250 and Counting

Tag: correspondence

  • Washington’s Thoughts of Home–September 30, 1776

    Cover art for September 30, 1776: "West Front of Mount Vernon," created circa 1787–1792 and attributed to artist Edward Savage. via Mount Vernon Ladies' Organization.

    Mount Vernon, the mansion along the Potomac River in which George Washington lived, was originally built by his father when George was two years old. At that time, however, it was a rather modest house.

    Washington’s half-brother Lance lived in the house until his death in 1752. After a year or two, George leased out the property, but he did not own it outright until 1761. He did, however, expand the house during the 1750s. In 1774 he made more additions, until it looked like the building we can see and visit today.

    Washington’s original intent was that the exterior of the building be symmetrical along its center line, which was a classical look for buildings.

    (Fun Fact: the college I attended for my undergrad coursework, Adelphi University, was also initially designed to have symmetrical buildings. In fact, the builders added a nonfunctioning chimney to the gymnasium building to ensure symmetry. They’ve since added to the building so the symmetry is gone, but the twin stacks remain.)

    At any rate, the building is not symmetrical because of design choices on the inside, so a couple of windows are “out of place” and the main entry door isn’t aligned with the cupola. Clearly Washington was a pragmatic guy when it came to these things. Symmetry is nice, but not strictly necessary.

    Nowadays the property is run by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, who bought the house from John Augustine Washington III for the sum of $200,000 in 1858, along with about 200 acres of the surrounding land. Over the years they’ve done lots of restoration work but other than the addition of electricity in 1917, they’ve made no significant changes to the house.

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  • John Adams, Correspondent–September 29, 1776

    Cover art for September 29, 1776: portrait of John Adams by John Trumbull, 1793. via White House Historical Association.

    When you only have two minutes to get the point across, you sometimes lose some of the nuances. This is a rundown of the second letter discussed today:

    Abigail Adams penned a poignant letter to her husband, John Adams, who was still serving in the Continental Congress but hoping to get home as soon as his replacement arrived.

    This correspondence highlights the immense psychological and economic strain experienced by those on the home front during the American Revolutionary War.


    Abigail’s primary anxiety centered on the military situation in New York. She expressed deep frustration over conflicting reports regarding casualties and prisoners, troubled by rumors of colonial regiments refusing orders or behaving poorly under pressure. This operational uncertainty coupled with the immediate hardships in Massachusetts painted a grim picture of the war effort.

    Furthermore, Abigail criticized a growing “venal spirit” within the local communities. She observed that patriotism alone was no longer enough to motivate enlistment; instead, towns were forced to offer increasingly high bounties to secure short-term military commitments. The relentless military drafts heavily strained Massachusetts towns as they struggled to meet their quotas, forcing citizens to pay exorbitant costs to hire replacement soldiers.

    On a domestic front, Abigail balanced these structural societal collapses with immediate family pressures. Rumors of an enemy fleet in the bay magnified her isolation as she managed the family household and farm entirely on her own. This letter serves as a vital historical record of the domestic sacrifices that sustained the revolution, an account that John Adams later acknowledged receiving in his response on October 8, 1776 (which we’re not likely to discuss then).

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  • John Adams Wants To Go Home–September 25, 1776

    Cover art for September 25, 1776: the entire letter from John Adams to Abigail on this date. via Massachusetts Historical Society.

    Back in April, Mike and I had the opportunity to visit the Massachusetts Historical Society, and we were able to spend some time with the man whose job it is to curate, analyze and organize the papers of the Adams family. Not just John and Abigail, but their descendants and maybe a few ancillary branches of the family. At one point in the conversation I said to him, “It seems like John and Abigail were really hot for each other.”

    He was a little taken aback by this but he didn’t disagree with me, either.

    And I stand by my statement; it was clear by both the content and the tone of their writing that they were deeply in love with one another, and it was positively killing him that he had to spend so much time in Philadelphia, away from her.

    Which is why the letter discussed in today’s episode may come as a surprise.

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  • Washington’s Desperate Letter–September 24, 1776

    Cover art for September 24, 1776: portrait of George Washington commissioned by John Hancock shortly before the Declaration was issued, painted by Charles WIllson Peale in 1776. via the Brooklyn Museum.

    George Washington was a practical man, and he realized that without a standing army, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the British.

    Sure, it’s good to have motivated people who are passionate about the cause, but when they have setbacks, they’re more likely to bail out, and that’s exactly what he was facing once the dust began to settle from his losses in New York. Many of the recruits that he had weren’t finishing out the enlistment period they’d agreed on when they first joined up, and the fact that their supplies and their pay were sporadic didn’t help matters.

    It was with this in mind that Washington wrote to Congress, strongly recommending that they make some changes to the way that the Continental Army was being administered. Improving pay would be great, but simply ensuring that pay happened on a regular basis would be even better. And, of course, if a standing army could be established, then the men would be locked in for longer periods of time, and his officers wouldn’t spend so much time training new recruits.

    Whether Congress agrees to this change…stay tuned.

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  • Washington’s Report–September 18, 1776

    Cover art for September 18, 1776: "The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776" (Cropped), multiple printmakers, via New York Public Library.

    Washington’s report to Congress regarding the events at Harlem Heights a couple of days earlier didn’t pull any punches with regard to how badly his army was beaten, or what mistakes he and his men might have made.

    It didn’t always make for cheerful reading in Congress, but at least they knew what they were up against. They knew they weren’t getting whitewashed “Everything Is Just Peachy” reports from someone afraid of dealing with Congressional fallout.

