You may also remember that motions by the Second Continental Congress needed to be voted on unanimously in order to pass, so they could “speak as one voice.”
To that end, the Congress recommended today that Colonies with a government that wasn’t in favor of independence, form a new government that would be more likely to endorse independence. It’s not entirely clear how they expected the individual Colonies to effect this recommendation, but before long it wouldn’t be difficult at all.
Artemas Ward was the man left in charge of things when Washington made his trek to New York, so you know that this was a man that Washington trusted. As a result they corresponded with one another frequently.
So it only makes sense that once in a while, the two would write to one another on the same day, and this was one of those days. Washington wrote to Ward his concern that the British would return to Boston and therefore the city should be fortified to protect against such an event, and Ward wrote to Washington about a pair of ships that had been captured in the Bay just a couple of days earlier.
For what it’s worth: Ward Circle, where the statue from today’s cover art is located, is in the middle of a peculiar looking traffic circle on Massachusetts Ave NW. There are no pedestrian crossings that will get you close to it, so if you do choose to make that particular pilgrimage, stop off at the National Cathedral first and ask for divine intervention, ’cause the traffic can easily make that a nightmare to cross.
Abigail Adams had some thoughts when it came to arbitrary power, and how fragile it is.
But you get all that from the episode itself. Instead, here in the show notes, I’m going to point out that I’m the one who took the photo used for today’s cover art.
The painting hangs at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and because they keep it relatively dim there, you can see the reflection of the stairwell leading down to the main entrance. The white spot over Abigail’s head is the reflection of a light across the gallery, which is maybe 15 feet across. I’m standing at a slight angle so I’m not part of the reflection. (It’s also partially cropped here; I’m not that bad a photographer.)
The painting was donated to the Society by one of John and Abigail’s descendants, who is coincidentally also named John. The docent I spoke with didn’t know whether there was a family tradition of naming sons “John” as homage to our Founding Father, but he conceded it’s certainly likely.
The letter cited in today’s episode is part of the MHS collection, though it wasn’t on display the day Mike and I visited. MHS has literally thousands of Adams Family documents, and there are people there who work only with those documents. That’s their only job!
May 4th is Rhode Island Independence Day, marking the date that one of our smallest states became the first of the Original Thirteen Colonies to declare its independence from Great Britain.
Almost.
Here—as the late, great Paul Harvey would say—is the rest of the story.
All of the colonies were required to sign oaths of allegiance to King George III, or whoever was in charge at the time. On May 4, 1776, the Rhode Island Assembly passed the Act of Renunciation, which repealed that oath. They didn’t formally declare independence; that didn’t happen until mid-July, when they approved the Declaration as written by Thomas Jefferson and his fellow delegates.
If you look closely at the cover art, you can see that there’s some material on the Renunciation that was X’ed out. Those are some accusations against the Crown that the Assembly apparently thought better of. I guess it wasn’t worth getting a new sheet of paper, then; they’d fix it in engrossing or at the printer’s.
George Washington was good at what he did because he’d studied military discipline, among other things. He read a lot about tactics and famous battles, and the importance of a well-trained army, and then he would meet with veterans and engage with them to learn what they thought.
During the Seven Years’ War he asked to use some of those techniques with the men under his command. Sometimes, but by no means all the time, was he able to enact some of his ideas.
So when Washington took over the Continental Army in July of 1775, he had some ideas about what that army should look like. And he had generally good counsel coming from other people who’d been through much of the same things as him.
But the problem was that the recruits of the early days of the Revolution weren’t committed to anything more than a single year. They didn’t get much time to learn the things they should have, and as a result they left before they could learn everything they should have, or they did learn what was needed and left anyway. And those who were left behind were still pretty new, and had little sense of military discipline.
So Washington decided he needed to get a little tougher.
We’ve noted before that France had been helping the United Colonies for a little while, using gray markets and go-betweens in order to give themselves some plausible deniability. Britain and Spain were both a little salty about having been beaten by Britain in the past, so they were only too happy to have somebody else fighting them while they stood by and watched. And in the long run it didn’t cost them much to provide materials to the Colonies to help them get the job done.
