250 and Counting

Category: American Revolution

250 and Counting: January 27, 1775

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William Legge was the second Lord Dartmouth and the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1772 to the end of 1775. He was also step-brother to Lord North, who gets a mention in this episode.

While he was a supporter of the constitutional supremacy that Parliament maintained they held over the Colonies, Lord Dartmouth was also the Colonists’ best hope for some form of reconciliation.

Dartmouth’s resolve to achieve this reconciliation was damaged by the Boston Tea Party, so by this time he ordered Gage to put some extra pressure on the Colonists. Unfortunately this backfired badly and led to the battles at Lexington and Concord, which we’ll talk about in a future episode. Even after that, however, Legge couldn’t fully support armed coercion against the Americans, and he resigned his post in November, which basically ended his political career.

Legge was considered by many to be very pious and gentle, to the point where some people called him “the Psalm Singer.” He died in 1801, nearly forgotten. Even his final resting place no longer exists, as it was destroyed by the Nazis during World War II.

January 27, 2025
250 and Counting: January 26, 1775

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With all the things we know about germ theory and diseases and the importance of vaccinations, it’s kind of a surprise when people take a stance against such things in the face of the hard data.

Before the invention of the smallpox vaccine, the disease could have a brutal effect on people who caught it, with the vomiting, the mouth sores and the high fever. It could kill you–often suddenly–within two weeks, and if you survived, you were often left blind, or infertile, and almost certainly with deep scars all over your body. Once someone had it, the best you could do to prevent its spread was isolate them from others.

The only known preventative dated back to around 200 BCE, and was a process called “variolation,” which involved transferring small amounts of material from smallpox sores and applying it to the skin of a healthy person. That person would get a much milder form of the disease, but they’d be much more resistant to it in the future. Other people did something called “insufflation,” where dried smallpox scabs were ground up and then blown up a person’s nostril with a small pipe.

In 1796 a vaccine was developed, which was basically variolation but using the much milder version of the disease, cowpox, which proved to be quite effective against smallpox.

It wasn’t without controversy, however: people thought that the cowpox-based vaccine would turn you into a cow. But by 1801 it was a generally accepted vaccine against smallpox, and the disease is considered by medical organizations around the world to be completely eradicated, there not having been a case recorded since 1980.

Thank goodness we’ve moved past that way of thinking! Imagine a pandemic taking place these days, and people thinking that terrible things would happen to them if they took the vaccine?–oh, wait.

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January 26, 2025
250 and Counting: January 24, 1775

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The Minutemen are among the more romantic images that many people have of the Revolution.

Around this time in 1975, the comic strip Doonesbury did a couple of series that were set in the Revolutionary War days. They focused on an ancestor of Zonker’s named Nate Harris, who was a Minuteman.

In one strip, Paul Revere shows up with the alarm “The British are coming!”

Nate asks, “How much time do you think we have?” Paul Revere says maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, and Nate replies “I only need one, you know.”

“Really?” asks Revere.

Nate’s wife Amy chips in, “Nate’s been specially trained.”

Nate Harris was a fun character; it’s kind of a shame that Doonesbury is a weekly strip now. It would be fun to see him return for America’s 250th anniversary.

Anyway: check out the story of the real Minutemen.

Minuteman statue photo by Donovan Reeves via Unsplash.

January 24, 2025
250 and Counting: January 23, 1775

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Awhile back we talked about a Loyalist who wrote an opinion piece under the pen name “Massachusettensis” (which we may have mocked a little bit but it’s just the Latin word for the Colony/State). His rhetoric angered John Adams to the point where he felt compelled to respond in kind, and he did so using a pen name of his own: Novanglus.

We’ll learn about Adams’ first response to Massachusettensis, but we’ll also discover that there may be another reason this particular essayist caught Adams’ imagination.

Also on this day, Mercy Otis Warren opens a new play whose plot may lie a little too close to real life.

January 23, 2025
250 and Counting: January 21, 1775

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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.

January 21, 2025
250 and Counting: January 19, 1775

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Most people (we think) have this popular notion of American history involving the British imposing taxes and massacreing people in Boston and the Colonists responding with an indignant “Oh, we need to dump some tea and write a Declaration of Independence and take up arms and shoot those red-coated monsters right now!”

