The American Revolution is a story most people learn once and never revisit, which is how the wrong parts stick. Paul Revere never shouted his famous line, Bunker Hill was fought on a different hill, and the Constitution was written out over a weekend by a clerk nobody can name. These stories keep the famous events and go looking for the people standing just outside the frame.
Every tile in a American Revolution game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Patriots and Allies
nine stories
1The double agent who waited on Cornwallis
On the tile: Armistead1781
James was enslaved in New Kent County, Virginia, when, with his enslaver's consent, he began spying for the Marquis de Lafayette. Posing as a runaway, he crossed into the British lines and worked as a double agent, waiting tables at Lord Cornwallis's headquarters and repeating what he overheard to Lafayette while passing misleading reports to the British. Papers he smuggled out confirmed that Cornwallis meant to stay at Yorktown. Freedom took longer than victory: the House of Delegates passed an act freeing him in December 1786, the Senate followed on New Year's Day, and he took the surname Lafayette.
In May 1782 Deborah Sampson, a young Massachusetts woman, mustered into the Continental Army under the name Robert Shurtliff. She served seventeen months as a light infantryman in the Hudson Valley, and the disguise held until a fever in Philadelphia put her in front of a doctor. She received an honorable discharge from General Henry Knox in October 1783. Payment took longer than the war. Paul Revere took up her cause, writing to Congressman William Eustis in 1804, and she was placed on the United States pension list the following year.
The baron who reached Valley Forge in February 1778 had been a captain in the Prussian service, and the title came from a German prince seven years earlier. None of that mattered on the drill field. He wrote his lessons in French and had them translated into English, then drilled a model company of a hundred picked men to show the rest of the army how it was done. When his English ran out, an aide swore at the soldiers on his behalf, and the men grew fond of him anyway. The manual he wrote guided the Army until 1814.
Brought to Boston as a child on a slave ship and named for the vessel that carried her, Phillis Wheatley was purchased as a house servant, and she began writing verse. Her collection appeared in London in 1773, and it made her one of the most famous Africans alive. The Wheatleys freed her that same year. In 1775 she wrote a poem for George Washington and sent it to his headquarters at Cambridge, and he invited her to visit him the following year.
In 1769 Salem Poor paid twenty-seven pounds for his own freedom, about what a working man earned in a year. At Bunker Hill his Andover company, part of Colonel James Frye's regiment, ended up covering the retreat from the redoubt on Breed's Hill. Five Andover men were killed near him, and he slowed his own retreat to help the wounded. In December 1775 fourteen officers petitioned the Massachusetts General Court on his behalf, calling him a brave and gallant soldier. There is no record that he was ever rewarded.
6The bookseller who learned artillery from his stock
On the tile: Henry Knox1775
Henry Knox clerked in a Boston bookstore, then opened his own, and read his way through the military science on the shelves. Artillery interested him most. In the winter of 1775 and 1776 he hauled sixty tons of captured cannon some three hundred miles to Boston on sleds pulled by oxen and horses, without losing a piece. Congress made him a brigadier general after Trenton and a major general in 1782. In 1789 he became the first Secretary of War under the new Constitution.
7She satirized the governor, then wrote the history
On the tile: Mercy Warren1772-1805
Mercy Otis Warren published plays in the Massachusetts newspapers while the crisis built, and she published them without her name. The Adulateur in 1772 and The Group in 1775 turned royal officials into stage villains, one of them a character transparently modeled on Governor Thomas Hutchinson. She wrote letters to the Washingtons, the Adamses and Patrick Henry. In 1805 she published a three-volume history of the Revolution, one of the first accounts of it to appear under a woman's name, and historians still cite her footnotes.
Bernardo de Galvez became governor of Spanish Louisiana in 1777, and before Spain entered the war openly he was moving gunpowder, muskets, uniforms and medicine up the Mississippi and Ohio to American hands. Then he took the field himself, capturing British posts along the Gulf and closing with a siege of Pensacola that ran from March to May of 1781. Every British soldier tied down in the Gulf was one who never reached Yorktown. Congress made him an honorary citizen of the United States in 2014.
