As in any soldier's knapsack, here you will find a melange of items.
A Moment in Time Daily Transcript - 15-033 Last Full Measure (66): Mammy Kate
Lead: For 400 years service men and women have fought to carve out and defend freedom and the civilization we know as America. This series on A Moment in Time is devoted to the memory of those warriors, whose devotion gave, in the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, the last full measure.
Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.
Content: Stephen Heard was born in 1740 in Hanover County, Virginia. Heard served under George Washington during the French and Indian War and was promoted to the rank of captain because of his courageous and exceptional leadership. In 1769, with his father and brother, Heard moved to Georgia and, like many Americans, tried to stay out of the fight during the early days of the Revolution. The loss of members of his family at the hands of Tories, crown loyalists, brought him into the war on the patriot side where he distinguished himself in the ranks of the Georgia militia at the crucial Battle of Kettle Creek near Augusta on Valentine's Day, 1779. Unfortunately, at that battle Heard was captured and transported to Fort Cornwallis, a military jail in the village of Augusta then held by the British.
Shortly after his incarceration there appeared at the gate of the prison one of Heard’s house slaves, Mammy Kate, a woman of impressive physical dimensions, over 6 feet tall, who may have been born in Africa. She and her husband, Daddy Jack, a gardener on the family plantation Heardmont, located not far from Augusta, made the journey when they heard of their master’s capture and impending execution. She convinced the guards to allow her to keep Heard in clean clothing and likely also provided this service to the Fort guards as well. Every day or so she would show up with a clothes basket on her head and gradually blended into the life of the prison.
One evening a guard let slip that Heard was about to be executed and Mammy Kate put into action a plan that she had been considering for some time. Apparently, Heard was of diminutive stature, small as Mammy Kate was large. She convinced her master to get in the clothes basket, covered him with linens, put the basket on her head and carried him right out of the prison. They made their way to the outskirts of Augusta where she and Daddy Jack had stashed a couple of horses and the little party made its way back to Heardmont and freedom.
For her heroism, Stephen Heard granted manumission (freedom) to Mammy Kate and probably Daddy Jack as well. Recognizing the perils of being cast out on their own in world that did not particularly welcome freedmen and demonstrating the loyalty and affection that prompted her heroic rescue, as legend would have it, she refused saying, “Na, Marse Stephen, you may set me free but I ain’t ‘gwiner set you free.” She was given a small tract of land and a small cottage, but remained in service to the Heard family until her death. Mammy Kate was buried in the family plot at Heardmont between her master and her husband.
Research by Katherine Mariani, at the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.
Resources:
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Coleman, Kenneth. The American Revolution in Georgia, 1763-1789. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1958.
Hays, Louise Frederick. Hero of Hornet's Nest: A Biography of Elijah Clark, 1733-1799. New York: Stratford House, 1946.
Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery: 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
Lovett, Howard Meriwether. Grandmother Stories From the Land of Used-To-Be. Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1974.
McCullar, Bernice. This Is Your Georgia. Montgomery, AL: Viewpoint Publications, 1968.
McIntosh, John H. The Official History of Elbert County, 1790-1935. Athens, GA: The McGregor Company, 1940.
Northen, William J., ed. Men of Mark in Georgia. Vol. 1. Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1974.
Richards, Cecile Davis. Wherever You Go: The Life of Jane Heard Clinton; Indian Territory Bride. Lincoln, NE: IUniverse, 2003.
Copyright 2009 by Broadcast Partners, LLC
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Additional information: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nwa/mammy.html
The FOUNDING of the CONTINENTAL NAVY, 1775,
by John Fitzhugh Millar
Breakfasts here at historic Newport House Bed & Breakfast (only five minutes walk from Colonial Williamsburg) are usually run as some sort of historical seminar (unless guests clearly are not interested in history, in which case we simply serve breakfast unadorned). One of the stories we most frequently recount is how the American Navy got founded in October 1775. Those mornings, we usually serve as the principal dish Jonnycakes (note spelling with no H). Jonnycakes, which are very seldom served in modern America, were among the most popular breakfasts of the colonial period. George Washington used to say that if he had not had Jonnycakes he had not had breakfast! Jonnycakes are a cornmeal pancake, which was usually eaten with some kind of sauce or jam from the Caribbean; we usually provide up to six: molasses, lime curd, pineapple jam, nutmeg jam, guava jelly, and banana jam. At the end of the story, I usually say that Rhode Island Independence Day (4 May 1776) is still a state holiday in RI, with flags, speeches and parades, and all that happened just so we could serve our Jonnycakes laced with the same kind of rum they used 250 years ago (rum being then an important ingredient).
