The summer meeting of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was an event as momentous as the eight years it took for the colonies/states to achieve independence. The failure of the Articles of Confederation, and the dismal outcome (and attendance) of the Annapolis Convention in 1786, made it clear to all concerned that a […]
Many followers of the history of the American Revolution are aware of the attempted invasion of Canada by Colonial forces in late 1775. The attack failed, and American designs on Canada were thwarted, for a time anyway. This was not the end of their pursuit to incorporate Canada into the Revolution on the American side. […]
Did Thomas Paine actively write against the American cause after emigrating from England in late 1774 and only opportunistically pretend to support the cause? When Paine was nominated for a Congressional position in April 1777, did delegate John Witherspoon hurl those accusations against Paine?[1] As other delegates were undoubtedly well aware, Witherspoon knew Paine personally. […]
The British Library in London, England, houses an internationally significant and relatively understudied copy of Dr. John Mitchell’s renowned 1755 map, renamed and reprinted circa 1775 A Map of the British Colonies in North America. . .[1] This map garnered particular attention due to its use in the 1782 boundary negotiations conducted by the British […]
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, […]
John Adams was making his way from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania for a convening of the delegates tasked to craft a response to the Coercive Acts when he and his entourage arrived in Manhattan on the morning of Saturday August 20, 1774. He met that day with numerous dignitaries and dined late into the evening at […]
The study of intelligence has always suffered from a bias towards the derring-do of spies, stealing of secrets, breaking of codes, and covert action. This is particularly the case with studies of intelligence during the American Revolution.[1] Books and articles on the topic have been premised on an understanding of “intelligence” as effectively limited to […]
After the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years War as it was known in Europe, Spain and France began to plan for their revenge against Britain. They had been humiliated by Britain by the terms of that ended that war. They began to rebuild their navies and to train them together with joint […]
BOOK REVIEW: Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022) America’s Founders are routinely criticized for creating a republic that tolerated, and often defended, African slavery, but at least one of the Founders, New York’s John Jay, inaugurated a family tradition of anti-slavery […]
Late in September 1774 the Continental Congress was in the middle of an ongoing debate on the means that should be implemented to restore American rights. Most of the discussion was around methods of confrontation with Britain, embargoes, and non-consumption activities, as well as the breaking down of British law and order in the colonies. […]
In July 1783 John Jay, one of the Americans negotiating a treaty of peace between Great Britain and the United States, was sitting at his desk. The negotiations, taking place in Paris had been going on for some months with much quibbling over language, borders, trading rights, and fishing rights. Sentences were being written and […]
During the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century the political philosophers of Europe were writing and discussing some new and radical ideas on what a government should look like and how it should function. They would reshape the political landscape in the late eighteenth century and well into the twentieth. One of the most […]
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the founders of the new American Republic were lurching forward from the shockingly successful outcome of their increasingly remote Revolution, and finding themselves immersed in the uncharted waters of nation-building. The political landscape was inflamed by passionate partisanship and varying, often vituperatively expressed visions of what course […]
At the beginning of March 1777, Arthur Lee, a delegate to the United States Congress, urgently requested to meet with the Marquis de Grimaldi, who until just a few weeks before had been the Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs of King Carlos III of Spain, and who was now on his way to take […]
On the morning of Saturday, July 14, 1804 the funeral cortège for Alexander Hamilton proceeded northward to Trinity Church where the former Revolutionary War officer and treasury secretary would be interred. Fittingly there was a substantial turnout; in addition to family, friends and the curious public were members of the Society of the Cincinnati, the […]
Following the Constitutional Convention’s completion of the United States Constitution in the Fall of 1787, many of those involved in its creation embarked on a campaign to ensure its ratification among the several states. The most significant effort was the publication of the Federalist in New York, published anonymously in a long series of newspaper articles […]
This month we asked our contributors: If George Washington had not run for President in 1789, who would you like to have had as a candidate (regardless of whether they were eligible based on the rules of time)? Michael J. F. Sheehan Dr. Benjamin Franklin, aside from Washington, was the only person in America […]
On the afternoon of April 30, 1789, George Washington stepped onto the balcony of the freshly-renovated and renamed Federal Hall on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan and took the presidential oath of office. Then, stepping into the Senate chamber, now-President Washington gave his inaugural address. He began plaintively, admitting in his opening line that “Among […]
In a country in which one of the main constitutional principles is separation of church and state, it is counter-intuitive to find that there are chaplains for the two houses of Congress. Aside from a couple of unsuccessful court challenges, the position has managed to survive into modern times largely due to custom and tradition. […]
Close the window. No, leave the window open. Cold night air can be toxic to one’s health. No, what’s truly toxic is stifled, fetid air . . . . What has for centuries been an argument between couples long-married was, on one evening in September 1776, an impassioned dispute between temporary bedfellows John Adams and […]
Speaking at South Carolina’s ratification convention in 1788, Charles Pinckney derided the Articles of Confederation as a “miserable, feeble mockery of government.” Pinckney was a young but significant figure at the Constitutional Convention along with his cousin Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. While coastal South Carolinians, rooted in Charleston, were likely to prevail in support of the […]
There is a gap in most histories of the United States Navy. The blank space lies between the end of the American Revolution and the re-establishment of the Navy in the 1790s. This is not the product of poor research; it is difficult to write about a Navy that did not exist. After the standing […]
The Revolutionary War was fought on a global scale, with six nation states engaged in battles across three continents and two oceans. Volunteers from many European nations came to the United States to fight alongside the American insurgents: Antoine Félix Wuibert and the Marquis de Lafayette from France, Jordi Farragut from Spain and Thaddeus Kosciuszko from Poland, to name […]
Thomas Jefferson, that American Sphinx,[1] is perhaps Alexander Hamilton’s only rival within the high pantheon of the founding generation for enigma. Hamilton’s character recalls Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, a spiraling marble Renaissance masterpiece resident in Florence’s Piazza Signoria, featuring three intertwined figures that can only be captured conclusively from a host of vantage […]
As the struggle between Great Britain and her colonists in the thirteen North American colonies entered a state of armed resistance against British military power, the delegates to the Second Continental Congress began to ponder the need for foreign assistance. With blood on both sides having been shed at Lexington and Concord, a siege in […]
