250 and Counting

This day in American History, 250 years ago.

  • April 11, 1775: Graves Brings in The Big Guns

    Cover Art for April 11, 1775: "View of the Attack on Bunker's Hill with the Burning of Charlestown, Engraving by Lodge. The Somerset is among the ships in the image.

    When the HMS Somerset first reached Boston, she was an old, leaky, weathered mess. Admiral Graves asked for permission to repair it, and while the work was slow at first, the sailors actually managed to get the important parts of the work completed. By this day in 1775, the ship was considered seaworthy and capable of doing more from its perch in the harbor, so Graves moved it into the place of two other ships, largely to demonstrate that he could do it, and safely.

    Had the lookouts been more alert when the battles of Lexington and Concord first broken out, the outcome could have been quite different.

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  • April 10, 1775: Skirmishes in Assonet, MA

    Cover art for April 10, 1775: Profile Rock in Assonet, MA. Scanned from a 1902 postcard. The formation collapsed in 2019.

    This isn’t the first time you’ll see a statement like this, but the bottom line is: the history books aren’t 100% correct. Sure, the Shot Heard Round The World was at Lexington and Concord. But that’s not where the fighting started.

    Nearly two weeks before Concord, there were small battles going on in Assonet, Massachusetts, near the Rhode Island border.

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  • April 9, 1775: Something’s Happening…Maybe Not

    Cover art for April 9, 1775: Portrait of Ann Arrundell (original spelling of her name), artist and date unknown.

    In January of 1775 someone took the time to write a 1400-word account of a riot that took place in Annapolis, Maryland just a few days earlier. The pseudonymous author alleged that a shipload of tea was burned in the harbor as an alternative to destroying the tea and tar-and-feathering the ship’s owner.

    But word got back to the folks in Annapolis, of course, and they countered with a resolution involving a reprinting of that article, plus a refutation of the allegations made. The basic thrust? The guy made it all up, and whatever he didn’t make up still isn’t true; it just happens to be close to the truth.

    Who’s the woman in the cover art? Tune in and find out.

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  • April 8, 1775: The New England Army

    Cover art for April 8, 1775: painting of members of the New England Army. Painting by Don Troiani

    Well…it’s official. It was on this day in 1775 that our assorted collection of irregular militiamen turned into a genuine army.

    The Provincial Congress in Massachusetts proposed, and adopted, a resolution that provided for a genuine army dedicated to protecting our shores against the British. That was the New England Army, but the name didn’t last long. Tune in to find out their other name.

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  • April 7, 1775: Francis Cabot Lowell

    Cover art for April 7, 1775: a silhouette of Francis Cabot Lowell. There are no portraits extant of Lowell, so this profile is typically used to represent him.

    It’s cake and candles today for Francis Cabot Lowell, a manufacturer who helped modernize the textile industry in the United States, largely through industrial espionage: in the middle of a trade war with Europe, Lowell visited England and memorized the processes they were using so that he could bring them back to this side of the pond, helping us to break the hold on imported goods from Europe by innovating the cradle-to-grave manufacturing process for fabrics.

    Yet, despite his prominence in the industry, and despite the statue that stands in his name in the town of Lowell, Massachusetts, the silhouette seen in today’s cover art is the only hint that we have regarding what he might have looked like. There are no portraits extant that we know of.

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  • April 6, 1775: Stop the Presses!

    Cover art for April 6, 1775: Detail of the front page of the Massachusetts Spy, July 7, 1774.

    In past episodes (quite recently, in fact) we’ve talked about the Colonists’ need to move caches of gunpowder and other weaponry when they got wind of an imminent British seizure.

    By the time April of 1775 rolled around, it wasn’t just the explosive weapons that the British were after; it was the press as well. And the more you hear about the specific things that the British imposed on the Colonies as events moved closer to all-out war, the more obvious their need to appear in the Bill of Rights becomes. (Whatever you think of any specific Amendment, it’s not too tough to see the reasoning that went into its inclusion if you look at it from a contemporary standpoint rather than a modern-day one.)

    This it was that on this day, the Colonists heard that the British were going to move in on restricting a free press, so the Massachusetts Spy simply up and left so there would be nothing to seize.

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  • April 5, 1775: The British Gear Up For War

    Cover Art for April 5, 1775: A 2007 photograph of the Old Powder House in Nathan Tufts Park, Somerville, Massachusetts. Photo by Erik Edson, via Wikimedia Commons.

    Up until now, we’ve presented General Thomas Gage as rather a hard liner who was looking to subjugate the Colonies somehow. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    The fact is, he like being a light-hearted guy, and when he became the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, he discovered exactly what kind of mess he’d stepped into. At that point, anything he did would only make matters worse.

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  • April 4, 1775: America’s First Female Pharmacist

    Cover art for April 4, 1775: a reproduction of an 18th Century Apothecary shop in Williamsburg, VA.

    The title kind of buries the bigger story, but we wanted to ensure that you understood what a big deal Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf was.

    Elizabeth was dead by the time 1775 rolled around, but her family continued to run the apothecary shop for many years, and they were instrumental in ensuring that the Massachusetts Patriots were equipped with medical supplies should war break out.

    Today there is a chain of pharmacies in the midwest called GreenLeaf Apothecary, but there’s no connection we could find between this and the original, except perhaps as homage.

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  • April 3, 1775: The New York General Assembly Hangs It Up

    Cover art for April 3, 1775: Seal of the Province of New York from 1767 until independence. From Eugene ZIeber's Heraldry in America, 1909 edition.

    In the play and film 1776, one of the delegates from New York says that in the state legislature, everybody talks very loud and very fast and never seems to get anywhere. This may or may not be true, but the fact is, they did have some specific instructions for their delegates to the Second Continental Congress. One of them was that New York would be expected to oppose independence for as long as possible. That was probably because they were looking at Vermont as a model and preparing to declare themselves an independent nation.

    Claude is originally from New York, and he’s of the opinion that most New Yorkers still think of themselves as members of a separate nation. But that’s a different debate.

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  • April 2, 1775: Calvin Jones–Physician, Soldier, Benefactor

    Cover art for April 2, 1775: Portrait of Calvin Jones (details not known to us at time of publication)

    Calvin Jones may have looked like an unassuming fellow, but that unassuming look concealed a very powerful mind and a strong moral compass.

    And today we’ve got Cake and Candles for him, since this day in 1775 was the date of his birth. Jones was a physician before his teenage years ended, and he began to design criteria that would separate good doctors from bad ones. He organized militias even though he was under no orders to do so. And then when the War of 1812 broke out, he became a major general with a reputation for excellence, to the point where nobody really worried about whether North Carolina would fall to the British.

    After the war he basically helped shepherd the development of a brand-new field of medicine, and after his death, much of his land became Wake Forest University. What’s more, it was because of Jones that the school has a head-scratcher of a name rather than an incomprehensible one.

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