Up until now, we’ve presented General Thomas Gage as rather a hard liner who was looking to subjugate the Colonies somehow. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is, he like being a light-hearted guy, and when he became the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, he discovered exactly what kind of mess he’d stepped into. At that point, anything he did would only make matters worse.
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The title kind of buries the bigger story, but we wanted to ensure that you understood what a big deal Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf was.
Elizabeth was dead by the time 1775 rolled around, but her family continued to run the apothecary shop for many years, and they were instrumental in ensuring that the Massachusetts Patriots were equipped with medical supplies should war break out.
Today there is a chain of pharmacies in the midwest called GreenLeaf Apothecary, but there’s no connection we could find between this and the original, except perhaps as homage.
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Today’s episode marks the end of Women’s History Month. We’ve noted a few episodes since this adventure first started that involved women taking political action as groups, but Mercy Otis Warren was one of the most influential individual women to take a political stand in the Revolution era.
She was self-educated, and married a man who was both enlightened and politically active himself, and she used her position as her husband’s hostess to develop and maintain connections of her own. She was also able to use what she learned to develop some of the pieces she wrote, whether they were factual or thinly-disguised fiction pieces.
Claude and his wife Shannon did the extra-touristy thing of visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts during Thanksgiving weekend several years ago, and we did see the Mercy Otis Warren statue, but frankly at that time we still had a lot to learn about her. (If you go, be warned that Plymouth Rock is even more disappointing than everyone tells you it is.)
And because it’s an episode celebrating Mercy Warren, we talked Shannon into recording the episode. Enjoy.
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In the past we’ve talked about the New England Restraining Act; today was the day that King George III actually put it into action.
To mark that day, Mike takes you through some of the details of the act and its impact on the trade in the Colonies, and the political impact in Britain.
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We’ve spent a lot of time talking about events in Virginia lately, but that doesn’t mean that the folks in Massachusetts weren’t getting things done. It just means that they weren’t making a big deal about it.
For the past several weeks, they’d been working on the down-low to make plans in case the British took any action that they might find too intrusive, from simple confiscations to an all-out shooting offense. (Of course that was still on the table; nobody had forgotten the Boston Massacre.)
It wasn’t until this day in history that they made their resolution publicly known. And in the wake of Patrick Henry’s very recent proclamation, nobody would be surprised if things escalated sooner rather than later.
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[NOTE: our apologies for those who came early and got the wrong file. We hope at least that you enjoyed the re-run. The correct file is now in place. –CC]
Topsfield, Massachusetts wanted to be prepared when the British came. What’s more, they wanted to ensure that their militiamen were drilled and fully outfitted should the need arise. To that end, they offered some of the best wages for their Minutemen.
But they had some trouble recruiting at first, until the town’s selectmen decided that their initial force wasn’t nearly formidable enough.
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Prince Hall, who appears in today’s artwork in an undated and unattributed picture, became interested in becoming a Mason but was turned down because of his race. The British Masons, however, were perfectly willing to accept Blacks into their ranks…so long as they fought on the British side of the Revolution.
It wasn’t long before the Americans caught on to the scheme and reversed their decision. But Hall wasn’t done with simply joining the Freemasons. He had additional ambitions for himself, and others who looked like him.
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It’s one thing to hear someone hollering “The British are coming!” and quite another to actually see them arriving in your port. And that’s especially true when they’re also seen confiscating the cannons that you’d hidden upriver.
This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, but there was something different about the Colonists’ response—and it almost touched off the war nearly two months before it actually did.
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Today we review two different pieces of correspondence—one local, the other trans-Atlantic—in which the letter writers are clearly coming to the conclusion that things are not going well between the British and the Colonies, and that preparing for war is probably inevitable at this point.
And that’s interesting on its own, but we also wanted to call your attention to the cover art for today’s episode. The person in the picture is Josiah Quincy II, who is discussed in the episode as a “side” character of sorts. The painting is by Gilbert Stuart, who is pretty famous for painting hundreds of American politicians and public figures, and perhaps most famous for the “unfinished” portrait of George Washington that served as the model for the one-dollar bill. There aren’t a lot of portraits of Quincy extant, but this one (which was painted after Quincy’s death in April 1775) gets a lot of attention from Stuart scholars because it provides a very candid representation of Quincy’s strabismus, or misalignment of the eyes. (It’s possible that he simply had amblyopia but we don’t know for sure nowadays.) Most people agree that it actually gives Quincy a little extra dignity and esteem.
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The interesting thing about surveillance in the 18th century is that, when you’re dealing with trans-Atlantic distances, the information moves slowly, and errors can be costly.
We told you not long ago about someone who’d heard about the Minutemen, but had their numbers wrong by a factor of thousands. Fortunately in that case, it was just casual gossip rather than actual spycraft. But today in history, a bit of information about Colonial artillery that was reported to the Provincial Congress in Massachusetts leaked to the British, along with information about the Minutemen’s numbers and level of preparedness. But as we’ll discover in the next couple of days, the British were already taking precautions.
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