee , a British revenue schooner run aground in Narragansett Bay, board her, wound the captain, and burn her to the waterline. The first organized attack on a British warship in the colonies. Britain's attempt to send the accused to England for trial backfires and directly...

Episode 6 — The Regulators Rebellion (May 1771) Backcountry North Carolina farmers rise against a corrupt court clique led by Edmund Fanning. After years of petitions and intimidation fail, Governor William Tryon marches on the Regulators and crushes them at the Battle of Alamance on May 16, 1771. Six Regulators are hanged; many survivors later side with the British or sit out the Revolution.

Episode 5 — The Boston Massacre Trial (Oct–Dec 1770) Patriot lawyers John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr. defend the British soldiers charged with killing five colonists in the March 1770 Massacre. Adams builds a rigorous self-defense case from a threatening mob. Captain Preston is acquitted; six of eight soldiers are acquitted and two are convicted of manslaughter (branded and released). Adams later...

Episode 4 — The Liberty Affair (June 1768) British customs officials seize John Hancock's sloop  Liberty  in Boston Harbor for alleged smuggling. A mob of ~3,000 Bostonians attacks the customs commissioners, drives them to Castle William, and strips the ship. The affair leads directly to the stationing of British troops in Boston — and turns Hancock into a revolutionary folk hero.

Episode 03 — The Non-Importation Agreements In 1768, colonial women — shut out of every formal political institution in America — became the enforcement arm of a colony-wide boycott of British goods, organizing spinning bees, wearing homespun cloth as political defiance, and bringing the Townshend Acts to their knees in under two years. The first mass political mobilization in American history was...

In the summer of 1765, secret committees of merchants, lawyers, and tradesmen in Boston, New York, and other port cities began coordinating anti-Stamp Act action, took the name "Sons of Liberty" from a speech by an Anglo-Irish member of Parliament, and built the first extra-legal political organization in British North America — using boycotts, mobs, and a colonial press network to bring...

August 1765. A Boston shoemaker leads a mob of thousands in the most thoroughgoing destruction in colonial American history. The targets: a stamp office, three mansions, and a government. The result: the first act of the American Revolution — and a warning to everyone about who would actually fight the war.