Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Known more for his administrative and political abilities than for aggressive command in battle, Gage was called home later in 1775, not long after Major Generals William Howe, Henry Clinton, and John Burgoyne arrived in Boston to prosecute the war against the Americans in the field. Thomas Gage and wife Margaret Kemble of New Jersey spent the rest of their years rather quietly in England, with Gage reaching the rank of full general before he died in 1787 at age sixty-six or so. His widow, the mother of their eleven children (ten of them born in America), lived to age ninety before she died in 1824.

  “Old Hickory”

  AS IS WELL KNOWN, THE TEENAGE ANDREW JACKSON, WHO BARELY SURVIVED smallpox and capture by the British, grew up to become hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and seventh president of the United States. Always hotheaded, Jackson worked his way up to the pinnacles of his adult career on what is a now-traditional political ladder…but with notable and strictly nontraditional personal scrapes along the way.

  Early in his career as an attorney in Tennessee, he challenged a rival lawyer to a duel for the latter’s remarks in court one day. They only fired their pistols into the air, which was fortunate for the rival, considering that Jackson in later duels (usually over his wife Rachel’s honor) would shoot to kill—and in one case actually kill—and in two other duels would suffer gunshot wounds.

  He once exchanged gunshots with John Sevier, a leader of the over-the-mountain men who had fought the Battle of King’s Mountain during the Revolution. The popular Sevier would be Tennessee’s first governor, a post he would hold for six terms. Jackson another time challenged Sevier to a duel and threatened to “cane” him.

  After that, their rivalry quieted down. In the meantime, Jackson’s pathway to the White House took him to the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, the Tennessee Supreme Court, a major generalship for the Creek War and the War of 1812, and the governorship of Florida. “Old Hickory” was twice elected president, in 1828 and 1832. He then retired to his beloved estate, “The Hermitage,” outside Nashville, Tennessee. His and Rachel’s onetime home remains open to the public today as one of the nation’s most frequently visited historic mansions.

  Meeting George III

  WHEN TRAVELING TO LONDON IN MARCH 1786—JUST TEN YEARS AFTER HE penned the Declaration of Independence, replete with stinging indictments of the arbitrary King George III—Thomas Jefferson was a rather hyper-critical tourist. The largest city in England—indeed, the entire Western World—“fell short of my expectations,” he later said.

  And all this disapproval despite the fact that England was his ancestral home—that his own mother, born in England, had spent her childhood in London itself.

  Despite these sentimental ties, he decided that the architecture of the great sprawling city was “in the most wretched stile I ever saw.”

  Interestingly, though, during his visit to the Ranelagh Gardens (long since swallowed up by the grounds of today’s Chelsea Royal Hospital) he certainly would have noticed the rotunda that the Gardens boasted as a major feature. When Jefferson designed the University of Virginia years later, as any architectural buff knows, a rotunda emerged as a central feature of the University’s vaunted “Grounds.”

  Nor was Declaration-author Jefferson greatly appeased by ways of the English in general that he encountered on this visit ten years after he composed his great document. Particularly not to his liking was the chill March weather—he complained of London’s “briskish” wind, icy streets, and occasional piles of snow in the parks. (The city indeed had been visited by a light snowfall about the time he arrived.)

  But then, his mood already was “chilly” to begin with, notes biographer Willard Sterne Randall in Thomas Jefferson: A Life. By now young America’s minister to France, Jefferson still smarted from “his severe financial loss and personal humiliation during the British invasions of Virginia.” In addition, “… living among the anti-British French had only sharpened his criticisms, major and minor,” wrote Randall.

  In addition to the more expected criticisms, the Founding Fathers also found one surprising fault with the English: they were meat-eaters.

  That does appear to be the point he had in mind when, just a few months before, he wrote a letter to Abigail Adams saying, “I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilization.” And further: “I suspect it is in their kitchens and not their churches that their reformation must be worked.”

  Spending five weeks in London, often in the company of John and Abigail Adams, Jefferson visited various tourist sites still familiar to us today, such as Covent Garden, Picadilly Circus, the British Museum, and the Tower of London—where he himself might have languished had he been captured by the British at any time during the Revolutionary War.

  Indeed, one has to wonder at his inner thoughts as Jefferson viewed the grim, old prison that had been the final earthly destination for so many condemned subjects of the Crown—in many cases, far less “sinful” subjects than he. And what of his thoughts during those first few days in town as he awaited an audience with the expectedly haughty King George III himself?

  So many questions indeed, for this audience would mean the formal presentation in Royal Court of the notorious Thomas Jefferson, now an official representative of the young and rebellious America that he had so famously helped to create. What to expect from this monarch, destined to sit on the English throne for sixty years (1760 to 1820) despite the loss of the American colonies and his intermittent periods of apparent insanity?

  Once the Revolutionary War ended, the king had expressed seemingly friendly views toward the new nation, true. But here, in person, was the very man who had accused the king in writing of harassing the colonists, eating out their substance, plundering their seas, ravaging their coasts, burning their towns and destroying their lives. Worse yet, the king sent armies of foreign mercenaries “to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny”—works that had already begun “with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized nation.”

