The Minuteman statue in Lexington, Massachusetts is said to represent Captain John Parker, who died on this day.
Except Parker wasn’t a minuteman.
He also probably didn’t look like the man in the statue, given his age and what other small details we know about him.
But as usual, nobody lets the facts get in the way of a good story, so just roll with it, hm?
(We’re guessing he probably wasn’t green, either. )
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So obviously this Josiah Bartlett isn’t the guy on The West Wing, in part because President Bartlet is fictional. (Okay, maybe entirely because of that.) But he is supposed to be a direct descendant of the Founding Father. Why, and when, the terminal T dropped off was never explained.
Anyway, Josiah Bartlett and John Langdon both arrived in Philadelphia from New Hampshire as delegates to the Continental Congress, and they both fought in the war, plus they were around for the Constitutional Convention—so there’s a lot of history between them.
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Since the early 1700s there have been several Fort Johnsons on James Island in the Charleston Bay. The curious thing is that few people know what happened to each fort as it was destroyed, with the exception of the third one, which was definitely damaged in a storm.
But the first two? Who knows.
Today’s episode focuses on the second version of the fort, which still has a few vestiges of the old walls around. But it’s much like visiting Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where the location of the barracks are marked off by the presence of some bricks in the ground rather than some actual walls.
The fort was taken on this day in 1775 and remained occupied until 1780, when the British came back for it and found it abandoned.
Today the island hosts a marine research center operated by the state in partnership with several federal and state agencies, all of which have already stood longer than any fort (though the powder magazine from its third incarnation–see the photo–still remains).
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John Henry Hobart was born on this day in 1775, and he came that close to dying on the same day in 1830, on September 12.
We read once that, statistically, men tend to die before “big” dates, e.g. birthdays and major holidays, while women tend to die afterwards. In Claude’s family anyway, it does have a ring of general truth to it.
Go figure.
Although Hobart was an Episcopalian minister (and later Bishop), he was the pastor to Elizabeth Ann Seton, our first American saint. (Seton converted to Catholicism in 1805.)
While Hobart was quite active in the New York City area, he also felt the need for higher education in the western reaches of the state, and established Geneva College (later Hobart College) in the Finger Lakes region. By the time he died, he’d established a church in most major towns in New York and begun missionary work among the Oneida Indians.
It’s not 100% clear what caused his death, but it was likely a chronic intestinal infection that affected his health in later years.
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Let’s talk state vexillology.
Believe it or not, there are people who are very passionate about state flags. (Not me, he said, about to go into a mini-rant.)
Most states have a very utilitarian purpose. They kind of lean in, announce themselves, and lean out again.
Some flags are weirdly cluttered (New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, Delaware).
Some flags are rather boring (Alabama, Minnesota).
Some have heavy symbolism but it’s lost on most viewers (Arkansas, Utah)
I’ve lived in Maryland almost 25 years and I don’t think I’ve seen a people more obsessed with their state flag:
Colorado’s flag is all over that state so they must be kind of obsessed, too:
South Carolina’s flag has symbolism and simplicity going for it, and I have to agree with people who put it in the top tier of state flags.
Here’s the story of the South Carolina flag and how it got that way.
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We mentioned a while back that John Adams had siblings, as did George Washington. This wasn’t one of them, and as far as anyone can tell, it’s more of a cousin-type relationship.
William Washington essentially won a bet with his brothers, and his prize was the ability to join the militia in Virginia to fight for independence. From this day in 1775 until 1781 he was engaged in multiple battles against the British in Virginia and the Carolinas. It was in 1781 that his horse was shot out from under him. The fallen animal pinned him down. He was bayoneted and captured, and spent the rest of the war under house arrest in Charleston, SC.
After the war he remained in South Carolina where he spent some time in the state legislature, but declined to run for governor because, as the story goes, he wasn’t a native Carolinian.
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As the winter of 1775 approached, George Washington had to think about the state of the siege of Boston. In short, housing and clothing thousands of men in a New England winter is a very different proposition than doing it in the summer.
So Washington convened his War Council to discuss the possibility of breaking the siege by attacking the city from a different direction.
Meanwhile up in Canada, General Philip Schuyler takes another run at Fort St. Jean.
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The riflemen in the Continental Army were a special breed of soldier. They weren’t subject to all the drudge work that most of the other soldiers had to endure.
The downside to this is, they knew it and they took advantage of it. So when one rifleman got himself in trouble, word got out and suddenly a relatively small problem turns into a relatively big one.
And while George Washington kinda-sorta recognized this stratification of soldiers, he didn’t do much to discourage it. He did, however, demonstrate more patience with the infantrymen than most people would give him credit for.
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The Independence Hurricane from September 2 is still going strong, and on this day it made landfall again, this time in Newfoundland, Canada.
The devastation was immense, and perhaps would have been worse had it happened in modern times (we get it, there are satellites and stuff now). It remains Canada’s worst natural disaster and it’s still in the Top Ten chart for North Atlantic hurricanes.
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As late as the 1970s, pioneers like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone had achieved a kind of mythical status, largely because of fictionalized stories created about them by the folks at Disney.
Sometimes it gets tough to determine what’s fiction and what isn’t, since they tend to embellish things that may have actually happened for the sake of a story. (Not a knock on Disney, so don’t sue us; that’s a typical practice when it comes to stuff like this.)
So these folks became larger than life for a while, and it’s not to say that they didn’t hold any importance in American history, but sometimes we have to temper those stories with the fact that these men were, after all, just men with real-life concerns, such as “how am I going to feed my family?” which was pretty much the calculus for the event we discuss today.
(P.S. the story about Washington and the cherry tree was written long after he died, so don’t count on that one either.)
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