250 and Counting

This day in American History, 250 years ago.

  • Two Men To The Carolinas–May, 1776

    Cover Art for May 5, 1776: Sir Peter Parker by Lenuel Francis Abbott, 1799. Note that while Parker is wearing an admiral's full-dress uniform for the period, there's an error in the cuffs.

    The advantage of having a large military force, as the British did, is that they were able to concentrate on multiple places at once with experienced soldiers. So while they had one group getting ready to move in on New York, they had others preparing to take on the southern states.

    Enter Sir Peter Parker and Lord George Cornwallis, who arrived in North Carolina on this day. Parker and Cornwallis’ mission was to take on the city of Charleston, in South Carolina. Why land in North Carolina?

    This is a guess, but at the time there really wasn’t anything between Wilmington and Charleston. None of what we now call The Grand Strand was developed to any significant extent. So staging everything in North Carolina, while simultaneously sending ships to observe Charleston, was the practical move to make.

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  • Valentine Efner–May 5, 1776

    Cover art for May 5, 1776: a cropped photo of the old Blenheim Covered Bridge, spanning Schoharie Creek, River Road. Photo by Jet Lowe and available via the Library of Congress.

    Given the fact that Valentine Efner (sometimes spelled “Effner”) skipped so many roll call votes in Congress, it’s a wonder he ran for Representative in the first place.

    We have to think that Efner was an informal kind of representative, and being in the rarefied air of Congress had him missing the farm life, to which he returned immediately after his term of office had ended.

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    PS Pardon the brief notes, we had a veterinary emergency here that ate up most of my night. Fortunately our dog is well.

  • Rhode Island Goes First–May 4, 1776

    May 4th is Rhode Island Independence Day, marking the date that one of our smallest states became the first of the Original Thirteen Colonies to declare its independence from Great Britain.

    Almost.

    Here—as the late, great Paul Harvey would say—is the rest of the story.

    All of the colonies were required to sign oaths of allegiance to King George III, or whoever was in charge at the time. On May 4, 1776, the Rhode Island Assembly passed the Act of Renunciation, which repealed that oath. They didn’t formally declare independence; that didn’t happen until mid-July, when they approved the Declaration as written by Thomas Jefferson and his fellow delegates.

    If you look closely at the cover art, you can see that there’s some material on the Renunciation that was X’ed out. Those are some accusations against the Crown that the Assembly apparently thought better of. I guess it wasn’t worth getting a new sheet of paper, then; they’d fix it in engrossing or at the printer’s.

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  • Washington Cracks Down–May 3, 1776

    George Washington was good at what he did because he’d studied military discipline, among other things. He read a lot about tactics and famous battles, and the importance of a well-trained army, and then he would meet with veterans and engage with them to learn what they thought.

    During the Seven Years’ War he asked to use some of those techniques with the men under his command. Sometimes, but by no means all the time, was he able to enact some of his ideas.

    So when Washington took over the Continental Army in July of 1775, he had some ideas about what that army should look like. And he had generally good counsel coming from other people who’d been through much of the same things as him.

    But the problem was that the recruits of the early days of the Revolution weren’t committed to anything more than a single year. They didn’t get much time to learn the things they should have, and as a result they left before they could learn everything they should have, or they did learn what was needed and left anyway. And those who were left behind were still pretty new, and had little sense of military discipline.

    So Washington decided he needed to get a little tougher.

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  • Help From Abroad–May 2, 1776

    Cover art for May 2, 1776: King Louis XVI, Roi de France et de Navarre by Antoine-François Callet, 1779.

    We’ve noted before that France had been helping the United Colonies for a little while, using gray markets and go-betweens in order to give themselves some plausible deniability. Britain and Spain were both a little salty about having been beaten by Britain in the past, so they were only too happy to have somebody else fighting them while they stood by and watched. And in the long run it didn’t cost them much to provide materials to the Colonies to help them get the job done.

    But while both nations committed money and supplies to the cause, it was at least another year before either of them would formally announce an alliance. This was more like an eighteenth century version of the Lend Lease Act that allowed us to arm Allied Powers in World War 2 before Pearl Harbor.

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  • Massachusetts Bay Cuts The Cord–May 1, 1776

    Cover art for May 1, 1776: a printed copy of Massachusetts Bay's Proclamation of Independence. This was apparently a military artifact now in the Westborough Public Library.

    When it comes to breaking away from England, there are a lot of “Firsts” involved.

    Just a few weeks ago, delegates from North Carolina are the first in the Continental Congress to have the authority to vote for Independence–as long as someone else proposes it first.

    Today, Massachusetts Bay becomes the first to declare itself independent from Britain, largely for financial reasons. Their proclamation reads like a protocol manual, plus the fact that their new rules have a start date of June 1 makes it all quite dry.

    And, of course, in just a couple of days, a third colony will get the credit for being the first to actually declare independence from Britain.

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  • Samuel Adams Is Spoiling For A Fight–April 30, 1776

    Cover art for April 30, 1776: Portrait of Rev. Samuel Cooper by John Singleton Copley, ca. 1750.

