American Political History

In September 1786, a Newport butcher named John Weeden refused to take paper money for a joint of meat, and demanded silver. Under Rhode Island law, that was a crime — punishable by a fine, the loss of his vote, and a trial with no jury and no appeal. This is the story of what happened next: the farmers who took a state government by lawful election and used it to save their farms, the merchants...

In 1786 the Congress of the United States asked the thirteen states for 3.8 million dollars to pay the debts of the Revolution. It collected 663 dollars. This is the story of the broken money machine underneath everything else in these years — the crisis that drove an army to the edge of mutiny, ruined the richest man in America, and finally put muskets in the hands of farmers. A government that...

He was the richest man in America, and for most of the Revolution he was also its treasury. When the United States had no money and no credit, it borrowed on the name of Robert Morris — a Philadelphia merchant who put his own fortune and signature behind a bankrupt government, kept General Washington’s army fed, and personally financed the campaign that won the war at Yorktown. This is the story...

In the spring of 1783, with the Revolution all but won, the most dangerous enemy of the United States was its own army. Unpaid for years, cheated of their promised pensions, the officers camped at Newburgh, New York, had every reason to be furious — and an anonymous letter, circulating hut to hut, told them the time for begging was over. A faction of politicians in Philadelphia, led by Alexander...

On December 23rd, 1783, in the Senate chamber at Annapolis, George Washington did the thing conquerors never do: he laid his commission at the feet of the Congress and went home to be a farmer — an act so astonishing that a stunned King George III reportedly called him “the greatest man in the world.” Three weeks later, in that very same room, that same Congress nearly failed to ratify the treaty...

If you've listening to this, you been with this show a while, scroll back to the beginning of the feed. Everything down there is new.Every episode from the start of this show has been remade. Season one, season two, all of it — re-researched, rewritten, re-recorded, and re-uploaded in place. Some seasons are even totally new content. The old files are gone. You don't have to do anything; if you...

Yorktown did not end the American Revolution. It ended the will to fight it — and that will broke not in Virginia but in London, and then in a rented room in Paris. This is the story of how the war was really won and then made real: Prime Minister Lord North taking the news “as he would have taken a ball in his breast” and crying “Oh God, it is all over”; a King who wanted the war more than any...

In October 1781, two armies closed a ring around a British force dug in at a Virginia tobacco port — and the American Revolution reached the field where it would be decided. This is the story of the siege of Yorktown: the parallels creeping closer night after night, the round-the-clock bombardment, and the midnight bayonet assault on Redoubts 9 and 10, where Alexander Hamilton’s light infantry...

After Charleston and Camden, the Continental Army in the South was a wreck — and George Washington sent it a limping Rhode Island foundryman named Nathanael Greene, who promptly did the one thing every rule of war forbids: with a stronger enemy in front of him, he divided his army. This is the story of how the Americans finally learned to beat the British in the South by refusing to fight them...

The most important battle of the American Revolution was fought without a single American in it. In September 1781, everything came down to one fact George Washington had preached for six years: whoever owned the sea would win the war. Lord Cornwallis had dug his army into a tobacco port called Yorktown, safe as long as the Royal Navy ruled the Chesapeake — and Washington, in the gamble of his...