But if you’ve been listening to this show for the past couple of weeks, you already know that wasn’t the case. There were many, many attempts to seek out a peaceful solution to the troubles going on. Some of them were rather covert: backchannel people talking to one another, negotiating quietly, Others, of course, were overt. And today we’ll be talking about one of those. It was an attempt by the First Continental Congress to bring up their issues, ask for relief and simultaneously affirm their allegiance to the King.

(Spoiler Alert: it didn’t work.)

January 19, 2025
250 and Counting: January 18, 1775

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When the Provincial Congress of Georgia met in the city of Savannah, the natural place for them to meet was a place called Tondee’s Tavern.

Georgians were no fans of British activities such as the Intolerable Acts, but they otherwise prospered under British rule and remained largely indifferent to the mother country. However, while the Provincial Congress didn’t want to join the other colonies in their association (which became the First Continental Congress), they were willing to support that association’s ban on trade with Britain, although they didn’t enforce it right away.

Tondee’s Tavern was ultimately destroyed in 1796, in a fire that took out more than half of Savannah. The next building on that spot was a bank which dealt heavily in the slave trade. As a result, in recent years the building was said to be haunted and appears on most of Savannah’s Ghost Tours.

The building reopened as a modern-day Tondee’s Tavern in 2013, but unfortunately it appears to have closed down sometime in the past year.

January 18, 2025
250 and Counting: January 17, 1775

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In the early 1770s, the American colonies began feeling the need to defend themselves against British pressures. In some cases the activity was political, but there were plenty of people who saw that there could conceivably be a need to take up arms at some point, especially given the way they interpreted the Intolerable Acts. Although in popular culture, Boston was the center of attention for this sort of thing, the fact is that small, informal militias began springing up all the way up and down the Eastern Seaboard. These soon gave way to more formalized groups which were funded by their respective governments. And when hostilities finally broke out, these militias quickly reorganized themselves into official Regiments. Today we’ll learn about the militias in South Carolina.

January 17, 2025
250 and Counting: January 16, 1775

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We suppose there’s something kind of heroic and–dare we say it, romantic–about the idea of a bunch of men dressing up as Native Americans, sneaking onto a boat and throwing 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. And as an overt act of rebellion, it certainly made a splash (you should excuse the expression).

But Boston wasn’t the only city holding tea parties. Edenton, North Carolina had a tea party of its own, and it’s notable for several reasons:

First, who was involved in it;

Second, the fact that it launched an interesting fashion trend (it’s not like everybody was dressing up like Native Americans after the Boston event, right?),

And Third, that it actually got some attention.

And while all of these are unusual, what’s more unusual is that it didn’t capture the imagination of people enough to endure in popular culture the way Boston did. Maybe becuase it was done in a more genteel manner, maybe because there was something special about the participants…it’s hard to tell froma modern-day standpoint. But we think you’ll agree that it’s a fascinating story.

Guest Voice: Lorene Childs

January 16, 2025
250 and Counting: January 13, 1775

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At one time there were rumors that Benjamin Franklin had lots and lots of children born out of wedlock. (Insert your favorite “lightning rod” joke here.) As usual, the real story is more complicated than that.

Franklin courted a woman named Deborah Reed. At the time, he was 17 and she was 15, so her mother forbade the marriage. Deborah later married another man who fled the country. Sometime after this, Franklin re-entered the picture, but because the status of her marriage was unclear, they simply lived together as common-law spouses. They had two children together, so technically they were “born out of wedlock.” Francis Folger Franklin died of smallpox at the age of four, and Sarah Folger Franklin was also politically active until her death at the age of 68. Meanwhile, Franklin had another “illegitimate” son whose mother is not known (and was also probably Deborah), but he acknowledged his own parentage and together they raised him. This was William Franklin, the future Royal Governor of New Jersey.

That’s it. That’s all of Benjamin Franklin’s kids. But we’re focused on William today.

William was appointed the Royal Governor of New Jersey largely because he was known to have Loyalist leanings. And while he was pretty good at being governor, there did come a point where New Jersey said “Enough of this” and imprisoned him locally for six months before moving him to Connecticut for two years. (This is an event alluded to in the play 1776, but by that point Franklin really had to know that his son had been removed from office. He probably didn’t know yet that William had just been moved to Connecticut, so by early July that would have been news to him.)

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January 13, 2025