250 and Counting

This day in American History, 250 years ago.

  • The New Jersey Seal–October 3, 1776

    Cover art for October 3, 1776: The original Great Seal of New Jersey, Illustration created in 1876 by Henry Mitchell for the book State Arms of the Union.

    The New Jersey Seal looks like a complicated and maybe convoluted project on its surface, but when you take a closer look, it becomes clear that in fact a lot of thought went into it and many of the individual pieces do tie together.

    New Jersey statutes are pretty specific about the Great Seal. Title 52, §2-1 reads:

    The great seal of this state shall be engraved on silver, which shall be round, of two and a half inches in diameter and three-eighths of an inch thick; the arms shall be three ploughs in an escutcheon, azure; supporters, Liberty and Ceres. The Goddess Liberty to carry in her dexter hand a pole, proper, surmounted by a cap gules, with band azure at the bottom, displaying on the band six stars, argent; tresses falling on shoulders, proper; head bearing over all a chaplet of laurel leaves, vert; overdress, tenne; underskirt, argent; feet sandaled, standing on scroll. Ceres: Same as Liberty, save overdress, gules; holding in left hand a cornucopia, or, bearing apples, plums and grapes surrounded by leaves, all proper; head bearing over all a chaplet of wheat spears, vert. Shield surmounted by sovereign’s helmet, six bars, or; wreath and mantling, argent and azure. Crest: A horse’s head, proper. Underneath the shield and supporting the goddesses, a scroll azure, bordered with tenne, in three waves or folds; on the upper folds the words “Liberty and Prosperity”; on the under fold in Arabic numerals, the figures “1776”. These words to be engraved round the arms, viz., “The Great Seal of the State of New Jersey”.

    That actually gives us the modern-day (that is, the 1928 design) version of the New Jersey Seal, which can be seen at right here. The lines have been simplified and the colors made more vibrant. In 1965 the colors were specifically defined by law using the Cable color system, with the blue as Cable Number 70087 and the buff as Cable Number 65015, and their hexidecimal equivalents being #2484C6 and #E1B584, respectively.

    That there’s a disembodied horse’s head in the New Jersey Seal makes it way too easy for me to do a cheap joke, so I’m going to lampshade the whole thing by making a point of not doing one, and telling you about it here.

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  • Jefferson Goes Home–October 2, 1776

    Cover art for October 2, 1776: "Thomas Jefferson, 1776" by Charles Willson Peale. via Independence National Historical Park.

    Thomas Jefferson, after many months in Philadelphia, finally got to return home today.

    One of the things that puzzled me early on in this podcasting project was the relative fluidity of the membership of the Continental Congress. People came in, people went out, and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. There didn’t appear to be a set schedule to it, and there were often periods in which a colony had nine delegates and other times when it had none. (Or that time when Georgia had only one delegate, and he wouldn’t vote because his views didn’t necessarily reflect those of his constituents. Or that other time when New York’s delegates abstained from anything involving Independence because they’d been directed not to vote in favor.)

    But as time went on it began to dawn on me that these weren’t elected officials in the sense that we think of them; they were appointed by their governments to serve, and at heart they were citizens who were performing a duty, and then returned to whatever they ordinarily did. In fact, this is one of the reasons why many states today impose term limits: politics wasn’t a career for these people; they’d go in, do their thing and then go home and do something else, and let another person take their place.

    And yes, many of the members of Congress, such as Thomas Jefferson, moved on to other political positions but many others returned to their previous profession (e.g., law) but perhaps at a higher level because they’d been in Congress.

    In retrospect, it wasn’t a terrible system, nor was it a bad philosophy.

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  • Re-Mastering the Army–October 1, 1776

    Cover art for October 1, 1776: Portrait of Thomas Mifflin by Charles Willson Peale, ca. 1783-4. via Independence Hational Historical Park.

    Thomas Mifflin was the Continental Army’s first Quartermaster General, and he was replaced by someone who just couldn’t get the job done, so he was asked to return to the position. He was good at the Quartermaster duties, but he really preferred to be on the front lines.

    Oddly enough, though, when the soldiers at Valley Forge went through all their hardships, it was Mifflin who got the blame for it, and Congress had to appropriate a lot of money to settle the complaints. He still managed to keep the position, but the writing was on the wall and he resigned his commission a few months later.

    Mifflin wasn’t done with public service, though. He became a delegate to the Congress and even spent some time as its President. And once Pennsylvania revamped its Constitution to include a genuine Governor position, as the last President of Pennsylvania he became the state’s first Governor, from 1790 to December 1799. He returned to the State Legislature but died a few weeks later.

