On July 21, 1776, the once-peaceful morning was broken by the sounds of musketry as a Cherokee war party, under Chief Old Abraham, attacked the frontier fort known as Fort Watauga, also known as Fort Caswell, near present-day Elizabethton, Tennessee. This attack was not successful, and it led to an eventual several-day siege on the […]
Lieutenant Gotthold Frederick Enslin served less than a year in the Continental army, and if his name is remembered, it is most often invoked for how that career ended. In what was certainly one of the more painful moments in his life, George Washington had him drummed out of the army for attempted sodomy, the […]
BOOK REVIEW: Backcountry Resistance: South Carolina’s Militia and the Fight for American Independence by Carl P. Borick. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2026) $27.99 hardcover As students of the Revolutionary War in the American South know, Carl Borick is the author of the definitive study of the 1780 Siege of Charleston, South Carolina, titled […]
It was not just an affirmation of him and his principles by the American people, nor a rejection of his opponents. Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800 was, above all else, an opportunity. Up to this moment, he had been a writer, theorist, legislator, ambassador, secretary, and vice president. But except for a […]
George Washington’s two most-remembered wartime mounts, Nelson and Blueskin, have been the subject of considerable popular retelling, much of it post-dating the events by decades. The manuscript record is thinner than the later accounts but clear on the essentials. Both horses came to Washington as gifts from friends. Both carried him through much of the […]