Tadeusz Kosciuszko landed in America at the end of August 1776 and was made a colonel of engineers within weeks. He laid out the defenses at Saratoga, picking ground that helped trap a British army, and he spent two years fortifying West Point. What he wanted done with his American estate is less well known. He named Thomas Jefferson his executor and directed that the whole of it be used to buy freedom and schooling for enslaved people.
Fort Ticonderoga guarded the corridor between New York and Canada, and in May 1775 it was held by about fifty British soldiers. Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys arrived before dawn, and so did Benedict Arnold, carrying a Massachusetts commission and a claim to command; the two agreed to share it. They pushed past a single sentry and ran up the stairs to the officers' quarters, and the commander was told to surrender. Nobody fired and nobody died. The fort's guns would matter more than the fort.
2The Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on another hill
On the tile: Breed's HillJune 17, 1775Myth busted
The battle everyone calls Bunker Hill was fought on Breed's Hill, the lower rise closer to Boston. Colonial troops reached the Charlestown heights first, on June 16, and dug in through the night on the nearer hill rather than the one they had been sent to fortify. The name of the taller hill stuck to the fight anyway. Taking the ground cost the British more than a thousand killed and wounded. The colonists lost something like three to five hundred killed, wounded or captured.
3An unfinished fort of palmetto logs held the fleet
On the tile: Fort MoultrieJune 28, 1776
The fort on Sullivan's Island was not finished when the British fleet came for Charleston in June 1776. It was built of palmetto logs and sand, and William Moultrie's garrison held it through about nine hours of bombardment until the warships had to withdraw. The attack failed, and Charleston stayed in American hands until a second British expedition came back for it four years later. The fort was named for Moultrie after the battle. The British renamed it Fort Arbuthnot when they took it, but Moultrie's name is the one it carries today.
Benedict Arnold's small fleet on Lake Champlain was beaten badly on October 11, 1776. Eleven ships were taken or destroyed and close to two hundred men were lost, against perhaps forty British casualties. The fight still did its work. With winter coming on, Guy Carleton gave up the push against Fort Ticonderoga and the upper Hudson valley and turned back. The delay handed the Americans a year they badly needed, which is a strange thing for a defeat to do.
The campaign came in two parts. At Freeman's Farm on September 19 the British held the field and paid nearly six hundred casualties for it. At Bemis Heights on October 7 the Americans took the Breymann Redoubt and the British position came apart. Burgoyne surrendered his army on October 17, 1777, ringed by some thirteen thousand Americans and running out of supplies. The news traveled to Paris, and France signed a formal treaty of alliance with the Americans.
The British came back to Charleston in February 1780 and settled in to do it properly. Benjamin Lincoln offered to give up the city if his men were allowed to march away unharmed, and the British refused. The siege lines closed, heated shot came into the town, and on May 12 Lincoln surrendered roughly five thousand men. An entire American army in the South ceased to exist. Then the victors misjudged the peace: a June proclamation required paroled men to swear allegiance to the crown, and it sent more Americans into the patriot ranks.
Kings Mountain was fought between neighbors. The Loyalist force on the hill and the Overmountain Men climbing it were all Americans. Major Patrick Ferguson, who commanded the Loyalists, was the only Briton on the field. The frontier riflemen fought from behind trees and rocks and they shot well; Ferguson was killed and his command surrendered soon after. Thomas Jefferson later called the day the turn of the tide of success, and it was the first serious break in Britain's southern strategy.
Daniel Morgan put his men in three lines and told the militia in the second line to fire two volleys, then fall back behind the Continental regulars in the third. They did, and to Banastre Tarleton it looked like the Americans were running. The twenty-six-year-old British commander, whose men had marched since two in the morning, sent them straight on. A misunderstood order pulled part of the Continental line back, but on Morgan's command it faced about and fired into the British rush. Tarleton lost 110 killed and more than seven hundred wounded or captured.
Yorktown is remembered as Washington's victory, and it was, but the door was shut by a fleet. A French fleet entered the Chesapeake Bay at the end of August 1781, and on September 5 it fought off the Royal Navy squadron sent to support Cornwallis; the British ships went back to New York. After that nothing could reach him by water and nothing could carry him away. The allied army closed in on September 28, and on October 19 Cornwallis surrendered the roughly eight thousand men he had in Yorktown.