If you lived in the colonial period, one thing would worry you more than anything else: how would you preserve your food? You could smoke things, dry things, and salt things, but those are not satisfactory – you have to add so much salt to cure a piece of meat that the microbes won’t want to eat it, and if they will not eat it, you will not want to eat it. That means that you have to run fresh water over it for hours to get some of the salt out again – rather a nuisance.
However, there was another way: strong alcohol. Anything you needed to preserve you could submerge in strong alcohol for days or decades. In Scotland, they used whiskey, in France brandy, in the Netherlands gin, and in America they used rum. Rum is distilled from molasses, and molasses is the by-product you get, whether you want it or not, when you refine sugarcane-juice into sugar.
Even a poor man’s house contained at least five barrels of rum, one for chunks of meat, one for chunks of fish, one for fruit, one for vegetables, and one for flour. If you go to the supermarket and buy a bag of flour, it went through a radiation chamber before it got to the market, and that killed the wildlife that otherwise would have infested it. If you submerge a cloth bag of flour in rum, that will similarly inhibit the wildlife. The flour will get soggy, but you are going to make it soggy in the recipe anyway. It will develop a rum taste, but most people thought that was a plus.
Researchers at Colonial Williamsburg came to me in puzzlement years ago. Virginia, they said, imported every year enough rum from Rhode Island – where they do not even grow sugarcane – that every man, woman and child, including blacks and Indians could have a whole bottle a day. What were they doing with it? Preserving food, of course, but that does not explain the Rhode Island connection.
The English passed various mercantilist laws in the seventeenth century, saying essentially that English colonists could buy sugar, rum and molasses only from another English colony, and not from a French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, or Danish colony. These laws were summed up in the Sugar Act of 1733, which was to remain in force for thirty years. Meanwhile, the French passed a very different law concerning their colonial sugar enterprises. The French law encouraged the shipment of as much sugar as possible to France, but absolutely forbade the French colonies (like Haiti) from making rum out of the molasses they collected as a by-product of the sugar production. They French did not want cheap rum flooding into France, where it would undercut the brandy industry (a sacred cow).
Therefore, the planters in Haiti were accumulating more and more molasses, and they did not know what to do with it. They were not permitted to refine it into rum. They could not throw it in the sea, as that would kill the fish, so they dug huge pits to fill with molasses. One day, a brilliant Haitian planter found a possible solution: the people of British America were not allowed to buy the molasses, but perhaps they could receive it as a gift, with mahogany barrels thrown in for free. American merchants rushed back home to ask their governors for approval, but they were told that such a gift would be merely making an end-run around the law, and would not be tolerated. However, the governor of Rhode Island was different from the others: he was elected, whereas they were appointed (actually, the Connecticut governor was elected, too, but with a great many restrictions on his activities). The governor of Rhode Island encouraged his merchants to import as much molasses as they wanted. British officials could see what Rhode Island was doing, but since it was not hurting anyone they generally pretended not to see it.
Rhode Island had been founded in 1636 as a special experiment to see if religious freedom, which had never been tried anywhere in the world, would actually work. When Rhode Island officials applied to Charles II for a charter in 1662, they pointed out that if he appointed a governor over them who did not believe in the experiment, then that could ruin the experiment. Charles II happily wrote into the irrevocable charter that Rhode Island could elect all its public officials. At first, Rhode Island officials abused their power by becoming too closely allied with pirates, but when the molasses situation presented itself the future of that trade appeared far more lucrative than piracy, and much more reliable, too. Rum distilleries appeared on the waterfronts of Newport and Providence, and Newport blossomed from a wide place in the road to the fifth-largest city in colonial America, accompanied by distinguished artists, architects, furniture-makers, silversmiths, music composers, writers and scientists, along with a substantial college in Providence.
