When a country is losing a war, especially a war it was expected to win easily, explanations acceptable to the powers-that-be, and the general population, can be hard to come by. Often there is a primary protagonist, or antagonist, depending on who is seeking answers. In the American Revolution, one such person was Joseph Galloway, […]
June 9, 1776: The colonel and the preacher exchanged concerned glances as they crouched in the swamp. They were spattered in mud, exhausted, and cut off from their unit. Visibility was poor through the trees, but they could hear the crack of musket fire nearby . . . the enemy was getting close. They saw […]
Sergeant Solomon Goodwin of Colonel Philip Burr Bradley’s Regiment of Connecticut Levies kept an orderly book for Capt. Bezaleel Beebe’s Company. On November 16, 1776, he added a poignant, personal note: “This Day was the Day that our friends & fellow Soldiers was either killd or taken who were on York Island. This fatal day […]
The common viewpoint on Benedict Arnold’s role in the Battle of Bemis Heights on October 7, 1777 is based almost exclusively on the early nineteenth century testimony of James Wilkinson. That view holds that Arnold, after clashing with Gates over matters involving the Battle of Freeman’s Farm on September 19, was without a command on […]
Americans made repeated unsuccessful attempts during the Revolution to capture Canada and incorporate it into the nascent United States. The British, meanwhile, attempted to incorporate additional territory into Canada. This territory, though not yet part of the United States, would eventually become so. As such, this effort also failed. If that weren’t enough, as with […]
It was well into the first week of October 1776, and all of Britain was anxious for news. By the last official dispatch printed in the October 1 edition of the London Gazette, as of the 15th of August, the British army in America under the command of Gen. William Howe was fully assembled and […]
Warfare during the American Revolution could be brutal; this brutality took on entirely new dimensions in the frontier, and could be devastating, unrelenting, and all-pervading. Threats came in many forms—isolation, starvation, exposure; labor took countless forms as well, demanding never-ending toil and dogged perseverance. Like many whose charge was to defend America’s back door, the […]
Following the surrender of the major coastal capital of Charlestown, South Carolina (present-day Charleston) to the joint army-navy expeditionary force led by Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton and Vice Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot in May 1780, British land forces began to fan out across the Carolina interior to reestablish Royal control. When Clinton returned to New […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews associate professor of history and JAR contributor Christopher Pieczynski on the strategic importance of Cape Henry and access to Chesapeake Bay during the American Revolution. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and […]
The city of Annapolis has never been attacked in its long history, but it has nonetheless played an important role in American conflicts, with the American Revolution being no exception. While the British never attempted to capture the city, extensive fortifications were built around Annapolis to hold off a possible British attack. What were the […]
BOOK REVIEW: Till the Extinction of This Rebellion: George Rogers Clark, Frontier Warfare, and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779 by Eric Sterner (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2024. $29.95, cloth) In Till the Extinction of This Rebellion: George Rogers Clark, Frontier Warfare, and the Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779, Eric Sterner presents a focused overview of one […]
The strategic economic importance of Cape Henry, at the juncture between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, was recognized early on in the American colonies with a recommendation that building a lighthouse at that location would be “of great Advantage to the Trade of this Bay.”[1] It took almost half of a century to […]
BOOK REVIEW: George Washington’s Momentous Year: Twelve Months that Transformed the Revolution—Volume 1, The Philadelphia Campaign by Gary Ecelbarger (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2004. $32.50, hardcover) Gary Ecelbarger is a skilled writer who weaves an interesting account of Gen. George Washington’s leadership and campaign management challenges in this, the first of a planned two-volume analysis. […]
“On the 18th of June, the British army, now under the command of Clinton, evacuated Philadelphia for New-York. The figure they made on the road had something the air of the sublime; for their baggage, loaded horses, and carriages, formed a line not less than twelve miles in length. General Washington, whose eye, like that […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Soldiers Fell Like Autumn Leaves: The Battle of the Wabash, The United States’ Greatest Defeat in the Wars Against Indigenous Peoples by Rick M. Schoenfield. (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2024. $32.50 Hardcover) In The Soldiers Fell Like Autumn Leaves, author and historian Rick M. Schoenfield presents a unique perspective on an often-forgotten […]
Christopher Gadsden arrived as a South Carolina delegate to the Second Continental Congress three weeks after fighting at Lexington and Concord lit the tinder for the American Revolution. He succinctly captured the backlash of collective anxiety when he created the iconic flag of a coiled and agitated rattlesnake conspicuously warning Britain of the ramifications with […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews historian and author Jason Cherry on his new book, William Trent: Factor of Ambition. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening (Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatches can now be easily accessed on the […]
As the American Bicentennial approached, the Smithsonian Magazine in April 1973 ran a story by Richard W. O’Donnell about Paul Revere not being the only messenger who rode to warn Massachusetts colonists on the night of April 18, 1775, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” outlined. Revere did not complete his ride and when […]
General histories of the Battle of Connecticut Farms, New Jersey, that was fought on June 7, 1780 tend to miss their mark with the very first shots. The intrusion of local myth impacts our understanding of the sequence of battle and distorts some of its key elements. In the process, the battalion that suffered nearly […]
