Titanic: Ship of Dreams - Founding Fathers: The Massacre and the Tea Party

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Boston is in chaos, culminating in a bloody clash between locals and redcoats. From the turmoil steps John Adams, a young lawyer who volunteers to do the least wanted job in the city: defending British soldiers accused of perpetrating a massacre. Later, Parliament comes down hard on the American colonies, introducing more taxes and suspending rights. Colonial leaders gather to plan a response… and a tall, composed Virginian named George Washington comes to the fore… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Clarke Peters. Featuring Benjamin Carp, Lindsay Chervinsky, Jane Kamensky, Peter Kastor, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Ray Raphael. Written and produced by Edward White | Series Producer: Ed Baranski | Executive Producer: Joel Duddell | Head of Production: Natalie Brook-Reynolds | Script Consultant: Peter Kastor | Sound Supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay & Tony Onuchukwu | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering by Josh Latham | Recording Engineer: Charlotte Sewter at The Soundhouse Studios. For ad-free listening, join Noiser+. Click the banner at the top of the feed, or head to noiser.com/subscriptions to find out more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's March the... 5th, 1770, a cold night. Outside the Boston Custom House on King Street, a soldier stands century. There are no street lamps here, but the moon is bright. Its light reflects off piles of snow that lined the street, illuminating the soldier's freezing face. These last few days, the city has been on edge. Two weeks ago, Boston was rocked by the death of a local boy. He was killed by a fellow Bostonian, one identified as a supporter of the British regime. The child's death adds to the atmosphere of resentment. The populace seethes at elite privilege, parliament's taxes, and the presence of the King's soldiers. The tension between officers and

civilians is palpable. Around the city, dirty looks turn into insults. Insults turn into threats, Threats turn into skirmishes. Now, on King Street, a group of adolescents gather. They taunt and heckle the soldier on duty. They call him a scoundrel lobster son of a bitch. Lobsters is what Bostonians routinely call the red-coated British troops who patrol their streets. The boys throw snowballs, hardened with chunks of ice.

More people join the crowd. Some of them have sticks. Witnesses will later swear that there are clubs and swords, too. Further down the street, a watching officer grows alarmed. He orders seven other soldiers to march down King Street and usher their colleague away. The redcoats pushed their way through the crowd. Angry faces only half-visible surround them. More snow and ice is tossed their way.

A voice screams, kill them. The situation is now off the rails. One of the soldiers is struck on the head. He loses his footing on the ice. When he regains his balance, he fires. Chaos descends. Other soldiers begin shooting. Several people are hit.

They slump to the ground. It is what will be remembered as The Boston Massacre. The world is turning upside down. I'm Clark Peters from the Noiser Podcast Network. This is part two of Founding Fathers, an American Dream. We ended our first episode with the tragic death of 11-year-old Christopher Sider, shot and killed during a clash over the imposition of British taxes. Several days later, it's the morning of the boy's funeral. We're with Samuel Adams, the leading light of Boston's protests against the imperial government. As snow falls, he joins a slow-moving sea of mourners walking towards the church,

leading the way of 500 schoolboys, all dressed in black. Behind them, six pallbearers, carrying Christopher Cider's coffin. Then come 2,000 locals, Adams among them. All around him are the Sons of Liberty, the name adopted by a network of zealous patriots. These last few days have kept Adams busy. For the Boston Gazette, he wrote an account of Christopher's final moments. He describes the child's bravery and dignity,

an angel cruelly slaughtered on his way home from school. Adams and his fellow activists have also been involved in arranging the funeral. Christopher's coffin is adorned with Latin inscriptions. One reads, Innocence is nowhere safe. The innocence referred to is not just one young boy, but a way of life. Christopher Sider has become a martyr for American liberty. Adams perhaps selected the inscription himself.

himself. Expressing populist rage in classical Latin is very much on brand. Historian and author Ray Raphael. Samuel Adams was quite gifted because he could operate on two planes. At that time, they had two sayings, indoors and without doors. And indoors, they're talking politics behind closed doors in chambers. And he understood that. He knew how to do that. And he could also operate out of doors. He was a man of the people. He got it. He got the people. He could communicate with them. So being able to operate on these two planes really positioned him well to get both planes kind of working in sync. The death of Christopher Sider unites the two planes of Boston and ratchets up the tension between the people and the occupying redcoats.