Newport exported its rum to all the colonies in North America (after all, Rhode Island was a British colony, so it was legal to import from Newport), and handily undercut the price of Jamaica rum. This was all very well, but what would Rhode Island do in wartime, when Haiti was enemy territory?
Luckily, Rhode Island found a loophole in the law. If you captured more enemy prisoners of war than you could afford to feed or house, you were permitted by international agreement to ship them back to their home country in a special ship, known as a “cartel,” which flew special flags, and no one was allowed to interfere with cartels. Since it was expensive to operate a cartel, cartels were also licensed to pick up a cargo in the enemy’s port. Some cartels may have carried as many as 200 prisoners, but Rhode Island cartels often carried only a single prisoner. While some Rhode Island ships were picking up Haitian molasses, others were out scouring the seas for French sailors to exchange, and British officials cited Rhode Island for prosecuting the war at sea more vigorously than any other colony! The Haitians fell into the game, too, as the Rhode Island Historical Society Library contains a letter from a Haitian governor in wartime, placing a huge order of Rhode Island-made furniture for his mansion.
When war against France and Spain ended in 1763, a new king was on the throne: the young George III. His grandfather George II and great-grandfather George I were Germans first and British second (it is said, for example, that when George I asked someone what was the name of the river at London, he answered Thames – pronouncing it as written – but the German king could not handle “th”, so he pronounced it “Tems” and Tems it has remained ever since). George III, on the other hand, was completely English. He saw how his two predecessors had been exceptionally permissive (which actually resulted in Britain’s most economically productive period ever), but he felt that it was his duty to tighten up the reins.
Therefore, since it was time to renew the Sugar Act of 1733 (which otherwise was due to expire), he saw that it was rewritten to make it more difficult for Rhode Island to continue smuggling. To make sure that Rhode Island received the message and obeyed the new rules, the Royal Navy was ordered to send a warship on station at Newport. They could have sent a battleship, which would have been the end of the story, but instead they sent one of the smallest vessels they had, the 6-gun schooner Saint John, which arrived late in the spring of 1764.
The Saint John arrested all the smugglers that came into Newport (which means virtually every ship that arrived), confiscated both ships and cargoes, and put the crews ashore. The Rhode Island economy could not withstand such an assault for long. But the Saint John also indulged in another unfriendly activity: impressment. Landing parties would roam the streets of Newport kidnapping strapping young men and making them join the navy. This activity was legal in Britain, but Parliament had passed a law in the reign of Queen Anne, exempting Americans from the navy’s press. Hardly anyone remembered that law from almost 60 years before, but Rhode Island’s Governor Stephen Hopkins knew it well.
Hopkins had himself rowed out to where the Saint John was at anchor, climbed up the side, and introduced himself to the captain. He told the captain that since the Rhode Island charter gave him authority over all military forces within the colony, and since the Saint John was in violation of the law, he was ordering the Saint John to depart by sunset, and never to return. The captain, a nineteen-year-old lieutenant who had all the authority that he thought he had, rudely replied to Hopkins that his orders came from his admiral, and if Hopkins did not leave the schooner by the count of five he would be thrown in the harbor.
Hopkins was rowed ashore, and he immediately entered the fort on Goat Island that guarded the harbor. No sign of Fort George remains, and Goat Island is now covered with condos, time-shares, and a resort hotel. Hopkins ordered the master gunner to sink the Saint John. The master gunner must have assumed that Hopkins was drunk, but Hopkins coolly explained the situation, so the gunner had all the fort’s massive cannons loaded and opened fire on the hapless schooner. Two shots hit her and turned big chunks into splinters, so the young lieutenant had a brilliant idea: he would take his ax, cut the anchor cable, and sail away, never to return. These were the first shots of resistance fired against British authority in America, 9 July 1764, twelve years before the Declaration of Independence.
