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. […]
The traditional story of Valley Forge tells of an encampment where a weakened and stripped-down army of 11,000 men endured the hardships of a winter cantonment rife with depravations. Overcoming crippling deficiencies and benefitting from superb training by the first Inspector General of the United States, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the army got healthy and […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Fevered Fight: A Medical History of the American Revolution, 1775-1783 by Martin R. Howard (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2023) Medical care was at the center of the Revolution. When the War for American Independence began, the British army summoned its physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and purveyors to tend to the men who sickened and […]
The 1774 colonial census for Litchfield, Connecticut lists 2,554 people living in this western New England town. Of these, just forty-five are people of color, including those of African origin described as “negroes” and indigenous Americans counted as “Indians.” Among fifteen “negro” males, eight are under twenty years old and seven are above.[1] During the […]
On the muster roll of a Continental Army regiment stationed at West Point in 1779, is a note that a soldier, Charles Turner, had deserted on June 5 of that year. In and of itself, it’s a routine entry, a common occurrence with every army of the period. The war saw thousands of such desertions […]
Major Peter L’Enfant is most well-known for his 1791 “wholly new” plan for the Federal City that would become Washington, DC. Fewer are aware of his previous experience during the Revolutionary War where he served as an aide-de-camp, engineer, and sometimes as an artist and light infantry officer. This military service, coupled with his fine […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Continental Dollar: How the American Revolution Was Financed with Paper Money by Farley Grubb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023) Economists and historians have been telling us the wrong story about Continental currency for two centuries. Continental money did not lose its value because Congress printed too much of it. In fact, […]
The national government under the Federal Constitution effectively began its reign on April 6, 1789, as an invisible and unremarkable presence in the lives of most ordinary Americans.[1] The army boasted about 750 men stationed mainly on the western frontier, there were no national buildings, roads or even construction sites, while few federal bureaucrats and […]
On the blazing afternoon of June 17, 1775, two forces met on the Charlestown peninsula just outside Boston, Massachusetts. An unstoppable force of red-clad British troops swept ashore and broke upon the immovable walls of the provincial fortifications atop Breed’s Hill, crashing across the Charlestown peninsula like a blood-red wave. Flood waters of British soldiery […]
BOOK REVIEW: Dishonored Americans: The Political Death of Loyalists in Revolutionary America by Timothy Compeau (University of Virginia Press, 2023) Early American scholars treated Loyalists of the American Revolution as bystanders and stereotypical villains in the story. This was part of a larger attempt to unify American colonists during and after the war. Some Loyalists wrote […]
I recently drove to Fishkill, New York to see the Daniel Nimham Monument located at the intersection of Routes 52 and 82. Nimham—diplomat, warrior, patriot, and the last sachem of the indigenous Wappinger people—died a violent death in combat on August 31, 1778, at the Battle of Kingsbridge in what now is the Bronx, fighting […]
Over the past few years, three demographic studies of North Carolina and Georgia Revolutionary War pension applicants have been completed (North Carolina militia, North Carolina Line, Georgia). A similar study of South Carolina soldiers who served in the Continental Line, state troops, and militia provides compiled demographic data of those who served in that state, […]
“The most ruinous of any regiment in the Army of the United States” is how Lt. William Eskridge described Lt. Col. Thomas Gaskins’ Battalion following the Siege of Yorktown.[1] Throughout the year of 1781, the Virginia Continentals had suffered through want of clothing, lack of shelter, and the rigors of a campaign across the state. […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews history professor and author Shirley L. Greenabout her new book, Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence. New episodes of Dispatchesare available for free every Saturday evening(Eastern United States Time) on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Amazon Music, and the JAR Dispatches web site. Dispatchescan now […]
Solomon Tift was long believed to be one of the last surviving veterans of the Battle of Groton Heights in Groton, Connecticut. Daniel Eldridge was also supposedly there with Tift heroically defending Fort Griswold. But neither man was there. In fact, on September 6, 1781, while the battle raged, Tift and Eldridge were not defending […]
When Don Diego Gardoqui stepped onto Philadelphia’s docks in May 1785, he was a hero of the American Revolution. A merchant from Bilbao, Spain, Gardoqui, forty-nine, had early on in the war transformed his trade connections with Massachusetts into a pipeline for delivering the arms and supplies desperately needed by American troops. Following the war, […]
BOOK REVIEW: George Washington Versus the Continental Army Showdown at the New Windsor Cantonment, 1782-1783 by Michael S. McGurty (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2023) Except for the dangerous Newburgh Conspiracy, historians overlook the Continental Army’s activities in the Hudson Valley during the last year of the American War for Independence. Michael S. McGurty […]
“Remove all public bells, in Philadelphia, to a place of security.”—Continental Congress Resolution, Sept. 14, 1777 The British Army commanded by Gen. Sir William Howe landed on the western shore of Elk River in Cecil County, Maryland, on August 25, 1777, with the objective of occupying Philadelphia, capital of the recently declared independent United States. […]
