On this day 250 years ago in Hartford, the Connecticut Assembly agreed to raise six regiments (6,000 troops) to join the New England Army besieging Boston.
Source: https://revolutionarywar.us/continental-army/connecticut/
On this day 250 years in Watertown, Massachusetts, Dr. Joseph Warren as Chairman of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety issued the following order to Captain Richard Derby of Salem:
make for Dublin, or any other good port in Ireland, and from thence to cross to Scotland or England, and hasten to London. This direction is given, that so he may escape all cruisers that may be in the chops of the channel, to stop the communication of the provincial intelligence to the agent. He will forthwith deliver his papers to the agent on reaching London. . . .
P. s. — You are to keep this order a profound secret fro:n every person on earth.
Derby’s secret mission was to carry the news of Lexington and Concord as reported by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress to England on one of his family’s very fast schooners in the hopes that they would beat the official report that General Gage had dispatched three days earlier. Richard Derby’s brother John Derby would captain the Quero when it left Salem the next day, and he would beat Gage’s ship by two weeks.
Sources: Journals of each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts at 159 n.1 accessed at https://archive.org/details/journalsofeachprma00mass/page/158/mode/2up?view=theater; Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride at 275; Phillips, Kevin, 1775, A Good Year for Revolution, New York, Viking, 2012 at 13-14.
Tomorrow, April 28, 2025 at 7:00 pm, Salem Maritime National Historic Site will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the voyage of the Quero.
On This Day In The Revolution 