When the folks in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, heard about the events at Lexington and Concord a month earlier, they were quite incensed. So much so that they decided they were going to declare independence from Britain.
Maybe. Maybe not. Tune in as Mike explains the controversy.
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Baltimore has a lot of historic pride in its street names. Nearly all of them can be traced back to an historic figure or event: Key Highway, named after Francis Scott Key. (Also the Key Bridge, but we’re all still sad about that.) Fort Avenue, leading to Fort McHenry. And while I’m at it, McHenry Street, about two miles from the fort. The town also has John Street, Eager Street and Howard Streets, all of them named after John Eager Howard. one of the earliest governors of the state.
During the revolution, a prominent family in the city of Baltimore was the Purviance Family, led by brothers Robert and Samuel Purviance. They were both well-known for their activities to support the Colonists’ side during the Revolution. Where are they memorialized?…Listen in and find out.
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P.S. I do have theories about this but I’m hoping to explore those in a later episode.
People seem to have an inherent need to excuse their own unfortunate behaviors. One of the most common is to point to someone else breaking a rule and making it about them.
Or, in the case of most of the battles of the early American Revolution, the colonists seemed always to be the aggressor, making their actions strictly an act of self-preservation.
But what happens when you’ve captured all their horses? Tune in!
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Is it just me or does Daniel LeRoy look a lot like actor Richard Kind?
Daniel LeRoy was born in upstate New York and started to put together a pretty good settlement, but an unfortunate choice on his part caused him to lose it all.
So he moved west and rebuilt his life and, by most accounts, it’s reasonable to say that he did rather well in the Michigan Territory, and in the State after that area became our nation’s 26th.
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While the Declaration of Independence was still about 15 months away, a small community in the far western reaches of Pennsylvania decided not to wait around for it to happen, and they took matters into their own hands.
The Hanna’s Town Resolves was probably the most direct challenge to British rule to date, if you don’t count the stuff that involved shooting.
Unfortunately, in the end the entire town paid the price and it was destroyed. However, on the same site you can visit reproductions of several of the structures that originally stood.
Likewise, the original document of the Hanna’s Town Reserves was never recovered (and was probably destroyed in the fires that took out the town), but the text was reproduced in the Pennsylvania Gazette in August of that year, which is the only reason we know about it today.
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The Second Continental Congress has only been convened for about five days and things are already heating up for them.
Delegates are still arriving. Lexington and Concord has upset their original plans so they’re making alternate plans. And even the alternate plans they made five days ago are being amended.
And then Virginia comes in with some crazy idea about Independence? Will the madness never end?
(Spoiler alert: it doesn’t, but we’ll tell you if it ever does.)
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The Thirteen Colonies didn’t have a lot in the way of a navy to help them with their battles, especially not against perhaps the biggest and best navy ever up until then.
What they did have was people who were willing to act in lieu of a navy. Some of them did it out of sheer patriotism, and others were a little more mercenary about it. Specifically, privateers.
Now, “privateers” sounds a little like “pirates” and people often use the words interchangeably. You should stop being friends with those people. Privateers are a specific breed of sailor. They’re government-sanctioned to act as a kind of ad-hoc navy, authorized to take action in times of war. Typically, their job was to disrupt merchant vessels (hence the confusion with pirates).
It wasn’t long after the Revolution began that Fairhaven, Massachusetts, became a place known for privateer activity.
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Extra credit activity: check out the West Wing, Season 4, Episode 18. You’ll learn more about privateers, and as a bonus, you’ll never think of Francis Scott Key the same way ever again.
Dr. Lyman Hall gets a little name recognition because he was a strong supporting character in the play/film 1776, but he was more involved in the Revolution than that.
While Georgia (eventually) sent five delegates to the Continental Congress, Hall was one of the three who regularly attended and signed the Declaration of Independence.
For instance, he ensured that food and medicine got to Colonial soldiers, and it was he who convinced the Georgia congress to send official delegates to the Second Continental Congress, himself among them.
He also became the state’s first Governor and spent that single year establishing the state university.
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A fort was built at Crown Point in 1730 by the French. The British attacked it twice before the French finally destroyed it in 1759.
That same year the British began building a new fort for defending against the French.
In 1773 it was partially destroyed in a fire. Since nobody had seriously threatened the area in thirteen years, the British didn’t really care and chose to keep a skeleton staff of nine soldiers there.
So what made it such an important target to the Green Mountain Boys? Mike’s got the answer to that question.
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When the Second Continental Congress convened, they spent a little time with the formalities of going over credentials and establishing some ground rules. But right after that, they got right down to business. They knew that they were going to move into a wartime footing immediately. They also knew that they wanted to operate in an “official” capacity, so they took the time to review, on the record, the events leading up to and including the battle at Lexington and Concord.
They then adjourned until the next day, but tabled discussion of the state of America to the following Monday. (May 11 was a Thursday, so this wasn’t terribly out of line.)
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