For two weeks, the city simmers. Then, on March the 5th, Boston is the site of a mass killing, the chaotic scene which began this episode. Three people are killed right there on King Street. Two others will eventually die of their wounds. Boston's propagandist set to work. Adams is the first to publicly describe the event as a massacre, a tale of wicked, calculating brutality. The flood of words is accompanied by images.

Paul Revere is one of the city's finest silversmiths. In his workshop, he labors over an engraving. In some ways, it captures the truth of that infamous night. In the bottom left of the engraving is a dark-skinned man. This is Crispus Attucks of African and Native American descent, the first casualty of British fire. Otherwise, Revere uses more than a little artistic license. artistic license.

He depicts an orderly line of red coats firing into a crowd of helpless onlookers in broad daylight. Nevertheless, the imagery is immensely powerful. Historian Jane Komeneski, president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. This gives the imperial crisis its first printable martyrs. The Boston newspapers have an iconography. for this event showing five coffins on the top of the papers. Revere calls it the Boston Massacre with a print that is seared into the mind's eye of people on both sides of the Atlantic. You can buy it

hand-colored and see the red coats and the blood spilling into the crowd. And calling it the Boston Massacre really turns a skirmish into an act of war. News spreads quickly to Britain. A jumble of conflicting reports compete for attention. In government circles, there's support for the British soldiers and in comprehension at the behavior of these upstart colonials. New England is the seat of the rebellion in ways that must be entirely mystifying to the crown because it's just not that important to the balance sheet of empire. It's noisy, it's accomplished, but economically, it doesn't

provide much. So if you read parliamentary debates and records of George III, there's almost a sense of surprise of how can we have to be devoting so much governmental attention to this thing over there, which has grown just entirely feral with its own institutions. When George III came to the throne a decade ago, he was fated. Now he's knee-deep in problems. He becomes associated with corrupt and incompetent advisors. The crown has giant debts, which Parliament is forced to settle. And problems with the American colonies are careening out of control. In January 1770, the king appoints Lord North, his sixth prime minister in a decade.

The Boston Massacre comes just weeks into North's tenure. The news is horribly familiar. Professor Andrew O'Shaughnessy of the University of Virginia. Many of the people who opposed the American policies were very critical of the Boston Massacre, but it coincided with a similar shooting in Britain called the St. George's Field Massacre. And so it fed into a narrative, both in Britain and America,

that you basically had a government that was determined to subvert liberties, a government that they suspected had become corrupted by patronage. On April 12, 1770, six weeks after the violence in Boston, the British government scrapped some of the taxes that caused this mayhem. The duty on tea, however, remains. A reminder to the colonies that Britain reserves the right to tax America as it sees fit. But justice must also be done in Boston's courts of law. Responsibility for that falls to Adams, not Samuel, but his lawyer-cousin, John.

As with Samuel, the 34-year-old John is a wig, the political faction demanding reform in the colonies. More than anything, though, he believes in the principle that all men are equal before the law. The very day after the killings on King Street, John Adams agrees to take on the least wanted job in Boston, joining the defense team for the nine soldiers charged with perpetrating a massacre of the innocence. When he tells his wife Abigail of his decision, she bursts into tears.

Lately, the Adams' household has been a somber place. Only a few weeks ago, John and Abigail buried their baby daughter. Now this new anxiety, one that will potentially make the whole family targets of abuse. But Abigail knows the fact that nobody wants to take the case is precisely the reason her husband must. Like him, she believes in protecting colonial rights. Like him, she also wants the world to see that Boston is committed to the rule of law. Whatever the risks, Abigail accepts John must do it.

