250 and Counting

Tag: American Revolution

  • The Siege of Ninety Six–November 19, 1775

    Cover art for November 19, 1775: memorial plaque commemorating the Siege of Ninety-Six.

    The Siege of Ninety-Six is considered to be the first land battle of the Revolution in the South. And believe it or not, we might be talking about this town again in fairly short order.

    This past Saturday, Governor McMaster officially proclaimed today through Thursday the 250th Anniversary of the battle. And while this battle lasted three days before mutual cessation of hostilities, it was just the beginning of a series of skirmishes between the two factions for for about six years.

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  • SC Troops Get Organized–November 18, 1775

    Cover art for November 18, 1775: the 2nd Couth Carolina Regiment.

    In retrospect, it appears that most of the action in the early days of the Revolution took place in Massachusetts and South Carolina.

    What was so important about South Carolina? New York wasn’t a big city yet, nor was it strategically important (yet). Baltimore was a small-time port at the time; so was Norfolk. Georgia was deeply divided. North Carolina and New Hampshire didn’t have any strategic advantage. Pennsylvania was inland. Neither Delaware nor New Jersey nor Connecticut were especially important yet. Rhode Island saw some action but not as much as the others.

    But Charleston was a huge port city, as was Boston. The Charleston Bay was ideal for moving materials in and out of the area, which made it fiscally and strategically important.

    The South Carolina Provincial Congress figured this out, and also realized that they had about thirteen militia groups moving in about thirteen different directions. It was time to get everyone moving in the same direction.

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  • The Prize Court Committee–November 17, 1775

    Cover art for November 17, 1775: a British prize court from World War I. From The Times History of The War (1914). Artist unknown.

    A Prize Court is a formal organization dedicated to the disposition of items captured from an enemy.

    Because the Colonies were more or less building it all from the ground up, much of what they adopted came directly from the British. As a result the Prize Court and its structure is a British institution that made its way over here. This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world, though in the early 20th Century an International Prize Court was proposed and established, but it was never ratified or implemented.

    So it’s still just the British, which maintains a formal court, and the United States, which largely followed the original committee recommendation by largely leaving it up to the individual states.

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  • The Birth of the Black Loyalists–November 14, 1775

    Cover art for November 14, 1775: art depicting a member of Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment. Original artist is unknown but this image is frequently used to represent those soldiers.

    Lord Dunmore issued his Proclamation just a week earlier, but the response was much stronger than anticipated, probably because—who knew!—people hate being slaves.

    While the Proclamation only applied to the Virginia colony, because Dunmore had no authority conferred upon him anywhere else, a huge number of slaves and otherwise indentured servants from throughout the thirteen colonies fled to the British side of the lines.

    (We have to say “throughout” because slavery was a thing in the north at this point; it just wasn’t nearly as common as in the south.)

    This led to thousands of “American” blacks living ex-patriate lives throughout the British Empire after the Revolution.

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  • Dis-Integrated–November 12, 1775

    Cover art for November 12, 1775: "Soldiers in the First Rhode Island Regiment /Varnum's Black Regiment," Frank Quagan, c. 1976.

    It should come as a surprise to nobody that America has a troubled relationship with its past when it comes to race relations.

    It may come as surprise to you that our Founding Fathers had a complex relationship with their present when it comes to race relations. Yes, many of them owned slaves, but a significant percentage of those men had committed to freeing them at some point.

    The problem was, that point was rather nebulous. And there was a lot of ambiguity when it came to the question of how to deal with both slaves and free Blacks at that time. As we noted a couple of days ago, Lord Dunmore had a pretty good idea to free any Blacks who chose to fight on the British side. Unfortunately it was rather poorly executed and soldiers were killed, died of smallpox, or returned to their masters. Very few of them remained free. It also never occurred to Dunmore that women and children might be interested in the deal, too.

    The idea crossed George Washington’s mind, too. Until it un-crossed it, then crossed it again.

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  • The Battle Of Hog Island–November 11, 1775

    Cover art for November 11, 1775: map dating to the mid-1700s depicting Fort Johnson and Hog Island in the Charleston Bay.

