And once again, we have someone (two someones, really) who manage to come up with a plan that will put all this unpleasantness between the Thirteen Colonies and the British Empire to rest, and once again the physical distance between the two threatens the success of those plans.
What’s more, it turns out that the more popular of the two plans has an almost-hidden ulterior motive…
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The interesting thing about surveillance in the 18th century is that, when you’re dealing with trans-Atlantic distances, the information moves slowly, and errors can be costly.
We told you not long ago about someone who’d heard about the Minutemen, but had their numbers wrong by a factor of thousands. Fortunately in that case, it was just casual gossip rather than actual spycraft. But today in history, a bit of information about Colonial artillery that was reported to the Provincial Congress in Massachusetts leaked to the British, along with information about the Minutemen’s numbers and level of preparedness. But as we’ll discover in the next couple of days, the British were already taking precautions.
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(N.B. We apologize that we initally uploaded this episode in the wrong format. We have no idea whether it made your podcast player cry, or anything else. At any rate, that’s fixed. Again, apologies.)
While Massachusetts, and Boston in particular, were getting a lot of attention from the British, it’s not as though the other colonies sat back and watched everything happening from afar.
To a certain extent they did do that, but they also had problems of their own to deal with. In some of the more southern states, the biggest problem was dealing with some of the natives, who had this odd insistence that they were there first and were somehow entitled to this land that had been stolen from them. This often led to multiple skirmishes on the western edges of the colonies. Plus, much of the Intolerable Acts didn’t really affect them…yet.
But Fincastle County in Virginia, while not the first territory outside Massachusetts to take up the cause, was probably one of the more gung-ho territories when it came to spelling out their intent.
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(Forgive us the jokey headline–sometimes it’s late at night when we post this stuff and we get punchy.)
Over the course of a single year—and beginning with this day in 1775—John Cox experienced what any reasonable person would call a “meteoric rise” in his personal and professional fortunes. He started out adjudicating British laws in the Colonies, but moved quickly into assisting with the Colonial resistance effort and subsequently to assisting with the actual war. He did this both materially (as a Quartermaster) and passively (allowing his land to be used by Patriot troops).
He died in 1793, at the age of 60, and even this week he’s probably still more productive than most of us.
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