There's clearly a lot of give and take between them. Men and women are not equal in New England, but they are perhaps more equal than they are anywhere else because that sort of broad fabric of Puritan culture gives women an exemplary role in instructing their households. She gives as good as she gets. And I think having somebody who is a household partner in the way that Abigail Adams is shapes everything about the way John Adams shows up in the world.

I think she's also one of the few people who can tell him to modulate himself, which is something he has quite a bit of trouble doing. Lindsay Tivinsky is executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. John Adams, well, he was certainly sincere. He was unbelievably earnest. He was often way too honest. He didn't always know when to keep his mouth shut. He was unbelievably brilliant.

But he also had a great sense of humor. He had a lightness to him that I think most people miss. He adored his wife and thought incredibly highly of her intellect. Her judge of character was superb. And as a result, she was a phenomenal part. partner and advisor to her husband. Many of his critics sometimes referred to her as his cabinet of one and is the most accurate criticism that anyone has ever levied against John Adams because she was his most important

advisor and generally gave him very good advice. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac canada.ca. Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. It's October 27th, 1770. In central Boston, the courthouse is filling with

spectators. They're here for the trial of Captain Thomas Preston. He's accused. He's accused, of giving the order to fire that precipitated the Boston Massacre, or the affray on King Street, depending on where your allegiances lie. Today is the fourth day of Preston's trial, the longest in Boston's history. The first two days had been reserved for jury selection, then the prosecution's case. Under cross-examination, the witness evidence is confusing and contradictory, pretty much like the knight itself. Now is the turn of the defense. John Adams sits quietly at the front of the room. He rifles through his sheaths of paper, last-minute preparations for the most significant

moment of his career to date. It's already been an eventful week for the young lawyer. Just yesterday, he and a colleague had an audible argument in court. They disagree about a line of questioning. Voices are raised. It gets so heated that Adams threatens to resign. Captain Preston is facing the gallows. He can't afford a brawl amongst his own counsel. Eventually, Adams prevails. He stands as ground bullishly as he always does.

Now, a day later, the judge calls upon the defense to continue its case. Adams clears his throat. He rises to his feet, not a big man, but with the gift of presence. Addressing the court, he makes his argument. He doesn't question the integrity of the witnesses. He doesn't draw attention to the violence of the mob. He doesn't even say much about the character of his client. Instead, he insists that no honest person could convict Thomas Preston.

The facts of the case are too contested, the witness statements too inconsistent. It's impossible to say for certain who, if anyone, gave the order to fire. Adams retakes his seat. The existence of reasonable doubt seems undeniable. Three days later, the jury delivers its verdict. Thomas Preston is found not guilty. Less than a fortnight after that, Adams is back in court, this time to defend the other eight soldiers.

In his closing argument, he paints a vivid picture of the night of March the 5th, the menacing crowds, the death threats, the missiles flying through the darkness. Adams gets the job done. Six of the soldiers are acquitted. Two are convicted of manslaughter. Their thumbs are branded with hot irons and punishment. But all of them escape the death penalty. The end of the second trial feels like a moment of resolution.

By this point, nine months after March the 5th, most of the new taxes that have produced so much controversy have been removed, as have a lot of the redcoats. And New England's reputation is enhanced. With prominent wigs securing the acquittal of British soldiers, nobody can accuse Boston of being a place ruled by mob justice. And this is precisely what worries Samuel Adams. While his cousin John has been victorious in court,

Samuel worries that Boston is too eager to move on. He meets in taverns with the Sons of Liberty. Over beer and roast beef, they agree on the need to remind Americans that this isn't over. Just look at the remaining duty on imported tea. If Parliament insists it has a right to tax the colonies, it leaves the door open for all kinds of other abuses. Taxation without representation is the thin end of the wedge.

