Reading 3 of 16 free1776 Club · all 16 storiesSunday, June 28
From the desk
Dive into the remarkable story of the Battle of Fort Sullivan, where a makeshift palmetto-log garrison held off Britain's first attempt to conquer the South. It's a testament to ingenuity and resilience that set the stage for the Declaration of Independence. Also, don't miss the tale of New England colonists capturing the formidable French fortress at Louisbourg, a victory that shook the foundations of colonial power dynamics.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1776Featured · This day in history
Palmetto Logs Hold: The Battle of Fort Sullivan Repels the British Fleet
Six weeks before the Declaration of Independence was signed, Britain's first attempt to crack open the South ran aground — literally — off the coast of South Carolina. On June 28, 1776, Admiral Sir Peter Parker's fleet of nine men-of-war and nearly 300 cannon opened a sustained bombardment on Fort Sullivan, a half-finished palmetto-log garrison held by Colonel William Moultrie and 435 men. The fort's spongy walls swallowed British cannonballs whole, one British ship ran aground on a sandbar, and General Henry Clinton's land assault stalled when the channel between Long Island and Sullivan's Island proved too deep to wade. The British withdrew to New York and did not return to South Carolina for four years.
Fort Sullivan (Fort Moultrie), Sullivan's Island, South CarolinaStory page →
The American Throughline
The victory rippled north almost immediately — Charlestonians learned of it within days of July 4, 1776, adding wind to the sails of independence. The battle also established the South's capacity for self-defense and bought four years of breathing room that allowed the southern colonies to supply the northern war effort. Fort Sullivan was renamed Fort Moultrie, and the palmetto became the emblem of South Carolina's state flag — still there today.
Did you know
QWhy did General Charles Lee, the senior Continental commander in Charleston, tell Moultrie he wasn't needed during the battle?
Lee had spent much of the day convinced the fort would fall and that Moultrie should abandon it rather than be trapped inside. He repeatedly urged retreat; Moultrie refused. When Lee finally came to the fort to see the situation himself mid-battle, he found the garrison calmly working their guns and the palmetto walls intact. His response, recorded by those present, was essentially a shrug: 'I see you are doing very well here, you have no occasion for me, I will go up to the town again.' The man nominally in command of the Southern theater took himself off the field, and the battle was won without him.
QWhat happened to the grounded British warship Acteon — and why did her crew set her on fire?
The Acteon ran aground on an uncharted sandbar during the battle, stranding her in range of the fort's guns and out of position to deliver the flanking fire Parker had planned. Her crew spent the night trying to free her and failed. The next morning, to prevent the fort's garrison from capturing the ship and her guns, her crew set the Acteon ablaze and abandoned her. A small party of Americans rowed out, boarded the burning vessel, fired her cannon at the rest of the retreating British fleet one last time, and escaped before she blew up. It was a small, sharp coda to the whole affair.
QHow did a half-finished fort's missing wall nearly become the battle's deciding factor — and what stopped Clinton's troops from exploiting it?
Fort Sullivan's landward wall had not been built when the British arrived. Clinton had roughly 2,000 troops on Long Island, just across a narrow channel from Sullivan's Island, and a land assault through that open rear could have overwhelmed Moultrie's 435 men regardless of what Parker's fleet did at sea. British intelligence reported the channel as fordable at low tide — eighteen inches deep. When Clinton's men waded in, they found it was actually seven feet deep in places. The channel could not be crossed without boats, which Clinton did not have in sufficient number. The fort's unfinished wall never mattered, because the water held the British army in place the entire day.
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1776military
Washington's Own Bodyguard Is Hanged for Treason
Six weeks before the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Army had a spy — or something close to one — inside Washington's own household. Thomas Hickey, an Irish-born private in the Commander-in-Chief's Life Guards, was arrested in the spring of 1776 on a minor charge of passing counterfeit money, then talked too freely in Bridewell prison about a much larger plot. On June 28, 1776, he was hanged at the corner of Chrystie and Grand Streets in New York before a crowd of 20,000 — the first Continental soldier executed for mutiny, sedition, and treachery.
Chrystie & Grand Streets, New York CityStory page →
The American Throughline
The Hickey affair gave the Revolution its first lesson in internal security: the threat wasn't only the British Army massing offshore. Washington's general order after the hanging — warning soldiers against "lewd women" and seditious company — was among his earliest attempts to define what discipline in a republican army looked like. The episode also planted a durable suspicion of Loyalists in New York that shaped how American memory sorted neighbor from traitor for generations.
