By this time in 1775, tensions between the British and the Colonists in Boston were especially high. The Boston Tea Party resulted in several thousand troops being sent in to restore and maintain order, and Americans being Americans, even before there was an America, nearly every home had plenty of arms and ammunition, or at the very least the village had a gunpowder magazine, where the explosives were stored safely but in central, easy-to-access locations.
To be on the safe side, General Gage ordered that the magazine nearest to Boston be emptied and the gunpowder brought back into the city under cover of night. The operation was successful, but trust of the British was only further eroded by this action. Ultimately it led to the Colonists continuing to arm themselves, but to do it more covertly. It wouldn’t be long before open war was waged.
Benjamin Franklin, like many of our Founding Fathers, was interested in repairing the relationship between the Colonies and England, at least early on.
What’s more, he thought that others in similar positions would be of a similar mind, so he was rather dismayed to learn that this wasn’t the case; in fact, when a sheaf of letters written by Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver made their way into his hands, he was rather dismayed to learn that they were badly misleading Parliament with regard to the situation in the Colonies.
So Franklin leaked the letters to the Speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly, saying they could be read but not copied. But Franklin didn’t heed his own advice: “Three people may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” The letters got out anyway, and they were published in the Boston Gazette a few months later. For his efforts, Franklin was humiliated in a Privy Council hearing and stripped of his title of Postmaster General of the Colonies. On the other hand, this was the event that tipped Benjamin Franklin firmly over to the cause of liberty.
It’s Cake and Candles today for James Brown Mason, a doctor in South Carolina and then his home state of Rhode Island.
Later on he began a career in politics as one of the last of his political party to take office in Congress. We think Mike had too much fun making this episode.
William Legge was the second Lord Dartmouth and the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1772 to the end of 1775. He was also step-brother to Lord North, who gets a mention in this episode.
While he was a supporter of the constitutional supremacy that Parliament maintained they held over the Colonies, Lord Dartmouth was also the Colonists’ best hope for some form of reconciliation.
Dartmouth’s resolve to achieve this reconciliation was damaged by the Boston Tea Party, so by this time he ordered Gage to put some extra pressure on the Colonists. Unfortunately this backfired badly and led to the battles at Lexington and Concord, which we’ll talk about in a future episode. Even after that, however, Legge couldn’t fully support armed coercion against the Americans, and he resigned his post in November, which basically ended his political career.
Legge was considered by many to be very pious and gentle, to the point where some people called him “the Psalm Singer.” He died in 1801, nearly forgotten. Even his final resting place no longer exists, as it was destroyed by the Nazis during World War II.
With all the things we know about germ theory and diseases and the importance of vaccinations, it’s kind of a surprise when people take a stance against such things in the face of the hard data.
Before the invention of the smallpox vaccine, the disease could have a brutal effect on people who caught it, with the vomiting, the mouth sores and the high fever. It could kill you–often suddenly–within two weeks, and if you survived, you were often left blind, or infertile, and almost certainly with deep scars all over your body. Once someone had it, the best you could do to prevent its spread was isolate them from others.
The only known preventative dated back to around 200 BCE, and was a process called “variolation,” which involved transferring small amounts of material from smallpox sores and applying it to the skin of a healthy person. That person would get a much milder form of the disease, but they’d be much more resistant to it in the future. Other people did something called “insufflation,” where dried smallpox scabs were ground up and then blown up a person’s nostril with a small pipe.
In 1796 a vaccine was developed, which was basically variolation but using the much milder version of the disease, cowpox, which proved to be quite effective against smallpox.
It wasn’t without controversy, however: people thought that the cowpox-based vaccine would turn you into a cow. But by 1801 it was a generally accepted vaccine against smallpox, and the disease is considered by medical organizations around the world to be completely eradicated, there not having been a case recorded since 1980.
Thank goodness we’ve moved past that way of thinking! Imagine a pandemic taking place these days, and people thinking that terrible things would happen to them if they took the vaccine?–oh, wait.
In this episode you’re going to learn a bunch of things about the general geography of the Bronx, and how some places got their names.
It’s actually interesting enough that may have to take some cameras up there and show you just how much the area has changed, and not just in a “what was wilderness then is city blocks now” way. It’s more like a “we needed to make this waterway safer for navigation, so we changed its path” kind of way.
The Minutemen are among the more romantic images that many people have of the Revolution.
Around this time in 1975, the comic strip Doonesbury did a couple of series that were set in the Revolutionary War days. They focused on an ancestor of Zonker’s named Nate Harris, who was a Minuteman.
In one strip, Paul Revere shows up with the alarm “The British are coming!”
Nate asks, “How much time do you think we have?” Paul Revere says maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, and Nate replies “I only need one, you know.”
“Really?” asks Revere.
Nate’s wife Amy chips in, “Nate’s been specially trained.”
Nate Harris was a fun character; it’s kind of a shame that Doonesbury is a weekly strip now. It would be fun to see him return for America’s 250th anniversary.
Anyway: check out the story of the real Minutemen.
Minuteman statue photo by Donovan Reeves via Unsplash.
Awhile back we talked about a Loyalist who wrote an opinion piece under the pen name “Massachusettensis” (which we may have mocked a little bit but it’s just the Latin word for the Colony/State). His rhetoric angered John Adams to the point where he felt compelled to respond in kind, and he did so using a pen name of his own: Novanglus.
We’ll learn about Adams’ first response to Massachusettensis, but we’ll also discover that there may be another reason this particular essayist caught Adams’ imagination.
Also on this day, Mercy Otis Warren opens a new play whose plot may lie a little too close to real life.
It’s Cake and Candles today for Abraham Henry Schenck, State Assemblyman and then Congressman from New York State.
But despite being from New York, and being a member of Congress, during his tenure as State Assemblyman he had something going on back at home. It wasn’t common in New York, but it wasn’t unheard of—nor was it illegal until several years later.
As we’ve noted a few times, the Colonists in general didn’t want war with Britain; in fact most of them were pretty sure they were going to get wiped out should it come to that.
Even our most famous Patriots of the time, such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, spent enormous amounts of time trying to engage the British peacefully. For a long time, any petitions sent to King George III had some form of “Hey, we’re totally loyal to you, can you please address this for us, your loyal subjects? Please?” somewhere in the document.
Thus it was that John Adams composed a letter to a friend of his in London, whose identity remains unknown to modern-day historians. He pinpoints the day he thinks things started to go wrong, and he notes that there’s a spirit on this side of the pond which shouldn’t go ignored.
