250 and Counting

It’s one thing to hear someone hollering “The British are coming!” and quite another to actually see them arriving in your port. And that’s especially true when they’re also seen confiscating the cannons that you’d hidden upriver. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, but there was something different about the Colonists’ respo...

Today we review two different pieces of correspondence—one local, the other trans-Atlantic—in which the letter writers are clearly coming to the conclusion that things are not going well between the British and the Colonies, and that preparing for war is probably inevitable at this point. And that’s interesting on its own, but we also wanted to call your attention to the cover art for today&...

The interesting thing about surveillance in the 18 th century is that, when you’re dealing with trans-Atlantic distances, the information moves slowly, and errors can be costly. We told you not long ago about someone who’d heard about the Minutemen, but had their numbers wrong by a factor of thousands. Fortunately in that case, it was just casual gossip rather than actual spycraft. But...

Alexander Hamilton isn’t really considered one of the Founding Fathers, largely because he’d only arrived in America from Scotland around the same time that things started getting ugly between the Colonies and the Crown. But he quickly took up the cause, and it’s clear from his writing that he was of a similar mind as Jefferson, Franklin and the rest. When he joined the Continent...

Back when Mike and Claude were kids, February 22 was celebrated as a national holiday, the 22nd being recognized as George Washington’s birthday. Lincoln’s Birthday was February 12, so we had two Federal holidays close together. (To be fair, Lincoln’s was always un officially recognized.) Until, that is, 1968, when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act came along, and many holidays were...

Of all the indignities we laid upon Claudius Herrick in this episode (okay, there weren’t that many), the worst is that we misspelled his name in the cover art. The post February 21, 1775 appeared first on 250 and Counting .

Until Israel Gregg came along, steamboat commerce on the Ohio river was considered impractical, largely because the currents were so strong. But Gregg had an interesting approach to demonstrate that it was, in fact, possible. In some portions of the river, there was a confluence with another river, which meant that there were multiple currents in the river for some distance. This is what made it h...

When I (Claude) was younger, I read a Star Trek novel titled The Final Reflection by John M. Ford. Trek novels weren’t considered canon, and later events in the films and subsequent series kind of wiped out some of the concepts put forth in the book, but what I found fascinating was that it was told entirely from the Klingons’ point of view. (It also provided an interesting explanation...

Maryland has a peculiar place in most of America’s major events. During the Revolution, the Continental Congress hid out there for a while. During the Civil War, the state mostly sat out the war because it was a “Southern” state occupied by the Union throughout. But the War of 1812? Well, that was Maryland’s time to shine, and today we meet one of the military men who fough...

We’ve mentioned in the past that the intent of most of the Intolerable Acts and the Coercive Acts were designed to punish the Massachusetts Province, but it had some effect on the other colonies as well. What’s more, there was a growing worry that, if Parliament could do things like this to Massachusetts, what’s going to stop them from doing it to us? To that end, the city of Alb...

David Barclay was a British merchant who frequently plied his trade with other merchants in the Colonies. Such trade was quite lucrative for him, so when the Stamp Act was enacted, he stood to lose a lot of money because the Colonists would simply look elsewhere for the goods he sold. Likewise, when the Intolerable Acts, and the Coercive Acts were enacted, Barclay stood to suffer even more. So Bar...

Only a few people had figured it out, and it’s not clear whether they were just guessing, but by this point in time both England and the Colonies were locked into a path that would lead inevitably to a shooting war. To that end, Parliament approved sending over four thousand soldiers and sailors to the Colonies to help keep them in line. But it wasn’t as simple as that; there were stil...

When it comes to Black people and their role in the American Revolution, the one name that most people appear to remember is that of Crispus Attucks, largely because he was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and that event is thought of as the beginning of the Revolutionary War, therefore it’s significant that the first person to die in the name of American freedom was a person...

Here’s a peek behind the curtain: Mike and Claude do their own research for the individual shows, though Mike did the initial setups for the dates. So he’s the one who figured out what happened when, and then they each do the deeper research for the episodes they record. So Mike probably had no idea that there was a familial connection to this episode for Claude. For what it’s wo...

We realize that this is going to come as a huge surprise to you, but when the future Louisa Catherine Adams met her future mother-in-law, it was not an auspicious occasion. This delayed—but did not prevent—Louisa from marrying John Quincy Adams, but Abigail Adams didn’t have a lot of respect for Catherine for many years. In the meantime, she and John Quincy had some ups and downs in their ma...

There are many events in the life of William Hall that could be ascribed to just plain luck on his part, and others which could conceivably tied to some shrewd timing on his part. But in the end, we think we’re going with luck. If he hadn’t survived two Cherokee ambushes, if he hadn’t been an officeholder previously, if he hadn’t been the Speaker of the Senate when a scanda...

(N.B. We apologize that we initally uploaded this episode in the wrong format. We have no idea whether it made your podcast player cry, or anything else. At any rate, that’s fixed. Again, apologies.) While Massachusetts, and Boston in particular, were getting a lot of attention from the British, it’s not as though the other colonies sat back and watched everything happening from afar....

The first week or two of February 1775 could best be described as a series of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Any attempts on both sides to reach out with some form of conciliation managed to fail for various reasons. And during all these breakdowns, the situation on the American side of the pond only got worse as time went on, largely because each side thought that the other wasn&...

(Forgive us the jokey headline–sometimes it’s late at night when we post this stuff and we get punchy.) Over the course of a single year—and beginning with this day in 1775—John Cox experienced what any reasonable person would call a “meteoric rise” in his personal and professional fortunes. He started out adjudicating British laws in the Colonies, but moved quickly into as...

In today’s episode, guest voice Lorene Childs tells us the story of Mary Peck Butterworth. Mary was a member of the First Families of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and a very respected member of the society there. But for a few years, and for reasons unknown to modern-day people, Mary enjoyed a rather peculiar hobby, one that perhaps should have made her a more famous person than she is. It wasn&...

John Adams and Daniel Leonard had an interesting relationship. They were great friends at first, until the British started cracking down on the Colonies. Adams chafed under the Crown’s pressure, while Leonard remained loyal. Ultimately it created a rift between the two men which never quite healed, and it broke Adams’ heart. When Leonard began submitting essays to the Boston Gazette un...

As noted previously, the First Continental Congress composed a Petition to the King asking him for some relief from the Intolerable Acts. The petition arrived in London in mid-December, which turned out to be some bad timing for a number of reasons. Benjamin Franklin was in town for diplomatic purposes, and he composed a letter to Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress, which s...

After the Boston Tea Party, Parliament enacted what they called the Coercive Acts and the Colonies called the Intolerable Acts. The Colonists were neither coerced, nor were the acts tolerated (hence the name). And you know that because we’ve told you this already several times. In October 1774 the Continental Congress composed the “Petition to … Continue reading 250 and Counting: February 4, 1775

Hugh Mercer is one of those people who was terribly important to the cause of Liberty during the American Revolution, yet his story goes untold largely because he died early in the effort. But if Mercer hadn’t come to America because he was on the losing side of a battle in Scotland, he wouldn’t have … Continue reading 250 and Counting: February 3, 1775

After the Boston Tea Party, the government in Britain enacted what they called the Coercive Acts, or what the Colonists called the Intolerable Acts. (From here, it doesn’t feel like one name was any better-sounding than the other.) Because the Colonists were still hoping to preserve a decent relationship with the Mother Country, the First … Continue reading 250 and Counting: February 2, 1775