The idea to have a flying camp at all belonged to Geroge Washington. He knew that he was going to be facing huge numbers of British soldiers soon, and he proposed having a mobile unit that could show up wherever they were needed.
While the soldiers came from three specific states, they were intended to be our first national force, with no specific state basis. Thus, they were recognized as “First Battalion,” “Second Battalion” and so on rather than “Burrell’s Connecticut Regiment” or “Pennsylvania Second Battalion”. That said, because there were specific quotas from each state, the various groups tended to have soldiers from those states and could still be identified as such.
These men were largely able to focus on the defense of New Jersey while the main Continental Army spent its time in New York. However, several men from Maryland and Delaware were assigned to fight in Brooklyn Heights when the Battle of Long Island broke out, and most of them lost their lives. They did, however, manage to prevent the capture of most of Washington’s army, but it could be viewed as a Pyrrhic victory.
We didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about John Morton, who comes up as part of today’s episode, and he does have an important part in the quest for Independence.
John Morton’s father died the same year he was born. John had very little formal schooling; most of what he learned, he learned from his stepfather. They had such a good relationship that John named one of his sons after his stepfather.
Despite his relative lack of education, John Morton was able to advise his neighbors and advocate for them when needed, and help them keep their books. In 1774, while serving as Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, he was voted to be a delegate to the First Continental Congress held in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. On November 4, 1775, he was elected to the Second Continental Congress which was held in the State House, later renamed Independence Hall.
In 1776 and 1777, John Morton became Chairman of the Committee of the Whole and was heavily involved in writing the Articles of Confederation, the new nation’s first form of government. Sadly, in March of 1777 John contracted tuberculosis and died on April 1, making him the first of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence to die.
The approval of the Lee Resolution was July 2, the Declaration was approved July 4, the signingof the Declaration was (mostly) on August 2.
Which date would you have considered for Independence Day if you were in charge back then?
Ah, who are you kidding. You’d have picked the Fourth as well. The approval of the Lee Resolution was a detail of procedure. The signing of the Declaration was just finishing up the paperwork. And we have an actual document with a date on it! Of course everyone chose the Fourth! (Sorry, Mike.)
Incidentally, practically every American knows what the Declaration of Independence looks like. But do you know that there’s something on the back?
Remember that early on, the original document was not especially well-treated. And oftentimes it was simply rolled up for transport. Because there were probably other documents it was housed with, someone wrote along one edge, “Original Declaration of Independence, dated 4th July 1776”.
Both Dr. Benjamin Franklin and the Reverend John Witherspoon made good points when they discussed state representation in Congress under the Articles of Confederation they were trying to put together.
The interesting thing is that the debate sounds very much like a modern-day discussion with regard to the nations that participate in NATO. Smaller nations are feeling a little “pushed out” by larger nations; the larger nations feel as though they’re dealing with most of the burden. And while those larger nations are correct in that the smaller nations aren’t making the contributions to which they initially agreed, it’s a matter of cure, not disengagement.
At any rate, as Mike notes, the siguation won’t be fully addressed through the Articles of Confederation; ultimately they kicked the can down the road and, when the AoC finally collapsed, our current bicameral legislature attempted to address the large/wealthy states vs. small/poorer states representation conundrum. The system could still use some fixes (e.g. the current total number of Representatives in the House is unconstitutionally low, by literally a couple of decimal places), but it’s all in pursuit of a more perfect Union. We screwed up today but we’ll get it a little more right tomorrow.
After Reverend John Witherspoon left Congress, he returned to Princeton, where the campus had been badly damaged by the British. He worked diligently to repair the damage. He was also a member of the New Jersey convention that ratified the US Constitution, and he organized the Presbyterian Church in the United States.
The presence of the British in Staten Island wasn’t a big mystery, but within a month after they first arrived, the number of ships in New York Harbor was well over 100, and still growing.
And, as George Washington suspected (along with many others), the British began moving up the rivers surrounding Manhattan, working their way up the Hudson River in the effort to use New York as a wedge between New England and the rest of the colonies. Specifically, if supplies couldn’t get through, then it weakens both sides of the line.
As for New York itself, part of Washington’s problem was that he didn’t know if the British plan was to take New York City (still a small chunk of Manhattan Island at that time), or to move through Long Island. As a result he had to hedge the bet a little bit and send troops in both directions, spreading the Continental Army rather thinly. This may have forced the British to do something quite similar, but they still had Washington vastly outnumbered.
Representatives from each colony were already working on draft Articles of Confederation beginning one day after Thomas Jefferson, et.al. started work on the Declaration of Independence.
The Founding Fathers were looking for a relatively weak central government, which is why the finished document is relatively short and can actually be boiled down to a dozen brief paragraphs. It took a while to realize it, but this wasn’t the best idea, which explains why the Articles of Confederation were abandoned for a new Constitution.
Coming up with a model treaty wasn’t John Adams’ idea, but it turned out to be a very good idea that he was responsible for implementing.
Once Adams had it in his head, he began to work on the model treaty along with the committee, and while it was intended to be used for commercial trade, it could be (and eventually was) adapted for soliciting military support in the form of weapons and other ordnance (rather than troops).
Today’s artwork, incidentally, is the Treaty of Amity and Commerce from 1778 that the US signed with France. If you look closely you’ll see that the left side is in English and the right side is the French translation. This is just most of the first page, of course, but it’s interesting to see how such things were handled.
