The Gunpowder Incident was an event that took place on April 21, 1775, so there won’t be much about it today. But that was the event that pushed Virginia deeply into the movement toward independence, and allowed the Continental Congress to finally consider seriously the idea of formally breaking away from England.
But it was an event that took place on this day— that barely got any notice at the time—which ultimately led to the Gunpowder Incident.
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As we noted yesterday, there were all kinds of abuses of tea going on in the Colonies. It (mostly) started with the Boston Tea Party, but also spread to other areas as well. The Boston Tea Party was notable for being a literal destruction of unsold tea, removing it from the market.
Other tea parties and actions largely involved tea that had already been purchased in the Colonies, either in the form of boycotts (as in the Edenton Tea Party), or in the form of destroying tea from one’s own pantry as a form of protest, as was the case in today’s episode. As noted during yesterday’s show, the Thirteen Colonies didn’t have enough economic clout to make a meaningful impact; they were meant to be symbolic in nature. But the British took these things seriously enough that their actions demonstrated they were looking for a fight rather than trying to avoid it.
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Today we meet yet another prominent citizen who thought he had the solution for putting an end to the tension between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain.
It’s important to note at this point, we think, that these people weren’t delusional; they were genuinely interested in maintaining a good relationship and therefore invested in repairing the damage that had been done. They liked being British citizens, even though a minority percentage of them had emigrated from England (many were born here; others came from different nations). And it’s also worth noting that when it came to separating from the British Empire…well, that sort of thing had never been done before. Never. So creating an entirely new nation was practically inconceivable for some people.
Unfortunately in the end, while Joseph Galloway’s plan was seriously considered by the Continental Congress, it was turned down, and there was an unfortunate series of events that forced him to leave America forever.
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And once again, we have someone (two someones, really) who manage to come up with a plan that will put all this unpleasantness between the Thirteen Colonies and the British Empire to rest, and once again the physical distance between the two threatens the success of those plans.
What’s more, it turns out that the more popular of the two plans has an almost-hidden ulterior motive…
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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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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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We’ve mentioned in the past that the intent of most of the Intolerable Acts and the Coercive Acts were designed to punish the Massachusetts Province, but it had some effect on the other colonies as well. What’s more, there was a growing worry that, if Parliament could do things like this to Massachusetts, what’s going to stop them from doing it to us?
To that end, the city of Albany, NY, began making plans just in case war broke out. It was against the law, but their reasoning was that it was better to have a militia and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
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Only a few people had figured it out, and it’s not clear whether they were just guessing, but by this point in time both England and the Colonies were locked into a path that would lead inevitably to a shooting war.
To that end, Parliament approved sending over four thousand soldiers and sailors to the Colonies to help keep them in line. But it wasn’t as simple as that; there were still some people protesting the action, not that anyone listened to them.
Today we also peek in on someone who’s watching the action and has some thoughts.
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When it comes to Black people and their role in the American Revolution, the one name that most people appear to remember is that of Crispus Attucks, largely because he was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, and that event is thought of as the beginning of the Revolutionary War, therefore it’s significant that the first person to die in the name of American freedom was a person of color.
Other people, more fussy about events, would say that Lexington & Concord was the beginning of the war. The reasoning behind that is that it’s the first event in a series of hostile actions that took place close to one another. But the real argument is that most historical events of this nature don’t have definitive “beginning” and “ending” points; it’s much like a roll of paper towels. Sure, there are perforations marking each sheet, but you know for a fact that when you pull one off, it’s going to tear at an oddball angle and those perfectly rectangular sheets are a rarity.
The fact is, however, that over 100 Black men fought as part of the militia in the opening battles of the Revolution. Here’s the story of one of the first.
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The first week or two of February 1775 could best be described as a series of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Any attempts on both sides to reach out with some form of conciliation managed to fail for various reasons.
And during all these breakdowns, the situation on the American side of the pond only got worse as time went on, largely because each side thought that the other wasn’t being responsive.
In the end, however, it didn’t really matter, because as we’ve discussed with the episodes dealing with Massachusettensis and Novanglus debating one another in print, the one thing they agreed upon was that these attempts to reach out were always, at their heart, rooted in some attempt to wrest control from the other party. Both reaching for it, neither attaining it nor caring what the other side’s argument meant at the core.
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