Pennsylvania, Commonwealth of (U.S.A.)
Substate | Active
1776 CE to 2057 CE
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Showing 10 events out of 331 total
Yellow fever travels along steamboat routes from New Orleans, causing some one hundred thousand–to one hundred and fifty thousand deaths in total.
At the age of thirteen, Morris had immigrated to Oxford, Maryland, to live with his father, who was a tobacco factor.
As a youth, Morris was provided a tutor and was a quick learner.
His father sent him to Philadelphia to study where he stayed with Charles Greenway, a family friend.
Greenway arranged for young Robert to become an apprentice at the shipping and banking firm of the Philadelphia merchant (and then mayor) Charles Willing.
A year later, Robert's father died after being wounded in an accident when hit by the wadding of a ship's gun that was fired in his honor.
When Charles Willing died in 1754, his son Thomas Willing made Morris his partner at the age twenty-four.
They established the prominent shipping-banking firm of Willing, Morris & Co. on May 1, 1757.
Their partnership is a merchant firm with interests in shipping, real estate, and other lines of business.
The partnership had been forged just after the Seven Years' War began (1754–1763), which had hindered attracting the usual supply of new indentured servants to the colony.
Potential immigrants are conscripted in England to fight in Europe, and the contracts for those already in the colonies in America are expiring.
Indentured servants can legally break their contracts to join the British forces to fight against the French and their native allies.
At the same time, the British Crown had wanted to encourage the slave trade which was profitable for the King's political allies in the African Company of Merchants.
While Morris was a junior partner and Willing was pursuing a political career, the company Willing, Morris & Co. had co-signed a petition calling for the repeal of Pennsylvania's tariff on imported slaves. (About two hundred slaves had been imported into Philadelphia in 1762, the height of the trade; most of whom were brought in by the Rhode Islanders Aaron Lopez and Jacob Rivera.)
Willing, Morris & Co had funded its own slave-trading voyage.
The ship had not carried enough to be profitable and, during a second trip, had been captured by French privateers.
The firm had handled two slave auctions for other importers, offering a total of twenty-three slaves.
In 1762 the firm had advertised an agency sale in Wilmington, Delaware for over one hundred Gold Coast slaves.
The ship had docked in Wilmington to avoid the tariff.
In 1765 on their last reported agency deal (out of a total of eight), the firm advertises seventy slaves who are brought in from Africa on the ship Marquis de Granby.
The slaves are not sold in Philadelphia, as the owner takes the ship and all the slaves to Jamaica.
In 1790, conservatives will gain power in the state legislature, call a new constitutional convention, and rewrite the constitution.
The new constitution will substantially reduce universal male suffrage, give the governor veto power and patronage appointment authority, and add an upper house with substantial wealth qualifications to the unicameral legislature.
Thomas Paine will call it a constitution unworthy of America.
Washington crosses the Delaware River back into New Jersey in a surprise attack in late December 1776 and defeats Hessian and British armies at Trenton and Princeton, thereby regaining control of most of New Jersey.
The victories give an important boost to Patriots at a time when morale is flagging, and will become iconic events of the war.
Kentucky's settlers, as the American Revolutionary War began in the East, had become involved in a dispute about the region's sovereignty.
Richard Henderson, a judge and land speculator from North Carolina, has purchased much of Kentucky from the Cherokee in an illegal treaty.
Henderson intends to create a proprietary colony known as Transylvania, but many Kentucky settlers do not recognize Transylvania's authority over them.
In June 1776, these settlers select George Rogers Clark and John Gabriel Jones to deliver a petition to the Virginia General Assembly, asking Virginia to formally extend its boundaries to include Kentucky.
Clark and Jones travel the Wilderness Road to Williamsburg, where they persuade Governor Patrick Henry to create Kentucky County, Virginia.
Before the Revolution had been a leading land speculator in lands west of the Appalachians where Virginians, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, have sought control from Native Americans.
Clark has been given five hundred pounds (two hundred and thirty kilograms) of gunpowder to help defend the settlements and is appointed a major in the Kentucky County militia.
The success of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense in the colonies has boosted public support for independence.
The Continental Congress, at war with Britain for a year, had on July 2, 1776, had, with twelve affirmatives and one abstention, finally passed the Lee Resolution (also known as "The Resolution for Independancy"), which declared the establishment of a new country of United Colonies as independent from the British Empire, creating what will become the United States of America.
New York was the only colony to not vote for independence, as the delegates were not authorized to do so.
News of this act had been published that evening in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and the next day in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
The final text of the document formally announcing this action, Jefferson’s draft of the United States Declaration of Independence, is approved two days later on July 4, 1776, which is celebrated as Independence Day.
Nathan Hale is executed for espionage in New York City.
General Howe had established his headquarters in the Beekman House in a rural part of Manhattan, on a rise between what are now 50th and 51st Streets between First and Second Avenues, near where Beekman Place commemorates the connection.
Hale reportedly was questioned by Howe, and physical evidence was found on him.
According to tradition, Hale spent the night in a greenhouse at the mansion.
He requested a Bible; his request was denied.
Sometime later, he requested a clergyman. Again, the request was denied.
According to the standards of the time, spies are hanged as illegal combatants.
On the morning of September 22, 1776, Hale is marched along Post Road to the Park of Artillery, which is next to a public house called the Dove Tavern (at modern-day 66th Street and Third Avenue), and hanged.
He is twenty-one years old.
Bill Richmond, a thirteen-year-old former slave and Loyalist who will later become a boxer in Europe, is reportedly one of the hangmen, responsible for securing the rope to a strong tree and preparing the noose.
By all accounts, Hale comported himself well before the hanging.
Over the years, there has been speculation as to whether he specifically uttered the line: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
The line may be a revision of "I am so satisfied with the cause in which I have engaged that my only regret is that I have not more lives than one to offer in its service."
The Americans withdraw across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania in early December.
Washington's army has dwindled to fewer than five thousand men fit for duty and will be significantly reduced after enlistments expire at the end of the year.
Spirits are low, popular support is wavering, and Congress has abandoned Philadelphia, fearing a British attack.
Washington orders some of the troops that returned from the failed invasion of Quebec to join him, and also orders General Lee's troops, which he had left north of New York City, to join him.
Lee, whose relationship with Washington is at times difficult, makes excuses and only travels as far as Morristown, New Jersey.
When Lee strays too far from his army on December 12, his exposed position is betrayed by Loyalists, and a British company led by Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton surrounds the inn where he is staying and takes him prisoner.
Lee's command is taken over by John Sullivan, who finishes marching the army to Washington's camp across the river from Trenton.