The following year, the British sent another small vessel, known as Maidstone’s Tender, to continue the pressure. This time, the people of Newport did not wait for the governor to decide what to do. They rowed out in the middle of the night, took the crew off, and burned it. The next British ship, the sloop Liberty (an ironic name for a ship involved in oppression), arrived in 1769, and the people burned her as well. The next British ship, the schooner Gaspee, arrived in 1772, and when she ran aground she was burned in the middle of the night, and her captain wounded.
Each time these incidents occurred, the British would learn about it months later because of bad communications. They would write a blistering letter to the Rhode Island governor, and he would receive it several more months later. He would be able to reply that he knew nothing about the incident because he had not been governor at the time – he had just been elected in the past few weeks. He would appoint a commission, which would report back in due course. The commission always reported back brazenly that persons unknown, believed to have come from Connecticut, had done the deed. After Gaspee was burned, the British decided they had had enough of persons unknown from Connecticut, so they sent their own commission to investigate, and gave the commission over $2.5 million in today’s money for a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone involved in burning the Gaspee. Almost 300 people had been involved in burning the schooner, so there was practically no one in tiny Rhode Island who did not know at least one person involved. In spite of that, no one came forward to claim the reward, and the commission had to return to England empty-handed.
However, before they left, Stephen Hopkins came into the story again. He was no longer governor, but he was now Chief Justice. Hopkins appeared before the Gaspee Commission and told them that even though Parliament had established the commission the enquiry was illegal on two counts: first, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 guaranteed any accused the right of a trial by jury, but anyone indicted by the commission would face only a judge. Second, Englishmen had a right of being tried in the courthouse closest to the crime, which in this case meant in Rhode Island, but anyone indicted by the commission was to be taken to England for trial. Those two points, said Hopkins, meant that the commission’s work was unconstitutional. They replied that he could jump in the harbor with the constitution.
Hopkins took matters into his own hands again. This time, he wrote letters to legislators he knew in all the other colonies, proposing that the colonies should join together in a series of Committees of Correspondence. The British, he wrote, were trampling over the constitution in dealing with Rhode Island, and next time they may do that while dealing with other colonies, so it was important to develop a joint response. The idea fell on fertile ground, and Virginia was the first to reply to Hopkins’ suggestion. The Committees of Correspondence of 1773 marked a major step on the road to independence, but they did not work very well because in the days before the Internet communications between the colonies were tenuous at best.
After a few months of watching the committees not functioning as well as he had hoped, Hopkins circulated his next idea. The members of the committees should meet face-to-face for a discussion of this and other related matters. He selected Philadelphia as the location, September 1774 as the date, and he called it a Continental Congress. Most history books say that the Continental Congress was founded as a result of the Boston Tea Party. No doubt the Tea Party was one of the factors that made the idea more attractive, but the Continental Congress was Hopkins’ idea. He had previously been responsible for founding the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, so he had an idea about what he was doing. Off went Hopkins to Philadelphia, sharing a carriage with his Rhode Island arch-rival, Samuel Ward.
A few months after the Continental Congress assembled, the British increased the pressure in Rhode Island. Just before Christmas 1774, the 24-gun frigate Rose arrived to clamp down on the smuggling industry, and in a few weeks the industry died. Thousands of people who were unemployed had to pack up and move to Connecticut to look for a new job. Rose ventured as far from Newport as Long Island Sound, but generally she remained close to Newport, which meant that the smuggling industry could not be revived.
While she was there, she was assigned additional duties by the admiral. British troops in Boston were mostly under embargo by the Rebels against buying food in Massachusetts, so ships like Rose in the rest of the northeast were expected to purchase food in their area and send it by sea to Boston. Captain James Wallace on Rose was given large amounts of gold coins with which to buy the necessary cattle, sheep, hogs, poultry and grain, but frequently he found that Rebels had visited the farms shortly before his arrival and removed the stock – after he had paid for it in full. Soon, other ships arrived to assist Wallace in his duties, the 24-gun frigate Glasgow, and the 16-gun corvettes Swan, Nautilus and Kingsfisher, as well as the bomb-brig Bolton and several small smuggling vessels Wallace had confiscated. In order to meet his quota of food for Boston, the now Commodore Wallace was obliged to turn up the pressure.