Thomas Paine's pamphlet appeared in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, with no author's name on it, and it stayed anonymous for about three months. Benjamin Rush suggested the title and Robert Bell printed the first edition. Paine gave up his copyright so that anyone could reprint it freely, and printers up and down the colonies did. Nobody can say exactly how many copies existed: estimates for the first year run from seventy-five thousand to half a million. Washington wrote that it was changing minds.
On July 5, 1775, less than three weeks after Bunker Hill, the Continental Congress adopted a petition to King George III. Delegates from twelve colonies signed it, every colony but Georgia, and John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were among them. It described them as attached to his person, family and government, and begged him to use his royal authority and influence to bring them relief. Congress had already voted to raise an army and named George Washington to command it. Both things were true at once.
The popular picture has the delegates signing the Declaration on July 4, 1776. That was the day Congress adopted it. On July 19 Congress ordered the text engrossed on parchment, and on August 2 John Hancock signed it with a bold signature, the delegates present following by state. Fifty-six men signed in the end, several of them later, and Robert R. Livingston of New York, who sat on the drafting committee, never signed at all. The copies that carried the news in July were printed sheets bearing only two names, Hancock's and the secretary's.
4The famous Declaration image is an 1823 engraving
On the tile: Stone's Copy1823
The Declaration most people picture is not a photograph of the parchment. In 1820, with the original already showing its age, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned the printer William J. Stone to make a full-size copperplate engraving of it, and Stone finished in 1823. His copy is the image most illustrated in history books, displayed in schools and libraries and sold as souvenirs. The parchment itself, faded by years of public display, is now so pale that its text and signatures are hard to read.
5A government that could ask for money, not take it
On the tile: Confederation1777-1781
Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation on November 15, 1777, and then waited more than three years for them to take effect. Maryland refused to ratify until Virginia agreed to give up its enormous western land claims, and the Articles became law only on March 1, 1781, when Maryland finally came in. The government they made could not tax and was nearly powerless to set commercial policy. Paper money flooded the country and inflation followed. The remedy was the convention that wrote a different constitution six years later.
Thomas Jefferson drafted it, the Virginia General Assembly adopted it on January 16, 1786, and it was signed into law three days later. The statute said that no man should be compelled to attend or support any religious worship, place or ministry, and that what a person believed would not touch his civil rights. It put the separation of church and state into law in the state Jefferson came from. He counted it among the achievements he was proudest of.
The treaty that ended the war was signed in Paris on September 3, 1783. Britain acknowledged the United States to be free, sovereign and independent, drew boundaries that opened the west, preserved American fishing rights and left the Mississippi open to the citizens of both countries. The three American negotiators put their names to it in alphabetical order: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay. Eight years of fighting closed on a page arranged by the alphabet.
Fifty-five men took part in the Philadelphia convention across the summer of 1787, and thirty-nine of them signed the Constitution on September 17. A number had gone home before the end, and three who stayed to the last day refused to put their names to it. One state was missing from the room the entire time: Rhode Island never sent anyone at all. The document itself runs to four sheets of parchment, each roughly twenty-nine inches by twenty-four.
9The man who wrote out the Constitution in a weekend
On the tile: Jacob ShallusSept. 1787
Somebody had to write the Constitution out by hand before anyone could sign it, and that somebody was Jacob Shallus, an assistant clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly. He had a weekend. The delegates settled the final text, and Shallus engrossed four sheets of parchment in time for the signing on Monday, September 17, 1787. His name appears nowhere on the document. Nobody knew whose handwriting it was until researchers worked out his identity in 1937, a hundred and fifty years later.
On the tile: Midnight RideApril 18, 1775Myth busted
Revere's mission was meant to be a secret one, with British patrols out on the roads, and the people he warned thought of themselves as British. What Paul Revere is recorded saying to a sentry at Lexington is that there would be noise enough before long, and that the regulars were coming out. He did not ride alone: William Dawes came by the longer land route, and Samuel Prescott joined them on the road to Concord. Nor did he finish. A British patrol stopped all three, Prescott and Dawes got away, and Revere was held, questioned and relieved of his horse.