American liberties must be protected. The colonies need to wake up. Sam Adams early on announces himself as one of the people, who is really willing to generalize about the condition of the colonies from the fate of Massachusetts and is very canny about the need to keep the drumbeat going in times of peace. So Americans tend to think of the road to revolution as flat and wide and without off-ramps or pebbles along the way. In fact, the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s has a lot of prolonged pauses. The troops land in 1768 and culminate with a so-called Boston massacre in March of 1770,

a huge peak in hostility. But then things get very quiet between 1771 and 1773. Sam Adams is one of those coordinators of rebellion that says, people are losing interest. We've got to keep this thing alive. He's very sensitive to the power of the press and the ability of printers and editors to spread a story all up and down the eastern seaboard, making common cause out of Boston's cause. And he uses that tactic quite deliberately. So I think the crisis starts as being quite reactive to Crown and parliamentary policies. Sam Adams is one of those who's sure to stay ahead of public opinion

and to form it. At this stage, Samuel Adams is advocating reform, not independence. He wants to shift power away from the imperial elite and towards the colonists to safeguard colonial rights. One way he does this is by keeping the memory of the Boston Massacre alive.

On March 5th, 1771, Adams is busy with events to commemorate its first anniversary. At noon, every church bell in the city tolls for an hour. There are solemn speeches and moments of mass reflection. Later that day, thousands turn out to view a triptych created by Silversmith Paul Revere. One panel shows the death of Christopher Sider. In another, Redcoats Open. fire on civilians. The final image is a female personification of America, trampling a British soldier.

The colony's struggle has its first fallen heroes, a powerful bank of imagery, and an emerging calendar of revolutionary anniversaries. Every year for the next 12 years, the date of the massacre, March the 5th, will be commemorated in Boston. It will only recede when the July 7th, when the live fourth holiday of Independence Day comes along. But at this point, hardly anyone's imagining things could ever reach that point. At her home in Boston, Abigail Adams takes her first sip of tea of the day. Like most people in the British world, she's an habitual drinker of buoy, a type of black tea from China. It's a strong brew. One she and the colonists cannot go without. Yet, these days, every cup is a reminder of the remaining duty on tea, something the

Adams is and their fellow wigs see as tyranny. Smugglers make a killing on tea that evades customs. The smugglers include John Hancock, a flash young protege of Samuel Adams. They allow Americans to still enjoy their morning tea and strike a blow for liberty at the same time. Across the water, Prime Minister North isn't thinking much about America. His attention is fixed on far away India. There, much of Britain's interest is represented by the East India Company, a joint stock enterprise whose ruthless practices have made Britain a major power in South Asia. Yet, in recent times, that once booming organization has run into problems. By 1773, it finds itself with a gigantic surplus of tea and no market to sell it to.

So, an idea is sparked in London. Why not sell that tea at a huge discount to the caffeine lovers in America? The East India Company will recoup its losses. The British government will raise revenues. And American consumers will get an affordable, high-quality, version of their favorite luxury. What's more, the price will be so low, it will even undercut smugglers evading Parliament's duties.

On the surface, it's a genius idea. Several problems will be solved simultaneously. Except they won't. Lord North couldn't have come up with anything better designed to annoy the colonies. To them, it seems like just another tax imposed upon them by the Parliament in London. a body in which they are still not represented. And once again, the focus of protest is wild, self-reliant Boston. AI is moving fast across the enterprise.

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along a wharf in Boston Harbor. He's accompanied by John Hancock and other self-declared patriots. In their hands, they carry muskets and bayonets. They're here to stave off the threat of invasion not of more redcoats, but of black tea. For weeks now, three ships containing East India Company tea have been sat in the harbor. But Adams has led a campaign against it.

Not a single leaf is allowed to come ashore. There have been town meetings and screaming matches with government officials, insults, damnations, and threats. And every evening, the Sons of Liberty produced. control the wharf. To these men, the consignment is caffeinated wickedness, an assault on liberty, and an insult to God. Rumors swirl that the Sons of Liberty will destroy the ships. To those who support the British government, it seems like an outbreak of contagious insanity, instigated by Samuel Adams. But some think there's too much focus on Adams, and that this distracts it to be a time.

