250 and Counting

Category: Massachusetts History

  • Delegates Start Getting Their Orders–May 23, 1776

    Cover art for May 23, 1776: portrait of James Duane by John Trumbull, 1805.

    Once the preamble to Congress’ resolution had been written and unanimously approved back on May 15, it really was just a matter of when, rather than whether, America was going to formally declare itself as a separate state from England.

    The hardest part was getting all the ducks in a row, as the expression goes. The biggest reason that independence hadn’t already been declared is that anything that came out of the Continental Congress had to pass unanimously, so they could speak with a single voice. Now, at the delegate level, they didn’t all have to vote the same way, but once a majority of the delegates from a given colony voted a certain way, then the colony voted that way as part of the larger body.

    Some colonies had the green light to vote in the affirmative, as long as a different colony brought up the question. Georgia was rather split within the state, and was also more concerned with the skirmishes they were having at the border with Florida. So they mostly didn’t care. New York delegates, as we mentioned yesterday, arrived with instructions not to vote on Independence at all. Even when they finally did vote, it was technically against their orders.

    But one of the more passionate sets of orders came from a group in Boston. Put your earbuds in and learn about how florid writing can really get your point across.

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  • Mugford’s Last Stand–May 19, 1776

    Cover art for May 19, 1776: a 1780 portrait believed to be that of Captain James Mugford, attributed to Samuel Blyth.

    Captain enlisted in the Continental Army not long after the battles at Lexington and Concord. He was commissioned as a Captain and immediately put to work capturing British ships.

    One of the more surprising things about the battle between the USS Franklin is not so much the victorious outcome, which was starting to feel a little bit of a foregone conclusion at this point, or that the ships moving in on the Franklin at first pretended to be friendly Bostonians, since that was actually a common tactic.

    It was the fact that his birth date and death date are the same calendar day. Mugford was born in 1789, and died in 1776, on May 19. That seems like the sort of coincidence that might get a little more attention.

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  • Massachusetts Bay Cuts The Cord–May 1, 1776

    Cover art for May 1, 1776: a printed copy of Massachusetts Bay's Proclamation of Independence. This was apparently a military artifact now in the Westborough Public Library.

    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.

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  • Patriots’ Day–April 19, 1776

    Cover art for April 19, 1776: Jonah Clarke's published edition of his sermon marking the first anniversary of the battles at Lexington and Concord.

    It seems like only a year ago we were marking the date the war began at Lexington and Concord, and how it became Patriots’ Day.

    So we’re here once again: the battle ended with the British retreating into the city of Boston, and holding siege there for the better part of a year, until Washington was given several cannons brought down from Fort Ticonderoga, which vastly improved his shooting range.

    A year later, Reverend Jonas Clark marked the day with a sermon that is nearly 40 pages long in its published version. He used a lot of harsh rhetoric in his sermon, casting the British as though they were Satan’s owm minions:

    They approach with the morning’s light; and more
    like murderers and cut-throats, than the troops of a christian king, without provocation, without warning, when no war was proclaimed, they draw the sword of violence, upon the inhabitants of this town, and with a cruelty and barbarity, which would have made the most hardened savage blush, they shed INNOCENT BLOOD!

    The sermon does come back around to God, noting that:

    And from the nineteenth of April, 1775, we may venture to predict, will be dated, in future history, THE LIBERTY or SLAVERY of the AMERICAN WORLD, according as a sovereign God shall see fit to smile, or frown upon the interesting cause, in which we are engaged.

    So…God picks favorites, so long as we humble ourselves before Him and trust in His name.

    Incidentally, I first heard about the children walking from Acton to Concord on the Julie Mason Show, on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel. she had very fond memories of this, so I dug around a little to discover whether this activity was still going on all these years later. If anything, it’s grown!

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  • Washington Departs Cambridge–April 4, 1776

    Cover art for April 4, 1776: Longfellow National Historic Site, also known as the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Uploaded to Wikipedia by user Daderot.

    To say the Washington left the Longfellow House is putting the cart before the horse, because Washington was in it before Longfellow.

    The house originally belonged to John Vassall Jr, a Loyalist who had the good sense to get out of town when the shooting started. From July 16, 1775 until this day in 1776, Washington occupied it as his home and his headquarters. In 1791 Washington’s apothecary Andrew Craigie purchased the house and made a major addition to it, the only big cosmetic change to the house. After Craigie’s death, his widow rented out various rooms to supplement what little income she had, and one of her tenants was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who eventually became the owner in 1843 when it was purchased for him as a wedding gift.

    The Longfellow family was the last to live in the house; some time after his death the family established the Longfellow Trust to provide for the house’s preservation, and in 1972 the house and its possessions were donated to the National Park Service.

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  • Letters From The General–March 24, 1776

    Cover art for March 24, 1776: Reproduction of a portrait of Josiah Quincy I by John Singleton Copley. Photo uploaded to Wikipedia by user Mmangan333.

