The cover art for today’s episode may be one of the most famous art pieces depicting an event of the American Revolution, and it happened under the Liberty Tree, which is clearly marked here.
This event, the tarring and feathering of Loyalist John Malcolm, took place about 18 months earlier and shows Malcolm already tarred and feathered, and now he’s having (also marked) tea poured into his mouth. The Stamp Act is nailed to the tree, upside down. Really, there’s a lot to unpack in this picture. So it makes sense that people were upset that the tree had been cut down.
It was another net win for the Americans as the HMS Falcon, which had originally been assigned to the Colonies to enforce the Intolerable Acts, took a run at stealing livestock in order to provision the British who were stuck in Boston during the siege.
Unfortunately for them, the Colonists were wise to their moves and took appropriate action…more than once.
Boston had been under siege since Lexington and Concord. Of course the British felt that they needed to break out of it from time to time, and today was one of those attempts.
Now, this was a success for the Continental Army, but the fact is, few people realized at that time just how close they were to losing that battle, and badly. But that’s for a couple of days from now, on August 1st.
Coincidentally, August 1st is the day that this podcast begins airing on Hamilton Radio!
Tune in to HamiltonRadio.net to hear our show, and a bunch of others. We’re in good company over there.
Oof, that’s a mouthful of title. Oh well, what’s done is done.
As noted in today’s episode, James Warren was not related to Joseph Warren. On the other hand, he is related to Mercy Otis Warren, because he’s her husband.
James and John Adams had a few ideas in common; the hard part was convincing a few others that they were in the right.
Meanwhile, did you know there’s another Long Island? That sort of thing really plays havoc with our research. This one is in the Boston Bay, and it’s a familiar story because something similar happened a few weeks ago. But tune in anyway.
As you listen to today’s episode, it’ll become clear that Mike had way too much fun writing and recording this one. But then again, I wrote the title, so.
There are plenty of jobs out there that are kind of obscure, in the sense that it’s a job that somebody has, but you never really thought about. For instance, did you know that with some high-end perfumes, the labels are put on manually? Someone’s out there sticking the labels on the bottles, because either the bottles don’t go through the machinery politely, or the levels of quality are low when they’re applied mechanically. So it’s easier to have someone stick on the labels.
“Buttonmaker” is also a likely profession in this realm, largely because it is so automated these days. But back in the Colonial days, it was a specialty profession, especially since Aaron Peasley, the subject of today’s episode, refined the die sinking procedure used to make buttons then. And except for the specific means of creating the die (it’s done using electrical discharges nowadays), the overall technique hasn’t changed much.
But his talent didn’t end there. Listen in and see what else he did.
Additional note: the closeup photo of the button used in the cover art comes from a fascinating article written by 2ndLt. Kevin Rosentreter, USMC, who also took the photo.
Mike and I alternate on the writing and recording, but the final steps of the show, including the artwork and the show notes, are entirely my responsibility.
There are lots of times when historians have to pull a lot of small pieces together to get a decent picture of events. They use oddball clues such as artifacts in paintings to determine someone’s state of health, for instance. They have to take into account that published reports could be propaganda in nature.
But once in a while, something turns up that was written more or less at the time it happened, and what’s more it was written by someone who doesn’t necessarily have an agenda.
And in this case, nobody even knew it existed until a hundred years later. Exactly a hundred years later, in fact. A young soldier named Peter Brown wrote a letter to his mother just a few days after the Bunker Hill battle to tell her what happened. He spared few details and told a rather complete story of a couple of days’ worth of activity. And while he did mail the letter, and his mother did receive it, it mostly lay in family archives until 1875, when a descendant found it and realized that it might be important.
In the long run, the Battle at Bunker Hill Breed’s Hill was a tactical win for the British, but they incurred heavy losses and it took three tries to get that win.
So why is it one of the battles that so many Americans seem to remember all these years later?
We’re speculating here, but it’s possible that, between this battle and the ones at Lexington and Concord, the Colonial forces realized that this was a war that they could actually win: it wasn’t crazy at all to fight the British army. It almost didn’t matter that we didn’t win this one; the colonial militiamen could stand up against the British and force them to work much harder for their victories.
There’s a scene in The Godfather, Part II in which Michael describes an incident he’d seen earlier in the day. He says he saw some Cuban rebels being rounded up by the soldiers, and one of them, rather than being taken prisoner, detontated a grenade on his person, taking a Captain of the Guard with him. From that he concluded that because the rebels weren’t getting paid to fight, they can actually win.
Jeez, I gotta stop writing these titles late at night.
Sometimes the history books make it sound like some people just appeared out of nowhere, but they did have pasts. George Washington would be a good example.
Washington has been nearly invisible since this show started on January 1, but that doesn’t mean that the Congress hollered “Anyone wanna be a general?” and he stepped up first. In fact, he was a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774, and for some time he’d been a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, often simultaneously with the Congress thing. And he did have a commendable military background dating back to the French and Indian War, so appointing him the Commander of Colonial forces wasn’t part of someone’s crazy scheme: they thought he could really do it.
It wasn't even close to being the first time, but this was an important "get": the colonist forces learned that troops were coming to capture Charlestown and Dorchester in an effort to break the siege. They got lucky, it all led to some ugliness and eventually both sides could call it a win, and both sides could call it a loss.
Some of what you’ll be hearing today will have overlap with yesterday’s episode, but we all have shorter memories, we read in an article…uh, somewhere.
But in the long run, that’s okay, because context is everything, and it’s important to understand what a big deal this particular incident was against the bigger picture.
