250 and Counting

This day in American History, 250 years ago.

  • The Staten Island Peace Conference–September 11, 1776

    Cover art for September 11, 1`776: The Billop House on Staten Island, where the aborted peace conference took place. Via Wikimedia Commons.

    The Staten Island Peace Conference was a bust almost from the beginning. Not because the sides were so opposed, but because one side didn’t have the authority to do any real negotiation.

    John Adams, Edward Rutledge and Benjamin Franklin had to row over from Perth Amboy, New Jersey to get to the Totten House, which is near the southernmost tip of New York State, on Staten Island. At the narrowest point I could find from the vicinity of the house, that’s nearly a half-mile across the mouth of the Arthur Kill River where it opens into Raritan Bay and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean.

    Unfortunately, Admiral Howe was so limited from a diplomatic standpoint that there wasn’t a lot he could do at that point, so after a few hours they broke up and the delegation was allowed to return to New Jersey. The war would continue for another severn years before concluding.

    In retrospect, we have multiple attempts for Admiral Howe to meet with George Washington, which failed on the basis of protocol (Howe wouldn’t refer to Washington as a General), so now we have to wonder what direction negotiations would have gone had one of those attempts succeeded. Would things be different, or would it wind up the same, and the events of today be obviated? If a meeting in July had ended in no agreement, would John Sullivan even have been paroled to go to Philadelphia and present the plan?

    I’ll leave that for you to chew on. In the meantime I’m still sounding pretty sultry, so enjoy that.

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  • More Bad News–September 10, 1776

    Cover art for September 10, 1776: portrait of William Heath, artist and creation date unknown, via New York Public Library print collection.

    General William Heath was around for the battle at Lexington and Concord, but you may remember him from our episode from just a few days ago.

    He was already a Brigadier General in Massachusetts before Lexington & Concord, and as the siege in Boston started, he worked at training the troops. When the Continental Army officially formed, he retained his title and was promoted to Major General in August 1776.

    Unfortunately (as Mike notes), George Washington didn’t think much of him and kept him largely sidelined. And the one time Washington did ask him to do something important, it didn’t go well at all.

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  • The Peace Delegation–September 9, 1776

    Cover art for September 9, 1776: portrait of Edward Rutledge, ca. 1791 by James Earl. Via Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston SC.

    First off, my apologies to you, and to Mike (because it was his episode), for not double-checking that yesterday’s episode was actually loaded into the feed. I’ve been fighting off a ridiculous sinus infection and I think my medication had me woozy.

    On the bright side, I’m probably sounding extra sexy in today’s episode because my head still feels like a brick.

    Yesterday’s show should be in your podcast feed now, though, along with this one.

    Today we have a trio of delegates headed to New York to attempt peace talks with the British. Meanwhile back in Philadelphia, the Congress officially declares that our country’s name is the United States of America. Check out the story behind that.

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  • Nathan Hale’s Fateful Decision–September 8, 1776

    Cover art for September 8, 1776: Statue of Nathan Hale at the Tribune Tower in Chicago by Bela Pratt. This statue is probably the model for two postage stamps issued in the 1910s. via Wikimedia Commons.

    There are lots of images of Nathan Hale that have him looking like a middle-aged fellow, and then there are others that have him looking like some kind of idealized young man, with a prominent jaw and youthful good looks.

    The fact is, nobody today is 100% sure what he looked like, because no contemporaneous images of him have been found. The best we have is a description written by a fellow soldier of his, Lieutenant Elisha Bostwick. Bostwick wrote:

    I can now in imagination see his person & hear his voice—his person I should say was a little above the common stature in height, his shoulders of a moderate breadth, his limbs strait & very plump: regular features—very fair skin—blue eyes—flaxen or very light hair which was always kept short—his eyebrows a shade darker than his hair & his voice rather sharp or piercing—his bodily agility was remarkable. I have seen him follow a football and kick it over the tops of the trees in the Bowery at New York, (an exercise which he was fond of)—his mental powers seemed to be above the common sort—his mind of a sedate and sober cast, & he was undoubtedly Pious; for it was remark’d that when any of the soldiers of his company were sick he always visited them & usually Prayed for & with them in their sickness.