    Mike had a little fun busting on George Washington’s spelling in today’s episode, but we do have to offer a little grace here, because in 1776 efforts to standardize spelling in the English language were only just beginning to catch on.

    About a hundred years earlier, some of the language was simplified; thus, sinne became sin; logique became logic; toune to town, etc. Not long afterward, some words were tied to their Greek or Latin roots, e.g. det became debt (Latin, “debitum”) and dout became doubt (Latin, “dubitare”), and so on.

    It really wasn’t until the 19th Century that more serious efforts to standarize some English took place, as the science of phonetics began to rise. In the 1870s, societies actually began springing up that were dedicated to reforming the English language’s spelling. One such group had the editor of the Chicago Tribune as a member, so whenever his group had something they thought was good, he’d be the first one using it in print.

    In 1903 a group called the Simplified Spelling Board was formed, backed by Andrew Carnegie. Their recommendations were immediately relayed to all government agencies by President Teddy Roosevelt.

    And then between the 1930s and 1975, the Chicago Tribune (again) was at the forefront of changes to standardized spelling, thus giving the new language a huge platform on which to rest.

    Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls, kids.

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  • Meet The New Boss–March 20, 1776

    Cover art for March 20, 1776: portrait of Nathaniel Greene "painted from memory" by John Trumbull, 1792. via Yale University Art Gallery.

    While preparing to depart Boston for New York, George Washington appointed Nathaniel Greene to run things for awhile until everything was back in order.

    Fortunately for both Greene and Washington, matters straightened out rather quickly, because Greene was called to join Washington just a few weeks later.

    Nathaniel Greene was tasked with fortifying Brooklyn while Washington prepared to defend Manhattan. As a military leader, Greene had a bit of a mixed record, but more often than not it appears that he was the victim of poor timing when things didn’t go well for him.

    Later on in the war, he took on the position of Quartermaster General, which on its surface looks like a demotion, but Washington still considered him “inner circle” and Greene would sit in on War Council meetings, even though he was considered a staff officer.

    Later on, when things started looking gloomy in South Carolina and Georgia, Nathaniel Greene was put in charge of the Southern Department of the Continental Army, where he embarked on a campaign of guerilla warfare rather than pitched battles. His unconventional approach wasn’t always successful, but if the British won a battle it was at a much greater cost than it should have been.

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  • Beginning of the End in Boston–March 4, 1776

    Cover art for March 4, 1776: A map of the Boston area during the siege. from the History Department at the US Military Academy.

    Colonel Henry Knox took about ten weeks to get from Ticonderoga to Cambridge rather than the two he anticipated. But his arrival meant the siege’s end in Boston would come soon.

    Knox had brought something like 60 tons worth of material overland using hand-built sledges and carts drawn by oxen. The last leg of the trip is still a mystery, because Knox’ diary ends about two weeks early. What is known is that as he passed through the occasional town, people would line up to watch. So we know when he was where, but the usual stuff that ran through Knox’ head for that portion of the trip is gone.

    Still, his arrival at Cambridge meant that Washington now had what he needed to fortify his position and do what he needed to drive the British out of Boston. After nearly a year, the siege’s end was actually in sight.

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  • A New Job For John Adams–February 9, 1776

    Cover art for February 9, 1776: John Adams as portrayed by Mather Brown in 1788.

    One of John Adams’ stronger talents was being able to see the motivation behind the action, and because of this he was usually able to thwart unattractive actions somehow.

    In today’s case, he was able to thwart people who opposed him by simply agreeing with them. As a newly-minted Chief Justice of Massachusetts, some Loyalist (if not Loyalist, then certainly in the Don’t Declare Independence crowd) delegates from Maryland suggested that because he worked for Massachusetts, he had an inherent conflict of interest and therefore couldn’t vote in Congress.

    Now, at that time a colony’s quorum was exactly one delegate, so if he was the only person from Massachusetts attending that day, Massachusetts wouldn’t be able to cast a vote. So, Adams did the sensible thing and agreed with the Marylanders. Then he resigned from the position they thought he’d never give up.

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  • The Play’s The Thing–January 8, 1775

    Cover art for January 8, 1775: Portrait of John Burgoyne c. 1766, by Joshua Reynolds. Via the Frick Collection.
    Portrait of John Burgoyne c. 1766, by Joshua Reynolds. Via the Frick Collection.

    Mike wasn’t kidding when he said that, had it not been for his part in the Revolution, John Burgoyne would be best known as a playwright. He wrote several plays, most of them quite successful. Interestingly enough, the play Mike cites today is not often listed among his oeuvre. So we get the feeling that “The Blockade to Boston” was more of a one-act, or a skit-level kind of show meant specifically for that day’s audience.

    But he was a general during the Revolution, and he was actually a pretty good one, although for the longest time he got the blame for the British loss. (You may still think this is the case, but more recently historians have moved away from this.)

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