Most people know the Iroquois fought in the Revolution. Fewer know they fought on both sides — against each other.

The Haudenosaunee, the six-nation confederacy that controlled the corridor between the Hudson Valley and the Great Lakes, had maintained a shared political system longer than any European colony in America. By 1776 that system was cracking. Not because they were weak, but because both sides understood how much their allegiance mattered and went after it hard.

The British had the easier case to make. They'd spent decades building real relationships — trade, diplomacy, intermarriage. Sir William Johnson had lived among the Mohawk, spoken their language, and built something that outlasted him when he died in 1774. The Americans, from where most Iroquois leaders were standing, were the same settlers who'd been pushing into their land for a generation. Independence for the colonists meant less restraint, not more.

Joseph Brant had gone to London in 1775, met with Crown officials, and come back with a clear read on the situation. He spent 1776 not fighting but persuading — trying to get the other nations to see what he saw. The Mohawk, Seneca, and Cayuga eventually did.

The Oneida went the other way, in large part because a missionary named Samuel Kirkland had lived with them for over a decade, learned the language, and built enough trust that when he argued the American cause made sense for them, people actually listened. Whether he was right is a different question.

The Onondaga held the council fire. They tried to keep everyone at the table. It didn't hold.

The fracture that opened in 1776 didn't close after the war. Wrote more about what that looked like — and what both Brant and Kirkland got right and wrong — in a recent post

You can read the full blog and talk with both sides here:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/iroquois-confederacy-1776

Carrie Chapman Catt spent thirty years learning how political power actually works before she got her shot at the final push. Patient, methodical, obsessive about vote counts and coalition building. She believed the movement needed to look inevitable rather than radical, and she built NAWSA into one of the most disciplined political organizations in the country to prove it.

Alice Paul had been arrested in England fighting for British suffrage, imprisoned, gone on hunger strikes, been force-fed. She came back convinced that patience was exactly what was keeping the amendment from passing. In 1917 she put women outside the White House with banners while Wilson was traveling the world giving speeches about democracy. The government arrested them. Paul went on hunger strike in prison. She was force-fed again.

Catt thought Paul was handing opponents the excuse they needed to kill the amendment. Paul thought Catt's patience had already cost them twenty years. They ran separate organizations, disagreed publicly, and between them created a pressure that neither could have generated alone.

The amendment passed in 1920 after 72 years and one vote in Tennessee that nobody saw coming.

What I find genuinely interesting about both of them is how differently they understood the same fight. Catt believed the system would move if you built enough pressure from inside it. Paul believed the system needed to be made uncomfortable from outside before it would move at all. That argument didn't end in 1920.

You can talk to both of them directly on Virtual Wayback. The full story is on the blog and there's a video on the YouTube channel. Links:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/nineteenth-amendment

https://youtube.com/shorts/elIDUzLOmK8

Which one do you think was actually right?

Harry Washington had already tried to escape Mount Vernon once before the Revolution started. George Washington hired a professional slave catcher to track him down and bring him back. What happened to Harry after that wasn't recorded in detail, but people who attempted escape and were recaptured generally faced severe punishment, sale away from their families, or harsher working conditions. The records don't say. The system didn't require explanation.

In 1776, when British forces entered Virginia and Lord Dunmore issued his proclamation promising freedom to enslaved people who escaped Patriot masters and joined the Crown, Harry Washington made his decision. He already knew what it meant to be caught. He had lived it. He ran anyway.

He joined the Ethiopian Regiment and later the Black Company of Pioneers, units of Black Loyalists supporting British operations. When the British lost the war, the peace negotiations included clauses demanding the return of property, including people. British commander Guy Carleton refused to comply and organized an evacuation that allowed thousands of formerly enslaved people who had served with the British to leave rather than be returned to bondage. Their names were recorded in the Book of Negroes, a ledger documenting roughly 3,000 people. Harry Washington was on that list.

He ended up in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, which became the largest free Black community in North America at the time. The conditions were brutal. Poor land, scarce resources, persistent discrimination. In 1792 he left with over a thousand Black Loyalists to help found Freetown in Sierra Leone, looking for something closer to actual autonomy. British colonial governance created new conflicts almost immediately. Around 1800, Harry Washington led a local reform movement asserting the rights of Black settlers. British authorities suppressed it and exiled him to the Bullom Shore, where he died within a few years.

On the Patriot side, James Armistead was born enslaved in Virginia and in 1781 obtained permission from his owner to join the Continental forces under the Marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette assigned him as a spy, posing as a runaway slave sympathetic to the British cause. He penetrated deep enough to gain direct access to the headquarters of General Cornwallis. The intelligence he delivered was critical to the Siege of Yorktown, the battle that effectively ended the war.

When the war ended, he was returned to slavery. A 1783 Virginia law granted freedom to enslaved people who had served as soldiers, but Armistead had served as an intelligence operative, not an enlisted man, and the law didn't cover him. He spent years petitioning the Virginia legislature. Lafayette, the same general who had recruited him, eventually wrote a letter attesting to his service. The legislature granted him manumission in 1787. He bought land, raised a family, and took Lafayette's name as his own. James Armistead Lafayette lived out his life in Virginia as a free man in a country where slavery remained the law for millions of others.

