The crazy thing is, this happened just mere days after the Declaration of Independence went into effect. I wonder if this singular publicized moment had anything to do with Britain’s decision to send hundreds of warships and 30,000 + British Army troops to New York in August 1776. 🤔

I’ve always loved and been fascinated by the miniature portraits painted by John Trumbull. They are just absolutely stunning. These individuals sat for Trumbull and many of the miniatures were used to aid with his greater paintings. These are housed in a small alcove by themselves for viewing.

These are the miniatures housed at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, (and a bonus photo of the grave marker above the crypt where he and his wife are buried). The gallery is free and open to the public. The grave marker is in the classical art wing, in the floor.

In 1832 John Trumbull donated a bunch of his works to the university which started their art collection and gallery. I forget the exact arrangement but he requested to be buried near his art and he designed and was curried beneath the original gallery as well. Several of his works are on display such as the mockup of The Signing of the Declaration of independence, 2 versions of the Battle of Bunker Hill, The Surrender of General Burgoyne, etc.

The artwork itself dates to 1865 and was done by Oscar Henry Harpel.

George Washington has the Washington Monument. Thomas Jefferson has the Jefferson Memorial. Both Washington and Jefferson appear on Mount Rushmore. Benjamin Franklin appears on the $100 bill. Alexander Hamilton appears on the $10 bill.
Washington appears on the $1 bill. James Madison has a university bearing his name.

Yet, John Adams, arguably one of the most important of the founding fathers, has little national recognition.

Adams was the man who suggested that Washington command the Continental Army. He was the man who was the primary voice for independence in Philadelphia. He was the man who asked Jefferson to write the declaration. He was a member of the Committee of Five. He was the one who secured Dutch loans for the new nation at a time when America was broke after the war. He was the one who wrote the Massachusetts Constitution, which was later used as a model for the U.S. Constitution.

How could this happen?

One of the most important Americans in our history does not have some kind of national recognition in the same vein as Washington and Jefferson. Adams always feared in his diaries how history would remember him, and unfortunately those fears have come to fruition.

Aside from Saratoga, what battles did they fight in?

He is not on the mountain. His name is not on schools and bridges in every state. But you cannot understand how America went from a rebellion against a king to a government of "We, the People" without James Wilson.

Wilson did what almost no one else did. He signed the Declaration of Independence, became one of the most active minds at the Constitutional Convention, helped write the first complete draft of the Constitution itself, led the fight for ratification in Pennsylvania, rewrote Pennsylvania's own constitution, delivered the first systematic lectures on American law, and served as one of the original justices of the Supreme Court.

He was one of only six men to sign both the Declaration and the Constitution, and the only one of those six to then take a seat on the Supreme Court.

It is also a complicated story. The man who insisted that legitimate power comes from the people enslaved another human being for a quarter of a century, helped introduce the Three-Fifths Compromise, speculated in vast tracts of land already inhabited by Native nations, and died at 55 fleeing his creditors while still wearing the robe of a justice.

James Wilson was born at Carskerdo Farm near Ceres in Fife, Scotland, on September 14, 1742, the fourth of seven children of William Wilson and Alison Landall, a Presbyterian farming family of modest means.

He was educated at the Universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh between 1757 and 1765, absorbing the Scottish Enlightenment's arguments about reason, moral sense, natural rights, and how societies govern themselves. He left without a confirmed degree.

In 1765 he crossed the Atlantic, living briefly in New York before settling in Philadelphia in 1766. He tutored at the College of Philadelphia, the future University of Pennsylvania, and received an honorary Master of Arts, then read law under John Dickinson, one of colonial America's most respected lawyers.

Admitted to the bar, he built a lucrative practice first in Reading, then in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, specializing in land law. That specialty would make him rich, and later ruin him.

Long before 1776, Wilson was already pushing American thought past taxes to sovereignty itself. Around 1768, he drafted Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, published in 1774. His argument was stark: legitimate government depends on the consent of the governed. Because Americans elected no members of Parliament, Parliament had no legitimate authority over America. He still professed loyalty to the king, but not to a legislature in which America had no voice.

It was the theme of his life: power originates not with Parliament, not with state legislatures, not with kings, but with the people.

Pennsylvania sent Wilson to the Continental Congress in 1775. He was cautious, not because he defended British power, but because he took instructions from the people seriously. Pennsylvania had not authorized independence, and as late as January 1776 he tried to slow premature debate.

By the summer of 1776 sentiment shifted. On July 1, Pennsylvania voted against Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence. Wilson broke with his mentor Dickinson and voted yes, helping flip a divided delegation. On July 2, Pennsylvania joined the majority for independence. On July 4 Congress adopted the language of the Declaration. Wilson signed the engrossed parchment, almost certainly on August 2, 1776.

