Month: February 2025

While Massachusetts, and Boston in particular, were getting a lot of attention from the British, it’s not as though the other colonies sat back and watched everything happening from afar.

To a certain extent they did do that, but they also had problems of their own to deal with. In some of the more southern states, the biggest problem was dealing with some of the natives, who had this odd insistence that they were there first and were somehow entitled to this land that had been stolen from them. This often led to multiple skirmishes on the western edges of the colonies. Plus, much of the Intolerable Acts didn’t really affect them…yet.

But Fincastle County in Virginia, while not the first territory outside Massachusetts to take up the cause, was probably one of the more gung-ho territories when it came to spelling out their intent.

The first week or two of February 1775 could best be described as a series of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Any attempts on both sides to reach out with some form of conciliation managed to fail for various reasons.

And during all these breakdowns, the situation on the American side of the pond only got worse as time went on, largely because each side thought that the other wasn’t being responsive.

In the end, however, it didn’t really matter, because as we’ve discussed with the episodes dealing with Massachusettensis and Novanglus debating one another in print, the one thing they agreed upon was that these attempts to reach out were always, at their heart, rooted in some attempt to wrest control from the other party. Both reaching for it, neither attaining it nor caring what the other side’s argument meant at the core.

Over the course of a single year—and beginning with this day in 1775—John Cox experienced what any reasonable person would call a “meteoric rise” in his personal and professional fortunes. He started out adjudicating British laws in the Colonies, but moved quickly into assisting with the Colonial resistance effort and subsequently to assisting with the actual war. He did this both materially (as a Quartermaster) and passively (allowing his land to be used by Patriot troops).

He died in 1793, at the age of 60, and even this week he’s probably still more productive than most of us.

In today’s episode, guest voice Lorene Childs tells us the story of Mary Peck Butterworth. Mary was a member of the First Families of Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and a very respected member of the society there.

But for a few years, and for reasons unknown to modern-day people, Mary enjoyed a rather peculiar hobby, one that perhaps should have made her a more famous person than she is. It wasn’t so much in the realm of John Adams and George Washington so much as it is in the realm of, say, Frank Abegnale.

John Adams and Daniel Leonard had an interesting relationship. They were great friends at first, until the British started cracking down on the Colonies. Adams chafed under the Crown’s pressure, while Leonard remained loyal. Ultimately it created a rift between the two men which never quite healed, and it broke Adams’ heart.

When Leonard began submitting essays to the Boston Gazette under the pen name “Massachusettensis,” Adams felt compelled to respond in kind, choosing a pen name of his own, “Novanglus.” It’s not entirely clear that each man knew who the other one was—certainly they did not at that time, but sources appear to differ on whether Adams knew it was Leonard later on—but what is clear is that neither man wrote from the standpoint of the troubles between Britain and the Colonies arising from a simple case of misunderstanding. They both viewed it as each side making a calculated effort to maintain control.

As noted previously, the First Continental Congress composed a Petition to the King asking him for some relief from the Intolerable Acts. The petition arrived in London in mid-December, which turned out to be some bad timing for a number of reasons.

Benjamin Franklin was in town for diplomatic purposes, and he composed a letter to Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress, which summed up the problem: not only was the Petition but one among many, many other documents, it appeared that Parliament didn’t much care what the Colonies thought. And that’s the kind of thing that makes for bad relationships.

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