The Rhode Island General Assembly reacted by re-establishing the Rhode Island colonial navy on 12 June 1775, the first navy of any colony in the Revolution. Three days later, that navy’s two sloops, the 10-gun Katy commanded by Abraham Whipple under charter from Providence merchant John Brown and the smaller vessel called Washington, engaged and captured the armed sloop Diana, which was being used by Wallace to patrol Narragansett Bay. This was the first capture by any official American navy in the Revolution, but it was by no stretch a continental navy.
In the mean time, young men at Machias in northeastern Maine (then a colony of Massachusetts) were so incensed by the news of the recent battles of Concord and Lexington and the seizure of Virginia gunpowder at Williamsburg by sailors from the small British schooner Margaretta that they decided to take action. Margaretta happened to be in the Machias area making measurements for coastal charts, so these brave men, armed with little more than pitchforks, took two local sloops, Polly and Unity, on 12 June and captured the schooner. A few days later, they captured two other small survey vessels. That was of course not a continental navy.
Late in May 1775, Ethan Allen and his men captured Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, New York. The cannons taken from the fort were laboriously hauled to Boston, where they were able to convert the embargo of the British into an actual siege. A few days before the fort was taken, Benedict Arnold and a few followers captured the ketch-rigged yacht Katharine from its Loyalist owner, Philip Skene, outfitted her with eight cannons, renamed her Liberty, and sailed to the northern part of the lake, where they captured two small British warships without a shot being fired, the 10-gun sloop George and the still unlaunched 12-gun schooner Royal Savage, as well as a partly-constructed 8-gun cutter. Arnold was working with men from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, but this significant achievement, which took place on 18 May 1775, was not a continental navy.
George Washington was commander-in-chief of the Continental Army encamped near Boston. His biggest obstacle was that British troops in Boston were receiving all the food and other supplies they needed by sea – such as those sent by Wallace from Rhode Island. Congress had given Washington no authority to take any action except on land. He knew that if he asked for permission to arm some ships he would either be turned down or Congress would take months to deliberate. Therefore, on 2 September, the Continental Army chartered the first of seven Marblehead fishing schooners, Hannah, and outfitted her with four cannons. Hannah and her consorts Lynch, Franklin, Lee, Warren, Washington, and Harrison captured many British supply ships in the following year until Congress ordered the fleet disbanded, but that was still not a continental navy.
On 26 August 1775, the Rhode Island General Assembly, realizing that it would take more naval power than one colony could muster to dislodge Wallace and his fleet from Rhode Island, passed a resolution urging Congress to establish a national navy. Congress was not in session until the fall, but as soon as sessions resumed Stephen Hopkins introduced a bill to create a Continental Navy of two ships. Hopkins in the mean time had talked to members of the Congress, and they had told him that if he expected to obtain passage of his bill he had better make the navy as small as possible. With strong support from Silas Deane of Connecticut and John Adams and John Hancock (himself a notorious smuggler) of Massachusetts, the bill passed on 13 October 1775, and the Continental Navy was born.
According to Deane, the two vessels mentioned in the bill were the Rhode Island sloop Katy and the 14-gun Connecticut brig Minerva. However, both vessels had problems. The officers and crew of Minerva unanimously refused to enter Continental service, so she had to be dropped, and it turned out that Katy was not immediately available because she was off on a long voyage. Washington had asked Rhode Island authorities if they would send her to Bermuda to take their gunpowder before the British could remove it, so she had departed on 12 September, encountered a serious hurricane, found that the British had already removed the Bermuda powder, and returned home by 20 October. At that point, she was fitted with two additional cannons, for a total of 12, (Hopkins and his business associates had developed a cannon foundry just outside Providence) and renamed Providence before being turned over to Continental service.