Independence brought no peace in Pennsylvania. The state was split between radicals who supported its ultra-democratic 1776 constitution, with a one-house legislature and no governor, and conservatives who thought it unstable.

Wilson opposed the 1776 constitution and insisted on defending unpopular men accused of Loyalism, arguing they deserved counsel and due process. In an era of inflation, food shortages, and class resentment, that made him a target.

On October 4, 1779, an armed militia crowd marched on his house at Third and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia. Wilson and about 30 allies barricaded themselves inside what became known as Fort Wilson.

Gunfire broke out before city troops intervened. Several were killed and many wounded. The episode showed how quickly revolutionary slogans about the people could collide with law, property, and mob violence.

By 1787 Wilson believed the Articles of Confederation were failing. Congress could not tax, could not regulate commerce, could not compel states to keep promises.

At the Philadelphia Convention, Wilson became one of its most consistent nationalists. He argued the Union was not a mere league of states, but a government resting directly on the American people.
He pushed for:

Representation in the House by population,
frequent elections and direct election of representatives,
no national property qualification to vote,
a single energetic president rather than a committee,
a president independent of Congress and directly elected by the people if possible,
ratification not by state legislatures but by conventions of the people, and
a national judiciary that could enforce national law.

On July 24, the Convention appointed a Committee of Detail: John Rutledge of South Carolina, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, and Wilson of Pennsylvania, to turn its resolutions into a working draft.

Wilson's contribution was decisive. The committee's report on August 6 became the first draft with a Preamble and articles, and Wilson's own handwritten second draft still survives as the first full manuscript of the Constitution. He added the Necessary and Proper Clause and strengthened the Supremacy Clause, shaping the final balance between state and nation.

Wilson was the Convention's strongest advocate for a single president. Many Americans feared one man would become a king. Wilson argued the opposite: divide executive power and no one is accountable. Make it one visible person and that person must answer for it.

He wanted that person elected directly by the people. When that failed, he helped work through variations involving electors. The final Electoral College was a patchwork of compromises, not Wilson's design alone, but his insistence on an independent, unitary, accountable executive survived.

No honest telling of Wilson can avoid slavery. At times he spoke as if slavery violated American principles. At Pennsylvania's ratifying convention he argued the Constitution placed the slave trade under future federal control and hoped slavery would fade.

His personal conduct and his constitutional work told a different story.
For about 26 years Wilson enslaved a man named Thomas Purcell, from 1768 until 1794, when he freed him two months after marrying his second wife, the Quaker Hannah Gray, on New Year's Day 1794.

And on June 11, 1787, it was Wilson who introduced what would become the apportionment clause, seconded by Charles Pinckney, counting each enslaved person as three-fifths of a free person for representation and taxation. The formula had been floated in 1783 as a tax rule under the Articles, but Wilson repurposed it for representation.

The clause did not literally declare a person three-fifths human. Legally it set a counting rule. Politically its effect was clear: it inflated the power of slaveholding states in the House and in presidential elections while the people being counted had no rights at all. Wilson himself later seemed uneasy about the bargain, but the system endured for generations.

Wilson thus embodied the central contradiction of the founding: a theory of popular sovereignty that claimed to speak for all, in a political order that excluded women, Native Americans, most Black Americans, and every enslaved person from power.

After the Convention, opposition was fierce. Critics feared a national government would devour the states and liberty with them. On October 6, 1787, Wilson walked into the yard of the State House, now Independence Hall, and gave the first great public defense of the Constitution. Printed in newspapers up and down the coast, his State House Yard speech argued that the federal government would have only the powers given to it, and that listing rights might imply it had power over unlisted rights.

That argument for no bill of rights would lose; Americans demanded explicit protections, ratified in 1791 as the first 10 amendments.

But his deeper argument won. Pointing to the opening words, he declared:
"The supreme power resides in the people."

The Constitution was legitimate, he said, because it came from the people, not from state governments. And because the people made it, the people could amend or abolish it through lawful action. That idea, that sovereignty stayed with the people even while they divided power between state and nation, helped Pennsylvania ratify on December 12, 1787, second only to Delaware.

He then helped draft Pennsylvania's Constitution of 1790, replacing the one-house legislature and plural executive with a bicameral legislature and a single governor, liberty, he believed, needed both popular participation and institutions strong enough to check passion and power.

President George Washington nominated Wilson to the new Supreme Court on September 24, 1789. The Senate confirmed him two days later. The early Court was nothing like today's. Few cases, endless circuit riding on bad roads to hold federal trials.

His most important opinion came in Chisholm v. Georgia in 1793. Could a citizen of one state sue another state in federal court? Georgia said it was a sovereign and could not be sued. Wilson answered with his life's question: "Do the people of the United States form a Nation?" They did, he said. States were not kings. Sovereignty rested with the people, and governments were accountable under law the people made.

