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250 years ago today a fuse was lit in Virginia, where a rogue assembly approved a set of earth-shaking instructions for its delegates in the Continental Congress. The detonation took time, time to traverse the miles from Williamsburg to Philadelphia, time to persuade and prepare the people and their representatives to risk a new political adventure, and time to drag the holdouts across the line. Join us this month on Stratford Mail as we recall the last adieu to the British Crown and count down to the 250th anniversary of Virginia and Richard Henry Lee’s resolution on independence.

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260 years ago, a merchant on the banks of the Rappahannock River threatened to undermine strategic non-compliance with the Stamp Act. He needed stamped paper to offload a cargo of perishable grain. He intended only to obey the law. Many in the community viewed that law as a violation of their constitutional rights and liberty. The Lee brothers stepped forward to express and enforce the will of the community on this recalcitrant merchant. Organizing a heavily armed private militia, the Lees rode on Hobbs Hole and made a public example of the man. Richard Henry Lee drafted the manifesto of this militia, the Leedstown Resolves, the first organized, armed, and publicly signed association of resistance in the American colonies and a founding document of our enduring American experiment.

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In 1662, the Royal Society of London adopted a motto that promised a revolution: Nullius in verba—or, on the word of no one. It was a bold renunciation of authority in favor of evidence, yet behind this polished veneer of the Enlightenment lay a messier reality marked by class-coded science and imperial gatekeeping. Even as Society president Sir Isaac Newton modeled dispassionate inquiry, the institution came to operate as a passionate apparatus for elite privilege and British expansion. Fellowship in the Society opened channels into an international fraternity of gentlemen-scientists and into the inner sanctums of British imperial power. As crisis ripened between Britain and its North American colonies, America’s first celebrity leaned on this scientific brotherhood to achieve political reform, while another American patriot rejected it as collusion with the imperial fist.

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In October 1774, a congressional committee with Richard Henry Lee at the helm drafted a Petition to the King. The petition invited “royal attention” to colonial grievances in pursuit of a peaceful resolution to the mounting crisis. That petition died in Parliament, starved of attention, but it wasn’t the last formal attempt by the Continental Congress to seek conciliation with the mother country. Another attempt in the summer of 1775, milder in tone, and with the Congress divided on the weight and wisdom of the measure, found its way to Lord Dartmouth. Tune in this month to hear the tale of the so-called Olive Branch Petition, a last-ditch diplomatic overture that failed to re-leash the dogs of war, leaving the path to independence wide open. Listen now to From Compulsion, Nothing.

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17 June 1775. The redoubt fortifying Breed’s Hill–not terribly far from the taller Bunker’s Hill–proved permeable to the advancing waves of better trained, better equipped British regulars. The British took Breed’s Hill, but paid a high price in men and perhaps an even higher price in emboldening colonial militia, who inflicted more than double the losses they sustained. ‘Bunker Hill’ was a point of no return for the colonies and Great Britain, but has often been returned to in memory and memorialization, typically as an opportunity for rededication to the ideals embodied in the colonists’ will to fight at Breed’s Hill. The legacy of ‘Bunker Hill’ was soon hammered out in letters, poetry, and art that mingled achievement and loss, an alloy perfected in the exaltation of the “godlike” hero-martyr Dr. General Joseph Warren.

Listen now to Wounds Too Deep!

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British General Charles Cornwallis said it best: “The Rivers of Virginia are advantageous to an invading army.” In the spring of 1781, the Royal Navy and loyalist privateers raided along the major and minor waterways of the Chesapeake. The April 1781 log of the British war sloop HMS Savage offers a glimpse of the destruction wrought along the Potomac to warehouses, manufacturing facilities, homes and outbuildings, and it counts 50 or more enslaved Africans and African Americans who escaped slavery aboard the marauding British ships. In April 1781, Richard Henry Lee was home at Chantilly overlooking the Currioman Bay, and from there he monitored British activity in the Potomac. Taking charge of the undermanned and ill-equipped Westmoreland County militia, Richard Henry organized local efforts to repel what he called a “contemptible collection of Pirates” and “freebooters.” Those efforts included a skirmish on April 9 he later described as a "very warm engagement." Tune in to Stratford Mail season 3, episode 2: A Very Warm Engagement to hear tales of the Potomac Raids of 1781!

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A 1781 letter written by Stratford-reared Alice Lee Shippen is mistakenly delivered to Braintree rather than to Boston. Politically literate, if shaped by family partiality, Alice's letter offers its unintended recipient clarity about intrigues involving an absent husband on diplomatic assignment. At the heart of these intrigues is a much beloved figure in the American mythos, Dr. Benjamin Franklin. But Dr. Franklin wasn't beloved by all, not quite the hero then that he has become, especially not to those who worked with him during the Revolution and expressed frustration with his idiosyncratic ways of conducting American business. The letter constitutes the origin of a correspondence between two elite women of politically significant families and raises a window on the intramural frictions, friendships, and resentments that were a naturally occurring feature of the American founding.

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Of the two epically scaled paintings of George Washington’s Delaware crossing, by far the most recognizable is Washington Crossing the Delaware by German-born, Philadelphia-raised Emanuel Leutze. This theatrical 1851 painting (measuring roughly 21 x 12 ft.) hangs today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its charismatic Washington commands the prow of the boat as around him the diverse peoples drawn into his orbit and the cause he represents struggle together in that cause. The lesser known 1819 painting (measuring 17 x 12 ft.) by Thomas Sully depicts an illuminated Washington astride a white mount with the night sky brooding above him and snow and mud churning below. A lone twisted and blighted tree encapsulates the desolation of the revolutionary movement in December 1776. In both paintings, the centerpiece is Washington himself, already the object of a triumphal American mythology, but on that Christmas night in the year of independence, the contest was far from won, and the outlook was desperate.

Join us this month as we reflect on that bleak midwinter 248 years ago when the tide turned.

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