250 and Counting

This day in American History, 250 years ago.

  • Thwarted On The Delaware–May 8, 1776

    Cover art for May 8, 1776: The HMS Roebuck (center right) during a different conflict in nearly the same place, in 1777. Drawn on the spot & engraved by Lieut. W. Elliott. via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

    The HMS Roebuck was a ship that tangled with the Americans numerous times. One advantage that she had over other British ships was a relatively shallow draught (vertical distance between keel and waterline), which proved helpful when it came to navigating some of the shallower waters off the American coast.

    The HMS Roebuck had already had an encounter just south of today’s events back in March. She was also involved in the Battle of Long Island, which took place during the summer, in a battle on the Hudson River in October 1776, and then in 1777 during another attempt to take Philadelphia, this time as part of a successful assault.

    There were other small battles that went on for another couple of years before she was finally recalled to England for a refit, after which she returned to America, successfully engaging again with the Americans. I

    In 1783 HMS Roebuck finished her war service and was recommissioned as a hospital ship for the French Revolutionary Wars. In the late 1790s she was recommissioned as a warship and participated in the Anglo-Dutch War and then the Napoleonic Wars. Once the Treaty of Amiens was ratified, Roebuck was was used as a guardship, then a receiving ship. Finally in 1811 she was formally decommissioned and broken up.

    HMS Roebuck was in action–most of it battles–for 37 years, a relatively long time for any ship of that era. Even though they were on the enemy side of the war, we can’t help but admire her record, which was quite glossed-over in this relatively small space.

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  • Abigail, On Power–May 7, 1776

    Cover art for May 7, 1776: portrait of Abigail Adams, 1764, by Benjamin Blyth. Photographed by Claude Call at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

    Abigail Adams had some thoughts when it came to arbitrary power, and how fragile it is.

    But you get all that from the episode itself. Instead, here in the show notes, I’m going to point out that I’m the one who took the photo used for today’s cover art.

    The painting hangs at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and because they keep it relatively dim there, you can see the reflection of the stairwell leading down to the main entrance. The white spot over Abigail’s head is the reflection of a light across the gallery, which is maybe 15 feet across. I’m standing at a slight angle so I’m not part of the reflection. (It’s also partially cropped here; I’m not that bad a photographer.)

    The painting was donated to the Society by one of John and Abigail’s descendants, who is coincidentally also named John. The docent I spoke with didn’t know whether there was a family tradition of naming sons “John” as homage to our Founding Father, but he conceded it’s certainly likely.

    The letter cited in today’s episode is part of the MHS collection, though it wasn’t on display the day Mike and I visited. MHS has literally thousands of Adams Family documents, and there are people there who work only with those documents. That’s their only job!

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  • 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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