Hopkins was very clever. He knew that Congress was terrified of taking on a naval commitment beyond their ability to finance it, so he started small, and every few days he was able to persuade them to vote for a few more ships. On 30 October, four additional vessels were added, the 24-gun ship Alfred, the 20-gun ship Columbus, and the 14-gun brigs Cabot and Andrew Doria, all renamed in honor of famous maritime heroes of the past. Shortly afterward, the 8-gun schooner Wasp was added, along with the 10-gun sloops Hornet and Fly. By Christmas, Hopkins had about 30 ships authorized through using his incremental method. The first vessels were obviously existing merchant ships that merely had to be modified, but almost 20 were genuine warships that had to be built from scratch, which would take a long time to build. On 10 November, Congress also authorized two battalions of a Marine Corps to serve on the ships, commanded by Samuel Nicholas.
Congress moved surprisingly fast to get the first fleet ready for sea. In many cases, they had to have gunports built in the sides of the ships, and they had to find the necessary cannons (usually all the same size on any given ship, so that they could use interchangeable cannonballs). But, what about sailors? In peacetime, Providence had a crew of five men, one boy, and Newfoundland dog (the dog was to rescue anyone who fell overboard, a plan that worked quite well), but in wartime Providence had a crew of 80 men, including marines (but no dog). She was so small that not all 80 had room to sleep at the same time. Luckily, Rhode Island had huge numbers of unemployed sailors, so tiny Rhode Island supplied roughly half of the seamen, officers and captains for the Continental Navy. By 10 January 1776, less than three months after the first bill passed, the first small fleet was ready for sea in the Delaware. But then it appeared that Congress had made a big mistake.
Congress considered that when it had established the Continental Army a few months earlier, it had appointed George Washington to command it and had given him almost the powers of a dictator (he did not see it that way, of course). He had not yet abused those powers, but it could be only a matter of time. Therefore, since they had a small amount of time before the ships were ready for sea, they wrote a different job description for the head of the navy. This man would have almost no power at all. All he could do was convene meetings of the captains, and the captains would vote what their strategy and tactics would be! Fortunately, that policy was soon scrapped, but not before it had ruined the career of the first man in charge of the navy.
Hopkins was given the task of finding the right man to head the navy. According to the [British] Dictionary of National Biography, Hopkins selected Jahleel Brenton of Newport, the highest-ranking American lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Not surprisingly, Brenton politely declined. Then Hopkins turned to his own brother Esek, an experienced merchant ship captain with some military experience on land.
Commodore Esek Hopkins called a meeting aboard his flagship Alfred on 10 January in the frigid Delaware, and told the captains that Congress would like them to go to Rhode Island to attack Rose and whichever consorts remained there. He looked around the table. Between them, Rhode Island and Connecticut captains held a majority, so surely they would vote to make the attack. But they replied that Rhode Island was too cold in the middle of the winter, and they would rather sail somewhere warm, like the Bahamas! As an excuse, it was known that the substantial supply of gunpowder at Fort Nassau on New Providence was only lightly guarded, so they sailed to Nassau.
Marines and seamen were landed just over two miles north of the fort. The fort was guarded by four mere militiamen, and when they saw the force of over 250 armed men about to attack they knew they would have no chance. Therefore, they asked townsfolk to help them roll the fort’s barrels of powder down to the pier and put them aboard the same schooner Saint John that had plagued Newport some twelve years earlier. Saint John and a chartered sloop Mississippi Packet took the 162 barrels of powder to the fort at Saint Augustine, Florida, where it was quite safe. When the Americans reached Fort Nassau, they found the door wide open, no guards inside – and no powder. Next, they scrounged around the island in search of anything that could justify the expedition. They found a small amount of powder, 68 large, ancient, rusty cannons, and a substantial supply of balls, which they loaded aboard the ships.
It was now springtime, and presumably warmer in Rhode Island, so the captains voted to set sail for Newport and bring Rose to battle. They reached Newport on 8 April 1776, unaware of other developments in New England. Those heavy cannons dragged from Lake Champlain had begun to bombard British troops in Boston. The British had therefore evacuated Boston on Saint Patrick’s Day 1776, so they no longer needed the small fleet in Rhode Island to purchase supplies for them. The Rhode Island smuggling industry was completely dead, so there was no longer any reason for the fleet to remain. Therefore, Rose had just departed for Halifax on 7 April and missed the Americans by only a few hours. Glasgow took a few additional hours getting under way, so the fleet fought a poorly coordinated battle with her in the dead of night, with no significant damage. However, the fleet managed to capture the small British schooner Hawke commanded by Wallace’s nephew, the first capture by the Continental Navy.