John Alsop was born in 1724 in New Windsor, Orange County, in the British Province of New York. He was the son of John Alsop, Sr. and Abigail Sackett. His father was a lawyer in New Windsor and later New York City, where he was largely interested in real estate.
As a young man he moved to New York City, where he entered the mercantile world with his brother Richard. The brothers became importers and merchants in cloth and dry goods. John became interested in civic and political activities. He was elected by New York County to serve in the Province of New York Assembly. He was one of the civic leaders that incorporated the New York Hospital Association and served as its first governor from 1770 to 1784. In 1757, his brother Richard retired from business and removed to Middletown, Connecticut.
Early in the Revolution, the Province of New York Assembly could not reach a conclusion about the Continental Congress. As a result, delegates were selected by the revolutionary committees in each county. In 1774, Alsop, along with James Duane, John Jay, Philip Livingston, and Isaac Low, was named as a delegate. When the First Continental Congress convened on September 5, Jay presented their credentials, and the Congress accepted. Alsop arrived in Philadelphia on September 14.
Alsop returned to the Second Continental Congress, and while he assisted in the war effort prior to the Declaration, he never lost his hope for reconciliation with Britain and he wound up resigning from the Congress rather than sign the Declaration. He did continue supporting the Continental Army, from his home in Newtown, NY until that town was overtaken by the British, then he continued to work from Manhattan. When they took Manhattan as well, Alsop fled to Connecticut and stayed there until 1783, when the occupation ended.
Alsop died at his home in Newtown, Queens County, New York, on November 22, 1794, and is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery in Manhattan. His considerable fortune, which he managed to rebuild, was passed to his daughter and son-in-law after his death.
In the play/film 1776, John Dickinson is portrayed as a Loyalist from the Pennsylvania Colony whose goal is to obstruct any efforts at achieving Independence. When his efforts fail, he resigns from the Congress and leaves, though John Adams publicly admires his integrity before Dickinson departs.
(Leave us alone; 1776 is a delightful film and we both like it, plus it’s many people’s only lens for viewing the story of that time.)
As usual, however, the truth is far more complicated than could be well-conveyed, especially when cramming several weeks’ worth of story into 168 minutes. So let’s dive in a little bit.
Dickinson, to begin with, actually represented the Delaware colony, whose delegates were divided on the cause of Independence. But remember that Delaware and Pennsylvania were the same colony as far as Britain was concerned.
Now, Dickinson argued that while the British Parliament had the right to regulate trade in Europe, they did not have the right to raise revenue via taxing the Colonies; furthermore if the Colonies didn’t resist this, then Parliament would only push their agenda further. But while he felt that the Colonies had the right to seek redress for whatever grievances they had, AND he felt that the Colonies were right in defending themselves against the British, they did not have the right to separate themselves from Britain. Part of this stand involved the fact that Dickinson was immersed in Quaker beliefs for most of his life, though he never officially joined a Quaker meeting.
Now, because it had been previously agreed by the Congress that no man could serve without signing the Declaration, Dickinson stuck to his principles and voluntarily left, but he did join the Pennsylvania/Delaware militia afterward, though he never actually saw combat. It’s also worth reminding you that the Declaration was still largely unsigned at this point, and would remain so for a few more weeks, so it’s not a contradiction that he was working on a new Constitution at this point.
Dickinson was re-appointed to the Continental Congress in 1779 and he did sign the Articles of Confederation, which arose from the document submitted by his committee on this day in 1776.
John Dickinson was a complex and fascinating man, and you can learn a lot about him by visiting the John Dickinson Plantation, part of First State National Historical Park.
I don’t know if we ever mentioned this, but People of a Certain Age may remember that back in the Bicentennial Days, on our television every night during the 8:00 PM hour there was a one-minute (two, if you count the commercial) which offered up some snippet of history from that day 200 years previous, told to us by a famous person (whose identity changed every day).
Does that sound familiar? It should. The “Bicentennial Minute,” as it was usually called, ran from July 1974 to 1976, and was meant to end on July 4, 1976, but instead ran through the end of that year. So they did 912 episodes. At any rate, this was the inspiration for 250 and Counting. I wanted to revive the Bicentennial Minute in podcast form.
Now, there was a lot of anticipation as we got closer to July 4, 1976/1776, because after all, that was the big day, yes? The July 4 episode was narrated by First Lady Betty Ford. But of course, the Lee Resolution had already been approved, the editing of the document was yesterday, the signing of the finished Declaration wouldn’t happen for some time…all there was for Independence Day was the vote to approve the Declaration as edited, so it wound up being a little anticlimactic. (We did try to warn you about not getting too excited. Learn From My Fail and all that.)
Mike and I have committed to 729 episodes, from January 1, 2025 through the end of this year. After that, who knows? Maybe we’ll keep it up, maybe we’ll move on to another project. That largely depends on your level of interest. But there’s still lots of American History to look into as word gets out about this bold step our Founding Fathers took, and the repercussions for the war. We still have a couple of major battles to deal with (Long Island and Trenton, NJ come immediately to mind), the launching of the first military submarine attack, the Cherokee-American Wars are heating up, and so much more. We hope you’ll continue to ride with us. And thank you for riding so far.
