250 and Counting

Category: John Adams

  • 250 and Counting: January 21, 1775

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    Cover Art for January 21, 1775: A portrait of John Adams

    As we’ve noted a few times, the Colonists in general didn’t want war with Britain; in fact most of them were pretty sure they were going to get wiped out should it come to that.

    Even our most famous Patriots of the time, such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, spent enormous amounts of time trying to engage the British peacefully. For a long time, any petitions sent to King George III had some form of “Hey, we’re totally loyal to you, can you please address this for us, your loyal subjects? Please?” somewhere in the document.

    Thus it was that John Adams composed a letter to a friend of his in London, whose identity remains unknown to modern-day historians. He pinpoints the day he thinks things started to go wrong, and he notes that there’s a spirit on this side of the pond which shouldn’t go ignored.

  • 250 and Counting: January 9, 1775

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    Cover art for January 9, 1775: A portrait of Daniel Leonard, a British Loyalist who wrote under the pen name "Massachusettensis."

    Daniel Leonard was the son of a prominent family in the ironworks industry. He lived in Taunton, Massachusetts until shortly after he accepted a position working for the Royal Governor of the state, at which point he became unpopular enough that he was forced to move to Boston, which was under British occupation at the time.

    It makes sense, then, that Leonard put pen to paper and wrote essays to be published in the Boston Gazette under the pen name “Massachusettensis.” (What doesn’t make sense, 250 years later, is why he chose such a peculiar name. At least, not to us.) He began writing these pieces in December 1774 but it was the one published on this day in 1775 that finally set John Adams to writing replies under a pen name of his own. This back-and-forth continued for about three months, until a major event escalated the tensions between the Crown and the Colonies to the point where the exchange of essays became moot.

  • 250 and Counting: January 6, 1775

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    Cover art for January 6, 1775: A map of the New York area from that year

    The impression that most people have of John Adams, it seems, comes from one of two places. It’s either William Daniels’ portrayal of him in the play and film 1776 (and we’re big fans of that particular bit of cinema), or it’s Paul Giamatti’s portrayal in the seven-part miniseries on cable TV. Both stories had their charms, and both took some liberties with the facts. (Oddly, both of them showed Benjamin Franklin being carried in to the Second Continental Congress, but that didn’t happen until the Constitutional Conventions eleven years later.) The bottom line is that Adams was a complex man and a very smart one who had the ability to see the bigger picture, as they say.

    George Washington was also a well-rounded person, as you no doubt discovered in the January 1 episode. Early in 1775 Washington wore multiple hats. He was a delegate to the First Continental Congress, he was responsible for training militiamen in Virginia, and he was unofficially the Commander-in-Chief of the army, except there wasn’t one quite yet.

    Today we’re looking at some correspondence from Adams to Washington, and we’ll learn in a future episode just how seriously Washington took his warnings.