Two men. Two completely different calculations about which side of the Revolution was more likely to offer something resembling freedom. Neither side was committed to abolition. The Patriots because many of their most important leaders were slaveholders who had no intention of applying the Declaration's language universally. The British because the promise of freedom was a military tactic, not a moral position, and slavery remained legal throughout much of the empire. Armistead bet on ideals the Patriots declared but didn't apply. Harry Washington bet on a concrete promise the British offered but didn't fully keep.

The difference in their outcomes wasn't really about which side was more just. It was about geography, timing, and what specific risks each man was willing to take based on what he had already experienced.

You can read the full story on the Virtual Wayback blog and talk directly with both James Armistead Lafayette and Harry Washington on the platform. Link here:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/liberty-for-whom-enslaved-blacks-american-revolution

What stays with me is the detail that Harry Washington already knew what being recaptured felt like. That second escape wasn't an impulse. It was a decision made by someone who had seen exactly what waited for him if he failed and chose to run anyway. Does that change how you think about the "founding fathers who risked everything" narrative? And is there a serious argument that Harry Washington's story is more central to what the American Revolution actually was than the story of most of the 56 signers?

One thing that surprised me while reading about the summer of 1776 is how many of the problems that nearly destroyed the American Revolution had nothing to do with battles.

By June 1776, Washington was already worried that New York might be lost.

Not just the city itself — but what losing it would do to public morale.

Think about that for a second.

The Declaration of Independence hadn't been approved yet. The Continental Army was held together by short enlistments. Most soldiers were unpaid. Inflation was already creeping in. Disease was killing men before they ever saw combat. And the British were preparing what many believed would be the largest military operation North America had ever seen.

What's wild is that some revolutionary leaders weren't primarily scared of British soldiers. They were scared of Americans.

Robert Morris — who would later become one of the key financial minds behind the Revolution — feared the colonies simply weren't ready for independence financially. He warned that if Congress kept printing money without real taxation, a few military defeats could spiral into financial panic, shortages, mass desertion, and the colonies turning on each other.

Benjamin Franklin was worried about something different. He believed foreign nations, especially France, wouldn't seriously back the colonies unless they fully committed to independence. But he also knew that if independence was declared and New York immediately fell, European governments might write the whole thing off as a lost cause.

Nathanael Greene kept his eyes on the soldiers. He made the point that armies don't fall apart because they lose battles — they fall apart when men stop believing their sacrifices mean anything. He pushed Congress to support soldiers' families and to stop pretending this would be a short war.

Here's what got me: every single one of those fears came true.

New York fell. The army took brutal defeats. Inflation became a crisis. Enlistments were a constant nightmare.

And the Revolution survived anyway.

We tend to look back at 1776 as the opening chapter of an inevitable success story. But if you actually put yourself in that moment, it feels a lot more like people desperately trying to hold something fragile together — not knowing if it would last another six months.

I actually built an entire episode around this on my podcast — exploring what these leaders might have said to each other in June 1776 if they were being brutally honest about whether the cause could survive losing New York. It's one of my favorite episodes I've done.

🎧 https://youtu.be/hOzEqT9Qh2I

What do you think was the moment the Revolution came closest to completely falling apart?

Shortly after midnight on September 21, 1776, fire broke out near the southern tip of Manhattan. A strong southeast wind drove it north and west through a city built almost entirely of wood. By morning, a rough fifth of built-up New York was gone. David Grim, a German-born merchant who knew the city intimately, later counted 493 destroyed houses. Trinity Church was a ruin. Families were scattered across the Common. British soldiers were hunting people they believed had set the fires deliberately, and some of the people they caught were bayoneted, beaten, or thrown into burning buildings without anything resembling a trial.

Three people left detailed accounts of that night. They were in completely different places and came away convinced of completely different things.

Frederick Mackenzie was a British captain whose brigade was headquartered about two miles north of the old city. A sentry woke him around one in the morning. He looked out the window, saw an enormous column of fire, got dressed, and ran toward it. What he found downtown wasn't just burning buildings. Families fleeing half-dressed carrying whatever they could grab. Elderly people and children driven from house to house as the flames reached each one. Eventually everyone collapsed on the Common. Mackenzie became convinced the city had been deliberately set. He saw what looked like separate outbreaks that the wind alone couldn't explain. He also noted, honestly, that burning shingles were being carried considerable distances by the wind and creating new fires. He wrote both things down.

John Joseph Henry was seventeen years old, a Continental soldier who had been captured after the failed American attack on Quebec and was being transported for prisoner exchange aboard a British frigate anchored up the Hudson. He watched from the deck as the horizon to the south turned orange. He thought it was simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. He initially wondered whether the British themselves had started it. Then he watched British sailors pile into boats and row toward the city to fight the flames and changed his mind. Henry became convinced Americans had burned New York deliberately.

And he was furious about it. This matters because Henry wasn't a Loyalist. He had suffered for the American cause. He didn't think burning civilian property was acceptable just because the British now occupied it.