    Reverend Samuel Cooper has an interesting item in his family history. His grandfather was Samuel Sewall, a judge in the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was involved with the Salem witch trials in 1692-3. Now, to be fair, Sewall did apologize for his part in that bit of foolishness, and he’s also known for writing an essay in 1700 criticizing slavery.

    As far as Cooper himself, he was an active Patriot of the Revolutionary Era, who was good friends with many of the Founding Fathers. According to our friends at the Massachusetts Historical Society, when letters written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lt. Governor Andrew Oliver were stolen in 1773, they wound up in Benjamin Franklin’s hands.

    Franklin in turn sent them to Samuel Cooper, who gave them to Thomas Cushing, the speaker of the Massachusetts assembly. Samuel Adams was the clerk of the Assembly and got to see them. They all knew that the letters were a bit of a bombshell (essentially, Hutchinson and Oliver were misleading Britain regarding conditions in the colonies), but because they were under strict orders not to copy or publish them, their hands were tied.

    Samuel Adams, however, came up with the idea of leaking the contents by way of a propaganda campaign in the Assembly that didn’t actually disclose the letters themselves. That was enough to create a political firestorm in Massachusetts, which led to General Gage implementing the Coercive Acts.

    Who stole the letters in the first place? It’s still not clear.

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  • The Road To Canada–April 29, 1776

    Cover art for April 29, 1776; One of the known extant stretches of Jacob Bayley's road that isn't paved over.

    It was called the Bayley Hazen Road, named after the two engineers who worked on it, and it was an attempt to make it easier for troops and equipment to get from New England to Canada.

    Prior attempts to move materiel were fraught with sickness and the need to navigate various forms of terrain, including waterways and deep mud, which made the journey so much longer that it wasn’t practical anymore.

    Bayley proposed creating a road that would not only make it easier to move things, it would cut the overall trip by about a third. What a great idea! thought George Washington. Get on it right away!

    In the span of six weeks, they had almost a third of the road completed. And then they realized there was an important tactical problem with the Bayley Hazen Road: like every other road, it runs in two directions.

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  • Recruiting In Georgia–April 28, 1776

    Cover art for April 28, 1776: portrait of Lachlan McIntosh. Early 19th Century engraving by Hoppner Meyer, based on a painting by James Barton Longacre, which in turn was created after an original, earlier portrait.

    Lachlan McIntosh was inadvertently responsible for a world record that stood for several years.

    In 1776 and 1777, McIntosh got into a bitter dispute with the Speaker of the Georgia Provincial Congress, a man named Button Gwinnett. It began when McIntosh succeeded Gwinnett as commander of Georgia’s Continental Battalion. Both men were Patriots but they were part of differing factions in the Independence movement. Gwinnett left the military and became a delegate to the Continental Congress, eventually signing the Declaration of Independence. Later when he returned to Georgia he became Speaker of the Congress and later elected President and Commander-in-Chief of the Committee of Safety.

    In March of 1777 McIntosh addressed the Georgia assembly and denounced Gwinnett harshly. Gwinnett responded with a written challenge, demanding and apology or other satisfaction. McIntosh refused to back down, so Gwinnett challenged him to a duel. On May 16 the duel took place and the men fired their pistols nearly simultaneously. Each man shot the other in the leg, but Gwinnett’s wound broke his thigh bone, and before long it was clear that he’d been mortally wounded.

    Because Gwinnett died relatively young and so soon after he signed the Declaration, his autograph became a huge prize for autograph collectors, especially those who wanted to complete their colleciton of signatures from Declaration signers. There are only 51 known authentic examples, and whenever they go on the auction block they can fetch anywhere from $700,000 to over $1 Million. For a period in the early 1970s, an authentic signature of Gwinnett held the Guinness World Record for autograph value. It’s still the rarest and most valuable of Declaration signers, oftentimes because it’s the last signature needed to complete a set.

    Granted, that’s a long route to get to Lachlan McIntosh and his responsibility for a World Record, but now you have a cool story to tell.

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  • Gates Moves Up Quickly–April 27, 1776

    Cover art for April 27, 1776: Horatio Gates, by Gilbert Stuart, 1793. via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    Horatio Gates did move up quickly through the ranks, and partially because he knew George Washington well, but it was also because he had a pretty good handle on getting things done.

    As an Adjutant General, Gates was the man who ran the administrative side of the Continental Army, and is now thought of as the US Army’s first Adjutant General. He handled a lot of the logistics of keeping records and ordering supplies, and offered Washington wise counsel when it came to the Siege of Boston. In that respect it appears that he prevented Washington from acting rashly now and then.

    But Gates was anxious to get a field position, and just a few weeks after this date, he was assigned to the Canadian Department with the new rank of Major General. Some intramural disputes followed as the Continental Army began to retreat from Canada, but were quickly settled.

    Unfortunately Gates’ ambition got the better of him, and as the year wore on, he left his troops to attempt to talk the Congress into having him replace Washington as Commander in Chief.

    Later, Horatio Gates was present when General Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga. He tried to parlay this into political gain, but his status began to falter for the rest of the war, to the point where he was nearly court-martialed. Shortly thereafter he retired and lived in Virginia, and then New York City, until his death in 1806. He was buried in the Trinity Church graveyard in lower Manhattan, but the exact site of his grave is unknown.

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