Episodes

When Washington’s Council of War (with a single exception) determined that sticking around New York City was a bad idea, the next step was deciding which way to go, and how to go about it. To a certain extent, the decision was made for them, because the British had pretty well sewed up the Hudson River, which meant that getting across and into New Jersey stealthily would be problematic. The other option was to move north, into the Bronx and the downstate area west and north of Pelham. There wo...

The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry that was first created by King George I in 1725. It’s typically bestowed by a monarch based on the advice of His/Her Majesty’s government. When General William Howe received his order, there was a single class called the Knight Companion. However, in 1815 this class was discontinued in favor of three separate classes for civilians and another three (with the same class names) for the Military Division. Now, I said that George...

By the time Charles Lee returned to duty, the Continental Army in New York was in a sad state of affairs. Many men had been injured or deserted. Supplies were low. Ammunition was low. Morale was low. And the British were up in the Bronx, gearing up for…something, who knows what. Lee had, of course, missed all the action in Brooklyn and Manhattan, so he brought a new perspective to the table. And it was fortunate that Lee felt free to say what he thought of the situation, namely that it was unte...

Charles Lee was born in Great Britain and only came to British America in 1773, when he purchased an estate in western Virginia. It wasn’t his first time in America; he’d fought for the British in the French and Indian War and married the daughter of a Mohawk chief. Lee was injured in 1758 during an attack on Fort Ticonderoga. The following year he was part of the capture of Fort Niagara and of Montreal the year after that. Lee returned to Europe and served in Portugal as a lieutenant colonel...

The Battle of Split Rock is really just a continuation of the Battle of Valcour, and a lot of it takes place in a location called Button Mould Bay (or Buttonmold Bay). So why is it called the Battle of Split Rock? That’s a fine question. On the western shore of Lake Champlain, just north of Button Mould Bay, is a formation called Split Rock Mountain. It rises sharply from the lake to an altitude of just over 1000 feet, and it’s where the confrontation between the British and the Americans resu...

The Battle of Throgs Neck, or Throg’s Point, or a number of other names, was part of a move intended to trap Washington’s forces through flanking them from the north while Washington concentrated on the troops already in front of him on Manhattan Island. Washington did anticipate that this might happen, and sent American troops that way, but part of the problem that he had was that there were so many possibilities, and he just couldn’t cover them all. So he took a little gamble in sending his n...

The Battle of Valcour Island didn’t really take place on the island; rather it was in Valcour Bay, a strait between New York and Valcour Island, in Lake Champlain. After the failed invasion of Quebec the Continental forces retreated south to Fort Ticonderoga, at the south end of Lake Champlain. As they retreated they destroyed materiel they couldn’t use and left it behind in the relatively shallow, relatively narrow lake. This made navigating the lake tough for the British, so they took their t...

The town created by Henry Shultz turned out to be as ephemeral as the man himself. Don’t go looking for Hamburg, South Carolina, because you’ll be sorely disappointed. At best what remains is a ghost town, unoccupied since 1929 after several floods came through. Perhaps the most notable one was in 1911, after which nearby cities built levees to protect themselves, but there wasn’t enough of Hamburg remaining at that point to bother building one there. For all that, Hamburg was a very big deal ...

It took a month to figure it out, but the British ship movement up the Hudson River was a sign that they’d finally decided how they were going to implement their plans. Rather than concentrating on New York City, which was going to be problematic because George Washington’s troops were pretty dug in over in Harlem Heights, Admiral Howe made the choice that ran closer to the original plan: start sending warships up the Hudson and establish a new foothold in the Pelham area of what we now call th...

There are several names for the battle about to happen here, depending on how you view the geography; Battle of Throgs Neck, Battle of Throgs Point, Battle of Pells Point and believe it or not that isn’t even half of the total names given to this one conflict. After George Washington’s successful defense of Harlem Heights, which was a good place to be from a defensive standpoint, the Continental and British armies were basically in a stalemate for a few weeks. The Americans were under the impr...