Nobody knows who fired first on Lexington Green at about five in the morning on April 19, 1775; a shot rang out from an unknown source. The fight at Concord's North Bridge later that morning is better documented. About four hundred militia advanced on roughly ninety-six British soldiers. Three British shots splashed harmlessly into the river, then the rest of the line fired, killing Captain Isaac Davis and Abner Hosmer. Major John Buttrick ordered the militia to fire back, and three British soldiers fell dead or mortally wounded. In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson placed the shot heard round the world at that bridge.
3He defended the soldiers from the Boston Massacre
On the tile: John Adams1770
The shooting on King Street on March 5, 1770 killed five men. Crispus Attucks was struck first; Samuel Maverick died the next morning and Patrick Carr nearly two weeks later. Paul Revere's engraving of the scene, The Bloody Massacre, outraged many colonists. Lawyers across Boston had refused to represent the accused, but John Adams agreed to defend Captain Thomas Preston and his soldiers despite a public backlash. He believed it mattered to show that a fair trial could be held in Massachusetts. Preston was acquitted, and so were six of the eight soldiers. Two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder.
4They destroyed the tea and replaced a broken lock
On the tile: Tea PartyDec. 16, 1773
On the evening of December 16, 1773, boarding parties went aboard the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver at Griffin's Wharf. Estimates of how many took part range from thirty to sixty men in disguise to about a hundred and fifty. In roughly three hours they destroyed all 342 chests of East India Company tea. They were careful about it: only the tea was targeted, and a single lock, broken by accident, was replaced within a few days. A crowd watched, near two thousand people by one merchant's diary. The work was finished by nine at night.
5No record it rang for independence, and the name came later
On the tile: Liberty Bell1751Myth busted
There is no evidence the bell rang on July 4 or July 8, 1776. Isaac Norris chose its inscription in 1751, a line about proclaiming liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof, possibly for the fiftieth anniversary of Pennsylvania's 1701 charter. The name came from the antislavery movement: The Anti-Slavery Record called it the Liberty Bell in 1835, and the name spread slowly from there. No one recorded when it first cracked, most likely in the early 1840s. The wide crack everyone photographs is the 1846 repair, and when a new fissure opened after it, the bell was silenced for good.
Molly Pitcher is a nickname rather than a person, and more than one woman is probably inside it. The closest fit for the famous story is Mary Ludwig Hays, who followed her husband's artillery company and is said to have taken his place at the gun at Monmouth. What survives is thin. A soldier named Joseph Plumb Martin wrote about a woman working a cannon under fire that day. Hays received a pension of forty dollars a year in 1822 and died at Carlisle in 1832.
Benjamin Tallmadge ran the ring and signed himself John Bolton. His childhood friend Abraham Woodhull, on Long Island, wrote as Samuel Culper, and Robert Townsend, a purchasing agent in Manhattan for his merchant father, became Culper Junior. The whaleboat captain Caleb Brewster carried letters across Long Island Sound, and the Setauket tavern owner Austin Roe made the dangerous trips to the city. The famous Agent 355 rests on one letter, in which Woodhull hoped to outwit them all with the help of a 355, the ring's code for lady, of his acquaintance. Many historians who have studied the ring dismiss the rest as speculation.
Between twelve and fourteen thousand soldiers spent the winter of 1777 and 1778 at Valley Forge, and about two thousand of them died. The picture in most minds is men freezing in the snow, and they were certainly cold: roughly a quarter of those who marched in lacked some essential piece of clothing. But that winter was neither the coldest nor the snowiest of the war. What killed men was disease, above all influenza, typhus, typhoid and dysentery, and two-thirds of the deaths came in the warmer months of March, April and May. Around fifteen thousand marched out on June 19, 1778.
The officers at Newburgh had not been paid, and an anonymous letter in camp urged them to send Congress an ultimatum. Washington called a meeting for March 15, 1783, and the officers expected him to stay away. He came, spoke against the plot, and began reading a letter from Joseph Jones, a Virginia congressman. Then he took out a pair of reading glasses and asked them to permit him to put on his spectacles, for he had not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of his country. Some officers openly wept. After he left, they put their faith back in Congress.