Friends of Liberty

On May 1st, 1777, an eighteen-year-old free Black man from Northampton, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Continental Army for the duration of the war. He was not seeking freedom through military service — he was already free. He served seventy-four months in total, through Saratoga, Valley Forge, and Yorktown, longer than the vast majority of soldiers whose names appear in the history books. He serv...

Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on October 19th, 1781. Ten months later, on August 19th, 1782, seventy-seven Kentucky frontiersmen were killed or captured in fifteen minutes on the bank of the Licking River. The British garrison at Detroit was still supplying raids on Kentucky settlements. The peace negotiations were underway in Paris. Nobody on the frontier had been told the war was over — and...

William Pitt won North America for Britain. He directed the Seven Years’ War from a desk in London, drove the French from Canada and the Ohio Valley, and built the largest empire the world had seen. The Americans named Pittsburgh in his honor. Then Parliament began taxing the colonies, and Pitt spent the next decade warning his colleagues — in speech after speech, with mounting urgency and increas...

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of American independence, this episode belongs to none of the famous names. It belongs to a fifteen-year-old boy from Connecticut who read about the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 and decided he was going to war. Joseph Plumb Martin served seven years in the Continental Army — Valley Forge, Yorktown, everything in between. He came home with al...

September 8th, 1781. Nathanael Greene is marching his army toward the last organized British force in South Carolina. His scouts report that the British soldiers are in the fields foraging for sweet potatoes and cooking breakfast. What follows is one of the most sharply fought engagements of the entire Southern campaign — a battle Greene very nearly wins completely, until his soldiers find the Bri...

In August 1779, a hurricane destroyed most of Bernardo de Gálvez’s fleet before his campaign against the British Gulf Coast forts had properly begun. He rebuilt his force and attacked anyway. Within six weeks he had captured three British forts and driven Britain from the lower Mississippi Valley. He then took Mobile. Then Pensacola — sailing his own ship into the harbor under British guns when hi...

In 1772, a savage political satire began circulating through patriot households in Massachusetts — read aloud in taverns, passed between neighbors, stripping the crown-appointed governor of whatever dignity he still possessed in the eyes of the colonial public. The author’s name never appeared on the page. It was, by practical necessity, a secret. The author was Mercy Otis Warren of Plymouth — wif...

August 19th, 1780. Three militia colonels ride through the night to raid a Loyalist outpost on the Enoree River in South Carolina. They arrive before dawn and send scouts forward. The scouts return with bad news: the camp has been reinforced overnight. Instead of two hundred men, there are five hundred. The horses are too exhausted to outrun a pursuit. The colonels cannot retreat. They have to fig...

In November 1775, the Continental Congress sent a secret letter to a Virginia lawyer living in London asking him to become their confidential correspondent — a polite term for spy. Arthur Lee accepted immediately. He had been doing the work for years. He had spent a decade building networks among opposition politicians, radical journalists, and foreign diplomats, gathering intelligence in the draw...

In 1763, a London journalist published an article accusing King George III of lying to Parliament. The government arrested forty-nine people in response. The journalist fought back in court and won a ruling that echoed all the way into the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. That was only the beginning. John Wilkes spent a decade being expelled from Parliament, re-elected by his co...

October 1777. The British have occupied Philadelphia. Six miles downriver, on a small island in the Delaware, an American garrison made of mud-and-timber walls is staring at six British warships moving into range. The British need the river open to supply their army. Washington needs the fort to hold as long as it possibly can. What follows is twenty-six days of bombardment — at its peak, one thou...

He walked into Benjamin Franklin’s office in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 with no letters of introduction and one audacious proposal: let him take an examination to prove his qualifications. Franklin administered a geometry test. The Polish engineer passed with high marks. Within a year, Tadeusz Kościuszko had chosen the ground at Saratoga that helped trap Burgoyne’s entire army — the turnin...

In 1768, the town of Newmarket, New Hampshire, elected a twenty-two year old man as town constable. It was a modest office in a small community. It was also a historic one. Wentworth Cheswell was the first person of African descent to win elected office in American history — the beginning of a civic career that would span five decades, include service as a soldier at Saratoga, and culminate in his...