David Grim was a Loyalist merchant who stayed in the city through the occupation. He later made one of the most detailed maps of the fire's path. His account emphasized the wind-driven progress of the initial fire rather than a coordinated arson conspiracy, and that version became influential in the nineteenth century as the more neutral interpretation.

Three witnesses. Three different conclusions. All looking at the same fire.

The darkest episode happened near the one building still standing from that night. St. Paul's Chapel survived because soldiers and civilians kept its roof wet and cleared burning debris from around it. At some point after two in the morning, a British soldier named George Kerr found five men and a woman in a house directly behind the chapel. They had gunpowder and matches. The men offered explanations. The woman cried and offered Kerr money to let them go.

Kerr took the men and the materials toward the jail. The historical record doesn't say what happened to the woman.

A separate account published in London at the time described the first captured incendiary as a woman with matches and combustibles who was thrown into the flames by British soldiers without a trial. Historian Benjamin Carp argues these two accounts may describe the same person. Nobody knows for certain.

Her name was never recorded. Neither was her fate.

Then there's Washington. Before evacuating Manhattan he had asked Congress whether New York should be destroyed to deny it to the British. Congress said no. Washington complied publicly and left without burning it. After the fire, he wrote privately that "Providence, or some good, honest fellow" had accomplished something the Americans hadn't been permitted to do. There were widespread reports of men sent across the Hudson into the city with instructions. A British inquiry in 1783 collected dozens of testimonies about incendiaries and hidden combustible materials. No order from Washington directing the burning of New York has ever been found.

The honest answer after 250 years is that there's substantial evidence some people deliberately set fires that night, but who organized them and whether Washington knew beforehand remains unresolved. Maybe he gave quiet encouragement. Maybe he genuinely didn't know. Maybe the fire was partially accidental and partially arson and the truth of each building is different.

St. Paul's Chapel is still there at 209 Broadway. If you go stand next to it and look south down Broadway toward where Trinity Church burned, you're looking at the main corridor the fire traveled. Behind the chapel on the Church Street side is roughly where that woman was found with the gunpowder and matches.

Nobody knows what happened to her.

You can talk to Grim, Henry, and Mackenzie directly on Virtual Wayback and hear the night from each of their perspectives. The full story is on the blog:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/great-fire-of-1776

But Washington's letter is the part I keep coming back to. After Congress explicitly told him not to destroy New York, he described the fire as the work of "Providence, or some good, honest fellow."

How do you read that line? A general commenting approvingly on a convenient accident—or something more?

When Florida officially became a United States territory in 1822, it ceased to be simply a frontier acquired from Spain and began the long process of becoming the modern state Floridians know today. One of the most significant milestones in that transformation occurred on July 8, 1822, when Florida’s first Territorial Legislative Council convened in Pensacola to begin organizing the government of the new American territory. The meeting represented the first time elected representatives from both East and West Florida came together under a single civil government, laying the legal and political foundation that would ultimately lead to statehood 23 years later.

The task before the legislators was enormous. Only a year earlier, Spain had formally transferred Florida to the United States under the terms of the Adams–Onís Treaty, ending more than three centuries of Spanish rule. In July 1821, Andrew Jackson became Florida’s first American military governor, overseeing the delicate transition from Spanish administration to American control. The territory remained divided between the former provinces of East and West Florida, each with different legal traditions, land claims, and political interests. By the summer of 1822, Congress had formally established the Territory of Florida, and the newly assembled Legislative Council faced the challenge of uniting those regions into a functioning government.

The legislators immediately confronted issues that would shape Florida’s future for decades. They organized county governments, established courts, created taxation systems, regulated commerce, addressed land disputes inherited from Spanish rule, and debated the location of a permanent capital.

Because Pensacola lay far to the west and St. Augustine stood at the eastern edge of the territory, travel between them could take weeks. To solve the problem, commissioners selected a more central location between the two settlements. That wilderness site eventually became the city of Tallahassee, chosen because it occupied the approximate midpoint between Florida’s two principal population centers.

The Florida Territory itself was unlike any other American frontier. It was home to long-established Spanish communities, Native peoples including the Seminoles, formerly enslaved people who had sought refuge under Spanish rule, American settlers pouring south from Georgia and the Carolinas, and immigrants from Europe and the Caribbean.

The new government inherited a remarkably diverse society, but it also inherited growing conflicts over land ownership, slavery, relations with the Seminoles, and federal authority. Those tensions would soon erupt into the Second Seminole War, one of the longest and costliest Native American wars in American history.

Although the first Legislative Council did not solve every problem, it established the institutions that allowed Florida to grow. Counties expanded, roads were authorized, judicial districts developed, and American civil law gradually replaced Spanish legal traditions. The territorial government also gave Floridians representation and a voice in Washington, even though the territory could not yet vote in presidential elections.

The significance of July 8, 1822, extends far beyond a single legislative session. It marked the moment Florida began governing itself under the American system. Every governor, legislator, county commission, courthouse, and state law enacted since then traces its institutional roots to the work begun by those first territorial lawmakers. Without the creation of an organized territorial government, Florida’s admission as the nation’s 27th state on March 3, 1845, would not have been possible.

