The Siege of Ninety-Six is considered to be the first land battle of the Revolution in the South. And believe it or not, we might be talking about this town again in fairly short order.
This past Saturday, Governor McMaster officially proclaimed today through Thursday the 250th Anniversary of the battle. And while this battle lasted three days before mutual cessation of hostilities, it was just the beginning of a series of skirmishes between the two factions for for about six years.
In retrospect, it appears that most of the action in the early days of the Revolution took place in Massachusetts and South Carolina.
What was so important about South Carolina? New York wasn’t a big city yet, nor was it strategically important (yet). Baltimore was a small-time port at the time; so was Norfolk. Georgia was deeply divided. North Carolina and New Hampshire didn’t have any strategic advantage. Pennsylvania was inland. Neither Delaware nor New Jersey nor Connecticut were especially important yet. Rhode Island saw some action but not as much as the others.
But Charleston was a huge port city, as was Boston. The Charleston Bay was ideal for moving materials in and out of the area, which made it fiscally and strategically important.
The South Carolina Provincial Congress figured this out, and also realized that they had about thirteen militia groups moving in about thirteen different directions. It was time to get everyone moving in the same direction.
A Prize Court is a formal organization dedicated to the disposition of items captured from an enemy.
Because the Colonies were more or less building it all from the ground up, much of what they adopted came directly from the British. As a result the Prize Court and its structure is a British institution that made its way over here. This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world, though in the early 20th Century an International Prize Court was proposed and established, but it was never ratified or implemented.
So it’s still just the British, which maintains a formal court, and the United States, which largely followed the original committee recommendation by largely leaving it up to the individual states.
It’s a little bit unfair using this portrait to represent Henry Knox, because it was painted many years after his involvement in the Revolution, which began when Knox was 25 years old. As it turns out, this painting is from 1806, the year Knox died.
Henry Knox ran a bookstore in Boston as a young man, and he was on-hand for the carnage of the Boston Massacre in 1770. So by the time the war officially broke out, Knox was fully radicalized and ready for action. Because of his actions at Ticonderoga, he rose quickly through the ranks and became the Chief Artillery Officer of the Continental Army, and later the Secretary of War under George Washington, though at that point he was mostly dealing with Indian affairs.
Fort Knox in Kentucky is named after him, but we’re talking about the military installation, not the national depository which is practically next door.
As noted during the episode, James Carnahan was the president of what was later known as Princeton University, the ninth man to hold that title since the school’s founding nearly 90 years earlier.
Carnahan held that position for over 30 years, making him the longest tenured president of that school to that date, a record that remains to this day.
Carnahan was buried in the University President’s Plot at Princeton Cemetery. Curiously, he specified in his will that none of his lectures, manuscripts or other writings be published, even though he was held in high esteem as a writer. This may account for his relative obscurity despite his enormous tenure.
Lord Dunmore issued his Proclamation just a week earlier, but the response was much stronger than anticipated, probably because—who knew!—people hate being slaves.
While the Proclamation only applied to the Virginia colony, because Dunmore had no authority conferred upon him anywhere else, a huge number of slaves and otherwise indentured servants from throughout the thirteen colonies fled to the British side of the lines.
(We have to say “throughout” because slavery was a thing in the north at this point; it just wasn’t nearly as common as in the south.)
This led to thousands of “American” blacks living ex-patriate lives throughout the British Empire after the Revolution.
Montgomery had done his thing at Fort St. Jean. Benedict Arnold had finally made it through the Maine (heh.) Now it was time to move in on Montreal.
What the Canadians didn’t count on was the possibility that Americans weren’t moving on Quebec, but Montreal. Americans can walk and chew gum at the same time, though, so they moved on Montreal, taking the city, and moved on Quebec at the same time, with less result. But the city was besieged just a few weeks later.
It should come as a surprise to nobody that America has a troubled relationship with its past when it comes to race relations.
It may come as surprise to you that our Founding Fathers had a complex relationship with their present when it comes to race relations. Yes, many of them owned slaves, but a significant percentage of those men had committed to freeing them at some point.
The problem was, that point was rather nebulous. And there was a lot of ambiguity when it came to the question of how to deal with both slaves and free Blacks at that time. As we noted a couple of days ago, Lord Dunmore had a pretty good idea to free any Blacks who chose to fight on the British side. Unfortunately it was rather poorly executed and soldiers were killed, died of smallpox, or returned to their masters. Very few of them remained free. It also never occurred to Dunmore that women and children might be interested in the deal, too.
The idea crossed George Washington’s mind, too. Until it un-crossed it, then crossed it again.
The Battle of Hog Island was the first of two major events early in the Revolution that got South Carolina firmly on board with the Independence cause.
Hog Island caused the South Carolina Committee of Safety to expand their navy; in this respect they were way ahead of the Continental Congress.
But when King George III approved the American Prohibitory Act in December, that really irritated South Carolinians. The Act act declared that any vessels captured by the Royal Navy after January 1, 1776, would now be considered lawful prizes. When this news reached Charleston, it was taken as an act of war.
And sure enough, it wouldn’t be long before another confrontation took place that would help to shape the overall look of the war.
The United States Marine Corps celebrates its birthday every year on this day, usually with a ball (the dancing kind) and a cake-cutting ceremony. The cover art today is from their 233rd birthday celebration.
Until 1921, the Marines marked the occasion on July 11, which was the date of the re-establishment of the Corps, since they were disbanded after the Revolution. But John Adams (again) came to the rescue and signed an act to re-organize the Corps. However, July 11 didn’t get a lot of attention. But when Commandant John Lejeune (the guy after whom the camp was named) was asked to draft an order to celebrate the Corps, he wrote Marine Corps Order 47, establishing the original November 10 date as the Marines’ birthday.
Also, for what it’s worth, the “halls of Montezuma” refers to Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City (left). So yes, it really is a thing, and it’s still standing.