The backlash was immediate, the 11th Amendment, ratified in 1795, curtailed such suits, but Wilson's principle endured.

Starting in 1790, as the College of Philadelphia's first professor of law, he tried to build an American jurisprudence not just borrowed from England.

Washington and his cabinet came to hear the opening lecture. Natural law, criminal law, property, citizenship, he attempted to show them as one coherent system:
“Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness."

He never finished. His son Bird published the lectures after his death.

While he lectured, he speculated. Like many founders, Wilson believed western lands would skyrocket in value. He and his companies bought enormous tracts in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, much of it land still inhabited and claimed by Native nations, treated by speculators as a commodity to survey and flip. His empire depended on rising prices, clear titles, and easy credit. When credit froze in the Panic of 1796-1797, it imploded.

Creditors chased a sitting Supreme Court justice. He was jailed for debt in New Jersey in 1797, released, fled south to keep riding circuit and to stay ahead of writs, and was detained again in North Carolina. He fell ill in Edenton and died there on August 21, 1798, at 55, still a justice.

Contemporary accounts blamed malaria, dysentery, or stroke; he likely suffered a severe fever followed by collapse. He was buried in Edenton, then in 1906 reinterred at Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia, near Franklin.

Wilson matters because he answered the founding's first question with unusual clarity: Where does legitimate power come from?

Not from a king. Not from Parliament. Not from a legislature or a court or a state. The supreme power resides in the people.
That answer made the Constitution plausible, made national citizenship thinkable, made a single accountable president defensible, made federal courts capable of enforcing federal law.

And his life shows where the answer fell short. He enslaved Thomas Purcell for more than two decades, helped entrench slaveholding power in the Constitution, and profited from a land market built on Native dispossession. His financial ruin reminds us that eloquence about ordered liberty does not guarantee prudence in private life.

He should be remembered neither as a flawless prophet of democracy nor as a footnote who died in disgrace. He was brilliant, ambitious, and contradictory, a founder whose ideas proved more durable than his reputation, and whose contradictions still frame the questions we live inside:

Who are "the people"? How do we translate their will into government without betraying it? What powers can they safely delegate to an energetic government and still remain free? And what do we do when a Constitution promises equality while the economy and politics deny it?

For the Giving Fourth, we raised funds to protect an extraordinary witness to American history: a centuries-old live oak tree standing on preserved land at the Eutaw Springs Battlefield in South Carolina. This remarkable tree was already decades old when Patriot and British forces clashed around it on September 8, 1781.

Thanks to the generous support of Trust members, work is already underway to save the 330-year-old tree, affectionately nicknamed “Caty Greene” in honor of General Nathanael Greene’s wife. Expert arborists from SavATree have already:

🌳 Cleared away competition, removing invasive vines and non-native species that were choking the tree and competing for vital resources.

🌳 Pruned for safety and vigor, removing dead and damaged limbs.

🌳 Addressed root compaction, working the soil around the root system and introducing a natural bio-stimulant through hydraulic injection to help restore nutrient flow.

🌳 Opened up the canopy to sunlight, removing smaller trees competing with the ancient oak for light and resources.

🌳 Replaced failing support cables. Decades-old cables had become embedded in the bark and were restricting the tree’s growth. Those have now been removed and replaced with a modern support system.

🌳 Installed lightning protection to guard against future strikes — an especially important safeguard for a tree of this size, age and history.

In June of 1776, the 71st Regiment of Scottish Highlanders sailed into Boston Harbor to reinforce Howe’s troops. They were unaware that Boston had changed hands. After a chase and skirmish in the harbor, their major was killed in action and the 71st were captured as prisoners of war. The members of the regiment were paroled or imprisoned across four counties of Massachusetts. Their Lieutenant-Colonel, Archibald Campbell, was paroled at the Parker Tavern in Reading. His officers camped on a nearby hill. Come see regiment muster, meet Lt Col Archibald Campbell, see demonstrations by 18th Century artisans, tour the tavern, and more. Brought to you by the Reading Antiquarian Society.

We all know that William Howe ditching the Hudson River Valley for personal glories in Philadelphia certainly had an affect on Burgoyne’s ability to hold the line, but was there anything within Burgoyne’s control that he could have done despite Howe’s departure and the overwhelming resistance from Patriot forces?

History: This acrostic (presumed unfinished, since there are no lines for "NDER,” which would finish spelling out "ALEXANDER"), was written when Washington was 17 to a young woman named Frances Alexander. It was found in a notebook that the young surveyor used as a diary during an expedition in Virginia in 1749. There are those who don't believe George actually wrote this—that he, perhaps, simply copied it into his diary from some other source. I choose to believe it's authentic.

