Smallpox raged across the backcountry in the late spring of 1781 and both of the Refugee commanders, Elijah Clarke and James McCall, caught the disease. Clarke was out of action for a month while McCall never returned at all, having died from the disease in March. During his time in bed, Colonel Clarke put plans […]
Control of the Hudson River was important strategically during the American Revolution. The river, along with lakes George and Champlain, was a potential invasion route from Canada. It also was a physical separator of the colonies. Men as well as supplies crossed the river. To split off the northern colonies from the South and interrupt […]
Born in England in 1735, Button Gwinnett immigrated to Georgia in 1762 just before the Stamp Act Crisis brought political upheaval to the colonies.[1] Within a few years, he was well established and active in political affairs. Unfortunately, financial health did not follow and Gwinnett soon found himself with debts greater than the value of […]
During the first half of the eighteenth century, there was a limited amount of specie or “hard money” in the American Colonies. There were three reasons for this: there were no established gold or silver mines; there was restrictive trade with the French and Spanish West Indies, and there were debt payments to the merchants […]
Busy with the Siege of Augusta and subsequent exodus from Georgia, Elijah Clarke and most of the Refugees missed the battle of King’s Mountain. Instead, they spent time in Watauga with the Overmountain Men helping guard against raids from the Cherokee while the local militia traveled to South Carolina and dealt Cornwallis a serious blow […]
Like thousands of colonists in British North America, Virginians were alarmed in the summer of 1774 by news of Parliament’s harsh reaction to the Boston Tea Party (which occurred months earlier in December 1773). Disturbed by the military occupation of Boston, the closure of Boston Harbor, and the suspension of Massachusetts’s charter and colonial government, […]
Book Review: Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence by Ken Miller (Cornell University Press, 2014; order on Amazon) A glance at the title gives the impression that this book is about prisoners of war – which would be fine, because there isn’t enough modern literature on that subject pertaining […]
Abraham Van Buskirk was Bergen County’s leading Loyalist at the onset of the American Revolution. A prominent “Practitioner of Physic” with an income of £ 200 per annum, Van Buskirk lived in Teaneck, across the New Bridge from John Zabriskie.[1] Both men were officers in the Bergen County Militia, Zabriskie a lieutenant colonel and Van […]
With the fall of Charleston, British columns spread into the southern backcountry. All of Georgia was occupied and the state government simply melted into the frontier along with most of the Whig population. In late June the prominent militia leaders of the Ninety-Six district in South Carolina took parole along with most of their men. […]
I was recently asked to speak about Elizabeth Burgin, an American woman who risked her life helping prisoners of war during the American Revolution. I’d never heard of her, but thanks to the magic of the internet I was quickly able to locate the key primary sources about her, and a large number of articles […]
In the early morning hours of July 16, 1779, Brigadier General Anthony Wayne and the Continental Corps of Light Infantry successfully stormed and carried the British works and garrison at Stony Point on the Hudson River. Not long after, gunners from the Continental Artillery turned the captured guns across the river to fire upon the […]
Book Review: Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America’s Independence by Jack Kelly. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Hardback. $27.00. ISBN: 978-1-137-27877-7; 368 pages, Index. It is difficult to condense the Revolutionary War into one volume and make it readable, informative, entertaining and even fascinating. Jack Kelly has done just that by focusing on […]
On the southern tip of Manhattan Island is a small oval area called Bowling Green. On this site on March 21, 1770 a statue, sculpted by Joseph Wilton, of King George III was erected. It was commissioned on June 23, 1766 by the New York General Assembly because of “the innumerable and singular Benefits received […]
The summer of 1774 was eventful for the colonists of British North America. News of Parliament’s harsh measures against Massachusetts, and particularly Boston, for the destruction of East India tea back in December 1773, produced much anxiety and sympathy for the Bostonians from their fellow colonists. Many agreed with Edmund Pendleton, a moderate member of […]
“We are hellishly frightened,” Gouverneur Morris wrote to a friend on October 8, 1777.[1] Morris was attending to the business of the New York State legislature in Kingston, a town one hundred miles north of New York City. The old Dutch village had that year, by default, become the state’s capital. Morris and his colleagues […]
Among the many challenges Gen. George Washington faced in his first year as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, he probably didn’t expect to deal with grave-robbing. But on 1 September 1775 his general orders included this admonition: Complaint has been made to the General, that the body of a Soldier of Col. [Benjamin Ruggles] Woodbridge’s […]
When de Grasse’s fleet left Yorktown for the Caribbean on November 4, 1781, he was already planning how to pursue the second objective of the July 17, 1781, de Grasse/Saavedra Conventions. The objectives that he had agreed to with the Secretary of State and General Bureau for the Spanish Indies, Don Francisco Saavedra, were “to […]
