On This Day In The Revolution

On this day 250 years ago the Massachusetts House of Representatives named one of its members, 68-year old Seth Pomeroy, as “general officer” for militias. Pomeroy would subsequently fight as a volunteer without command at Bunker Hill, serve as the Major General in command of the Massachusetts Militia and serve in the Continental Army as a…

On this day 250 years ago, the New Jersey Assembly created a Committee of Correspondence making New Jersey the twelfth colony to do so. Source: https://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/learn/deep-dives/committees-of-correspondence/

On this day 250 years ago the Boston Evening Post published Resolutions from the Town of Concord that resolved that anyone who continued to buy, sell, or use East India Company’s tea would be “for the future deemed unfriendly and enemical to the happy constitution of this country” and that anyone attempting to import the tea…

On this day 250 years ago Isaiah Thomas published the first issue of The Royal American Magazine in Boston. Notwithstanding the name of his new publication, Thomas was not a Loyalist, and the magazine supported the Patriot cause. He also published the Massachusetts Spy which was the preferred publication for letters and editorials by Patriots in…

On this day 250 years ago the Boston Gazette and Country Journal published a letter from a Patriot from the Town of Duxbury, Massachusetts complaining about “Resolves of the town of Marshfield” that opposed “the destruction of teas, &c.” and supported the British authorities rather than the Sons of Liberty. The letter writer asserted the…

On this day 250 years ago, Dr. Benjamin Rush delivered an oration “before the American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia: containing, an enquiry into the natural history of medicine among the Indians in North-America, and a comparitive view of their diseases and remedies, with those of civilized nations ; together with an appendix, containing, proofs…

On this day 250 years ago the Town of Andover, Massachusetts appointed a Committee of 5 — Samuel Phillips, Esq., Captain Asa Foster, Joshua Holt, Samuel Osgood and Dr. Joseph Osgood — to respond to a letter from the Boston Committee of Correspondence about the arrival of ships carrying East India Company tea. At her…

On this day 250 years ago the Pennsylvania Gazette published “A Lady’s Adieu to Her Tea Table” — a poem that, as the name implies, shows that the Patriots protesting the Tea Act were not all men.

On the day 250 years ago America’s greatest supporter in Parliament, Edmund Burke, wrote future American General Charles Lee, who had recently emigrated to America, about Wedderburn’s “furious Philippic against poor Dr. Franklin” in the Privy Council a few days earlier. Source: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/01/brilliant-agony-edmund-burke-spring-1774.html [sorry I am posting this one a little late]

On this day 250 years ago, Charles Clinton Beatty wrote to his brother-in-law and fellow student Rev. Enoch Green about the destruction of tea earlier in the month at the College of New Jersey in Princeton: “to show our patriotism, we gathered all the Steward’s winter store of Tea, and having made a fire on…