250 and Counting

This day in American History, 250 years ago.

  • Hickey Leaves A Bad Mark–June 26, 1776

    Cover art for June 26, 1776: "Washington and the Green Peas". Engraving by Albert Bobbett, ca. 1876-77.

    That New York had a strong contingent of Loyalists was never a secret in 1776, but chances are that George Washington never thought one of his bodyguards, Thomas Hickey, was one of them.

    Hickey was a private in the Continental Army, which meant that he was part of a group that not only protected George Washington, but the Army’s local cache of money. At one point he was arrested for passing counterfeit money and it was while he was in jail that word got back to Washington that Hickey was planning to switch sides as soon as the British got there. So Hickey betrayed both the General and the currency he’d been assigned to protect.

    About the cover art: many years later, a story came out that was written by Washington’s grandson (more accurately, Martha Washington’s grandson) George Washington Parke Custis, that Washington was in danger of being killed by an insider via poisoning. After Custis died, his memoirs were published by his daughter Mary Anna Custis Lee, with extensive notes added by an antiquarian. According to this account:

    When Washington and his army occupied the city, in the summer of 1776, the chief resided at Richmond Hill, a little out of town, afterward the seat of Aaron Burr. [Samuel] Fraunces’s daughter was Washington’s housekeeper, and she saved his life on one occasion, by exposing the intentions of Hickey, one of the Life-Guard (already mentioned), who was about to murder the general, by putting poison in a dish of peas prepared for his table.

    Who alerted Washington to the poisoned peas varies from one account to another, and given a bunch of the details (which I’ve largely omitted here), it’s very likely that the story is apocryphal.

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  • A Busy Day In Congress–June 25, 1776

    Cover art for June 25, 1776: "Signing of the Declaration of Independence", an 1873 portrait by Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq, reportedly on display in the White House.

    The big story today is about the Pennsylvania Delegation finally getting new orders, but I admit that I buried the lede on this one, largely because the Board of War and Ordnance had a lot going on, and the Pennsylvania story was a relatively simple one to tell.

    But as you can tell in today’s episode, the note we gave you the other day about the sheer volume of material they had to deal with is evident in the minutes of the Continental Congress for today; what’s more, a bunch of it was items that needed to be addressed immediately, so the business of the Congress was halted for several hours until the Board could report back.

    But the fact that the Pennsylvanian government had finally gotten past whatever they needed to get past, made it possible for the Pennsylvania Delegation to be able to vote in the affirmative on the question of Independence, which left exactly one colony about to vote “Yes” and another one unable to do so. And that’s something we’ll talk about in just a few days.

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  • Prison For Governor Franklin–June 24, 1776

    Cover art for June 24, 1776: portrait of William Franklin, attributed to Mather Brown, ca. 1790. via WIkimedia Commons.

    As Mike notes, we haven’t talked about the Royal Governor of New Jersey, William Franklin, in quite some time. But matters were quickly coming to a head, and it was decided that he needed to be imprisoned. The biggest reason for this is that he not only remained loyal to the Crown, he actively reported to the British anything he heard about American movements and plans.

    William Franklin was finally placed under house arrest in January for these shenanigans, but as things heated up and New Jersey replaced its provincial government, it was determined that he still posed a threat to operational security, and he was sent to Connecticut for imprisonment. And, as Mike also tells you, even prison in Connecticut wasn’t quite getting the job done.

    I guess we have to admire his ability to commit to the bit.

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  • Howe Readies For NY–June 23, 1776

    Cover art for June 23, 1776: "Die Anlandung der Englischen Troupen zu Neu Yorck" ("The Arrival of British Troops in New York"), by Franz Xaver Habermann, engraved shortly after the event in 1776. via New York Public Library.

    That Admiral Richard Howe maintained some sympathies for the Colonists in the earlier years of his career might be overselling it a little bit.