  Now, Jefferson was in England for a weeks-long sojourn, combining both his usual inquisitive tourism and a few diplomatic chores, in company with his onetime revolutionary colleague and congressional comrade John Adams—these days envoy to England. Thus, Jefferson soon joined his old friend in a meeting with Lord Carmarthan, England’s Secretary of State at the time, to seek greater Anglo-American cooperation on several fronts.

  But the session with Carmarthan didn’t go well for the two Americans. “The vagueness and evasions of his answers to us confirmed me in the belief of their aversion to have anything to do with us,” Jefferson later reported.

  Just two days later, the two onetime rebels, now bona fide diplomats in the service of their young country, were to meet the highest-ranking Englishman of them all. Although George III was the third of Britain’s Hanoverian (German) monarchs, he was the first of these royal imports able to speak English without a heavy accent.

  Considering the circumstances, all those already-roiled waters, would it really be wise for Thomas Jefferson to appear before the very monarch he had so thoroughly castigated in such a public way? Perhaps not, but tradition called upon visiting diplomat Jefferson to pay his respects to the sitting king of England. And the setting would be one of the king’s twice-weekly levees at St. James Palace, noted biographer Randall.

  The same king, nearly a year before, had not appeared unduly troubled in receiving the newly-arrived Adams. “It was even rumored in gossip-ridden diplomatic circles that, after Adams had presented his credentials, there had been a tear in the king’s eye and a lump in his throat as he made Adams welcome,” wrote Randall.

  And so, in mid-March of 1786, Thomas Jefferson did meet his historic nemesis in person, with two outraged accounts resulting on the American side.

  One, thirty-odd years later, came fro
m none other than Jefferson himself, apparently still stung by the episode. “On my presentation, as usual, to the King and Queen, at their levees, it was impossible for anything to be more ungracious, than their notice of Mr. Adams and myself,” Jefferson wrote in his autobiography. “I saw at once that the ulcerations in the narrow mind of that mulish being left nothing to be expected on the subject of my attendance.”

  Perhaps even more outraged was the Adams family’s account, also given years later, to the effect that the king and queen deliberately turned their backs to the two visiting Americans.

  But biographer Randall has determined that neither version appears to be true.

  For one thing, Queen Charlotte normally would not have been present for the twice-weekly king’s levee at St. James Palace. “Moreover, the customary drill for the king’s levees would have made it physically impossible for the two envoys to come forward and bow or the king to rise and turn his back.”

  Then, too, the story of the turned royal backs came from John Adams’ grandson, historian Charles Francis Adams…but not from the supposedly snubbed John Adams himself. If the story were true, Randall wrote, “certainly someone, especially the hyper-punctilious John Adams, would have recorded the event. But no one did until Jefferson wrote about it in his memoirs at age seventy-seven.”

  Quite in agreement on that point, in his biography John Adams David McCullough also wrote that “almost certainly no such incident occurred.” The two biographers concurred that the many gossip-prone diplomats, courtiers and others present and closely watching would have reported untoward behavior by any of the parties involved in such a historically dramatic meeting.

  Quite possibly, though, while making his way down the line of visitors with an affable word or two at every stop, the king did briefly present his back as he turned from greeting Adams and Jefferson to the next gentleman in line, Randall suggested. And, true, it certainly is likely that “he had very little to say to this man [Jefferson] who had addressed him [the king] last in a declaration of his tyranny to all his subjects.”

  Perhaps nothing much happened at all, after all…and quite likely Jefferson, obviously no lover of the English, still would have complained—as he did a year later. “They [the English] require to be kicked into common good manners.”

  George Washington “in Extremis”

  JEFFERSON, MADISON, AND WASHINGTON ALL SICK AT ONE TIME, BUT IT WAS President Washington himself who was in the worst shape of all…who would soon be at death’s door.

  Abigail Adams was also ill, as was her son Charles.

  It was May of 1790, and the flu was on the rampage throughout Manhattan Island, temporary federal capital of the United States.

  Thomas Jefferson was only suffering from a migraine, but Congressman James Madison was in bed at a boardinghouse on Maiden Lane with the flu. That seems to have been Abigail’s problem, and perhaps her alcoholic son’s, as well.

  At 39 Broadway, the Macomb House, on Sunday May 9, Washington stayed indoors writing letters while battling a “cold.” But it turned quickly into “a potentially fatal combination of influenza and pneumonia,” reported historian Richard Norton Smith in his book Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. By Monday the tenth, “The fifty-eight-year-old President was fighting for his life, and straw was laid on the Broadway pavement to dull the sound of passing carriages.”