In 1768, the town of Newmarket, New Hampshire, elected a twenty-two year old man as town constable. It was a modest office in a small community. It was also a historic one. Wentworth Cheswell was the first person of African descent to win elected office in American history — the beginning of a civic career that would span five decades, include service as a soldier at Saratoga, and culminate in his...

May 29th, 1780. Charleston has fallen. The last organized Continental force in South Carolina is retreating north. Behind them, closing fast after a 160-mile pursuit, is Banastre Tarleton — the most feared British cavalry commander in America. A white flag goes up. What happens next is the most disputed moment of the entire Southern campaign. British and American accounts are irreconcilable. But t...

Three weeks after arriving in America, a Polish exile assessed a deteriorating battlefield at Brandywine and acted without waiting for orders. Washington’s army was retreating and the retreat was threatening to become a rout. Casimir Pulaski gathered what cavalry he could find and charged directly into the pursuing British force — buying the Continental infantry the minutes it needed to fall back...

He arrived in New York in 1775 with almost nothing but his languages. The British arrested him twice — the second time condemning him to death. He escaped, fled to Philadelphia as a refugee, and rebuilt his fortune from scratch. Then he gave it away. Haym Salomon financed the Continental Army, made personal loans to members of Congress — including James Madison — and kept the Revolution solvent du...

In February 1779, a twenty-five year old Virginia lieutenant colonel stood on the eastern bank of the flooded Wabash River and made a decision that military logic said was impossible. Between him and a British fort two hundred miles away lay flooded prairies, chest-deep water, and February cold. He had 170 men, no artillery, no supply line, and no support from Washington or Congress. He ordered hi...

In 1776, a shoemaker from Putnam County, New York, was recruited by John Jay to do the most dangerous work the Revolution produced. He would infiltrate Loyalist networks, earn the trust of men planning to support the British, report everything he learned — and then allow himself to be arrested alongside the men he had betrayed. He did this four times. His family thought he had turned traitor. His...

An American woman ran the most fashionable wax sculpture studio in London throughout the Revolutionary War. Lords, ministers, and members of the royal family sat for their portraits while she molded warm wax and listened carefully to everything they said. She passed what she learned to Benjamin Franklin in Paris — sometimes hiding written intelligence inside the wax figures she shipped across the...

February 1776. The British plan to secure the South before the rebellion could take hold depended on 1,600 Highland Scottish Loyalists marching to the coast to meet a British fleet. Two Patriot colonels got to a small wooden bridge first, removed the planks, greased the support beams, and waited. The battle lasted three minutes. The British Southern strategy collapsed. The South remained in Patrio...

In the spring of 1781, an enslaved Virginia man walked into the British camp and offered his services to Lord Cornwallis. Cornwallis accepted. What Cornwallis didn't know was that James was working for the Marquis de Lafayette — gathering intelligence about British troop movements, intentions, and the fateful decision to fortify Yorktown. The intelligence he provided helped close the trap that end...

The author of The Barber of Seville had a second career that history has largely forgotten. In 1776, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais created a fictitious trading company, filled it with French army surplus, and smuggled an estimated ninety percent of the gunpowder used by the Continental Army in the war's early years across the Atlantic. The Battle of Saratoga — the turning point that brough...

August 1777. A relief column marching through the Mohawk Valley walks into one of the most brutal ambushes of the entire war. The general commanding it is shot from his horse early in the fighting — and directs the battle from under a tree, bleeding steadily, calmly smoking his pipe. The military outcome stopped the western prong of Burgoyne's invasion. The human cost went far deeper — at Oriskany...

Episode 7: Deborah Sampson — The Soldier Who Would Not Be Told No In 1782, a young Massachusetts woman enlisted in the Continental Army under a man's name, was assigned to a light infantry company, fought in skirmishes, and extracted a musket ball from her own leg rather than risk discovery. She served seventeen months before a Philadelphia physician uncovered her secret. The army's response was n...