250 and Counting

Category: Boston History

  • February 14, 1775

    Cover art for February 14, 1775: Depiction by Percy Moran circa 1909 of British Grenadiers and Light Infantry scaling today's "Breed's Hill."

    When it comes to Black people and their role in the American Revolution, the one name that most people appear to remember is that of Crispus Attucks, largely because he was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and that event is thought of as the beginning of the Revolutionary War, therefore it’s significant that the first person to die in the name of American freedom was a person of color.

    Other people, more fussy about events, would say that Lexington & Concord was the beginning of the war. The reasoning behind that is that it’s the first event in a series of hostile actions that took place close to one another. But the real argument is that most historical events of this nature don’t have definitive “beginning” and “ending” points; it’s much like a roll of paper towels. Sure, there are perforations marking each sheet, but you know for a fact that when you pull one off, it’s going to tear at an oddball angle and those perfectly rectangular sheets are a rarity.

    The fact is, however, that over 100 Black men fought as part of the militia in the opening battles of the Revolution. Here’s the story of one of the first.

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  • February 13, 1775

    Cover art for February 13, 1775: historical marker outside the Phipps Street Burying Ground in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

    Here’s a peek behind the curtain: Mike and Claude do their own research for the individual shows, though Mike did the initial setups for the dates. So he’s the one who figured out what happened when, and then they each do the deeper research for the episodes they record.

    So Mike probably had no idea that there was a familial connection to this episode for Claude. For what it’s worth, neither did Claude, until he started looking into the story of Nathaniel Gorham. So if Mike had been recording this episode, it’s likely that he wouldn’t have had anything to say about it other than “Oh, fun coincidence.”

    We’re only sad that we couldn’t find a portrait of Nathaniel; we have no idea whether there’s a family resemblance.

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  • February 6, 1775

    John Adams and Daniel Leonard had an interesting relationship. They were great friends at first, until the British started cracking down on the Colonies. Adams chafed under the Crown’s pressure, while Leonard remained loyal. Ultimately it created a rift between the two men which never quite healed, and it broke Adams’ heart.

    When Leonard began submitting essays to the Boston Gazette under the pen name “Massachusettensis,” Adams felt compelled to respond in kind, choosing a pen name of his own, “Novanglus.” It’s not entirely clear that each man knew who the other one was—certainly they did not at that time, but sources appear to differ on whether Adams knew it was Leonard later on—but what is clear is that neither man wrote from the standpoint of the troubles between Britain and the Colonies arising from a simple case of misunderstanding. They both viewed it as each side making a calculated effort to maintain control.

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  • 250 and Counting: February 2, 1775

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    Cover art for February 2, 1775: portrait of Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blyth, in 1766.

    After the Boston Tea Party, the government in Britain enacted what they called the Coercive Acts, or what the Colonists called the Intolerable Acts. (From here, it doesn’t feel like one name was any better-sounding than the other.)

    Because the Colonists were still hoping to preserve a decent relationship with the Mother Country, the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and put together a letter to the king, which said in essence, “We’re very loyal to you, O King, but it’s been a year and enough is enough. Maybe you could prevail upon Parliament to dial it back a little bit, hm?”

    That was in October of 1774. Of course, documents moving slowly and all that, the reply from the king didn’t come back for a couple of months, and at the heart of it was George affirming his faith in Parliament’s actions, and nothing’s going to change for the forseeable future.

    Both John and Abigail Adams, in different places at the time and in separate letters to friends, each relayed to friends their opinion that the tipping point had passed and that war was probably inevitable.

    Guest Voice: Shannon Call, who needed a lot of convincing to get near a microphone.

  • 250 and Counting: February 1, 1775

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    Cover art for February 1, 1775: Portrait of John Hancock.

    Before the shooting started, Boston appeared to be the place which gave King George III the most hassles. But to be fair, Boston is the place that the British seemed to provoke more than the other Colonies, so it kind of evened out in the end.

    When the Intolerable Acts dissolved the existing government in Massachusetts, the locals said, “Whatever” and convened anyway that same summer. But there’s no denying the results: they did all the things that a government is supposed to do, and the locals pretty much ignored whatever apparatus was set up by the British.

    There were three Provincial Congresses in Massachusetts, but by the time the Third one convened, much of what they did was rendered unnecessary because the war had turned “hot” and other structures were in place to do the job.

  • 250 and Counting: January 31, 1775

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    Cover art for January 31, 1775: portrait of John Rowe

    John Rowe was one of those guys who always seemed to be nearby when something happened, but he also manged to let it be known that he was nowhere nearby when that thing happened. For instance, he was the guy who owned the tea that got dumped into Boston Harbor, but he was “sick” that day and couldn’t have possibly participated in the event.

    The Suffolk Resolves was a document written to formally reject the Massachusetts Government Act, but it was so well-crafted that other colonies were able to use it as a model for their Resolves. And Rowe was around to hear what King George III had to say about that document, but his opinion isn’t as clear as you might think.

  • 250 and Counting: January 30, 1775

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    Cover Art for January 30, 1775: the cover of the Diary of Frederick Mackenzie

    By this time in 1775, tensions between the British and the Colonists in Boston were especially high. The Boston Tea Party resulted in several thousand troops being sent in to restore and maintain order, and Americans being Americans, even before there was an America, nearly every home had plenty of arms and ammunition, or at the very least the village had a gunpowder magazine, where the explosives were stored safely but in central, easy-to-access locations.

    To be on the safe side, General Gage ordered that the magazine nearest to Boston be emptied and the gunpowder brought back into the city under cover of night. The operation was successful, but trust of the British was only further eroded by this action. Ultimately it led to the Colonists continuing to arm themselves, but to do it more covertly. It wouldn’t be long before open war was waged.

  • 250 and Counting: January 26, 1775

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    Cover Art for January 26, 1775: an anti-vaccination political cartoon from that era

    With all the things we know about germ theory and diseases and the importance of vaccinations, it’s kind of a surprise when people take a stance against such things in the face of the hard data.

    Before the invention of the smallpox vaccine, the disease could have a brutal effect on people who caught it, with the vomiting, the mouth sores and the high fever. It could kill you–often suddenly–within two weeks, and if you survived, you were often left blind, or infertile, and almost certainly with deep scars all over your body. Once someone had it, the best you could do to prevent its spread was isolate them from others.

    The only known preventative dated back to around 200 BCE, and was a process called “variolation,” which involved transferring small amounts of material from smallpox sores and applying it to the skin of a healthy person. That person would get a much milder form of the disease, but they’d be much more resistant to it in the future. Other people did something called “insufflation,” where dried smallpox scabs were ground up and then blown up a person’s nostril with a small pipe.

    In 1796 a vaccine was developed, which was basically variolation but using the much milder version of the disease, cowpox, which proved to be quite effective against smallpox.

    It wasn’t without controversy, however: people thought that the cowpox-based vaccine would turn you into a cow. But by 1801 it was a generally accepted vaccine against smallpox, and the disease is considered by medical organizations around the world to be completely eradicated, there not having been a case recorded since 1980.

    Thank goodness we’ve moved past that way of thinking! Imagine a pandemic taking place these days, and people thinking that terrible things would happen to them if they took the vaccine?–oh, wait.

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