tension from the so-called Boston mob, the ordinary men and women who want their grievances heard. The whole point of the whole revolutionary period was to broaden the base of who the people work. Popular sovereignty. That's what the whole thing is about. Boston's a seaport, teeming with rough-and-tumble guys, and it's not a gentle place. And these people are kind of rowdy, and they drink a lot. and they growls, and when you actually get political engagements, they're much more prone to using violence. So ironically, you have this popular image that Samuel Adams was revving up the crowd to do their thing,

and it was exactly the reverse. The leadership is trying to calm them down because they say this isn't going to get us anywhere. There are those whose beef with the redcoats is more personal than political. In some cases, they're disgruntled that soul. are moonlighting, hustling for work in their spare time, taking jobs from local people. But the Boston Massacre radicalizes many ordinary people. Among them is the unusually named George Robert 12's Hughes. He was in the crowd that night.

He claims to have known four of the five killed. A shoemaker with a troubled pass, Hughes is one of life's underdogs. First thing you have to know about Hughes is he's very short. He's five feet one. He tries to enlist in the Seven Years' War, but he's too short. They had a five foot two limit. He's kind of a street kid, basically. When the British occupied the city, this saucy youngster has several run-ins with him, you know,

because he's not taking any stuff from these guys. So he has no warm feelings in his heart for the British soldiers. He's also a very charismatic fellow, currently, and he has a special skill, which he's a good whistler. In ordinary times, whistling might not be a highly prized skill, but Hughes is not living in ordinary times. It's the evening of December the 16th, 1773. At the Old South Meeting House, Boston is doing what Boston does best,

making itself heard. Inside, 6,000 people occupy every square inch of the place. Most have been here since morning. Speeches and arguments have filled the day. Fractious, tired Bostonians are waiting for something to happen. Samuel Adams stands in front of the audience. He explains that repeated efforts have been made to peacefully end the dispute, but the British government will not respect the rights of the people.

especially their right to be tax only by bodies in which they are represented. Suddenly, strange noises drift in from outside, yelps and cries, something alien. Adams keeps going, but he's lost his audience. Men and women look towards the exit. Almost as one, hundreds of them squeeze and jostle their way outside, Awaiting them on the street is a peculiar sight. A group of men dressed as crude parodies of Native Americans with feathered headdresses and tomahawk axes.

The mob is loud, demonstrative. Maybe they're trying to show that they are as formidable as Native American warriors. Whatever the case, if it's intended to be a disguise, it's not a great one. Boston isn't a vast city. It's pretty easy to work out who's who. One of them is Hughes. His short stature is a clear giveaway. The men quickly make their way towards the three T-ships in the nearby wharf.

They split into groups, each boarding a different vessel. Hughes is the leader of the group that boards the Dartmouth, so he will later claim his whistling prowess allows him to communicate with his co-conspirators in the dark. He demands the keys from the startled captain. The men clambered down to the hall where the tea is stored. They hauled chests of the stuff up on deck. Now they hat the chests open.

Masses of tea leaves are tossed into the water. They clogged together on the surface like knots of seaweed. The destruction goes on for a further two hours. Ultimately, the contents of 342 tea chests are consigned to Boston Harbor. The tea standoff has come to an astonishing conclusion, and this isn't an isolated event. In other cities, colonists are doing the same thing. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and South Carolina, white settlers are dressing as native people before staging similar raids on British tea.

But because this one is in the tinder box of Boston, it captures worldwide attention. The latest news from Boston spills out into the world and soon acquires the name the Boston Tea Party. And it happens because of Hughes and his buddies, men on the margins who suddenly sees center stage. The unique power of the Boston's, Tea Party, was that was really the first time that the interests of the Boston leadership and the

Boston mob, the people coincided. They're saying to Parliament, there's no more back and forth. You send stuff here that we don't like, we're going to destroy it. It's that one point of uniting the merchant class and the working class. Yet at the time, there are fears that the Boston Tea Party has damaged both causes. In London, Benjamin Franklin is embarrassed and perturbed. He does not condone destruction of private property. He suggests the colonists should reimburse the East India Company for its losses. Others in London agree.

