Tag: On this date

On This Date: An America 250th Anniversary

On By Daniel WelchIn Uncategorized1 Comment

The 27-year-old from Thetford, Norfolk, England native had a long journey before he even sailed across the Atlantic Ocean for the colonies. Although receiving an education until age 13, and an apprenticeship with his father until age 19, both uncommon among his peers, Thomas Paine started his professional career as a privateer. It did not suit him for long, he returned to Britain in 1759. Paine then became a staymaker, and within several years, opened his own store in Sandwich, Kent. By the end of the same year, Paine had married.

Read more: On This Date: An America 250th Anniversary

Life seemed to be set for the young couple, but tragedy after tragedy ultimately led Paine to the American colonies. Paine’s shop ran into financial challenges not long after his nuptials, and although offset by the joy of pregnancy, a relocation to a new town may have been too much on Mary. She went into early labor, and both mother and child tragically died during the delivery. A series of moves, career changes, and troubles dotted the next dozen years.

A supernumerary, Excise Officer, staymaker, schoolteacher, were all ahead of time. Charges of fraud and dismissal were as well. By the age of 31, in 1768, Paine’s next professional endeavor took him to Lewes in Sussex. Over the ensuing years in Lewes, a town with a long history of opposition to the monarchy and republican sentiments, Paine became a member of the Court Leet and parish vestry, worked as a tobacconist and grocer, and married for the second the time.

Thomas Paine

By 1772, Paine wrote his first political piece. His time in his home country was now on the clock. By the spring of 1774, following his political priorities and ideologies, Paine had all but abandoned his post as an excise officer and was essentially fired. He next separated from his second wife, Elizabeth, and moved to London. It was while in London that Paine met Benjamin Franklin who suggested he emigrate to Philadelphia. Paine did exactly that.

His journey through life was turbulent, even more so during the first half of the 1770s, just like his voyage across the Atlantic on his to Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania colony. The water supplies aboard the ship were dreadful, and typhoid raged across the decks of the vessel. Paine was barely alive by the time the ship reached Philadelphia. He was so ill he was unable to leave the docked boat under his own power, Benjamin Franklin sending his personal physician to the ship and have him carried off. Yet, on this date, November 30, 250 years ago, Thomas Paine had arrived to the American colonies. After six weeks of recovery his new journey, a journey shared by all those that were to be swept up in the American Revolution, began.

Less than two years after landing in Philadelphia, Paine published his work Common Sense. Coupled with a series of works entitled The Crises, Paine, “ignited a nation to help the failing cause of the Revolution.”

On this date…The Jay Treaty

On By Phill GreenwaltIn Emerging Revolutionary War, Memory, Personalities, PoliticsLeave a comment

On this date in history…

On November 19, 1794, John Jay, representing George Washington’s administration, affixed his signature to a document bearing his name in history. The Jay Treaty. Although the official name of the pact was “The Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation, Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America.”

The treaty’s aim was to resolve outstanding issues from the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War and facilitate economic trade. Although some of the clauses were not fulfilled completely and another war, the War of 1812, erupted because of it, the treaty did serve a purpose. The agreement ushered in a decade of trade between the two countries and gave the fledgling nation a chance to gain footing, a major concern for George Washington, as first president. The treaty also cemented the promise that Great Britain would vacate the forts in the Northwest Territory and agreed to arbitration on the boundary between Canada and the United States and the pre-American Revolutionary War debt.

Yet, the treaty was divisive. Even Jay remarked that he could find his way in the dead of night by the illumination of his own effigy. The treaty angered the French as that country was amid its revolutionary throes, and bitterly divided the nation. Out of it came the separation into two political parties, the Federalists, who supported the treaty, and the Democratic-Republicans who stood opposed to it.

The treaty was ratified by the Senate on June 24, 1795, with an exact two-thirds majority, 20 to 10 along with being passed by William Pitt the Younger, prime minister of Great Britain and his government, and took effect on February 29, 1796.

Historian Joseph Ellis wrote that the Jay Treaty was “a shrewd bargain for the United States” and “a precocious preview of the Monroe Doctrine.” As one of Washington’s most fervent wishes, the treaty “postponed war with England until America was economically and politically more capable of fighting one.”