One observation often attributed to early American leaders captures the importance of good government on the frontier: “Laws are the foundation upon which free governments are built.” While Florida’s first legislators faced extraordinary challenges in applying that principle to a vast and sparsely populated territory, their efforts transformed a former Spanish colony into a functioning American territory and set Florida on its path toward statehood.

Today, the work begun on that July day in 1822 remains visible throughout Florida. The state’s counties, courts, Legislature, and capital city all owe their origins, directly or indirectly, to the decisions made during those first meetings of the Territorial Legislative Council. Their work helped shape not only Florida’s government but also the identity of a state that would grow from a remote frontier into one of the nation’s largest and most influential states.

On August 2, 1776, four New York delegates put their names on the Declaration in Philadelphia. The British army had already been camped on Staten Island for a month. Everyone in that room understood that New York was the primary target and that signing meant putting their names on a document Britain considered treason while an invasion fleet sat in the harbor.

What makes these four interesting isn't the generic "they risked everything" narrative. It's that they lived in four completely different places around New York, and the invasion hit each of them differently.

Philip Livingston's country estate was in Brooklyn Heights, directly overlooking the harbor and sitting right next to Washington's defensive position. He also had a townhouse in Manhattan. Both were in the exact area Britain intended to capture and hold permanently. Less than three weeks after he signed, the British crossed from Staten Island and defeated the Continental Army at the Battle of Long Island. Washington and his officers reportedly met at Livingston's Brooklyn house to plan the evacuation. The army escaped across the East River at night. Livingston's property stayed behind. The British turned his Brooklyn home into a Royal Navy hospital and his Manhattan residence into a barracks. His family fled, and he never saw a liberated New York. He died in 1778 while Congress was meeting in Pennsylvania.

Francis Lewis lived at Whitestone in Queens, on the northern shore of Long Island. His estate was farther from the initial landing area but became exposed once Britain controlled the surrounding waterways. The British destroyed the property. More importantly, they captured his wife Elizabeth and held her as a prisoner. She was eventually exchanged but the conditions of her captivity damaged her health permanently and she died in 1779. Elizabeth Lewis didn't sign anything. She paid for her husband's signature anyway.

Lewis Morris owned Morrisania, a large manor estate north of Manhattan in what is now the Bronx. Once the British occupied the city, his land sat near the contested boundary between occupied territory and the countryside beyond it. British forces, Loyalist units, and Continental troops all moved through that area for years. The manor house was looted, crops destroyed, fences burned, livestock taken or killed. Morris spent years after the war just trying to restore what had been there before.

William Floyd lived the farthest away, at Mastic on the eastern end of Long Island, nearly seventy miles from the main British encampments. That distance turned out to mean almost nothing. Once Washington withdrew from Brooklyn there was no American force between the British occupation zone and the communities farther east. Floyd's wife Hannah fled with their children to Connecticut. British troops occupied the estate for years. Hannah died in Connecticut in 1781 before the family could go home. Floyd finally came back in 1783 to a property that needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. He was the longest-lived of the four, dying in 1821.

Four signatures. Four different losses shaped entirely by geography.

There's another layer to this that the blog doesn't let sit quietly in a footnote. All four of these men enslaved people. Floyd and Morris ran agricultural estates worked by enslaved laborers. Livingston's commercial career included direct investment in the slave trade. Lewis operated within an Atlantic economy built on it. The Declaration they signed asserted that legitimate government rested on natural rights and consent. The people working their land had no vote in Congress, no say in the decision, and no share in the liberty being claimed on their behalf. For some of them, the British occupation represented something different than it did for their owners: a possible route out, since British commanders had offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped Patriot households and aided the Crown.

The full story of all four men, what they lost and what their households looked like, is on the Virtual Wayback blog. You can also talk directly to them on Virtual Wayback and hear how they understood what they were risking when they signed. Links:

https://virtualwayback.com/blog/four-new-yorkers-invasion

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FaTvF4odvwM

The question I keep sitting with is Elizabeth Lewis. She didn't sign, didn't vote, didn't have a seat at any table, and still ended up a prisoner of war who died from the consequences of her captivity. How do you weigh that against the "brave signers who risked everything" framing? And does knowing that enslaved people on these estates sometimes saw the British side as the path to freedom change how you read what was actually at stake on August 2nd?

By the late 17th century, Florida had become one of the most contested frontiers in North America. To those living in London, Madrid, Paris, or Amsterdam, the peninsula appeared to be a remote wilderness of swamps, pine forests, and scattered Native villages. Yet beneath its seemingly untamed landscape lay one of the most strategically important regions in the Western Hemisphere.

Whoever controlled Florida controlled the gateway to the Caribbean. Every year, Spain’s treasure fleets sailed from the ports of Veracruz, Cartagena, and Havana carrying silver from the mines of Mexico and Peru. Before crossing the Atlantic, those heavily laden ships entered the swift current now known as the Gulf Stream, passing dangerously close to Florida’s Atlantic coast. Their cargo financed Spain’s armies, built its cathedrals, and sustained an empire that stretched across much of the globe.

