The events of exactly 250 years ago today (1776). A project in conjunction with America’s semiquincentennial. By Jon Blackwell, an editor at the Wall Street Journal. Also follow me @100yearsagonews.bsky.social
250 Years Ago News
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June 11, 1776: Congress resolves to name committees to "prepare a plan of treaties to be proposed to foreign powers," and "to prepare and digest the form of a confederation to be entered into between these colonies." These panels are in addition to the one drafting the Declaration of Independence.
June 11, 1776: Notorious loyalist John Goodrich, a privateer who has seized hundreds of ships in the Chesapeake, is found guilty by the Virginia Convention of bearing arms against the colony. His property will be seized; once his health permits, he is to be jailed in Charlottesville.
June 11, 1776: Responding to reports that bands of people are roaming New York’s streets attacking suspected loyalists, the Provincial Congress condemns these acts. However, it rationalizes that "a real regard to liberty" is causing the mob behavior. 1/2
June 11, 1776: The news reaches London of the Continental Congress’ decision to outfit privateers to seize British ships. The French chargé d'affaires, Charles-Jean Garnier writes promptly to Paris of the advantages this brings for France in the West Indies trade.
”…that we and you may be as one people, and have but one heart, and be kind to one another like brethren.” The king of Great Britain, it’s explained, “is angry with us, because we will not let him take away from us our land…and because we will not do everything that he bids us.” 2/3
Unspecified presents are given to the Indians. Before departing, according to the journal of Congress, they “gave the president [John Hancock] the name of Karanduawn, or the Great Tree, by which name he informed him the president will be known among the Six nations.” 3/3
June 11, 1776: John Constable, an artistic master who made his name synonymous with the English landscape in all its greenness and grandeur, is born in Suffolk. A conservative who called himself a “natural painter,” he conjured up nostalgia for rural traditions that were sliding into the past.
The colony also instructs its delegation at the Continental Congress that they are not authorized "to give the sense of this Colony on the question of declaring it to be, and continue, an independent State." (From the National Park Service’s “Bicentennial Daybook,” 1976) 2/2
June 11, 1776: Congress delivers an address to the 24 Iroquois Indians visiting them in Philadelphia. “We hope the friendship that is between us and you will be firm, and continue as long as the sun shall shine, and the waters run,” it begins. 1/3
