On this day 250 years ago off Canso, Nova Scotia, Captains Nicholson Broughton and John Selman commanding the USS Hancock and Franklin respectively captured the schooners Prince William and Mary although both schooners would be subsequently released by General Washington as noncombatant ships that were not involved in supplying Boston.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Broughton
On this day 250 years ago in Philadelphia, Dr. Benjamin Rush, member of Congress and future signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote to Thomas Rushton:
General Washington has astonished his most intimate friends with a display of the most wonderful talents for the government of an army. His zeal, his disinterestedness, his activity, his politeness, and his manly behavior to General Gage in their late correspondence have captivated the hearts of the public and his friends. He seems to be one of those illustrious heroes whom Providence raises up once in three or four hundred years to save a nation from ruin. If you do not know this person, perhaps you will be pleased to hear he has so much martial dignity in his deportment that you would distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among ten thousand people. There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side.
Tonight, October 29, 2025, at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, my wife and I watched an excerpt of Ken Burns’ coming film The American Revolution that quotes the final sentence of this excerpt from Benjamin Rush’s letter.
On This Day In The Revolution 