But while both nations committed money and supplies to the cause, it was at least another year before either of them would formally announce an alliance. This was more like an eighteenth century version of the Lend Lease Act that allowed us to arm Allied Powers in World War 2 before Pearl Harbor.
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.
Reverend Samuel Cooper has an interesting item in his family history. His grandfather was Samuel Sewall, a judge in the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was involved with the Salem witch trials in 1692-3. Now, to be fair, Sewall did apologize for his part in that bit of foolishness, and he’s also known for writing an essay in 1700 criticizing slavery.
As far as Cooper himself, he was an active Patriot of the Revolutionary Era, who was good friends with many of the Founding Fathers. According to our friends at the Massachusetts Historical Society, when letters written by Governor Thomas Hutchinson and Lt. Governor Andrew Oliver were stolen in 1773, they wound up in Benjamin Franklin’s hands.
Franklin in turn sent them to Samuel Cooper, who gave them to Thomas Cushing, the speaker of the Massachusetts assembly. Samuel Adams was the clerk of the Assembly and got to see them. They all knew that the letters were a bit of a bombshell (essentially, Hutchinson and Oliver were misleading Britain regarding conditions in the colonies), but because they were under strict orders not to copy or publish them, their hands were tied.
Samuel Adams, however, came up with the idea of leaking the contents by way of a propaganda campaign in the Assembly that didn’t actually disclose the letters themselves. That was enough to create a political firestorm in Massachusetts, which led to General Gage implementing the Coercive Acts.
Who stole the letters in the first place? It’s still not clear.
It was called the Bayley Hazen Road, named after the two engineers who worked on it, and it was an attempt to make it easier for troops and equipment to get from New England to Canada.
Prior attempts to move materiel were fraught with sickness and the need to navigate various forms of terrain, including waterways and deep mud, which made the journey so much longer that it wasn’t practical anymore.
Bayley proposed creating a road that would not only make it easier to move things, it would cut the overall trip by about a third. What a great idea! thought George Washington. Get on it right away!
In the span of six weeks, they had almost a third of the road completed. And then they realized there was an important tactical problem with the Bayley Hazen Road: like every other road, it runs in two directions.
Lachlan McIntosh was inadvertently responsible for a world record that stood for several years.
In 1776 and 1777, McIntosh got into a bitter dispute with the Speaker of the Georgia Provincial Congress, a man named Button Gwinnett. It began when McIntosh succeeded Gwinnett as commander of Georgia’s Continental Battalion. Both men were Patriots but they were part of differing factions in the Independence movement. Gwinnett left the military and became a delegate to the Continental Congress, eventually signing the Declaration of Independence. Later when he returned to Georgia he became Speaker of the Congress and later elected President and Commander-in-Chief of the Committee of Safety.
In March of 1777 McIntosh addressed the Georgia assembly and denounced Gwinnett harshly. Gwinnett responded with a written challenge, demanding and apology or other satisfaction. McIntosh refused to back down, so Gwinnett challenged him to a duel. On May 16 the duel took place and the men fired their pistols nearly simultaneously. Each man shot the other in the leg, but Gwinnett’s wound broke his thigh bone, and before long it was clear that he’d been mortally wounded.
Because Gwinnett died relatively young and so soon after he signed the Declaration, his autograph became a huge prize for autograph collectors, especially those who wanted to complete their colleciton of signatures from Declaration signers. There are only 51 known authentic examples, and whenever they go on the auction block they can fetch anywhere from $700,000 to over $1 Million. For a period in the early 1970s, an authentic signature of Gwinnett held the Guinness World Record for autograph value. It’s still the rarest and most valuable of Declaration signers, oftentimes because it’s the last signature needed to complete a set.
Granted, that’s a long route to get to Lachlan McIntosh and his responsibility for a World Record, but now you have a cool story to tell.
