Author: Mike Messner

The title kind of buries the bigger story, but we wanted to ensure that you understood what a big deal Elizabeth Gooking Greenleaf was.

Elizabeth was dead by the time 1775 rolled around, but her family continued to run the apothecary shop for many years, and they were instrumental in ensuring that the Massachusetts Patriots were equipped with medical supplies should war break out.

Today there is a chain of pharmacies in the midwest called GreenLeaf Apothecary, but there’s no connection we could find between this and the original, except perhaps as homage.

In the play and film 1776, one of the delegates from New York says that in the state legislature, everybody talks very loud and very fast and never seems to get anywhere. This may or may not be true, but the fact is, they did have some specific instructions for their delegates to the Second Continental Congress. One of them was that New York would be expected to oppose independence for as long as possible. That was probably because they were looking at Vermont as a model and preparing to declare themselves an independent nation.

Claude is originally from New York, and he’s of the opinion that most New Yorkers still think of themselves as members of a separate nation. But that’s a different debate.

Calvin Jones may have looked like an unassuming fellow, but that unassuming look concealed a very powerful mind and a strong moral compass.

And today we’ve got Cake and Candles for him, since this day in 1775 was the date of his birth. Jones was a physician before his teenage years ended, and he began to design criteria that would separate good doctors from bad ones. He organized militias even though he was under no orders to do so. And then when the War of 1812 broke out, he became a major general with a reputation for excellence, to the point where nobody really worried about whether North Carolina would fall to the British.

After the war he basically helped shepherd the development of a brand-new field of medicine, and after his death, much of his land became Wake Forest University. What’s more, it was because of Jones that the school has a head-scratcher of a name rather than an incomprehensible one.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Thomas Gage was kind of a weird bird. In our cover art he’s defending children who were using Boston Common for sledding and skating. This was just a couple of months before today’s events.

But other times, he was a little on the lazy side, often looking for clues that aren’t there, and letting other peoples’ opinions get the better of him. It’s entirely possible that the best idea Gage ever had was whatever he’d been told most recently. His decisions appear on their surface to be expressions of concern for the Colonists. Do with that what you will.

Today’s episode marks the end of Women’s History Month. We’ve noted a few episodes since this adventure first started that involved women taking political action as groups, but Mercy Otis Warren was one of the most influential individual women to take a political stand in the Revolution era.

She was self-educated, and married a man who was both enlightened and politically active himself, and she used her position as her husband’s hostess to develop and maintain connections of her own. She was also able to use what she learned to develop some of the pieces she wrote, whether they were factual or thinly-disguised fiction pieces.

Claude and his wife Shannon did the extra-touristy thing of visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts during Thanksgiving weekend several years ago, and we did see the Mercy Otis Warren statue, but frankly at that time we still had a lot to learn about her. (If you go, be warned that Plymouth Rock is even more disappointing than everyone tells you it is.)

And because it’s an episode celebrating Mercy Warren, we talked Shannon into recording the episode. Enjoy.

In the past we’ve talked about the New England Restraining Act; today was the day that King George III actually put it into action.

To mark that day, Mike takes you through some of the details of the act and its impact on the trade in the Colonies, and the political impact in Britain.

There are plenty of scholarly books and articles out there regarding American History, but there are elements of British history that stick out, too. General Gage giving the order today that his troops begin to march on Roxbury. It was a relatively small gesture at the time, but many, many colonial events can be traced to that particular action.

And as a result the Colonists determined that Britain can’t move numbers of men like that again without bumping into a few flintlocks along the way.

One of the interesting things about many of the British officials who were around during the early days of the American Revolution is that most of them were actually pretty good at their job. It’s just that they were given rather thankless tasks to do which wound up backfiring on them.

And then there’s John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore. History has not been especially kind to Lord Dunmore, not should it be. He often acted rashly and without consulting some of the people he should have consulted, and in the end he wound up getting a lot of people very angry, instead of getting a few people a little annoyed.

Lord North, over in London, is often defined as the Prime Minister who lost the Colonies, but Dunmore clearly did his part to ensure that they stayed lost regardless of the outcome. And today in history, Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation against electing delegates to the Second Continental Congress, but the Second Virginia Convention, by now in its last day or so, ignored him and sent people anyway. (They’d already elected a couple, so Dunmore’s proclamation was a little bit of closing the barn after the horse had escaped.)

We hate to say it, but Thomas Jefferson was kind of a nepo baby.

Jefferson was part of the Second Virginia Convention, and no doubt he got there honestly, as a man who had lots of property and was well-regarded, even at the tender age of 32. But when Peyton Randolph needed someone to replace him in the Second Continental Congress, he called on Jefferson—who was his cousin.

On the positive side, Jefferson acquitted himself well in both the Virginia House of Burgesses, where he represented Albemarle County, and simultaneously at the Second Continental Congress. So while he probably didn’t need the familial boost, it surely didn’t hurt.

Never let it be said that we can’t find the less-obvious folks in American History. Thomas Bayly was definitely one of them.

Bayly was a one-term congressman to the US House of Representatives as part of the 13th Congress (as this is written, we’re in the 118th). By most accounts he wasn’t especially distinguished, but only serving for the one term didn’t mean that he was politically finished. A few years after he left Congress, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and he was part of the Virginia Constitutional Convention.

Bayly was “minor” enough in history that we were only able to find a single image of him—the one in the cover artwork. And it’s actually a black-and-white rendering of a color painting that’s been zoomed in to the point where you can see the texture on the canvas. It’s a detail from a painting of the entire House of Delegates around 1820.