Up until now, we’ve presented General Thomas Gage as rather a hard liner who was looking to subjugate the Colonies somehow. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is, he like being a light-hearted guy, and when he became the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, he discovered exactly what kind of mess he’d stepped into. At that point, anything he did would only make matters worse.
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The title kind of buries the bigger story, but we wanted to ensure that you understood what a big deal Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf was.
Elizabeth was dead by the time 1775 rolled around, but her family continued to run the apothecary shop for many years, and they were instrumental in ensuring that the Massachusetts Patriots were equipped with medical supplies should war break out.
Today there is a chain of pharmacies in the midwest called GreenLeaf Apothecary, but there’s no connection we could find between this and the original, except perhaps as homage.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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A quick note on the cover art: this may be the first time I (Claude) happened to match the side banner with the background of the webpage exactly.
As we’ve noted in the past, Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Burke were good friends who worked together to come up with a solution that would get the Colonies and the Crown back into each others’ good graces.
Now that we think about it, Franklin was good friends with many people on both sides of the Atlantic, and now we’re wondering if he was just one of those guys to whom you take an instant liking without knowing quite why.
At any rate, by this point the two men had to concede that it was far too late to prevent further escalation, and they were right. Burke took the time to address Parliament on this day, and let them all know just what a mistake they’d made.
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Benjamin Franklin was pretty good at diplomacy, but even when given several years to try, he was unable to bring about peace between England and the Thirteen Colonies.
From December 1774 through February 1775, he and some of his British friends tried to put together a map to peace, but unfortunately both sides were too entrenched to even consider compromise. Franklin finally went home on this day in 1775, but he left one final impression that we’ll learn about tomorrow.
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