    Hale was twenty-one years old in 1776, so the images of him as an older man are almost certainly incorrect. The statue used in today’s cover art is one of several copies cast in 1912 from a sculpture by Bela Pratt. (Baltimoreans note: Bela Pratt was a distant cousin of Enoch Pratt, the man who founded the city’s libraries.) In addition, Pratt’s sculpture was the model for two postage stamps issued in 1925 and 1929.

    We know nowadays that Hale’s efforts to infiltrate the British didn’t work out very well, and Mike and I will return to his story in a few days to tell you specifically how it shook out, and a long-standing controversy over his last words—what did he say, and how did he say it?

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  • All Under Heaven Is Chaos–September 7, 1776

    Cover art for September 7, 1776: Cutaway diagram of the Turtle, drawn by Lt.C. Francis M. Barber of the US Navy in 1875. via Library of Congress.

    …but the situation was not excellent, for the American side, anyway.

    George Washington got a wake-up call in the form of a letter from Congress. In that letter he was told that it was not a good idea to burn down New York City; what’s more, they weren’t quite so invested in his holding the City as he thought they were. This was a good news/bad news situation for him, since he knew that strategically, the British occupying New York had the potential to be a huge problem, especially if they were able to take the entire Hudson Valley.

    But even if they didn’t, having one of our biggest and busiest ports was going to create a lot of headaches, regardless of what was supposed to be moving in or out of the city.

    Meanwhile, we have Ezra Lee making his first attempt at genuinely deploying the Turtle submersible. The currents plus the darkness made maneuvering very difficult, and while he did get close enough to Admiral Howe’s ship to stick the explosive charge to it, the spear he used couldn’t penetrate the hull enough to stick. In recent years it’s thought that he tried to pierce the hull near the rudder, which had an iron plate on it; another theory involved the recent use of copper on ships’ bottoms, but this copper was quite thin and would have been easily pierced.

    Lee made one more attempt with the Turtle, on October 6, but that try also failed. The Turtle was lost less than a week later when the sloop serving as her tender was sunk by British ships. Who knows? Maybe there are still pieces of her in the Hudson River.

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  • Redrawing Maryland Maps–September 6, 1776

    Cover art for September 6, 1776: Portrait of Thomas S Wootton, painted by John Hesselius in 1764. via North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC.

    I’ve brought this up in the past, but Maryland appears to have an extraordinary grasp of its own history, even when it comes to naming Maryland counties.

    As Mike notes today, Maryland has the first two counties established by local representatives, and the first counties named after popular Americans. But even in Maryland, when the names come from old-world aristocracy, it’s not always easy to draw the lines from A to B. For instance, the colony of Maryland was established by Catholic settlers in what became St. Mary’s City, but the colony (and later state) name derives from Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I (and namesake of Charles County).

    My favorite bit of trivia about Maryland counties (leave me alone, I know what that sounds like) is Anne Arundel County, named after the wife of Cecilius Calvert, whose last name actually had a second L (“Arundell”). Cecilius Calvert was the second Lord Baltimore. And now you know where Cecil County, Calvert County and Baltimore County and Baltimore City got their names.

    (I list the county and city separately because they’re separate regions politically and geographically. Baltimore County surrounds the city on three sides.)

    But getting back to Anne Arundel: unless I’m mistaken, and so far in my casual research, I’m not, Anne Arundel County is the only county in America that has someone’s first and last name in it. Beat that with a stick.

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  • More Brooklyn Aftermath–September 5, 1776

    Cover art for September 5, 1776: The Capture of Nathaniel Woodhull, John Ward Dunsmore, 1910. via New York Historical Society.

    The American Army has evacuated Brooklyn. Reports are coming in from all over that the Loyalists are being rather sore winners over the event. Refugees are coming into Connecticut from across the Long Island Sound. George Washington, literally the last man out of Brooklyn, is trying to figure out his next move, and that of the British.