BOOK REVIEW: William Trent: Factor of Ambition by Jason A. Cherry. (Mechanicsburg, PA: Sunberry Press, 2024. $34.95 Paper) Independent historian Jason A. Cherry has turned an interest in the activities of an unfamiliar western merchant during the antebellum colonial period into a fascinating and interesting book. His biography William Trent: Factor of Ambition details the […]
On Saturday, June 17, 1775, Abigail Adams and her seven-year-old son, John Quincy, stood on Penn’s Hill near her home in Braintree, Massachusetts. They watched sulfuric smoke cloud the sky and heard cannon thunder across Boston Harbor from British ships in the Mystic and Charles Rivers bombarding colonial forces who had built a redoubt on […]
Thomas Waters of Georgia was present in crucial events of the American Revolution in Georgia and South Carolina. He represented as an individual the problems of class and conscience affected by British efforts to restore the rebelling Southern colonies by “Americanizing” the war, what has been called the Southern Strategy. After 1778, the King’s ministers […]
In George Washington’s Mount Vernon mansion many visitors take note of the key presented by Lafayette to the first American president, formerly used in the Bastille prison in Paris. Few visitors invest much time to look at a tea set on display in the exhibition and fewer still will wonder about who made Martha and […]
A good story spreads like glitter on a craft table: one spill and suddenly it’s everywhere. Readers picking up almost any history book about the American Revolution in the southern colonies will learn about the 1780 Battle of Kings Mountain and the plot point of British Major Patrick Ferguson threatening the Patriots of the southern […]
When Bryan McSweeny stepped ashore on Staten Island in August 1776, it must have looked like a paradise. He had spent the previous three years in Jamaica, in a tropical climate that was often fatal to Europeans; now, he saw a verdant landscape and felt temperatures similar to his native town of Macroom in County […]
Just sixty days after the start of armed hostilities at Lexington Green, the Continental Congress’s decision to invade Canada resulted in one of the worst defeats in the War for Independence.[1] While exact casualty figures are difficult to discern, likely half of the American forces sent north were killed in battle, wounded, captured, or died […]
Ten days before General Daniel Morgan’s momentous victory at Cowpens, a battle, or rather to some, a skirmish took place beyond the peripherals of the Continental army on the Eastern Seaboard. Though all but forgotten by the majority of history books and locals, this action was the bloodiest Revolutionary War battle fought in modern-day Alabama […]
BOOK REVIEW: Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution by Jack D. Warren, Jr. and the American Revolution Institute of The Society of the Cincinnati (Essex, CT: Lyons Press, 2023. $59.95 cloth) George Washington walked away from power when he resigned his commission to the Continental Congress in December 1783. King George III, on […]
Albigence Waldo was a man of various talents but, in a Revolutionary context, is best known for the diary he kept before and during the Valley Forge encampment in the winter of 1777-1778. This article reflects the value of that work while also seeking to convey an appreciation of his life and accomplishments, as well […]
The once-promising Continental invasion of Canada was clearly headed for disaster by May 1776. With British forces chasing the American Army out of the Province of Quebec, Continental leaders started grappling with the fact that their ten-month strategic offensive in the north had failed. Canada would not be joining the Continental Congress as a fourteenth […]
As 1776 was ending, a group of about 225 American prisoners was released from the British prisons in New York City to be sent to Patriot-controlled New England.[1] Most of them were enlisted soldiers from Connecticut, but there were also a few from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and several officers.[2] They had so far survived the […]
On April 7, 1776 American ships began dropping anchors off New London, Connecticut. Esek Hopkins, commander in chief of the new Continental navy, was returning from a successful raid on the town of New Providence on Nassau island in the Bahamas. While there, the Americans had seized eighty-eight desperately needed cannon and fifteen mortars, thousands […]
Very early on a hot summer’s day in 1778, Moses Mather, Jr., son and namesake of the Patriot minister of Middlesex Parish (today’s Darien), Connecticut, was seventeen years old and sitting in a whaleboat just offshore.[1] Only two years before, whaleboats rarely had been seen in western Long Island Sound. But as enemies on both […]
The last surviving major general of the American Revolution was French aristocrat Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert Du Motier, the marquis de Lafayette. Invited by President James Monroe to help usher in America’s fiftieth anniversary, Lafayette came, accompanied by his son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, and Secretary Auguste Levasseur. In 1824 and 1825, these […]
The Royal Governor of the Colony of North Carolina, Josiah Martin, was young and dedicated to the Crown. His popularity was waning as he urged members of the Assembly on April 4, 1774, to resist the monster of sedition that was raising its ugly head in the colonies. He knew that his appeals fell on […]
The Livingston mansion was a large frame house with a colonnaded front porch and four marble chimneys.[1] The chimneys were Italian imports and illustrated the worldliness and influence of the house’s prosperous merchant owner, Philip Livingston. Livingston, though, was absent and the house was instead serving as the military headquarters for George Washington’s Continental Army […]
The General Sir Henry Clinton papers at the William C. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, contain a curious document, “A proposal to Subdue the Rebellion and a Sketch of the Necessary Rout for that purpose.” The British military plan envisioned a summer campaign attacking north from New York City to capture the Hudson River […]
On October 19, 1777, two days after the Articles of Convention brought his “disaster at Saratoga” to a close, British Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne arrived in Albany, New York, a defeated man. There, Burgoyne resided in the home of Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler until October 27, 1777.[1] Most accounts of his stay focus on the hospitality […]
BOOK REVIEW: A Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation edited by David Head and Timothy C. Hemmis (New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2023) Many believe that books written with rigorous academic care are not enjoyable and appropriate only for wonkish readers. Editors and essayists David Head and Timothy C. […]