    Howe did have some sympathies, but when he and his brother, General William Howe, met with the Committee of Safety headed by Benjamin Franklin, the idea was to quash the idea of revolution and effect a return to status quo. When that failed, Admiral Howe was the first to hoist the Jolly Roger.

    Okay, he didn’t do that exactly, but he was fully prepared to do whatever he needed to do to end the situation. And that’s probably why he moved up in the ranks so quickly between 1770 and 1776. He’d already shown his competence in the Seven Years’ War, and now he was proving himself again.

    Howe’s plan to blockade ships entering major harbors might have worked in the long run, but those plans were interrupted when John Burgoyne’s troops were captured, forcing Richard Howe to winter in Rhode Island.

    In recent years there have been suggestions that Howe’s blockades were less successful in the northern colonies because he was allowing ships to get through, accidentally on purpose as they say. Is it possible that he was letting those sympathies get the better of him? It’s actually tough to say for sure.

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  • New Jersey Votes Yes–June 22, 1776

    Cover art for June 22, 1776: Portrait of Abraham Clark by James Reid Lambdin, 1873, after a portrait by John Trumbull. via National Park Service.

    How the Jersey Five got its name isn’t especially mysterious, but what’s interesting is that one of the Five, Abraham Clark (pictured in the cover art), was not a new delegate to the Continental Congress. In fact, he was the only one retained because he was also the only delegate who was in favor of Independence.

    So when the new Provincial Congress took over in New Jersey, they retained Clark and appointed new delegates around him. And thus was the Jersey Five born.

    Clark is the namesake of the New Jersey township just south and west of Newark, and that’s pretty cool. But Richard Stockton has a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike named after him, so there’s that. For what it’s worth, Francis Hopkinson left New Jersey shortly after signing the Declaration, so he doesn’t have a lot of legacy there. John Hart has several streets bearing his name, and John Witherspoon has memorials all over the state, so I guess he wins this contest I just now invented.

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  • Board of War and Ordnance–June 21, 1776

    Cover art for June 21, 1776: Seal of the United States Board of War and Ordnance, created in 1778. It was used by the U.S. War Department until 1880.

    We’ve spent a bunch of episodes describing a day in the life of the Second Continental Congress, and many of them were almost exclusively dealing with military matters.

    In January 1776 George Washington recommended that the Congress designate a specific office for these dealings, and Edward Rutledge picked up the idea and suggested it to the Congress. It took a little time, but the Congress ultimately agreed and set up a Board of War and Ordnance, which began operating on this day in 1776.

    The original Board of War and Ordnance was five delegates to the Congress, plus a secretary who wasn’t a delegate. After only a few months they recognized that they couldn’t do their jobs as delegates and keep up with the War workload, so they had themselves replaced with a permanent Board.

    The Board operated until the war ended, after which it was dissolved, but the logo (see cover art) persisted in the War Department until 1880. Incidentally, note the Phrygian Cap in the artwork. We haven’t talked about that in a while, but in those days the Cap was a universally-recognized symbol of freedom dating back to ancient Rome, when it was given to former slaves. In the Revolutionary Era, it specifically symbolized freedom from British tyranny.

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  • Natick Makes It Official–June 20, 1776

    Cover art for June 20, 1776: The Minuteman statue in Lincoln, MA, was the site where several Natick-based soldiers chose to re-enlist in 2017. image via the US Army website.

    Please forgive Mike’s pronunciation of “Natick”; he’s a Left Coast guy. And, he took his wife to Hawai’i this week. I never did that for my wife, though I did buy her a beach condo, so I guess we’re even. Plus, if I’m butchering any West Coast pronunciations, he’s keeping quiet about it. For the most part we’ve both got the language so baked into our heads that it never occurs to us that the other one might not know how to say things.

    And let’s face it, a lot of place names don’t always make sense when it comes to pronunciation.

    At any rate, while we focus on Natick here, it should be noted that towns all over Massachusetts, and in fact other places, were beginning to do this on their own. But they didn’t have Thomas Jefferson putting their documents through multiple drafts. We’ll need to talk about some of that later on as we get closer to the big day.