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  • Washington’s Thoughts of Home–September 30, 1776

    Cover art for September 30, 1776: "West Front of Mount Vernon," created circa 1787–1792 and attributed to artist Edward Savage. via Mount Vernon Ladies' Organization.

    Mount Vernon, the mansion along the Potomac River in which George Washington lived, was originally built by his father when George was two years old. At that time, however, it was a rather modest house.

    Washington’s half-brother Lance lived in the house until his death in 1752. After a year or two, George leased out the property, but he did not own it outright until 1761. He did, however, expand the house during the 1750s. In 1774 he made more additions, until it looked like the building we can see and visit today.

    Washington’s original intent was that the exterior of the building be symmetrical along its center line, which was a classical look for buildings.

    (Fun Fact: the college I attended for my undergrad coursework, Adelphi University, was also initially designed to have symmetrical buildings. In fact, the builders added a nonfunctioning chimney to the gymnasium building to ensure symmetry. They’ve since added to the building so the symmetry is gone, but the twin stacks remain.)

    At any rate, the building is not symmetrical because of design choices on the inside, so a couple of windows are “out of place” and the main entry door isn’t aligned with the cupola. Clearly Washington was a pragmatic guy when it came to these things. Symmetry is nice, but not strictly necessary.

    Nowadays the property is run by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, who bought the house from John Augustine Washington III for the sum of $200,000 in 1858, along with about 200 acres of the surrounding land. Over the years they’ve done lots of restoration work but other than the addition of electricity in 1917, they’ve made no significant changes to the house.

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  • John Adams, Correspondent–September 29, 1776

    Cover art for September 29, 1776: portrait of John Adams by John Trumbull, 1793. via White House Historical Association.

    When you only have two minutes to get the point across, you sometimes lose some of the nuances. This is a rundown of the second letter discussed today:

    Abigail Adams penned a poignant letter to her husband, John Adams, who was still serving in the Continental Congress but hoping to get home as soon as his replacement arrived.

    This correspondence highlights the immense psychological and economic strain experienced by those on the home front during the American Revolutionary War.


    Abigail’s primary anxiety centered on the military situation in New York. She expressed deep frustration over conflicting reports regarding casualties and prisoners, troubled by rumors of colonial regiments refusing orders or behaving poorly under pressure. This operational uncertainty coupled with the immediate hardships in Massachusetts painted a grim picture of the war effort.

    Furthermore, Abigail criticized a growing “venal spirit” within the local communities. She observed that patriotism alone was no longer enough to motivate enlistment; instead, towns were forced to offer increasingly high bounties to secure short-term military commitments. The relentless military drafts heavily strained Massachusetts towns as they struggled to meet their quotas, forcing citizens to pay exorbitant costs to hire replacement soldiers.

    On a domestic front, Abigail balanced these structural societal collapses with immediate family pressures. Rumors of an enemy fleet in the bay magnified her isolation as she managed the family household and farm entirely on her own. This letter serves as a vital historical record of the domestic sacrifices that sustained the revolution, an account that John Adams later acknowledged receiving in his response on October 8, 1776 (which we’re not likely to discuss then).

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  • Pennsylvania Ratifies A New Constitution–September 28, 1776

    Cover art for September 28, 1776: first page of the original Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776.

    As I mentioned a few days ago, when Pennsylvania drafted its constitution and then voted on it, not everybody involved was on board with the idea.

    In June 1776, The Pennsylvania Provincial Conference resolved “that the present Assembly of the Colony is ‘not competent to the exigencies of affairs’ and that a Provincial Convention ought to be called for inaugurating a form of Colonial government, in compliance with the recommendation of Congress”. In short, We gotta move on this, since Independence is around the corner.

    So a state convention was called, which met for the first time on July 15, 1776. They determined that whatever government they came up with would supersede whatever was in place at the time of ratification. Then they established a Council of Safety which would handle things in the interim. So the Council of Safety was designed specifically to be obsolete once a Constitution was in place. The change of government, was, however, opposed by many of the commonwealth’s citizens: John Dickinson, James Wilson, Robert Morris, and Frederick Muhlenberg, among others.

    The Constitutional Convention elected Benjamin Franklin as their president, along with Colonel George Ross, vice-president, John Morris, secretary, and Jacob Garrigues, assistant-secretary. Given this particular group of men, it’s no surprise that the new Constitution borrowed pretty heavily from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, with an underlying fear of an aristocracy and words such as “liberty” and “the people’s government.” Giving so much power to a lower class and limiting the power of the upper reaches of government clearly reflects this fear.