    And fortunately, Washington’s report in this case was a mixed bag of bad luck, extraordinarily good luck, unfortunate timing and the plain difficulty of defending an island that had so much coastline within sight of adjacent coastline (because Manhattan is surrounded by rivers, not oceans). New York ended badly for the Continental Army, but there were multiple times that it could have ended so much worse.

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  • All Under Heaven Is Chaos–September 7, 1776

    Cover art for September 7, 1776: Cutaway diagram of the Turtle, drawn by Lt.C. Francis M. Barber of the US Navy in 1875. via Library of Congress.

    …but the situation was not excellent, for the American side, anyway.

    George Washington got a wake-up call in the form of a letter from Congress. In that letter he was told that it was not a good idea to burn down New York City; what’s more, they weren’t quite so invested in his holding the City as he thought they were. This was a good news/bad news situation for him, since he knew that strategically, the British occupying New York had the potential to be a huge problem, especially if they were able to take the entire Hudson Valley.

    But even if they didn’t, having one of our biggest and busiest ports was going to create a lot of headaches, regardless of what was supposed to be moving in or out of the city.

    Meanwhile, we have Ezra Lee making his first attempt at genuinely deploying the Turtle submersible. The currents plus the darkness made maneuvering very difficult, and while he did get close enough to Admiral Howe’s ship to stick the explosive charge to it, the spear he used couldn’t penetrate the hull enough to stick. In recent years it’s thought that he tried to pierce the hull near the rudder, which had an iron plate on it; another theory involved the recent use of copper on ships’ bottoms, but this copper was quite thin and would have been easily pierced.

    Lee made one more attempt with the Turtle, on October 6, but that try also failed. The Turtle was lost less than a week later when the sloop serving as her tender was sunk by British ships. Who knows? Maybe there are still pieces of her in the Hudson River.

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  • Washington Is Back To Business–August 31, 1776

    Cover art for August 31, 1776: General William Heath. Artist and date unknown. via New York Public Library.

    Washington wrote two letters today: one to General William Heath, and the other to Congress.

    To Heath, he basically gave a little bit of an “attaboy” in agreeing with Heath’s assessment regarding the British Army’s next move. So he recommended that chevaux de frise be sunk in the waters nearby the next likely target (Huntspoint), to thwart the British ships moving in. Other than that, some reinforcements are on their way, so until the British arrive, just hurry up and wait.

    Now, a cheval de frise (“chevaux” is plural) was tough for me to explain during the show, but picture a sawhorse with long spikes protruding from it. That’s a basic cheval de frise. (The one in the picture is from the Civil War.) But they’re not limited to this specific design; some stone walls had broken glass, or sharp rocks embedded in their tops to make it tougher to climb over them; those are also considered to be a cheval de frise. The ones that Heath were expected to sink in the East River looked more like boxes with angled spears pointed in the direction the ships were likely to be coming from.

    Washington’s other letter, to the Continental Congress, wasn’t so much to inform them of his loss on Long Island as it was to assure them that he was alive and well, and that most of his troops had gotten away despite the magnitude of the loss. It would be several months before Washington could truly notch one in the “Win” column against the British.

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  • GW Explains His Exit–August 30, 1776

    Cover art for August 30, 1776: "US Army--Artillery Retreat from Long Island 1776, an 1899 portrait from the Werner Company of Akron, Ohio.

    Even though George Washington was in charge of the whole Continental Army, he still had people to answer to. Most directly that would be the Continental Congress and that will happen very soon, but in the meantime there were also some local officials he had to placate.

    Which brings us to today’s episode, in which Washington wrote to the New York Convention, which was the name at that time for the body of state’s representatives. He’d kept them up to date on everything that was going on so far, so it only made sense that he’d send them another note to let them know why the troops had bailed on Brooklyn. There were lots of good reasons, but the one he didn’t write about was the fact that his army was getting shellacked and it was either get killed outright, or run away to fight another day.

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  • Greene Isn’t Happy–August 15, 1776

    Cover art for August 15, 1776: Statue of Nathaniel Greene at the Rhode Island State House.

    Nathanael Greene was among the first to step up when the shooting started at Lexington and Concord. This is almost certainly because a British official seized a vessel owned by Greene and his brothers.

    After the Intolerable Acts were enacted in 1774, Greene organized a militia unit called the “Kentish Guards.” Despite his leadership, he was not selected as an officer in that militia because he had a limp he’d acquired in childhood (there are no records extant showing why this was the case.)

    However, when the war broke out, Greene was selected to lead the Rhode Island Army of Observation and head to Boston. That company was involved with the battle at Bunker Hill but Greene wasn’t there for it; he was visiting home at the time.

    Later that month, the Continental Army was established, and he became Brigadier General Nathanael Greene. Greene remained with the Boston-based forces after the siege of that city ended, but he rejoined Washington shortly thereafter in New York. As we note in today’s episode, Greene was ill with a severe fever when the Battle of Long Island broke out, but he was able to take command for the Battle of Harlem Heights in September, during the withdrawal from Manhattan. We’ll talk about that more in a few weeks.

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  • Mail From Braintree–August 14, 1776

    Cover art for August 14, 1776: one of many, MANY letters written by Abigail Adams to John Adams. Photographed by Claude Call at the Massachusetts HIstorical Society.

    John and Abigail Adams were one of the great love stories of the 18th Century, and for John to receive a letter from Abigail must have been heavenly, even if it happened nearly every day.

    To be sure, Abigail didn’t always have good news with regard to whatever might be happening at home, and today’s letter is no exception to that. But Abigail was a woman with strong opinions and she wasn’t afraid to put them to paper and let John know what she thought. It was presumably her hope that John could sway the Congress to take on some of her ideas, and it’s entirely possible that he tried, but Abigail was a very progressive, forward-thinking woman and the men in Congress just weren’t realy for that level of social change.

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