    The Battle of Hog Island was the first of two major events early in the Revolution that got South Carolina firmly on board with the Independence cause.

    Hog Island caused the South Carolina Committee of Safety to expand their navy; in this respect they were way ahead of the Continental Congress.

    But when King George III approved the American Prohibitory Act in December, that really irritated South Carolinians. The Act act declared that any vessels captured by the Royal Navy after January 1, 1776, would now be considered lawful prizes. When this news reached Charleston, it was taken as an act of war.

    And sure enough, it wouldn’t be long before another confrontation took place that would help to shape the overall look of the war.

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  • Happy Birthday To The US Marines!–November 10, 1775

    Cover art for November 10, 1775: the US Marine Corps' 2008 Birthday celebration at Camp LeJeune. Courtesy of the US Marines. (USMC photo, ID 674; VRIN #081107-M-3189M-001.jpg)

    The United States Marine Corps celebrates its birthday every year on this day, usually with a ball (the dancing kind) and a cake-cutting ceremony. The cover art today is from their 233rd birthday celebration.

    Until 1921, the Marines marked the occasion on July 11, which was the date of the re-establishment of the Corps, since they were disbanded after the Revolution. But John Adams (again) came to the rescue and signed an act to re-organize the Corps. However, July 11 didn’t get a lot of attention. But when Commandant John Lejeune (the guy after whom the camp was named) was asked to draft an order to celebrate the Corps, he wrote Marine Corps Order 47, establishing the original November 10 date as the Marines’ birthday.

    Also, for what it’s worth, the “halls of Montezuma” refers to Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City (left). So yes, it really is a thing, and it’s still standing.

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  • Arnold’s March to Canada Ends–November 9, 1775

    Cover art for November 9, 1775: "Quebec from the Pointe Lévis Side" by James Pattison Cockburn, Watercolor and pencils, 1827

    We gotta give Benedict Arnold this: he set a goal and he stuck to it.

    Given the opportunity to take men and help invade Quebec through a kind of pincer move with General Montgomery, Benedict Arnold took 1100 men through the wilds of Maine to the St. Lawrence River, a trip that he thought would take 20 days over 180 miles.

    But they ran into problems almost immediately involving weather, leaky boats, bad maps, bad terrain, illness and almost half the men turning back.

    But make it he did, still with 600 men in tow, and with the help of the locals he got the sick ones healthy, the hungry ones fed, and established a base of operations for the next step, which we’ll talk about in just a few days.

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  • Dunmore Has A Tempting Offer–November 7, 1775

    Cover art for November 7, 1775: detail of Lord Dunmore's Proclamation as it appeared in the Philadelphia Journal and Weekly Advertiser, 12/6/1775. Via the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

    Lord Dunmore was driven from the Governor’s Mansion back in June, but he never went far. That same day he took refuge on a British ship near Williamsburg and continued playing the role of Governor, even though the House of Burgesses was already doing quite nicely, thank you.

    Slave revolts were a constant concern in the slave states, and Dunmore was almost certainly inspired by an incident just a couple of days earlier during the Battle of Kemps Landing. An enslaved man, serving alongside the British regulars, came face to face with his former enslaver, Joseph Hutchings, a local militia commander. Hutchings fired at him point blank and missed. In retaliation, the black soldier wounded him with a sword.

    Dunmore and his British compatriots, who were clearly already aware of the power of a general revolt, saw this event as an opportunity.

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  • Congress Has A Busy Day–November 6, 1775

    Cover art for November 6, 1775: portrait of John Langdon by Hattie Elizabeth Burdette, 1916.

    There are going to be days when no truly big events happen, but that wasn’t going to stop the Second Continental Congress from getting stuff done.

    Today we have a bit of an image of that group as a bunch of men who are hard-drinking philosophers, ready—and maybe eager—to burst into fisticuffs, or perhaps the occasional song, depending on where you got your impressions.

    So for that reason, we do like to remind you that the Continental Congress, for all their weird little squabbles, was a serious group of men. They took their jobs seriously, and put a lot of thought into everything they did. They often put in long hours, working until after darkness fell many days, and they typically worked six days a week.

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