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Tag: July 14 1775

  • 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 14, 1775: Support From An Odd Place

    Cover art for July 14, 1775: Cropped detail from John Glynn, John Wilkes and John Horne Tooke, after Richard Houston (1769), given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1922.

    Lord John Wilkes was an interesting person who was always willing to run against popular opinion if he felt strongly that he was in the right.

    In 1769 he fought for the right of his voters – rather than the House of Commons – to determine their representatives. In 1761 he got Parliament to concede the right of publishers to print the content of Parliamentary debates. In 1776 he put forth a bill proposing Parliamentary reform.

    But on this day in 1775, Wilkes managed to anger a great number of people in Parliament when he expressed support for the Colonial rebels.

    Unfortunately, after one of his actions had an unfortunate effect, his politics became increasingly conservative and as a result he lost his seat in Parliament in 1790. Not long afterward he took a position as a magistrate, and he seemed to once again show more compassion toward the lower classes.

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