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 […]
On this week’s Dispatches, host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Eric Wiser on the bitter political rivalry between Abraham Clark and William Livingston. 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 […]
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 […]
“I, A. B.do promise and declare that I will remain in a peaceable Obedience to His Majesty, and will not take up Arms, nor encourage Others to take up Arms, in Opposition to His Authority, shall and may obtain a full and free Pardon of all Treason and misprisions of Treason, by him heretofore committed […]
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 […]
While brutal internecine warfare was waged in various sections of New Jersey, nowhere in the state were the effects both in length and degree felt as harshly than in the central coastal county of Monmouth.[1] The guiding principle of the war here was lextalionis, that is, the law of retaliation, whereby a punishment resembled the […]
The British evacuation of Philadelphia had been under way for several days. Given the honor to be among the last units to leave, the Brigade of Guards slept on their arms by the redoubts north of the city the night of June 17. At daybreak, they embarked on flatboats to cross the Delaware into New […]
In the weeks before it declared independence, the Continental Congress was already hard at work building the institutions it would need to maintain the new republic. In June 1776, a committee was appointed to explore articles that would link the thirteen provincial legislatures in a loose confederation. A second was tasked to consider how the […]
One of the most famous or notorious of Tory partisans in the American Revolution was the New Jersey soldier and spy James Moody. Moody had tried to stay quietly neutral at the beginning of the war, but his refusal to sign a loyalty oath to the Patriot government of William Livingston had enraged his Patriot […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews JAR contributor Eric Wiser tells the fascinating story of notorious Loyalist partisan and British spy, Cornelius Hatfield, who operated in northern New Jersey and New York, escaped from capture and eventually settled in London following the war. New episodes of Dispatches are available for free every Saturday evening […]
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 […]
The war for all practical purposes was over when hostilities ended with a cease fire negotiated by the Americans, British, French, and Spanish in January 1783.[1] In New York, on June 19, British Brig. Gen. Samuel Birch wrote Commander-in-Chief Sir Guy Carleton that he had failed in his mission to locate and apprehend Capt. Cornelius […]
In 1793, a widely circulated American editorial observed, “A few years ago, to say of any man that he was ‘a friend to toleration,’ was to place his temper in the fairest point of view.” By the 1790s, people knew better. “Now every friend to the rights of man perceives that toleration was founded on […]