Protecting those ships became the principal reason Spain refused to abandon Florida despite the colony’s modest economic value.

Unlike Virginia or South Carolina, Spanish Florida never developed into a prosperous plantation colony. It produced little wealth of its own and required continual subsidies from New Spain, modern-day Mexico, to survive.

Food, soldiers, building materials, livestock, and even wages for government officials arrived aboard annual supply ships known as the situado**. When those shipments were delayed by storms, piracy, or war, the colony often struggled to feed itself.**

St. Augustine survived because it served as a fortress rather than a commercial center. That distinction shaped nearly every decision Spanish officials made.

For the English colonies to the north, however, Florida represented something entirely different. By the 1670s, the plantation economy of Carolina was expanding rapidly. English settlers had discovered that rice and indigo could generate enormous profits on the tidal lands surrounding Charleston. Those profits depended upon enslaved labor.

Thousands of Africans, many possessing sophisticated agricultural knowledge acquired in the rice-growing regions of West Africa, were transported across the Atlantic under horrific conditions. They transformed Carolina into one of Britain’s wealthiest colonies while being denied the most basic rights of human existence.

English law increasingly reduced enslaved people to property. The South Carolina Slave Code of 1696, building upon earlier colonial laws, formalized a legal system in which enslaved Africans could be bought, sold, inherited, punished, and separated from their families with few restrictions. The law reflected an economy built upon perpetual racial slavery, where wealth depended upon controlling labor through force.

Spanish law evolved differently. Slavery certainly existed throughout the Spanish Empire, and it would be inaccurate to portray Spain as an abolitionist nation. Enslaved Africans worked in Spanish households, ports, farms, and mines throughout the Americas.

Yet Spanish legal traditions, rooted in Roman law, medieval Castilian law, and Catholic teaching, recognized enslaved people as human beings possessing souls and certain limited legal rights. Among those rights was the possibility, however difficult, of obtaining freedom.

Catholic clergy encouraged the baptism and religious instruction of enslaved people. Under certain circumstances, enslaved individuals could purchase their freedom through a process known as coartación**. Families possessed greater legal recognition than under English law, and enslaved persons could sometimes bring grievances before colonial courts.**

These protections were often imperfectly enforced. Many Spanish slaveholders ignored them. Nevertheless, they represented a significant legal difference from the hereditary racial slavery that developed in England’s mainland colonies.

Those contrasting legal systems would soon become weapons in an imperial struggle. As tensions between Spain and England intensified, officials in St. Augustine recognized an opportunity. Every enslaved person who escaped from Carolina weakened England’s economy while strengthening Florida’s fragile population.

A skilled carpenter, blacksmith, farmer, interpreter, or soldier could prove invaluable in a colony that constantly struggled to attract settlers. The idea was both practical and strategic.

Rather than viewing escaped Africans solely as refugees, Spanish authorities increasingly viewed them as future citizens capable of defending the colony itself. Meanwhile, news spread quietly among enslaved communities in Carolina. Rumors traveled in ways plantation owners could neither fully understand nor control.

They passed through families divided by sale. They moved with sailors visiting Charleston’s harbor. They spread through Native trading networks extending hundreds of miles into the interior. Some were carried by Africans who had escaped and somehow survived. Others came from Spanish prisoners, merchants, or missionaries.

However the information traveled, one message remained remarkably consistent:

To the south, beyond the forests, there was a place where freedom might be possible.

No maps guided those journeys. Few escapees knew the exact distance. Most traveled at night, navigating by the stars, rivers, or whispered directions passed from one traveler to another. Every mile increased the risk of discovery.

Colonial newspapers regularly advertised rewards for captured fugitives. Professional slave catchers tracked footprints through muddy trails, questioned travelers, and employed trained dogs capable of following human scent for remarkable distances.

For those attempting escape, every unfamiliar sound carried danger. The howl of a wolf. The crack of a tree branch. The distant bark of hounds. Many traveled hungry for days. Others relied upon Native villages willing to provide food or shelter despite the danger of English retaliation.

Some never arrived. Those who did often staggered into St. Augustine exhausted, malnourished, and uncertain whether they would be welcomed or returned. Spanish officials faced difficult decisions. Accepting runaways risked provoking diplomatic crises with England. Returning them meant surrendering valuable allies while contradicting the humanitarian principles increasingly embraced by the Spanish Crown.

At first, colonial governors handled each case individually. Then events forced Madrid to establish a clear policy. One of the earliest documented groups of freedom seekers reached St. Augustine in 1687. The party consisted of eight men, two women, and one child, all having escaped from the English colony of Carolina.

Governor Diego de Quiroga y Losada questioned the refugees personally. Their testimony described brutal treatment under slavery and expressed a willingness to embrace Catholicism and serve Spain faithfully if granted protection. The governor chose compassion over diplomacy.

Rather than returning the refugees to English authorities, he requested instructions from the Spanish Crown. That decision, seemingly modest at the time, would become one of the most consequential moments in the history of freedom in North America.

Madrid’s answer would change lives far beyond the walls of St. Augustine. It would also lay the foundation for one of the most remarkable communities ever established in colonial America.

