(From the National Park Service's "Bicentennial Daybook," 1976
March 30, 1776: Colonies Minister Lord George Germain tells King George III he would be "graciously pleas'd" if the sovereign would appoint his youngest son, George Germain, to be receiver of Jamaica. The sinecure is worth £600 a year.
March 30, 1776: The practice of militiamen electing their officers creates bitterness in Great Barrington, Mass., which has two companies. Men of the South Company charge their captain was court martialed while in the Continental Army; the North Company complains their captain is old and sickly. 1/3
March 30, 1776: The New York Safety Committee resolves that livestock on Staten Island should be removed to New Jersey "if a fleet should arrive and attempt depredations."
The commander, who is still maintaining a siege with about 1,000 soldiers, vents his frustrations today in a letter to fellow Connecticut patriot Silas Deane. He says his many orders to prevent smallpox are “repeatedly disobeyed or neglected" by men now paying the price for their negligence. 2/3
Very few replacements are fit for duty, "so that the publick will incur an expense of at least 20 pounds for each of those people, who will not, on an average, have done 10 days’ service... Our Surgeons are without medicine; our Hospitals crowded, and in want of almost every necessary." 3/3
"By the proposed new division, the main of those called Tories will be in the West Company," Hopkins writes. "The petitioners imagine that, upon a choice according to this division, such officers would be chosen as would give general satisfaction." 3/3
The complaints are forwarded to the colonel, Mark Hopkins, along with a claim that loyalism pervades their ranks, especially among Anglicans. Some propose a form of what will later be called gerrymandering: Redivide the town so that there will be east and west divisions, not north and south. 2/3
March 30, 1776: American Gen. Benedict Arnold, still camped outside Quebec City, bemoans the refusal of his New England troops to take precautions against smallpox. “That fatal disorder has got into our camp, though every method that prudence could suggest has been attempted to prevent it." 1/3
March 30, 1776: Vasily Tropinin, a Russian painter who rose from serfdom to fame as a portraitist, is born in Korpovo village. Allowed by his master to study painting at the country's leading academy, he achieved freedom at 47 and had a life's work of over 3,000 portraits.