    This constitution was in use until 1790, when another convention refined a few items and instituted a bicameral legislature. There have been a few more updates, but the Pennsylvania Constititution has essentially been the same since 1968.

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  • Busy Day For Mr. Rutledge–September 27, 1776

    Cover art for September 27, 1776: Portrait of Edward Rutledge by James Earl, 1791. via Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC.

    In putting this episode together, I realized that I used this same image of Edward Rutledge back in the September 9 episode. However, I neglected to put the information for the image in the alt text. And that’s something I do try not to overlook. On the other hand, I was still hopped up on cold medication, so there’s that.

    And before I forget, I mentioned the censure of Esek Hopkins during the episode, so I wanted to ensure that I linked back to that as well.

    In addition to being the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence, at the tender age of 26, Edward Rutledge was also a governor of South Carolina. By my count he was their ninth governor, from 1798 to 1800, but that’s if you count his brother John Rutledge twice, since John served twice, non-consecutively. Also, he was the ninth governor of the state of South Carolina; if you count the colonial governors, he’d be thirty-ninth.

    After leaving the Continental Congress, Rutledge did fight in the Continental Army. He was captured during the Siege of Charleston in 1780 and released in a prisoner exchange the following year.

    I should note that while Rutledge was governor he suffered from an attack of gout and went home to Charleston to recuperate. Not long afterwards, he heard the news of George Washington’s death and was so upset by this that he had an attack of apoplexy and died. (Modern-day medical types would probably say that he had a cerebral stroke.) Rutledge had been the Governor for 401 days.

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  • The French Commission

    Cover art for September 26, 1776: 1785 portrait of Arthur Lee by Charles Willson Peale. via Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia.

    The Continental Congress, in the wake of Washington’s recent letter, finally realized that they weren’t going to be able to defeat the British on their own. Some outside assistance would be needed.

    So on this day in 1776, they appointed a three-man commission to undertake a diplomatic mission to France, seeking money, arms and other materials.

    France, as we’ve mentioned before, was a good country to hit up. They were still salty about the way the French and Indian War ended up, and they’d already been assisting America through gray and black markets, in order to give themselves plausible deniability should someone get caught. Should this mission succeed, the activity would be much more overt, and could be perceived as France’s official recognition of the United States as a sovereign nation.

    It ultimately didn’t work out that way; that particular distinction went to Morocco and France became the second nation to officially recognize the US.

    As Mike notes, the trip itself wouldn’t get underway for another few months, but there’s no doubt that the meeting with French authorities marked a critical turning point for the American Revolution.

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  • John Adams Wants To Go Home–September 25, 1776

    Cover art for September 25, 1776: the entire letter from John Adams to Abigail on this date. via Massachusetts Historical Society.

    Back in April, Mike and I had the opportunity to visit the Massachusetts Historical Society, and we were able to spend some time with the man whose job it is to curate, analyze and organize the papers of the Adams family. Not just John and Abigail, but their descendants and maybe a few ancillary branches of the family. At one point in the conversation I said to him, “It seems like John and Abigail were really hot for each other.”

    He was a little taken aback by this but he didn’t disagree with me, either.

    And I stand by my statement; it was clear by both the content and the tone of their writing that they were deeply in love with one another, and it was positively killing him that he had to spend so much time in Philadelphia, away from her.

    Which is why the letter discussed in today’s episode may come as a surprise.

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  • Washington’s Desperate Letter–September 24, 1776

    Cover art for September 24, 1776: portrait of George Washington commissioned by John Hancock shortly before the Declaration was issued, painted by Charles WIllson Peale in 1776. via the Brooklyn Museum.

    George Washington was a practical man, and he realized that without a standing army, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the British.

    Sure, it’s good to have motivated people who are passionate about the cause, but when they have setbacks, they’re more likely to bail out, and that’s exactly what he was facing once the dust began to settle from his losses in New York. Many of the recruits that he had weren’t finishing out the enlistment period they’d agreed on when they first joined up, and the fact that their supplies and their pay were sporadic didn’t help matters.

    It was with this in mind that Washington wrote to Congress, strongly recommending that they make some changes to the way that the Continental Army was being administered. Improving pay would be great, but simply ensuring that pay happened on a regular basis would be even better. And, of course, if a standing army could be established, then the men would be locked in for longer periods of time, and his officers wouldn’t spend so much time training new recruits.

    Whether Congress agrees to this change…stay tuned.

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