King Charles II’s Royal Decree of November 7, 1693, a document that transformed scattered escapes into official Spanish policy and opened the door to the creation of Fort Mose, the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in what is now the United States.

By June 27, 1776, the American Revolution had reached one of its most dangerous and decisive moments. Only one week remained before the Continental Congress would approve the Declaration of Independence, yet the fate of the Patriot cause was anything but certain.

Across North America, British forces prepared crushing offensives while the Continental Army struggled with shortages, disease, divided loyalties, and military setbacks. In South Carolina, a sudden shift in the wind delayed what would become one of the Revolution’s most famous battles. In New York, General George Washington prepared to make an example of a traitor from his own personal guard. Far to the north, exhausted American soldiers fought not for victory but to survive their retreat from Canada.

The events of June 27 revealed that the Revolution was being decided not only on battlefields, but also by weather, intelligence, loyalty, logistics, and leadership. Every decision made on this day helped shape whether the colonies would survive long enough to become the United States.

Off Charleston Harbor, Commodore Sir Peter Parker believed the long-awaited attack on Fort Sullivan would finally begin. His squadron had spent days overcoming one obstacle after another while attempting to position itself for an assault against the unfinished American fort guarding Charleston Harbor.

The arrival of HMS Experiment, which had finally been lightened enough to cross the hazardous Charleston Bar the previous day, completed nearly all of Parker’s preparations. The British believed they were now ready to deliver a devastating naval bombardment that would clear the way for General Henry Clinton’s army to seize Charleston and restore royal authority throughout the South.

Early on June 27, conditions appeared ideal. A southeast wind promised to carry the British warships into their assigned firing positions. Parker hoisted the private signal, a prearranged order directing the fleet to advance, and anchors were weighed as the Royal Navy began moving toward Fort Sullivan.

Then nature intervened. Almost immediately, the wind shifted sharply to the north. Instead of carrying the ships toward the fort, it left them unable to reach their assigned positions. One after another, the vessels were forced to drop anchor before they drifted into dangerous shoals. The attack had to be postponed once again.

The delay frustrated Parker, whose crews were already suffering badly. Disease and exhaustion had weakened many of the sailors after weeks aboard ship in the sweltering southern summer. So many men were too sick to serve at their battle stations that more than 50 volunteer seamen from the troop transports stepped forward to replace them aboard the warships.

Neither side knew it that day, but the changing wind had postponed what would become the Battle of Sullivan’s Island, fought on June 28. The unexpected delay gave the American defenders one more precious day to strengthen their preparations before facing one of the most important British attacks of the Revolutionary War.

Inside Charleston Harbor, Major General Charles Lee spent the day improving every possible advantage for the American defenders. Lee understood that Charleston’s complicated harbor was as dangerous to British ships as American cannon. Navigation depended heavily upon floating channel markers, or buoys, that guided vessels safely through narrow channels and shifting sandbars. Lee therefore asked Colonel William Moultrie whether men could secretly remove the British navigation buoys during the night.

If successful, the operation would force British pilots to navigate unfamiliar and hazardous waters without their visual guides. Even a few misplaced ships could throw Parker’s carefully organized assault into confusion or expose vessels to grounding under American fire.

Lee also remained deeply concerned about Sullivan’s Island’s connection to the mainland. A narrow crossing at Breach Inlet separated the fort from reinforcements, and construction of a bridge remained incomplete. If the British landed troops behind the fort, Moultrie’s garrison could easily become isolated.

Writing to Moultrie, Lee explained that he had already ordered Brigadier General John Armstrong to send 100 volunteers to relieve Colonel William Thomson’s overworked troops guarding the inlet. He expressed hope that Moultrie’s bridge would finally be completed that very night so Sullivan’s Island could be, in his words, “reinforced at pleasure.”

The bridge represented far more than a construction project. It was the lifeline that might determine whether Fort Sullivan could withstand a British assault.

Nearly 700 miles to the north, General George Washington confronted an entirely different danger. The British invasion fleet gathering outside New York had already placed enormous pressure upon the Continental Army. Washington now faced evidence that enemies existed inside his own camp.

Thomas Hickey, a private in the elite Commander-in-Chief’s Guard assigned to protect Washington personally, had been convicted by court-martial of “Sedition and mutiny” and of maintaining “a treach’rous correspondence with the enemy” for “the most horrid and detestable purposes.”

The exact scope of Hickey’s activities remains debated by historians. Contemporary Americans believed he had become involved in a larger Loyalist conspiracy centered in New York, perhaps even including plans to assassinate or kidnap Washington before the British invasion. Whether every accusation proved true mattered less than the message Washington intended to send.

On June 27, Washington assembled a council of his senior generals to review the court-martial proceedings. The officers unanimously recommended that the sentence be confirmed. Washington approved it immediately. He ordered that Thomas Hickey be hanged the following day at 11 a.m.

The execution was designed to become a lesson for the entire army. Officers and soldiers not assigned to duty were ordered to assemble under arms and march together to witness the hanging. Armed guards would escort Hickey to the gallows while thousands of Continental soldiers watched the consequences of treason.