    Nathanael Greene, who missed the Battle of Long Island because he’d been seriously ill, finally returns to duty. At last, some good news for General Washington! And maybe some sage advice regarding what should be done next to preserve New York City!

    And Greene tells him to get out of town. There’s no way that you can hold a place like New York City if you can’t control the shoreline across the East River, no more than a few hundred feet away.

    Washington doesn’t think this is a good idea, partially because he thinks New York is more important to the Continental Congress than it actually is. But Greene has another idea, which we’ll get into in a couple of days.

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  • Nicholas Emery–September 4, 1776

    Cover art for September 4, 1776: the headstone for Nicholas Emery, in Portland (ME)'s Western Cemetery. via findagrave.com.

    When Nicholas Emery was born, the state in which he did most of his important work didn’t yet exist.

    At the time of his birth, Maine was still considered part of Massachusetts, which is a vast oversimplification, since New Hampshire also had claim to a lot of this land (and that partially explains why New Hampshire has about 15 miles of coastline between Maine and Massachusetts).

    What’s more, Maine might not have become a state had it not been for the Missouri Compromise, part of which provided that for every slave state added to the Union, a free state also would be added, and vice-versa. Therefore, the addition of (free) Maine as a state allowed (slave) Missouri to become as state as well.

    (Side note: I have a favorite joke about the Missouri Compromise, because I’m nerdy that way. It comes from Dave Barry. He explains the Missouri Compromise as a law which says that half the people there have to pronounce it “Missou-ree” and the other half has to pronounce it “Missour-ruh”.)

    While Emery was part of the Convention to separate Maine from Massachusetts, and he was a delegate to the new state’s Consititutional Convention, he was not around to sign the document itself.

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  • Down By The Bay–September 3, 1776

    Cover art for September 3, 1776: A 1781 British map of Manhattan; Kip's Bay is labeled as "Kepps Bay". via Boston Public Library.

    The HMS Rose was a British ship that we first discussed a little over a year ago. Her job was largely to patrol the waters off southern New England to prevent smuggling activity on the part of the Americans.

    In July 1776 the Rose was dispatched—like many, many other British ships—to New York Harbor for the invasion of Long Island and, later, New York City. And today we look at some of her activity in the East River.

    For those of you who know the area at all, the Kip’s Bay neighborhood is where the Midtown Tunnel opens at the Manhattan end; presumably it was an especially good place to do this because unlike much of Manhattan, the land that needed digging up wasn’t solid bedrock; it was a combination of wetland and fill material from construction projects. In fact, for a while there was a cement factory nearby and a lot of their castoffs were thrown in there. Cement is tough but it’s easier to get through than bedrock, especially when it’s not one big solid chunk.

    At any rate, this move on the part of the Rose was just the beginning to what became known as the Battle of Kip’s Bay. So we’ll be coming back to this place a couple of times in the near future.

    Not long after this action, the Rose moved down to the Chesapeake Bay and then to Georgia, where she was eventually deemed unfit for service and scuttled in the Savannah River, making ship passage impossible until the war’s end.

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  • A British Offer–September 2, 1776

    Cover art for September 2, 1776: portrait of John Sullivan at age 34 in 1774. Painted by Richard Morell Staig circa 1876, based on a mezzotint print from 1776.

    General John Sullivan had been captured only a few days before by the British, during the Battle of Long Island.

    Now, Mike tells us in this episode that the Howes talked him into approaching the Continental Congress with their peace offering, but equally likely is that Sullivan simply agreed to deliver the message because it would get him out of captivity, at least for a while. (He was paroled specifically to deliver the message. Once he had his answer, it was “Back to jail with you, Johnny.”)

    Part of the problem Sullivan had was that Congress didn’t think the offer was sincere; another part is that some members didn’t think Sullivan was sincere. Sullivan returned to the British, delivered the reply from Congress, and was re-imprisoned for another few months, until he was returned in a prisoner exchange.

    So we haven’t heard the last of John Sullivan!

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