250 and Counting

This day in American History, 250 years ago.

  • April 1, 1775: Thomas Gage is Steps Behind

    Cover art for April 1, 1775L Thomas Gage telling his troops to allow children to use Boston Common for sledding and ice skating.

    We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Thomas Gage was kind of a weird bird. In our cover art he’s defending children who were using Boston Common for sledding and skating. This was just a couple of months before today’s events.

    But other times, he was a little on the lazy side, often looking for clues that aren’t there, and letting other peoples’ opinions get the better of him. It’s entirely possible that the best idea Gage ever had was whatever he’d been told most recently. His decisions appear on their surface to be expressions of concern for the Colonists. Do with that what you will.

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  • March 31, 1775: Mercy Otis Warren, Ignoring the Rules

    Cover art for March 31, 1775: photo of the statue of Mercy Otis Warren that stands outside the County Courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel,. Other than cropping to fit, used without changes under the Creative Commons License.

    Today’s episode marks the end of Women’s History Month. We’ve noted a few episodes since this adventure first started that involved women taking political action as groups, but Mercy Otis Warren was one of the most influential individual women to take a political stand in the Revolution era.

    She was self-educated, and married a man who was both enlightened and politically active himself, and she used her position as her husband’s hostess to develop and maintain connections of her own. She was also able to use what she learned to develop some of the pieces she wrote, whether they were factual or thinly-disguised fiction pieces.

    Claude and his wife Shannon did the extra-touristy thing of visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts during Thanksgiving weekend several years ago, and we did see the Mercy Otis Warren statue, but frankly at that time we still had a lot to learn about her. (If you go, be warned that Plymouth Rock is even more disappointing than everyone tells you it is.)

    And because it’s an episode celebrating Mercy Warren, we talked Shannon into recording the episode. Enjoy.

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  • March 30, 1775: King George III Restricts Trade

    Cover Art for March 30, 1775: Portrait of King George III, ca 1790,

    In the past we’ve talked about the New England Restraining Act; today was the day that King George III actually put it into action.

    To mark that day, Mike takes you through some of the details of the act and its impact on the trade in the Colonies, and the political impact in Britain.

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  • March 29, 1775: The Brits Head to Roxbury

    Cover art for March 29, 1775: The Auckward Squad, painted by George Cruickshank, ca. 1780

    There are plenty of scholarly books and articles out there regarding American History, but there are elements of British history that stick out, too. General Gage giving the order today that his troops begin to march on Roxbury. It was a relatively small gesture at the time, but many, many colonial events can be traced to that particular action.

    And as a result the Colonists determined that Britain can’t move numbers of men like that again without bumping into a few flintlocks along the way.

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  • March 28, 1775: Lord Dunmore Makes Noise

    Cover art for March 28, 1775: Lord Dunmore By Joshua Reynolds - lgECWFRNNa2txg at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21865923

    One of the interesting things about many of the British officials who were around during the early days of the American Revolution is that most of them were actually pretty good at their job. It’s just that they were given rather thankless tasks to do which wound up backfiring on them.

    And then there’s John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore. History has not been especially kind to Lord Dunmore, not should it be. He often acted rashly and without consulting some of the people he should have consulted, and in the end he wound up getting a lot of people very angry, instead of getting a few people a little annoyed.

    Lord North, over in London, is often defined as the Prime Minister who lost the Colonies, but Dunmore clearly did his part to ensure that they stayed lost regardless of the outcome. And today in history, Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation against electing delegates to the Second Continental Congress, but the Second Virginia Convention, by now in its last day or so, ignored him and sent people anyway. (They’d already elected a couple, so Dunmore’s proclamation was a little bit of closing the barn after the horse had escaped.)

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  • March 27, 1775: Thomas Jefferson Gets an Important Appointment

    Cover art for March 27, 1775: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1791, by Charles Willson Peale.

    We hate to say it, but Thomas Jefferson was kind of a nepo baby.

    Jefferson was part of the Second Virginia Convention, and no doubt he got there honestly, as a man who had lots of property and was well-regarded, even at the tender age of 32. But when Peyton Randolph needed someone to replace him in the Second Continental Congress, he called on Jefferson—who was his cousin.

    On the positive side, Jefferson acquitted himself well in both the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he represented Albemarle County, and simultaneously at the Second Continental Congress. So while he probably didn’t need the familial boost, it surely didn’t hurt.

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  • March 26, 1775: Thomas Monteagle Bayly

    Cover art for March 26, 1775: B&W detail of a (c. 1820) painting by George Catlin of the Virginia House of Delegates.

    Never let it be said that we can’t find the less-obvious folks in American History. Thomas Bayly was definitely one of them.

    Bayly was a one-term congressman to the US House of Representatives as part of the 13th Congress (as this is written, we’re in the 118th). By most accounts he wasn’t especially distinguished, but only serving for the one term didn’t mean that he was politically finished. A few years after he left Congress, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and he was part of the Virginia Constitutional Convention.

    Bayly was “minor” enough in history that we were only able to find a single image of him—the one in the cover artwork. And it’s actually a black-and-white rendering of a color painting that’s been zoomed in to the point where you can see the texture on the canvas. It’s a detail from a painting of the entire House of Delegates around 1820.

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  • March 25, 1775: Letters to and From George

    Cover art for March 25, 1775: AI-generated image of George Washington writing a letter. Via Canva.

    George Washington was a frequent letter writer, something that the creators of the stage play 1776 would poke some fun at. But the documentation he kept plays an important part not only in the history of the American Revolution, but in the more mundane details of life during that time in American History. What’s more, we’re fortunate that so much of the correspondence both to and from Washington remains extant to this day. (Not all of it, as you’ll hear today, but it appears that most of it does.)

    Today we present two letters: one written from the Second Virginia Convention from George to his brother, and another written to George the same day by a merchant he frequently dealt with. The merchant died not long after writing the letter, so it’s not known whether Washington received it before the merchant died. What we do know is that the death resulted in an unexpected expense for Washington.

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  • March 24, 1775: The Massachusetts Provincial Congress Steps Up

    Cover art for March 24, 1775: John Hancock, oil on canvas by John Singleton Copley, 1765; in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

    We’ve spent a lot of time talking about events in Virginia lately, but that doesn’t mean that the folks in Massachusetts weren’t getting things done. It just means that they weren’t making a big deal about it.

    For the past several weeks, they’d been working on the down-low to make plans in case the British took any action that they might find too intrusive, from simple confiscations to an all-out shooting offense. (Of course that was still on the table; nobody had forgotten the Boston Massacre.)

    It wasn’t until this day in history that they made their resolution publicly known. And in the wake of Patrick Henry’s very recent proclamation, nobody would be surprised if things escalated sooner rather than later.

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  • March 23, 1775: A Wedding Announcement and a Birthday Celebration

    Cover art for March 23, 1775: Portrait of Dr. William Foushee, ca. 1820 (public domain image; attribution on the image is to someone named "Eugene")

    This show isn’t just about the big moments in American history, though we’ve been giving you those. We also take the time to look at some of the smaller things, which may have an effect later on down the line. And today we can mark two of those events.

    First up is a wedding taking place in Southampton County in Virginia, across the bay from Williamsburg. The bride was an educated woman who carried on that tradition afterward, and the groom was a future mayor of Richmond, the city’s first, in fact.

    Meanwhile, up in Pennsylvania, America’s first botanist was celebrating a birthday. Unfortunately it was one of his last.

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