Professor Benjamin Karp is the author of Defiance of the Patriots, the Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. When Parliament hears about this, they are furious. So they passed a series of laws known as the chorus of acts, later remembered by Americans as the intolerable acts. The first one is the Boston Port Act, which specifically references the Boston Tea Party and says, we are going to close Boston to most commercial traffic. In other words, we're going to throw everyone out of work until the town of Boston repays

the East India Company for its losses. Now, the Bostonians say, wait a minute, this wasn't a town meeting that ordered this. How can you blame the official town of Boston for the acts of these random guys in disguise? We don't know who they were. Of course, everyone knew who they were, but they have this fiction. And what Parliament is hoping is that Boston will be isolated by this punishment, and it will set an example, and the other colonists will be like, oh, we better not protest like this. But the other colonists actually send food and supplies to Boston and end up rallying around its support. The British also restrict political rights. Massachusetts has its colonial charter suspended.

elected officials are replaced by crown appointees. Perhaps most shocking, town meetings, the lifeblood of Massachusetts self-government are abolished. A lot of Americans nowadays say, oh, the Tea Party was so inspiring that it encouraged the colonies to get together and begin clotting for independence. No, no, no, no. It's not the Tea Party itself, but it's once they hear about Parliament's reaction and how far Parliament is willing to go to punish the Americans, this is what leads Americans on the people. path eventually to war and independence in the years of 1775 to 1776. If the Boston Tea Party is an inflection point for Americans, the same is true for Britain's, including one VIP.

George III didn't take a great deal of interest in America initially, and it's really only with the Boston Tea Party that his attitude changes, that he becomes a leading war hawk even before the war is broken out. He thinks that if you try to appease the Americans, it'll only encourage them to make more demands. So it's really the opposite to the Munich idea. We often criticize people for compromises for appeasement and likened to Neville Chamberl. This was quite Churchillian, but of course it backfired. And during the war, in many ways he helped hold government together and kept out opposition leaders who would have ended the war much earlier. Until now, American anger has been trained on Parliament and royal advisors, not on the king himself.

But the relationship between the sovereign and his colonial subjects is beginning to change. The people of Massachusetts figure that if they're to be prevented from assembling, they should prevent the crown authorities from doing the same. In their sights are county courts. What better place to deliver some popular justice? So here's what they did. They decided that the next session of the county court, in each town, we will close the courts. We will not allow the crown to exert authority locally.

And so every time the court was scheduled to meet, break hordes of people gathered together and prevented it from doing so. Oh, by the way, this is happening every county seat throughout Massachusetts. It's September the 6th, 1774. As dawn creeps in, the town of Worcester, Massachusetts is half asleep. 45 miles from Boston,

Worcester is the nautil point between the colony's biggest city and the vast stretch of countryside to its west. Life here is rarely, if you're not only, but today is different. On Main Street, a handful of men walk up to the courthouse. They force entry. Once inside, they barricade themselves.

Then, wait. A little while later, more men appear at the top of Main Street. Not just a handful this time. Thousands. They're not an army exactly. Exactly, although a minority do have weapons. Some are blacksmiths, others are coopers and masons, a lot of them are farmers.

This is the local militia, here to provide backup to the men inside the courthouse. They line either side of Main Street from one end to the other. Before long, a third group arrives. Court officials, 25 of them, in town to begin a new judicial session. When the officials arrive at the courthouse, they're apprehended by the men hidden inside. Each is presented with a choice. Renounce your position on the court, or experience country justice as dispensed by the people.

These officials know all too well what happens to members of the elite who displeased the populace. The painful humiliation of tarring and feathering. They want to avoid that at all costs. So, one by one, the two dozen officials are taken out into the daylight. To their left and right are long lines of militiamen. Holding their hats and bowing their heads, each official must now go down. the middle of the street.

As they walk, they recite a recantation of their status and a disavowal of the Crown's authority. But there's so many militiamen present, it's impossible for them to all hear what's being said. So, the officials are told to repeat themselves over and over again until every man present has heard it. No guns are raised. No shots are fired. There's no cruel and unusual physical punishment.

