Jackson Kuhl is the author of Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer (The History Press, 2011), a biography of the Revolutionary War patriot and sea captain. Kuhl's journalism has appeared in Connecticut Magazine, the Hartford Courant, National Geographic News, Reason, and other publications.
In 1662, Charles II, the restored monarch of Great Britain, issued a charter for the founding of Connecticut. The colony’s borders were delineated as spreading from Narragansett Bay in the east to the “South Sea on the West.” Later the colony of New York took exception to this clause, and the two colonies battled over […]
When the Continental Congress first commissioned the use of private ships and boats of war in April 1776, they specified that each vessel’s commander had to deliver a bond payable to the president of the Congress before the privateering commission — called a letter of marque and reprisal — could be granted. These bonds were […]
“I never Emplored my pen in writing more Disagreeable News than at this time,” wrote Samuel Smedley, captain of the Connecticut state ship Defence, to Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull in March 1779. “According to your Excellencys Orders I got the ship Defence in Readiness for Sea & having no men Belonging to the ship it […]
