250 and Counting

Tag: American Revolution

  • Martha Comes to Cambridge–December 11, 1775

    Cover art for December 11, 1775: Portrait of Martha Dandridge Custis, 1757 by John Wollaston. This was the year her first husband died.

    Most of the portraits we see of Martha Washington were made when she was older, so we have (I think) this image of her as a bit of a crabby old frump.

    And maybe she was, by the time her husband got to be President. She didn’t really love the life of the public spouse and charming party hostess. But it turned out she was good at it, and if it made her crabby, nobody who mattered knew about it on a firsthand basis.

    In fact, Martha Washington was known to be fashionable, calm, outgoing and easy to get along with. And because Boston was rather straitlaced compared to Virginia, she gave off a bit of an exotic air during her time in Cambridge.

    Frump, indeed.

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  • Raid on Conanicut–December 10, 1775

    Cover art for December 10, 1775: Portrait of Admiral Richard Graves by Sir WIlliam Beechey, dated to the 19th century.

    Conanicut Island isn’t much of an island to look at, but they had supplies of some kind, and the British were looking.

    Admiral Graves had the task of finding supplies for the British who were under siege in Boston, and he decided to move beyond the local waters, and went into Narragansett Bay. In some towns (such as Newport, which was Loyalist) he was able to just buy supplies. But if the locals resisted, that’s when he broke out the guns.

    Conanicut Island looked like a vulnerable place to get supplies. He was able to get some of what he needed, but it wasn’t the cake walk he thought it would be.

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  • The Battle of Great Bridge–December 9, 1775

    Cover art for December 9, 1775: Sketch of the Battle of Great Bridge by Lord Rawdon. Title: A view of the Great Bridge near Norfolk in Virginia where the action happened between a detachment of the 14th Regt: & a body of the rebels. Key: A. A stockade fort thrown up by the regulars before the action. B. Entrenchments of the rebels. C. A narrow causeway by which the regulars were forced to advance to the attack. D. The church occupied by the rebels. Once again, the map has North toward the bottom.
    Note once again that the map is drawn with North on the bottom. Hover to get the guide to the markers.

    The Battle of Great Bridge is a little bit overlooked these days, and more’s the pity. It was the first battle in Virginia, it was a big victory for Patriot troops, the Royal Governor and his crowd got pushed out altogether, and nobody died on the Patriot side.

    On the British side, about 100 soldiers were dead. The last time the British lost a substantial number of troops, it was at Bunker Hill, which they won. (The vocabulary word you seek is “Pyrrhic Victory.”)

    Best of all, it fueled Virginia’s moves toward independence.

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  • The Siege of Quebec–December 8, 1775

    Cover art for December 8, 1775: Benedict Arnold's forces moving in on Quebec. from a painting by F. C. Yohn, date unknown.

    The siege of Quebec was an event that was months in the making, and it was still just the penultimate act of the play.

    Benedict Arnold and his troops thought they could get to the American side of the St. Lawrence River within 21 days; instead it took several weeks. Along the way they lost about a third of their troop strength. Some of the men died of illness en route, but most of them finally gave up altogether and headed home.

    When they finally arrived they realized they didn’t have nearly what they needed to effect a decent attack on the city, so they had to hunker down and wait for supports to arrive. They were able to institute a couple of blockades, but that wasn’t nearly enough.

    Finally General Montgomery showed up, and after an attempt at getting the city to surrender, they began the shooting. Unfortunately that didn’t do a lot of good, so the Continental Army had to settle for placing the city under siege. At this point, however, the clock was ticking because a big chunk of the Colonial soldiers were due to have their enlistments end on December 31. Something had to give, and soon.

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  • Tensions Rise At Great Bridge–December 7, 1775

    Cover art for December 7, 1775: Detail from a map circa 1785 showing the Norfolk area. Oriented with North to the bottom, Fort Murray is visible near the top of the map. via Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

    The map in today’s cover art might be a little confusing to people who live and work in the modern-day Norfolk area. That’s because it’s oriented with North at the bottom. What’s not known is why this was done in this particular case. North/Up South/Down is, of course, the usual convention, and there are arguments that there’s a psychological component to this (e.g. north/up is somehow “better” than south/down).

    From a cartography standpoint, there isn’t much difference between a map oriented one way and a map oriented any other way. In fact, most cartographers consider the matter trivial in nature.

