250 and Counting

Tag: US History

  • February 28, 1775

    Cover art for February 28, 1775: Drawing of Joseph Galloway.

    Today we meet yet another prominent citizen who thought he had the solution for putting an end to the tension between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain.

    It’s important to note at this point, we think, that these people weren’t delusional; they were genuinely interested in maintaining a good relationship and therefore invested in repairing the damage that had been done. They liked being British citizens, even though a minority percentage of them had emigrated from England (many were born here; others came from different nations). And it’s also worth noting that when it came to separating from the British Empire…well, that sort of thing had never been done before. Never. So creating an entirely new nation was practically inconceivable for some people.

    Unfortunately in the end, while Joseph Galloway’s plan was seriously considered by the Continental Congress, it was turned down, and there was an unfortunate series of events that forced him to leave America forever.

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  • February 27, 1775

    Cover art for February 27, 1775: Portrait of Frederick North, Lord North, by Nathaniel Dance-Holland, ca. 1773-4

    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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  • February 26, 1775

    Cover art for February 26, 1775: "A 38-gun frigate, about 1770" by William Frederick Mitchell

    It’s one thing to hear someone hollering “The British are coming!” and quite another to actually see them arriving in your port. And that’s especially true when they’re also seen confiscating the cannons that you’d hidden upriver.

    This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, but there was something different about the Colonists’ response—and it almost touched off the war nearly two months before it actually did.

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  • February 24, 1775

    Cover art for February 24, 1775: "Stand Your Ground," painting by Don Troiani

    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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  • February 22, 1775

    Cover art for February 22, 1775: a map of Binghamton, NY in the early 1800s

    Back when Mike and Claude were kids, February 22 was celebrated as a national holiday, the 22nd being recognized as George Washington’s birthday. Lincoln’s Birthday was February 12, so we had two Federal holidays close together. (To be fair, Lincoln’s was always unofficially recognized.)

    Until, that is, 1968, when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act came along, and many holidays were moved to the Monday of that week. Not every state complied right away, but eventually Lincoln’s Birthday disappeared and Washington’s Birthday moved from the malleable February 22nd to the always-on-Monday Presidents Day.

    But here’s the part they don’t always tell you: George Washington wasn’t born on February 22. He was actually born on February 11, 1731 but that was under the old Julian calendar. In 1752, Britain and all its colonies switched to the Gregorian Calendar, which changed Washington’s birthday (well, everyone’s, really) by a year and 11 days, to February 22, 1732.

    Believe it or not, people did not take the calendar change well. Because it was essentially a Catholic innovation (named after Pope Gregory XIII), Protestants thought it was a Catholic plot to return them to the fold. Other people, especially in the Colonies, thought that time was being stolen from their lives, and they demanded that the “lost” days be returned. It wasn’t until public figures—including George Washington—adopted the new dates and made a big deal about doing so, that people started to calm down.

    None of this is relevant to the story you’ll hear in today’s episode, but this whole Washington’s Birthday thing doesn’t get told nearly enough. In the meantime, enjoy Mike’s story of William Seymour.

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  • February 17, 1775

    Cover art for February 17, 1775: a map of Albany and the surrounding area in the late 1700s.

    We’ve mentioned in the past that the intent of most of the Intolerable Acts and the Coercive Acts were designed to punish the Massachusetts Province, but it had some effect on the other colonies as well. What’s more, there was a growing worry that, if Parliament could do things like this to Massachusetts, what’s going to stop them from doing it to us?

    To that end, the city of Albany, NY, began making plans just in case war broke out. It was against the law, but their reasoning was that it was better to have a militia and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

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  • February 11, 1775

    Cover art for February 11, 1775: portrait of Governor William Hall of Tennessee, by Washington B. Cooper.

    There are many events in the life of William Hall that could be ascribed to just plain luck on his part, and others which could conceivably tied to some shrewd timing on his part. But in the end, we think we’re going with luck.

    If he hadn’t survived two Cherokee ambushes, if he hadn’t been an officeholder previously, if he hadn’t been the Speaker of the Senate when a scandal broke out…things could have turned out very differently for our friend William.

    But William was also smart enough to walk away when the walking was good, and he lived to a ripe old age (81).

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  • February 10, 1775

    Cover Art for February 10, 1775: A historical marker for Fincastle County, Virginia.

    (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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  • February 8, 1775

    Cover art for February 8, 1775: Portrait of Colonel John Cox in 1793 by Charles Willson Peale

    (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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  • February 7, 1775

    Cover art for February 7, 1775: Portrait of Mary Peck Butterworth

    In today’s episode, guest voice Lorene Childs tells us the story of Mary Peck Butterworth. Mary was a member of the First Families of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and a very respected member of the society there.

    But for a few years, and for reasons unknown to modern-day people, Mary enjoyed a rather peculiar hobby, one that perhaps should have made her a more famous person than she is. It wasn’t so much in the realm of John Adams and George Washington so much as it is in the realm of, say, Frank Abegnale.

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