250 and Counting

Tag: American Revolution

  • July 31, 1775: Congress Responds to the North Proposal

    Cover art for July 31, 1775: Response of the Continental Congress to the Conciliatory Resolution, published in a New England newspaper in 1775.

    It’s not entirely Lord North’s fault that his proposal for securing peace took so long to get to the Colonies; messages took a long time to get across the ocean.

    It is his fault that he sent it to individual people across the Colonies, thinking he could demonstrate that the Colonies are divided and aren’t on board with the revolution.

    It’s also his fault for not counting on someone from the New Jersey delegation (in this case; it could have been any delegate) bringing the proposal to the Second Continental Congress.

    Unfortunately, before anyone on this side of the Atlantic saw it, fighting had broken out at Lexington and Concord, and the document was seen as far too little, far too late.

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  • July 30, 1775: A Battle at Charlestown Neck

    Cover art for July 30, 1775: OK, we'll level with you. This is a painting of the Battle at Bunker Hill from June. There are no significant images of the battle described today.

    Boston had been under siege since Lexington and Concord. Of course the British felt that they needed to break out of it from time to time, and today was one of those attempts.

    Now, this was a success for the Continental Army, but the fact is, few people realized at that time just how close they were to losing that battle, and badly. But that’s for a couple of days from now, on August 1st.

    Coincidentally, August 1st is the day that this podcast begins airing on Hamilton Radio!

    Tune in to HamiltonRadio.net to hear our show, and a bunch of others. We’re in good company over there.

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  • July 29, 1775: Law and Moral Order

    Cover art for July 29, 1775: the insignia of the Army JAG Corps and the United States Army Chaplain Corps Branch Plaque (via Wikipedia)

    George Washington didn’t have a ton of military experience when he was named Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. But it’s clear that he gave the position a great deal of thought as he made his way from Philadelphia to Boston. When he arrived, he clearly had a lot of ideas about what an army should look like. Furthermore, he had ideas regarding the overall structure of things and the institutions that should be in place.

    Shortly after officially taking the position, Washington began petitioning Congress for various titles and positions, and groups. And it appears that Congress recognized that his ideas had merit, because there was very little that they actively turned down. (Obviously, there were some things that they were unable to provide because of shortages here and there, but they were typically behind him.)

    And today, Washington was able to get the ball rolling on two of them.

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  • July 28, 1775: Reaching Out to Ireland

    Cover art for July 28, 1775: Detail of a broadside of Congress' July 28 declaration to Ireland, as published in a Connecticut newspaper on August 16, 1775

    We told you a short time ago about a document sent to Canada by the Second Continental Congress. It outlined the reasons we got into a shooting match with Britain. It also made a point of noting that we’re not asking them to join us, but we wouldn’t complain too loudly if they did. The Canadians declined and they maintain a connection to Britain even as an independent nation. (As this is written, King Charles III is considered the King of Canada.)

    Some time later, Congress sent a similar letter to Jamaica. For what it’s worth, Jamaica is still a “commonwealth realm”, with Charles III as king. (We didn’t do an episode on that one, but it also happened around this time.)

    And on this day in 1775, Congress sent yet another letter to Ireland. The Irish also managed to stick with the Mother Country for a while, but finally broke away themselves a few years ago.

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  • July 27, 1775: The Army Hospital is Born

    Cover art for July 27, 1775: Posthumous portrait of Dr. Benjamin Church, based on "contemporary description."

    The Continental Congress thought they had a strong candidate in Dr. Benjamin Church as their Surgeon General. And while Church was a generally good doctor as such, and a loyal member of the Sons of Liberty, he wasn’t especially good at leading others to do the same. This eventually turned into a big problem that came to a head in October, when George Washington needed to step in.

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  • July 25, 1775: Early Drafts of History

    Cover art for July 25, 1775: Portrait of Thomas Jefferson. 1791, by Charles Wilson Peale

    First off, let me note that sometime this week we cracked the 1,000-download mark, and we have you to thank for that, especially inasmuch as 40% of that took place in the last 30 days or so. We’re grateful that you’re giving us this little slice of your life each day. We’re also happy to see that the number of daily downloads has grown, slowly but surely, so consider yourself ahead of the curve. You’ve got bragging rights, my friend.

    In yesterday’s episode, Mike teased the commandeering and re-outfitting of a British ship, but further research revealed that that took place on a different date, so we went with this short story plus my longer rant about historical documents.

    Okay…it’s not so much a rant as it is a hissy fit.

    It’s not even that. Look, just listen to it, all right?

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  • July 24, 1775: A Leaked Letter From Someone Who Knows Better

    Cover art for July 24, 1775: Engraving of John Dickinson, approximately mid-1770s, from the New York Public Library Digital Collection.

    Even when it’s Mike’s voice you hear on the episode, it’s Claude who takes the blame for the episode titles.

    It wasn’t a bad thing for members of the Continental Congress to disagree, but some level of decorum was still expected from those members. And almost certainly, one of the commandments was Thou Shalt Not Trash Talk Thy Fellow Delegate. (I may have softened the language a little bit, there.)

    Still, Adams had a right to express whatever frustration he had with John Dickinson, unfortunately the letter in which he did it got intercepted by the British and publicly published; the mere suggestion that there was some dissention among the ranks of a group that typically presented its work as a united front was certainly a Big Deal.

    And it certainly didn’t grease the skids between Adams and Dickinson, nor was that rift ever truly healed.

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  • July 22, 1775: Lord North’s Motion

    Cover art for July 22, 1775: portrait of Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford by Nathaniel Dance, 1773.

    Lord North gets kind of a bad rap for being the Prime Minister who “lost the colonies.” But the fact is, he mostly understood their concerns and was sympathetic to them. However, Parliament was itching for a fight and not making life easy for anyone involved.

    Lord North put forth a proposal to the Colonies that, to be honest, didn’t offer a lot of change from the status quo. But once again, the slowness with which messages moved from one place in the world to another doomed its delivery to a date after the shooting started, and Congress deemed it as not worthy of serious consideration.

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  • July 18, 1775: The Burning of Fort Johnston

    Cover art for July 18, 1775: Photo of Fort Johnston taken in 2008, via Wikipedia. Photographed by User Dincher and available under Creative Commons Attribution.

    Although Fort Johnston was originally a British fort, a few years into the Revolutionary War, the Colonies recognized that it could be a valuable place to have a fort, and in 1778 they appropriated the money to have it rebuilt. That fort was also destroyed and, although reconstruction began in 1794, it took many years to complete the project.

    Time and again Fort Johnston was destroyed or abandoned, and then repaired or refurbished. The fort regained importance during the Civil War but was officially removed from seacoast defense in 1881. For many years it held multiple military-adjacent agencies or tasks, until it was finally decommissioned altogether in 2004.

    Today it holds the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport.

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  • July 17, 1775: The Third Virginia Convention

    Cover art for July 17, 1775: an 1860 photo of St. John's Church in Richmond, site of the Second and Third Virginia Conventions. Photo by Matthew Brady.

    Given the fact that the existing government of Virginia was technically extra-legal, it’s a little amusing to think that they themselves felt the need to conduct extra-legal activities of their own. A more cynical mind would think that they were hedging their bets, so that if anything Revolutionary were to come up and the British started rounding up people, they could say, “That wasn’t us…it was that Virginia Convention crowd!”

    A more cynical mind would think that. Heh.

    But the various conventions, while not having large agendas, did have important ones, and they managed to help the colony get their act together and improve their overall effectiveness during the Revolution.

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