  Blessed with an iron constitution, Washington earlier in life had withstood bouts with smallpox and dysentery, both of them killer diseases, plus a childhood episode of pulmonary disease that left him with a “sunken” chest. At six foot three and roughly two hundred pounds, he otherwise was a magnificent specimen of manhood, his well-being enhanced by an active, energetic, and physically challenging life. Even so, as he advanced in years and commanded his men in time of severe stress, accentuated by the physical hardships of military campaigning, he suffered violent headaches; he contended with the ague, various fevers, the aching of rheumatism, the constant pain of ill-fitting dentures, and “excruciating surgery for a large tumor on his thigh.” In that instance, just a year before he fell ill at the Macomb House, the freshly inaugurated—and surprisingly fatalistic—president had told his civilian aide David Humphries, “I know it is very doubtful whether I shall ever rise from this bed, and God knows it is perfectly indifferent to me whether I do or not.”

  Now, for the crisis of May 1790, First Lady Martha took up her vigil at her husband’s bedside on the second floor of their four-story residence, built only three years earlier for New York merchant Alexander Macomb and now considered New York’s “grandest address.” Located on Broadway below Trinity Church and fairly close to Federal Hall, it suited the presidential couple quite well for its rental fee of $1,000 per annum.

  The government had spent $10,000 refurbishing the house after the previous tenant, French Ambassador Comte de Moustier, returned to France. Washington himself financed a new washhouse and “stables to accomodate six Virginia grays and as many milk-white horses to pull the presidential chariot on occasions of state,” reported historian Smith in Patriarch. A luxury accommodation for its era, the Macomb House boasted “glass doors at the rear leading to a balcony overlooking the swift Hudson River and Jersey shore beyond.”

  For all that, it wasn’t an entirely restful setting for the terribly ill man upstairs, where a watchful Martha Washington sat by the hour knitting and turning away all visitors.

  Not entirely restful? “From outside his window,” explained Smith, “urban sounds hammered on Washington’s brain. Maddening cowbells announced the daily trek north by herds penned on Wall Street. Mingled with the shuffling sounds of the cattle were the sharp cries of vendors peddling straw, hickory wood, and steaming yellow corn. Chimney sweeps out at daybreak left their verbal calling card: ‘Sweep ho! from the bottom to the top, with a ladder or a rope, sweep, ho!’ Congressmen complained of being unable to hear their own oratory for the street traffic outside Federal Hall, at the intersection of Wall and Broad streets, while the bleating of animals interrupted sessions of the Supreme Court, meeting over a farmers’ market in the Royal Exchange building.”

  As the week progressed, with the patient only sinking further into his fever and labored breathing, the dismaying word went out. The president! The president is dying!

  His aides sent for an additional doctor, the famous surgeon John Jones of Philadelphia…not long from a dutiful stand at Benjamin Franklin’s deathbed. For the moment, his treatment steps unknown today, Jones could only apply his ministrations, then watch and wait with all the Washington household members and fellow physicians attending the president.

  Four more days passed, and by May 15, “less than a week after his first symptoms were reported, Washington was in extremis.”

  A visiting farmers’ lobbyist from Pennsylvania innocently dropped by and found “a household in tears.” That was nearly a week after Washington stayed home to pamper his cold. One of the doctors on hand told the visitor that Washington’s death was near.

  Fearing the worst, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson soon appeared. As he later reported, however, about four o’clock in the afternoon, “a copious sweat came on.” Washington’s fever was finally breaking! “…[A]nd in the course of two hours it was evident he had gone thro’ a favorable crisis.”

  By the next day, Jefferson was able to record also, Washington was recovering after all—“Indeed, he is thought quite safe.” Weak at first, Washington indeed did recover fully. He served out his initial term as president; he then served a second term before finally retiring to Mount Vernon one last time.

  For Washington and his newborn nation, it had been a close brush with disaster. As Jefferson said later, “You cannot conceive the public alarm on this occasion. It proves how much depends on his life.”

  By the time Washington did die, nearly ten years later, the nation he did so much to create was beyond its infancy. Under the stewardship of a second president, John Adams, young America was prepa
ring to move its seat of government—from Philadelphia by now—to its final and permanent home in Washington, D.C. George Washington’s death at that time certainly did matter, but it probably would have had a much greater and perhaps even dangerous impact upon the stability of the new nation had it come about during his first term as the nation’s first president.

  When George Washington did die at the end of 1799, his death was blamed upon a respiratory illness that again began as a cold, apparently contracted while riding about his beloved Mount Vernon plantation on a wet and chilly December day.

  What’s in a Name?

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE POST OFFICES STREWN ACROSS THE LAND; NINE colleges; seven mountains; ten lakes; eight streams; thirty-three counties; one state; the nation’s capital city, and who knows how many streets, avenues, boulevards, byways, and highways in America all have shared the same common denominator—all named Washington, for George, Father of His Country.

  Last Gasp

  SHE WAITED AND WAITED FOR THE RETURN OF HER WAR-HERO HUSBAND FOR many years…unsure that he could come back. Eventually, with the passage of so much time, it became obvious he would be one of the last to come home.

  She waited and she tried to go on with a normal life. A member of New York’s prominent and wealthy Livingston family, she counted one brother as a delegate to the Continental Congress and secretary of foreign affairs and another as a colonel in the Continental Army. Still another, far younger, would be secretary of state under Andrew Jackson. And all were fathered by Judge Robert R. Livingston.