Lord North gets kind of a bad rap for being the Prime Minister who “lost the colonies.” But the fact is, he mostly understood their concerns and was sympathetic to them. However, Parliament was itching for a fight and not making life easy for anyone involved.
Lord North put forth a proposal to the Colonies that, to be honest, didn’t offer a lot of change from the status quo. But once again, the slowness with which messages moved from one place in the world to another doomed its delivery to a date after the shooting started, and Congress deemed it as not worthy of serious consideration.
We know: when an episode is a biography, we typically use a portrait of the person born on this day 250 years ago.
But this time around is special: the artwork on today’s episode is a building that was erected by the subject of the episode. The McKim Free School is now the McKim Community Center, and it’s just around the corner from McKim Park. In fact, between the time recording this episode and writing this, I learned that the McKim Center was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and while the neighborhood itself is officially called Jonestown, the residents refer to themselves as the McKim Community Association.
As long as we’ve had a Constitution, the United States has had a nominal separation between church and state. What that means is that Congress isn’t able to establish a state-sanctioned religion.
For longer than we’ve had a Constitution, Congress has proclaimed days of prayer of some kind or another.
For a long time, these days were announced not as a National Day of Prayer (the current nomenclature), but rather as “a day of fasting, prayer and humiliation.” Now, this isn’t the old Christian kind of humiliation in which haircoats are worn, or self-flagellation is necessary. In this context, “humiliation” refers to self-reflection and expression of sorrow or remorse before God.
In 1988 televangelist Jimmy Swaggert (who died just a couple of weeks ago) was caught with a prostitute. When he cried on television and gave his “I have sinned” speech, he was humiliating himself before God. Even if he hadn’t done it in front of an audience, it would still be an act of humiliation. Oddly enough, the national presbytery wasn’t buying it as genuine and stripped him of his credentials anyway. And they were right, considering that he was busted a second time with a prostitute a few years later.
Anyway.
“Fasting” and “prayer” retain their meanings to this day, so explanations probably aren’t necessary here. It’s worth noting, however, that fasting is meant to have a spiritual purpose and again, can show some level of humility.
John Andrew Shulze was the sixth governor of Pennsylvania and a member of the Muhlenberg political clan. So this was a guy with some heavy firepower behind him, and he managed to use some of it in righteous ways.
Shulze wasn’t completely successful with all of his endeavors, but even when he failed, he laid the groundwork for someone after him to succeed at it.
After retiring from his job as governor, he was a delegate to the Whig Party’s first convention in 1839 and was president of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College in 1840, when William Henry Harrison became President of the United States.
Although Fort Johnston was originally a British fort, a few years into the Revolutionary War, the Colonies recognized that it could be a valuable place to have a fort, and in 1778 they appropriated the money to have it rebuilt. That fort was also destroyed and, although reconstruction began in 1794, it took many years to complete the project.
Time and again Fort Johnston was destroyed or abandoned, and then repaired or refurbished. The fort regained importance during the Civil War but was officially removed from seacoast defense in 1881. For many years it held multiple military-adjacent agencies or tasks, until it was finally decommissioned altogether in 2004.
Given the fact that the existing government of Virginia was technically extra-legal, it’s a little amusing to think that they themselves felt the need to conduct extra-legal activities of their own. A more cynical mind would think that they were hedging their bets, so that if anything Revolutionary were to come up and the British started rounding up people, they could say, “That wasn’t us…it was that Virginia Convention crowd!”
A more cynical mind would think that. Heh.
But the various conventions, while not having large agendas, did have important ones, and they managed to help the colony get their act together and improve their overall effectiveness during the Revolution.
As noted a couple of days ago, Abigail and John Adams wrote to each other quite frequently. Their relationship was not only deep with love, but with admiration for one another. If you get an opportunity, read David McCullough’s biography of John or, better yet, the Library of America’s volume of Abigail’s letters (not just to John but to many others). Their writing is florid without being mawkish. There’s a LOA volume of John’s correspondence as well.
In today’s episode, they’re not pining for one another (as they so frequently are). Abigail is relaying to John the details of her meeting with George Washington. Spoiler alert: she found him impressive, despite what she knew about him before meeting him.
If you’re going to be in rebellion, you may as well do something rebellious.
Thus was (presumably) the reasoning behind Ben Franklin putting forth a resolution that the Colonies would effectively ignore a ban on the importation of weapons and gunpowder to the Colonies.
And while we’ve mentioned numerous times that the Congress doesn’t seem to do a lot more than form various Committees, again we need to stress that these were serious men, who gave serious thought to whatever they presented to the larger group, because they knew that any votes had to be unanimous. They took the job with great gravity, and in fact worked long hours. And in Philadelphia in the summer time…that is no joke, my friend. I mentioned it in a Baltimore context during the show, but remember that these cities aren’t very far apart, and thus have similar climates.
Lord John Wilkes was an interesting person who was always willing to run against popular opinion if he felt strongly that he was in the right.
In 1769 he fought for the right of his voters – rather than the House of Commons – to determine their representatives. In 1761 he got Parliament to concede the right of publishers to print the content of Parliamentary debates. In 1776 he put forth a bill proposing Parliamentary reform.
But on this day in 1775, Wilkes managed to anger a great number of people in Parliament when he expressed support for the Colonial rebels.
Unfortunately, after one of his actions had an unfortunate effect, his politics became increasingly conservative and as a result he lost his seat in Parliament in 1790. Not long afterward he took a position as a magistrate, and he seemed to once again show more compassion toward the lower classes.
The Speech to the Six Nations is one of those documents that pretty much answers what was going on with the Native Americans during the Revolution. Athough to be fair, it largely addresses what happened with the Native Americans in Upstate New York. But that area, being a border with Canada, was pretty important to the Independence cause.
Part of the reason that the tribes took the document seriously is that each tribe received a series of belts which represented our intent and desire for peace. The belts themselves were reportedly larger than usual for such a task, in the hopes that the tribe leaders would understand the gravity of the situation.