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  • Francis Johnson–June 19, 1776

    Cover art for June 19, 1776: The Old State House in Kentucky. We have to confess, Francis Johnson did not use this building; the one he occupied burned down a few years earlier. He was likely part of the vote to get this one built, though.

    Let’s start with the truth: Francis Johnson was not in office when the building in today’s cover art opened. This is the Old State Capitol in Frankfort, Kentucky, which opened in 1827, just after he left the US Congress.

    But while this is the Old State Capitol, there are two buildings even older which were used; unfortunately both of them burned down, hence this stone edifice, one presumes.

    You kind of have to feel badly in the long run when stuff like this happens. It feels a little bit like the universe is trying its best to wipe this guy from history. Even his specific birthplace is unknown, and the graveyard where he was interred is a public playground. (I’m going to presume it’s been paved over, yes?) But the fact is, once we’re gone we begin to accumulate anonymity unless something extraordinary happens to you or by you.

    Not meaning to be a downer; it’s just what they call a shower thought.

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    P.S. if your download is wonky or if you’re having trouble with the website this week, please get in touch with me at claudecall@gmail.com; I’d be most appreciative. I had a bit of a time getting this post to play nice.

  • The First Draft–June 18, 1776

    Cover art for June 18, 1776: Detail of the original first draft of the Declaration, in Thomas Jefferson's handwriting. The finished engrossed version (what you're used to seeing) has Timothy Matlack's handwriting.

    As Mike notes, marking today as the day that the first draft of the Declaration of Independence was presented to Congress is largely a matter of interpoloation on the part of historians working from incomplete information. But who are we to argue?

    The writing you see in today’s cover art is, in fact, Thomas Jefferson’s, mostly. Some of it is corrections made by Benjamin Franklin. It’s also worth noting that this image came from Wikimedia Commons and is color-adjusted. The original image has the paper looking much whiter, but the parchment coloring makes for a little bit better contrast against the ink.

    Incidentally, some documents from this era do look very good still while others are quite faded. The original Declaration of Independence, for example, is rather faded. This is because over time, the ink oxidized from black to a brownish color. In addition, it was displayed under relatively bright light for many years, and the ultraviolet radiation from those lights further faded the ink. The specific paper can also have an effect; some documents are written on a kind of cotton rag, which allows the ink to “bleed” over time and start to look rather smeared, whereas other documents written on vellum (which was basically calfskin) hold their shape better. In both cases the color holds better unless UV gets to it.

    Oddly enough, paper from the 19th through mid-20th centuries made use of wood pulp, which turns color and becomes more brittle over time, and is more acidic, which will damage the ink as well. So it’s possible that there could be a “hole” in our historical records unless steps are taken to preserve, or at least digitize, some of them.

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  • The San Francisco Journey–June 17, 1776

    Cover art for June 17, 1776: Historical Marker in Moraga, California, on the Moraga Library. Photograph by Andrew Ruppenstein, via the Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org)

    Joseph Joachin Moraga along with a party of colonists and soldiers first set forth from Monterey to the future site of San Francisco, along with supplies for beginning a new community.

    He supervised the selection of a location for the presidio (fortress), then managed its construction and provided leadership. He also ensured that a ramada—a roof ssupported by poles—was built, which eventually became Mission Dolores.

    For all his work, Joseph Joachin Moraga is considered the founder of San Francisco. But he wasn’t done there; the following year he founded a second mission in Santa Clara, and a third one in 1778 that became San Jose. Bottom line: if this guy isn’t prominent in local history classes, then something is seriously wrong.

    Moraga’s youth and education are rather hazy, but he kept extensive journals so he could read and write; in fact some of the research for today’s episode came from his written account of the trip, which can be found here. Given that he wrote it nearly two years later, there’s a remarkable level of detail here.

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