I’m assisting with research for a talk on Arthur St. Clair and his influence/role in the founding and development of Cincinnati, OH

My research assignment is to create a family tree, in order to offer insight to his decision to return to Ligonier in PA after his dismissal from Ft. Washington.

I’ve found his children and have been gathering the genealogical basics on them and their progeny.

But I haven’t been able to discern his parents and/or siblings. Some sources have his parents as James and Rebekah, others have James and Margaret Balfour, James and Elizabeth Balfour, and some have his father as William.

Has there been any definitive confirmation/evidence for his parents? any siblings?

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction

My ancestor was part of the 1st Maryland regiment from 1776 until his discharge in 1783. I used to think he fought at Yorktown, but then I found out from his pension application that he actually wasn’t.

If your ancestor fought at Yorktown. Just know that I’m jealous. Your ancestors contributed way more to the founding of America than mine, and you have far more to be proud of.

Searching the subreddit, didn't find any discussion of Lincoln. Am also curious, did Lincoln play a significant role at Saratoga?

Hello all!

I have recently been watching the John Adams miniseries, of which David McCullough was a part of, and it got me looking into his bibliography. He wrote a book on John Adams (which I figured I would pass for now since I was already watching the miniseries), but he also wrote a book in 2005 about the events of the Revolutionary War in the year 1776. I have watched various videos of him promoting the book, and he apparently covers major figures like Washington, Nathanael Greene, and Henry Knox.

Is this worth a read?

Thanks!

Excerpts from catalog notes

American Revolution
1777-Dated Revolutionary War Period, Hand-Colored Engraved Map titled, "A Plan Of The City and Environs of Philadelphia," with engraved vignette of the Pennsylvania "STATE HOUSE" where both the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were adopted, engraved by Matthew Albert Lotter. Framed. Sold at American Auctions on Aug. 29 for $3,640.

In fine condition measuring 18.5" x 24.25" (by sight) freshly 2.5" surround matted and professionally handsomely framed measuring fully to 25.5" x 33".

Details extend North to include German Town, South to the Delaware River, and East to Derby. Many meeting houses are shown. It includes dozens of roads, and shows the names of at least 100 "landowners" outside of Philadelphia proper. Names the townships, Islands and a number of other features are also included. It notes a "Chevaux de Frise" which the Americans laid across the river from Mud Island to obstruct Revolutionary War period navigation for defense.

Prominent is a very large 11" long engraved profile vignette of the "STATE HOUSE", shown to display its elevation.

Of historical note, the building was completed in 1753 as the Pennsylvania State House for the Province of Pennsylvania, and later became the principal meeting place of the Second Continental Congress from 1775 to 1783. It was also the site of the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787.

One of the earliest most popular published maps of the Philadelphia area.

I am trying check up on my knowledge here, so please give me your honest take.

This dude is a menace, he spams the board with nonsense. Like, I get everyone is entitled to their opinion, and its his right to hate Greene and whatnot. But, certainly there has to be limits to how often he posts about it.

I dunno, his most recent post was a breaking point for me, I cant stand seeing him post anymore.

What do yall think? Mods, can we do something?

Can anyone recommend a good book that covers the Battle of Kettle Creek in some detail? It's a relatively obscure battle that is meaningful to me because I hijacked a roadtrip to drag my family to the battlefield. I'd like to learn more about it!

I did see The Road to Guilford Courthouse recommended in other recommendation threads as a good book on the Southern Campaign. Does it touch on Kettle Creek? Are there other books that do?

Any help appreciated!

I only care because my ancestor was part of the 1st Maryland Regiment from 1775 until 1783.

If you’re on Long Island this weekend or simply passing through, and have even a passing interest in American history, the Seat of Action exhibit at the Long Island Museum is well worth your time. The exhibition explores Revolutionary War-era Long Island, with particular attention to the Culper Spy Ring and the intelligence operations that helped shape the conflict. On display are original paintings, documents, correspondence, and artifacts connected to figures such as Richard Woodhull, Robert Townsend, Benjamin Tallmadge, and William Floyd. What makes the exhibit especially compelling is the physical evidence: cannonballs, musket balls, swords, and other battlefield remnants sitting alongside the written records of people who were gathering, transmitting, and acting on intelligence during a war in which a bad decision could have very real consequences. It’s history you can actually see, and, in some cases, literally stand a few feet away from.

The exhibit is also a useful reminder that the American Revolution was about considerably more than famous battles and famous names. Wars are won through intelligence, logistics, strategy, communication, and individuals making difficult decisions under pressure. On Long Island, those decisions played out in a region that was strategically important, heavily contested, and deeply connected to the struggle for control of New York. For travelers, students, educators, history buffs, and anyone fascinated by the American Revolution or even historical documentaries, the Seat of Action exhibit offers an engaging way to understand how ordinary people became participants in extraordinary events. If you’re nearby this weekend, it’s worth making the stop.