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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jonathan Trumbull was first and—for a while—the only Colonial Governor to support the American Revolution. (Most of the other colony leaders either didn’t hold that title, or remained quiet, as if hedging their bets.)
Througout the Revolution, Trumbull supported the troops in general and George Washington in particular, and was often a close advisor to Washington on military matters.
So it was a little bit of a surprise when Washington wrote to Trumbull, noting some of the problems he’d had with Trumbull’s recent decision to move a bunch of soldiers northward.
On a side note: there aren’t a lot of portraits of Govenor Trumbull around. That’s one of the reason I’ve used this picture before. The other reason is that I just think it’s neat.
Thomas Stone was a delegate to the Second Continental Congress who served with strict instuctions to “arrive at a happy settlement and lasting amity” with the Mother Country. What’s more, he and his fellow delegates were told not to vote for any proposition that declared independence.
Fortunately, just a few days before Richard Henry Lee put forth the resolution for Independence in early June 1776, the Maryland government removed that restriction, so the delegates could vote however they wanted. And yes, they did vote.
It may seem as though a large number of men were suddenly being appointed as South Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress, but in fact they weren’t all new appointees. Some of them had already been delegates and were re-appointed.
It’s also worth noting that while many of them were supporters of Colonial rights, they were also under instruction to oppose motions for independence. Specifically, when Richard Henry Lee’s motion comes down on June 7, Edward Rutledge specifically was told to oppose it. According to lore, his superiors in South Carolina’s government weren’t sure that the time was “ripe” for independence.
Arthur Middleton was not only a supporter of Colonial rights, he was said to think ruthlessly when it came to Loyalists.
Thomas Heyward didn’t distinguish himself very much in the Congress but in 1780 he was captured by the British and held for a year. The loss of the year and his “property” (i.e., slaves) made him a martyr for the Revolution.
Thomas Lynch was instrumental in helping George Washington organize his army in the early days, but illness kept him from signing the Declaration of Independence.
William Henry Drayton was born in 1742 on his family’s plantation just outside of Charleston. The plantation was dedicated to growing rice.
In 1764 he married Dorothy Golightly. In the early 1770s he was a Loyalist and enjoyed some of the perks that came with it. Then in 1774 he wrote a pamphlet supporting a Continental Congress and lost all his government jobs. That, go figure, radicalized him to the Patriot cause and he dedicated the rest of his life to it.
William Henry Drayton died in Berkeley County, SC at the age of 37. His home, Drayton Hall, is now within Charleston city limits and operates as a museum.
North Carolina’s Orange County Regiment went through a lot of change in a very short amount of time. First they were divided, then reabsorbed into a different group, all in the span of about two weeks.
Fortunately things stablilized for them then, but the resulting Hillsborough District Brigade of militia saw a lot of action over the next several years in the Carolinas and in Georgia. By the time the war ended, Hillsborough was one of the few groups still standing. But chances are, if there was an important battle in that part of the world, this group was part of it.