Still, this is public, ritual, humiliation, and a truly historic moment. That's the end of British Authority in Worcester, Massachusetts. I mean, that's it. There's this idea that a few very special and very wise men, founding fathers, who basically determined who we, should be as a country. Is this a handful of founding fathers? It's half the adult male population of the rural county, saying, no way, we will not do this. This is the heart and soul and guts of the American Revolution. Where is that in our national narrative? While Massachusetts rises up, John Adams spends long, hot summer days in the back of a carriage. Alongside him are his cousin, Samuel, and two other senior wigs from Boston.

The sun beats down. The air inside the carriage thickens. Dust from the unpaved roads gets everywhere. With every bump and divot, the passengers are tossed like fishing boats on the high seas. They're making their uncomfortable way to Philadelphia. An unprecedented event is taking place. delegates from 12 American colonies are convening for the first continental Congress. The objective is to coordinate a unified response to the coercive acts.

Along the way, the delegates from Massachusetts spend six days in New York. John Adams drinks in every moment. He fills his diary with observations about the place, large and small. He won't be the last visitor to find news. Yorkers a little much. As he tells his diary, there is no modesty. They talk very loud, very fast, and altogether. If they ask you a question before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again and talk away. He writes of New York as though it's some far distant country, which in some ways it is. These are a dozen colonies wedded to Britain,

not to each other. When the delegates arrived in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress in 1774, more delegates had been to London than had been to Philadelphia. And that demonstrates that there were no emotional ties really between the colonies. There were very few economic ties between the colonies. They didn't see themselves as a cohesive unit. They saw themselves as attached to the homeland. The differences between the delegates are glaring.

Those from New England, such as the Adams cousins, take pride in being straight talkers, direct and argumentative, as plain and impassioned as Puritan preachers. The Southerners, well, they're a whole other thing. Their manners, outlook, and experiences are a long way from those of Boston. That's especially the case for the Virginians. Arguably, they are the vital influence when Congress begins in September 1774. So Massachusetts is intellectually prominent.

Virginia is economically and culturally prominent. Of all the British colonies, it has the highest balance of import and export. It has a large population and nearly half. half is enslaved. Of the approximately 500,000 people that are enslaved on the eastern seaboard, 200,000 of them live in Virginia. It's a place where free people have what's later referred to as a cavalier culture, an honor culture invested in horse racing and high style, fine dining.

Because of the prevalence of slavery in Virginia, wealthy white men, and, and, you know, who rule the colony, pay a quite exceptional degree of attention to poor white men, because they want to make sure that the common cause is organized along a racial rather than a class axis, right? It's the kind of society where if all the poor people, regardless of color, got together, their numbers would overwhelm the tiny elite horse riding strata at the top. So Virginia just economically is the indispensable colony. Among the Virginian delegates, one stands out, tall, red-haired, and conspicuously quiet. George Washington makes an instant impression.

Unlike the Adams' cousins, Washington has a military background. He's a veteran of the French and Indian War. Also, unlike the Adams' who oppose slavery, he owns about 200 enslaved people. It's their labor that keeps his vast plantation running. What Washington and the New Englanders have in common is a desire to push back hard against the British government. Over dinners in Philadelphia taverns, John Adams and George Washington get to know each other. Adams does most of the talking.

Washington, most of the listening. That tends to be how conversation with either of them goes. I think it's very hard to discover Washington's interior life at all. There's no correspondence like the correspondence of John and Abigail, where you see him disclosing himself and wrestling with his own personality and heart on the page. Washington, he's incredibly practiced at perfecting the mask of a leader. One of the things that makes him a great general is that he's kind of nomic in public, right? He shows up standing nearly six foot four, right, looming above everybody and having been a good enough written that he's read all the manuals of deportment and politeness in the formal British sense.

