On This Day In The Revolution

On this day 250 years ago at Old South Meeting House in Boston, John Hancock delivered the annual oration on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre before a “vast Croud” according to eyewitness John Adams. Hancock’s stirring rhetoric was published and distributed throughout Massachusetts and the other Colonies and did much to galvanize Patriotic resistance…

On this day 250 years ago, William Bradford of Pennsylvania wrote to his Princeton classmate and good friend James Madison of Virginia about their shared belief in freedom of religion: I have ever looked on America as the land of freedom when compared with the rest of the world, but compared with the rest of…

On this day 250 years ago in Pittsburgh, Alexander McKee wrote to William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs that young Shawnee warriors had killed six White men and “some Negroes” in the area of present-day West Virginia. McKee also reported that he met with Shawnee chiefs in Pittsburgh and had urged them to “Use their…

On this day 250 years ago in Savannah, the Georgia House of Commons passed a resolution asserting that the power to appoint an agent for Georgia in London is a “right and priviledge which is and ought to be exclusively lodged in the Representatives of the People” rather than the Royal Governor or the Georgia…

On this day 250 years ago, John Cruger, Jr., Speaker of the General Assembly of New York, transmits to the Virginia Committee of Correspondence, the New York Assembly’s resolutions of January 20, 1774 appointing a Committee of Correspondence and adding that “I am also directed to return their thanks to the Burgesses of the ancient…

I am taking a break from posting today because nothing happened on this date 250 years ago. There was no February 29 in 1774.

On this day 250 years ago from Mount Vernon, George Washington wrote to William Preston, County Surveyor for Fincastle County, which was the western county in Virginia constituting the frontier with Native American territory, regarding the survey of 13,000 acres in what is now West Virginia. Washington claimed this property from a land grant that…

On this day 250 years ago in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Mercy Otis Warren wrote a poem about the Destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor. John Adams had requested that Warren write the poem and she mailed it to Abigail Adams. Source: https://founders.archives.gov/?q=Ancestor%3AADMS-04-01-02-0072&s=1511311111&r=2

On this day 250 years ago in London, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter responding to a critic who attacked him falsely claiming that Franklin had sought to benefit from the Stamp Act while publicly opposing it. Source: https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%2226%20February%201774%22&s=1111311111&sa=&r=2&sr=

On this day 250 years ago Indian trader David Taitt wrote to John Stuart, the British Superintendent for Southern Indians, about a Talk between Indian trader George Galphin and his friend Young Lieutenant of the Creeks. Galphin warned Young Lieutenant that “You must take care to tell the Young People not to be frightening the…