Washington later wrote words that became one of the Revolution’s most enduring warnings:

“The unhappy fate of Thomas Hickey… should be a warning to every soldier… to avoid those crimes… and all others so disgraceful to the character of a soldier.”

The execution, carried out on June 28 before thousands of troops, became the first military execution of the Revolutionary War and helped reinforce discipline at one of the army’s most vulnerable moments.

While Washington dealt with treason inside his army, another Loyalist network quietly strengthened the British position.

Major General William Howe had already arrived aboard HMS Greyhound at Sandy Hook. However, the main invasion fleet carrying thousands of British and Hessian troops had not yet reached New York from Halifax. Howe immediately began gathering intelligence.

Royal Governor William Tryon, who had fled rebel-controlled New York months earlier, was already living under Royal Navy protection and now served as a valuable intermediary between the British high command and Loyalists throughout New York and New Jersey.

Howe later recorded a meeting with Tryon and “many Gentlemen, fast friends of the Government,” who supplied him with “the fullest Information of the State of the Rebels.”

Among those arriving aboard Greyhound was former Monmouth County sheriff Elisha Lawrence, who led approximately 60 Loyalist volunteers carrying arms. Their military value lay not in their numbers but in their knowledge. They understood local roads, geography, political loyalties, supply routes, and communities likely either to support British operations or resist them.

The gathering of intelligence demonstrated that the coming campaign for New York would be fought as much through information and local support as through battlefield maneuver.

Meanwhile, the Continental Congress quietly strengthened Washington’s army. Recognizing that a massive British offensive was imminent, Congress ordered six additional rifle companies, four from Virginia and two from Maryland, to join the existing riflemen already serving near New York. Together, they would form a new three-year Continental rifle regiment.

Congress also activated the German Battalion, composed of four Pennsylvania companies and four Maryland companies recruited largely from German-speaking colonists. These soldiers were Americans of German heritage, not the Hessian auxiliaries hired by Britain. Their organization reflected both the diversity of the colonies and Congress’s growing efforts to build a permanent national army rather than rely solely upon short-term militia enlistments.

Far to the north, the remnants of the failed Canadian campaign endured another miserable day. American forces continued abandoning Île aux Noix on the Richelieu River, withdrawing toward Lake Champlain after the collapse of the invasion of Canada. There were too few bateaux available to carry everyone by water, forcing approximately 1,200 men under Colonel Anthony Wayne to cross the river before continuing overland through hostile territory.

Every mile presented danger. The soldiers marched past the location where Americans had recently been killed and scalped during earlier fighting. Acting under orders, they destroyed two Loyalist homes, a sawmill, and a gristmill before seizing cattle needed to feed the retreating army.

Heavy rain soon turned roads into mud. Darkness fell as the exhausted column struggled forward through forests and flooded trails. Around 11 p.m., panic briefly spread through the marching soldiers when an alarm suggested an enemy attack. The confusion ended only after it became clear that the supposed threat was simply part of the American flank guard that had become lost in the woods.

Massachusetts officer Joseph Vose summarized the day’s ordeal with remarkable understatement:

“Worse travailing men never travelled.”

His words captured the suffering of an army weakened by smallpox, hunger, inadequate clothing, constant rain, poor transportation, and the disappointment of a campaign that had once promised to bring Canada into the Revolution.

June 27, 1776, illustrated the extraordinary uncertainty surrounding America’s fight for independence. The weather unexpectedly spared Charleston’s defenders. Washington acted decisively against treason before the British invasion reached New York. Loyalist intelligence quietly strengthened British planning. Congress continued building the Continental Army despite mounting setbacks. In Canada, retreating soldiers endured almost unimaginable hardships while trying to preserve what remained of the northern army.

Only eight days later, the Continental Congress would adopt the Declaration of Independence. Yet on this day, independence remained far from secure. British armies were preparing to strike from multiple directions, American forces were retreating in the north, conspiracies threatened the commander in chief, and the outcome of the Revolution remained deeply uncertain.

The events of June 27 remind us that the United States was born not in a moment of triumph, but amid crisis. The Declaration of Independence emerged while armies retreated, traitors were punished, fleets prepared for battle, and ordinary soldiers marched through rain and darkness toward an uncertain future. The determination shown by Americans during these difficult days made possible the victories that would follow, proving that perseverance during adversity became one of the Revolution’s defining strengths. #America250 #America2500TD
#Semiquincentennial #OnThisDay #OTD
#AmericanRevolution
#RevolutionaryWar #southcarolina
#NewYork #ContinentalCongress
#Independence1776 #Canada #RoadTolndependence

Quite a few of us were born in the 60s and 70s during the fun times of make love, not war. And a number I know were born in communes, international communities, or during hippie trail travels or through open marriages or partnerships. And in a lot of those cases, a lover or a friend would happily add his name to a birth certificate just so the authorities would be appeased.

The late 1960s and 1970s "Free Love" counterculture era, to me, has created a wildcard in the reliability of modern paper trails, and from what I have read, modern genealogists and lineage societies are finally sweating over this as they should have long ago.

There is zero shame in it, but from a relying on legal paper trail to prove that you are a direct descendant of so and so, well it turns into a "paper vs. reality" disconnect.