Before I tell you a little bit about the First Virginia General Assembly of 1776 (which I do have to differentiate with a date, so it’s not confused with the First Virginia General Assembly of 1619), I wanted to spend a moment on the show’s cover artwork. For some reason it was in putting today’s art together that I noticed the strong similarity between today’s artwork and yesterday’s. Perhaps it’s because they’re both buildings, even though today’s structure is much larger then yesterday’s. Th...

We’ve talked so much about Silas Deane that I don’t have much new to share in this space, so I’ll tell you a little about his house. The house in today’s cover art was completed in 1769. It’s located in Wethersfield, Connecticut. The facade is asymmetrical because there was a porch at one time. Deane designed the house specifically to impress people and to project an image of power. It has two parlors: one for entertaining and one for family dining, and the kitchen is oversized specifically to...

The cover art for today’s episode is the historical marker for Bergen Neck Fort, in Bayonne, New Jersey. As someone who was born and raised on the other side of the East River, it’s supposed to be my duty to bust on New Jersey and say something like “there’s nothing interesting going on in Bayonne” and I’d mostly be right, but I will note that Mercer Park, just a hair under a mile from this spot, is rather nice. I did spend a few years living in northern New Jersey, just a stone’s throw from w...

War bonds have been a thing since literally the beginning of the country. In this particular case, Britain had spent a few years taking as much hard currency (that is, gold and silver) from America as they could, which left us in a pretty bad state when it came to having something to back our money. The coin used for today’s cover art was actually a Continental Dollar, which was designed by Ben Franklin. Coin dies at that time were hand-punched, which means that because the dies only had so mu...

The New Jersey Seal looks like a complicated and maybe convoluted project on its surface, but when you take a closer look, it becomes clear that in fact a lot of thought went into it and many of the individual pieces do tie together. New Jersey statutes are pretty specific about the Great Seal. Title 52, §2-1 reads: The great seal of this state shall be engraved on silver, which shall be round, of two and a half inches in diameter and three-eighths of an inch thick; the arms shall be three plo...

Thomas Jefferson, after many months in Philadelphia, finally got to return home today. One of the things that puzzled me early on in this podcasting project was the relative fluidity of the membership of the Continental Congress. People came in, people went out, and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. There didn’t appear to be a set schedule to it, and there were often periods in which a colony had nine delegates and other times when it had none. (Or that time when Georgia had only one del...

Thomas Mifflin was the Continental Army’s first Quartermaster General, and he was replaced by someone who just couldn’t get the job done, so he was asked to return to the position. He was good at the Quartermaster duties, but he really preferred to be on the front lines. Oddly enough, though, when the soldiers at Valley Forge went through all their hardships, it was Mifflin who got the blame for it, and Congress had to appropriate a lot of money to settle the complaints. He still managed to kee...

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...

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 prim...

As I mentioned a few days ago, when Pennsylvania drafted its constitution and then voted on it, not everybody involved was on board with the idea. In June 1776, The Pennsylvania Provincial Conference resolved “that the present Assembly of the Colony is ‘not competent to the exigencies of affairs’ and that a Provincial Convention ought to be called for inaugurating a form of Colonial government, in compliance with the recommendation of Congress”. In short, We gotta move on this, since Independen...

In putting this episode together, I realized that I used this same image of Edward Rutledge back in the September 9 episode. However, I neglected to put the information for the image in the alt text. And that’s something I do try not to overlook. On the other hand, I was still hopped up on cold medication, so there’s that. And before I forget, I mentioned the censure of Esek Hopkins during the episode, so I wanted to ensure that I linked back to that as well. In addition to being the youngest ...

The Continental Congress, in the wake of Washington’s recent letter, finally realized that they weren’t going to be able to defeat the British on their own. Some outside assistance would be needed. So on this day in 1776, they appointed a three-man commission to undertake a diplomatic mission to France, seeking money, arms and other materials. France, as we’ve mentioned before, was a good country to hit up. They were still salty about the way the French and Indian War ended up, and they’d alre...

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 m...

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 f...