On This Day In The Revolution

On this day 250 years ago in London, Benjamin Franklin wrote his friend, and supporter of America, Bishop Jonathan Shipley about a bill under consideration in Parliament to restrict expansion of western settlements in the American colonies. Franklin explained that Parliament intended that the effect of the bill would be that People will not go…

On this day 250 years ago from his plantation Richfield in Botetourt County, Virginia, Andrew Lewis wrote George Washington an alarming report about Indians attacking settlers, although the extent of the attacks turned out to be greatly exaggerated: we have had repeted advices by travolars that the Creeks Cherokees & Chocktaws have Joined in a…

On this day 250 years ago in Boston, Andrew Oliver, the Lieutenant Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts was buried. Lt. Gov. Oliver was hated by the Sons of Liberty of Boston and they celebrated his demise. Royal Governor Hutchinson wrote in his diary: “upon his internment a large mob attended, and huzzaed at the…

On this day 250 years ago occurred the lesser-known Second Boston Tea Party. A group of Patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians entered the Boston shop of Davison, Newman, & Company (a tea merchant whose tea had been destroyed in the first Boston Tea Party) and took 16 chests of tea down to the harbor and…

The Georgia Commons House of Assembly voted to raise 1000 militia to fight Creeks who were attacking frontier settlements plus a permanent force of 500 men to patrol the border with the Creek Nation. Source: Cashin, Edward J. William Bartram and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier, at p. 73

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…