But I find him very hard to truly know in the way that Adams, for example, John Adams, you know so well that you feel like you would recognize him in a pub. Congress gets underway. The venue is Carpenter's Hall, a new red brick building designed as headquarters for the local Carpenters Guild. While Samuel Adams might have been a key instigator in Boston, in Philadelphia, his presence is less pronounced. He's just one of numerous loud voices. He likes it this way,

it staves off accusations that he's a dangerous extremist intent on deepening the conflict with Britain. From his seat in the hall, he watches others denounce Parliament. Patrick Henry of Virginia is the most radical. In Henry's eyes, war with Britain is inevitable. It's time to rethink everything. think everything, including the core identity of the colonies. I am not a Virginian, he says, but an American.

Professor Peter Castor, Washington University in St. Louis. Patrick Henry was one of the most compelling orators of his generation, and he's a Virginian. He's surrounded by a lot of famous guys. He's a rough contemporary of Washington and Jefferson and Madison, but he could talk rings around them. He was an incredibly effective communicator. He gave voice to an emerging political language that said, this isn't just a conflict between some settlers in the home country. It's not just about tax policy. It's about something much bigger. It's about liberty, which is a concept.

And he believed it. He wasn't just taking advantage of it. The American Revolution was about a set of high-minded ideals. And one thing that Henry was doing was finding a way to say that in a way that would mobilize and motivate people. This all terrifies the Tories, the term that by 1774 has come to define the people who support British policies. Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania is one of them. He pitches something that he hopes will end the radical talk of men such as Patrick Henry.

At its heart is an American parliament, made up of representatives from each colony. This body would make its own laws and veto those imposed from Britain. The plan is taken seriously. Perhaps it's the solution everyone's been looking for, or nearly everyone. Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry are dismissive. Their minds seem made up. The colonies must stand their ground, prepare for war. A vote is called. Each colony would get to say yes or no to Galloway's plan of

Union. The colony of Rhode Island has just two delegates. They disagree about the plan canceling each other out. That leads 11 colonies to vote one way or the other. The votes are tallied. Five colonies vote in favor, but six vote against. The plan is defeated by the narrowest of margins. To Tories at the time, it seems like a missed opportunity. In years to come, it seems like a moment that could have rewritten history. When Galloway proposed that, he, like a lot of other folks at the Continental Congress, were all imagining themselves as British subjects advocating for their rights as Englishmen. That's really what they were advocating. People wouldn't accept Galloway's plan because it didn't go far enough. They said, this won't guarantee our rights as

Englishmen. They increasingly came to conclude that both Parliament and increasingly the king were unredeemably corrupt, that there was no way they were going to modify their behavior in a way that guaranteed the rights of British settlers. And it's really that change, that change in mindset that leads to the Declaration of Independence. With the plan rejected, the Congress moves forward. A formal pact to boycott all British goods is agreed upon. As part of this, it is resolved that the colonies will phase out slavery. The slavery provision, of course, is later discarded,

but it demonstrates how at least some delegates are thinking. Suburrent old ideas are being challenged. The Congress also makes a direct appeal to the King. A petition is sent, requesting that his Majesty's government repeal the coercive acts. One last public plea for unity and reconciliation. But George III looks the other way. To intercede, he says, would be to trample on the rights of Parliament. And that really would be tyranny.

As the petition is making its creakingly slow way across the waves, a customs official in Rhode Island also contacts London. He notes that the assembly in his colony has recently passed some startling legislation, purchases that the king himself should know about. Four cannons and 300 barrels of gunpowder. Similar moves are being made everywhere in a country. America. The First Continental Congress has urged all colonies to bolster their militias. As 1774 comes to a close, George III is absorbed in a report, a survey of the Royal Navy's current capacity for conflict. On both sides of the Atlantic, the unthinkable is fast becoming the only thing anyone's thinking about. War is looming. Next time on founding

fathers an American dream, more and more militias begin forming across the colonies as America prepares for battle. The British bite back. Two forces come head to head in the town of Lexington, and the first shot of the Revolutionary War is fired. But by who? George Washington is chosen as commander-in-chief of the brand-new Continental Army. But as the general inspects his troops for the first time, there's a bleak wake-up call. He needs to turn a misfit band of poorly armed and poorly organized rebels into a force capable of going toe to toe with the biggest military on earth. That's next time.

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