The Rhode Island General Assembly then made a courageous decision. No British ships remained in the colony, and an American fleet was anchored nearby in case help was needed. In order to give the British ships no legal reason to return, Rhode Island officially declared its independence from Great Britain on 4 May 1776, two months ahead of the rest of the country. Stephen Hopkins, who was stricken by Parkinson’s Disease, eagerly signed the national Declaration of Independence in his wiggly handwriting before retiring from Congress.
As for Rhode Island, when the Revolution was over, the other states had the same freedom to elect their own public officials, so they no longer needed Rhode Island to provide leadership. Rhode Island merchants hoped that they could return to their old smuggling industry, but it soon became obvious that Congress was no friendlier to smugglers than the British had been. Newport, which had once been almost on a level footing with Boston and New York, never recovered, and is today a small city with the largest collection of colonial buildings still standing in the country. Rhode Island took time to adjust to its changed circumstances, and so the state that was first to declare independence was the last to ratify the constitution in 1790.
Book Review: Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution by Benson Bobrick, Simon & Schuster, 1997, 495 pages. (Review by John C. Moore—July, 2008).
This review is designed primarily for members of the American Revolution Roundtable of Richmond, Virginia and is offered by one of its members whose depth of knowledge of that period is somewhat shallow but whose interest in American history is certainly growing.
When we started with our "Roundtable," it was advertised as a group which did not require an indepth knowledge of the Revolution. However, the majority is on the whole well read and with a broad background in the subject. Thus I began looking for reading materials which would be helpful to me in "catching up."
Hence, I was drawn to Angel in the Whirlwind which does not purport to plow new ground nor does it hone in on only one or two specific battles or events. Instead Mr. Bobrick, whose ancestors had both patriot and loyalist leanings and attitudes, leads the reader on a journey of an interesting combination of an overview of the period and various battles, together with an exciting portrait of the economic and social conditions of the time. He also renders a well-balanced portrait of George Washington, and brings the reader to tears as he recounts the general's farewell to his officers as war's end, which event in the words of Bobrick "was reminiscent of Socrates' farewell” (without hemlock).
Mr. Bobrick's style is very readable and his recounting of the events gives one a sense of the whole and that the revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people as well as on the various battlefields, whether in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston or finally in Yorktown. And along the way he gives the loyalist's point of view a little, but not too much, its due.
Even though the Battle of Yorktown was in 1781, the Treaty of Paris ending the war was not signed until 1783 and ratified by Congress in January of 1784. Thus, Mr. Bobrick dwells for a while on the aftermath and how much Washington wanted a stronger central government. Finally the general got his wish when the Constitution, although not absolutely to his liking, was finally ratified by the states.
In conclusion, Mr. Bobrick wrote of the difficulty in coming up with a seal of the new country which was finally adopted by Congress in 1782. The central image was of an eagle with an olive branch and arrows in its talons and a scroll on a shield of thirteen stripes inscribed with "E Pluribus Unum" ("one from many"). A certain William Barton came up with the winning design after a long afternoon genteel drinking at a Philadelphia tavern. Whether or not the story is true, Daniel Webster once remarked that the "Tavern" was the headquarters of the Revolution since so many events and discussions took place there, as in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris was proclaimed, in Williamsburg, the order of procession had everyone proceeding to the Raleigh Tavern at the end "to pass the rest of the day." The reason I end on this note is that in recounting the importance of the Tavern as so important during the Revolution, Bobrick reminds us (and our Roundtable) of Banastre Tarleton's Charlottesville raid that June of 1781 and how Jouett foiled him by keeping that watchful eye at the Cuckoo Tavern!
So Angel in the Whirlwind, and there must have been an angel for so many coincidences to have gone the patriots' way, is a good read for those like me who want an interesting review of the era in an attempt to "catch up" with our other members.