    The bodies are gathering at Great Bridge; in a couple of days the battle begins.

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  • The Raid On Yarmouth–December 5, 1775

    Cover art for December 5, 1775: Map of Nova Scotia. That big honkin' arrow we added points to Yarmouth.

    Yarmouth, Nova Scotia was a frequent target of raids throughout the Revolution. Indeed, most of Nova Scotia was harassed from both land and sea by Americans. This had a huge impact on the maritime economy there. But all those attacks—mostly by American (and probably some French) privateers—inflicted lots of disruption on British supply lines the entire time.

    On the downside, all these attacks pretty much put an end to any trade between America and Nova Scotia.

    But the Raid on Yarmouth, as the event came to be known, was especially egregious both for its intensity and the lasting effect it had on its inhabitants.

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  • When The North Went South–December 4, 1775

    Cover art for December 4, 1775: a 1776 map of Pennsylvania and surrounding colonies.

    While the premise of today’s episode seems a little far-fetched, if you look closely at the map in today’s cover art, you’ll see it makes a lot of sense. In the mid-1700s, neither Pennsylvania nor Virginia had well-defined western borders. In fact, Virginia was occasionally thought to continue northward all the way to Lake Erie. Some maps even have a Pennsylvania boundary somewhere east of Pittsburgh.

    The point is, there have been times when the borders have been blurry, and others where they’ve overlapped, and still others (before West Virginia was a thing) when the two colonies had well-defined borders AND were neighbors. And now we’ve brought the South into the realm of mutual commitment.

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  • The First American Flag Is Raised–December 3, 1775

    Cover art for December 3, 1775: Oil painting by W. Nowland Van Powell, depicting Lt. John Paul Jones raising the "Grand Union Flag" on December 3, 1775. via the US Navy Art Collection.

    John Paul Jones was born in Scotland as John Paul and began his maritime career at 13 when he was hired as an apprentice.

    In 1770 he was involved in an incident wherein a crew member was flogged after a failed mutiny. The crew member later died, and it was clear that his reputation had taken a big hit. So John Paul left Scotland and took command of a British vessel. Again, however, he put down a mutinous sailor, this time killing him with a sword in Tobago. Before he could be tried, however, he fled the area and essentially disappeared for 18 months.

    In the meantime his brother, who lived in the Fredericksburg, Virginia, area, died. John Paul went to America to settle his brother’s affairs. It was at this time that he appended the last name “Jones” to his name. Shortly thereafter he joined the American Navy. During his time as an American naval officer, it doesn’t appear that he killed anyone, but in his later years, he sailed for the Russian Navy, where he was derailed by the accusation of rape of a ten-year-old Russian girl. It was only because of the murkiness of some of the details that gave the Empress Catherine some leeway to have him exiled rather than beheaded.

    But as an American sailor, he did shine. And he shone for the first time on this day in 1775.

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  • Homesickness Sets In–December 2, 1775

    Cover art for December 2, 1775: Portrait of Joseph Hewes, 1775. Author unknown; now hanging at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, Greensboro, NC

    All of the men who were part of the Second Continental Congress were serious men who had businesses of their own back at home. So spending so much time in Philadelphia had to have been taxing on them, especially since the days were so long. Of course many of them were going to be homesick. Read the letters between John and Abigail Adams as an excellent example.

    And remember: to go home to, say, Boston could take about a week in 1775. So they’d be away for two weeks at a minimum, and that’s entirely traveling time. Taking care of whatever they needed to only added to the absence.

    We do know that many of them did go home from time to time, but they were obliged to return and continue the business of running a country while simultaneously ducking interference from the British.

    Joseph Hewes’ letter to Samuel Johnston has a special poignancy about it.

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  • Montgomery Arrives at Quebec–December 1, 1775

    Cover art for December 1, 1775: "Gen. Richard Montgomery." via the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

    The events at Lexington and Concord were only about a month in the rear-view mirror when it occurred to both the Americans and the British that the Canadian provinces were colonies, too, and that they might have some kind of interest in the activities going on further south.

    Quebec, being perhaps the largest city close to the border, was the natural target for everyone involved. So it was always in the back of minds in the Thirteen Colonies, and in England. And slowly, each side began to think about either converting Canada to the American side, or defending Canada from American invasion.

    And on this day in history, everyone moved a giant step closer to what eventually became the Battle of Quebec.

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