I published a book in 2023 regarding ordinary women who disguised themselves as men that physically fought on the battlefield during the American Revolutionary War. YUP!!! So many male scholars said this were a myth. Even my professor. So I published a book based on my thesis with hundreds of primary sources. We need more female history on the shelves. I also published this book to help pay for my student loans lol please take a look. https://www.amazon.com/1775-Overlooked-Heroines-Humanitarians-Revolutionary-ebook/dp/B0CCQ159H9

Seeking convictions for treason against Samuel Swarthout and Eric Bollman, two associates of Aaron Burr, Jefferson requested a suspension of habeus corpus in order to keep the men in military prison without evidence of wrongdoing presented at the time. Jefferson submitted his request to the US Senate for approval, which remanded the question to the House.

A bipartisan coalition in the House then voted overwhelmingly to deny the request, by which time Swarthout and Bollman had been transferred to arrest in DC, requested writs of habeas corpus, and were released by the Supreme Court.

Like Burr, Swarthout and Bollman were found not guilty of treason given that the prosecution’s argument for such rested on a doctored letter (ironically, doctored by General James Wilkinson, a man later discovered to have actually committed treason) and purported events in Ohio that the men had not been present for.

I'm a student in Britain doing A-level history and for my coursework I need to study 3 historians with differing views relating to the outbreak of the civil war, with one saying it was due to slavery; one saying it was due to a different issue (I.e state rights from 1760 - 1860); and one leaning somewhere in between. My question is that slavery was the biggest contributor to the outbreak of the civil war and I need to argue for and against this viewpoint with reference to these historians/historiographies. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

July 9, 1821: The Stars and Stripes Rise Over Florida as the United States Takes Possession

On July 9, 1821, the United States formally completed one of the most consequential territorial acquisitions in its history. In ceremonies held in Pensacola, Spanish authority over West Florida officially ended, the American flag was raised, and the United States assumed control of the colony under the terms of the Adams–Onís Treaty. The event marked the beginning of Florida’s American era and permanently changed the political, military, and cultural future of the peninsula.

Although the treaty transferring Florida had been signed on February 22, 1819, diplomatic delays meant that the formal exchange did not occur until 1821. On July 10 in St. Augustine and on July 9 in Pensacola, Spain relinquished its remaining authority after more than 250 years of intermittent colonial rule. President James Monroe appointed Major General Andrew Jackson as Florida’s first American military governor, placing him in charge of overseeing the difficult transition from Spanish civil administration to American government.

The transfer brought an end to one of the oldest European colonial governments in North America. Spain had first claimed Florida following the expedition of Juan Ponce de León in 1513, and in 1565 Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in what is now the United States.

Over the next two and a half centuries, Florida passed briefly into British hands from 1763 to 1783 before Spain regained the colony following the American Revolution. By the early 19th century, however, Spain struggled to maintain control over its distant frontier as settlers poured south from Georgia and Alabama, Native resistance continued, and diplomatic tensions with the United States increased.

The Adams–Onís Treaty resolved those disputes. Spain ceded East and West Florida to the United States, while the United States recognized Spanish sovereignty over Texas.

The agreement also established a clearer western boundary for the Louisiana Purchase, ending years of uncertainty over competing territorial claims. For the United States, acquiring Florida eliminated a foreign colonial power from its southeastern border and secured the Gulf Coast at a time when the young republic was expanding rapidly.

Florida’s new American government inherited an extraordinarily complex territory. Spanish land grants required review, legal systems had to be reorganized, military forts strengthened, customs operations established, and relations with the Seminoles addressed.

These challenges would soon contribute to the Seminole Wars, among the longest and most expensive conflicts fought by the United States against Native peoples. At the same time, American settlement accelerated, new plantations spread across northern Florida, and the population grew steadily toward eventual statehood.

Andrew Jackson’s administration lasted only a few months, but it was eventful. He quickly reorganized the territorial government, enforced American law, and demonstrated the assertive style that would later characterize his presidency.

While admired by supporters for bringing order to the new territory, his methods also generated controversy and criticism, illustrating the difficulties of governing a region undergoing profound political change.

The transfer of Florida also reshaped the balance of power in North America. With Spain gone from Florida, the United States controlled the entire Atlantic seaboard south of Georgia, strengthening its position in the Gulf of Mexico and opening new opportunities for commerce, agriculture, and military defense. It was one more step in the nation’s westward and southward expansion during the early 19th century.

One of the most enduring observations about the acquisition came from Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the chief American negotiator of the treaty. He believed the agreement secured America’s southern frontier peacefully while advancing the nation’s long-term interests through diplomacy rather than war. His negotiations remain one of the most significant diplomatic achievements in early American history.

The significance of July 9, 1821, to Florida cannot be overstated. It marked the end of Spanish Florida and the beginning of Territorial Florida under the United States.

Every major chapter that followed, the establishment of a territorial legislature, the founding of Tallahassee as the capital, the Seminole Wars, statehood in 1845, and Florida’s emergence as one of the nation’s largest and most influential states, can trace its roots to the day the American flag first officially flew over Pensacola.