Did you know
QWhy does the court-martial transcript call Hickey's commander 'Maj. Gibbs' when Gibbs wasn't promoted to Major until two years later?
Caleb Gibbs, the captain who commanded Washington's Life Guards, wasn't promoted to Major until June 29, 1778 — exactly two years and one day after Hickey's execution. The court-martial record that names him 'Maj. Gibbs' is either a transcription error, a later editorial revision, or evidence that the surviving document was recopied at some point after 1778. It's a small anachronism, but it's the kind of detail that reminds historians how many 'primary sources' passed through later hands before they reached the archive.
QWhat did Samuel Fraunces claim in a petition to Congress nine years after the execution — and what was he actually asking for?
In March 1785, Fraunces submitted a petition to Congress itemizing his wartime services and debts owed to him, and he included a striking claim: that he was 'the Person that first discovered the Conspiracy' against Washington's life in 1776, and that suspicion of his role in the discovery had once put his own life at risk. He was not seeking posthumous glory. He was asking Congress to pay him money. The petition was part of a broader accounting of services rendered during the war, and it remains the earliest documentary evidence connecting Fraunces to the Hickey affair — predating the romanticized Phoebe Fraunces legend by nearly a century.
QHow did a video game, a children's book, and a TV series all end up drawing from the same disputed legend about Hickey?
The Phoebe Fraunces story — the fictional housekeeper's daughter who saves Washington — entered popular culture through an 1876 children's book published exactly one hundred years after the event, when no one who might have corrected it was still alive. That version, embellished over time, fed into the 1977 children's novel 'Phoebe the Spy,' then the 2008 young-adult novel 'Chains,' then the AMC series 'Turn: Washington's Spies,' and then the 2012 video game 'Assassin's Creed III,' which cast Hickey outright as an assassin. Each adaptation borrowed from the one before it. The original source — a centennial-era story with no contemporary corroboration — is now buried under two centuries of retellings.
1865military
The Army of the Potomac Is Disbanded
Two months after Appomattox, the Union army that had bled through every major Eastern Theater campaign — Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness — ceased to exist as a military organization. On June 28, 1865, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade formally stood down the Army of the Potomac, exactly two years to the day after he had taken command on the eve of Gettysburg. The men had already marched one last time down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Grand Review of the Armies, cheered by Washington crowds who had spent four years reading casualty lists from the same regiments. The army that Lincoln had watched struggle, stumble, and finally grind the Confederacy down was gone before the summer was out.
The Army of the Potomac spent nearly four years as the most closely watched military force in American life — its victories celebrated, its defeats dissected in every Northern newspaper. Its disbandment marked the practical end of the mass Union war machine and set the template for how America demobilizes: rapidly, deliberately, and with a parade first. The veterans' organization it spawned, the Society of the Army of the Potomac, held reunions until 1927, threading the war's memory into living American life for more than six decades.
Did you know
QWhy did the Union's most famous army end up carrying the name of a Confederate force that had just defeated it?
When the Army of the Potomac was organized in July 1861, General P. G. T. Beauregard's Confederate army at the First Bull Run battlefield was also calling itself the Army of the Potomac — a name derived from the river both sides were contesting. The Union army that lost that battle then adopted the same name for the force being built to replace it. So the premier Union fighting force in the Eastern Theater spent all four years of the war carrying the name of the Confederate army it had just been routed by. Whether this was oversight, defiance, or simple geography is unclear. Either way, the Union kept it, and the Confederate version quietly disappeared as Beauregard's forces were redesignated.
QHow precisely symmetrical was Meade's command of the Army of the Potomac?
George Meade assumed command of the Army of the Potomac on June 28, 1863 — three days before Gettysburg — under pressure, in the dark, with almost no transition from his predecessor. The army was formally disbanded on June 28, 1865. His command lasted exactly two years to the day, bookended by the same date. He had taken over a force marching toward the bloodiest battle fought on American soil and stood it down after one of the longest sustained campaigns in the war's history. The precision of those dates is the kind of thing that looks arranged and wasn't.
QHow long did the Army of the Potomac's veterans keep meeting after the army itself ceased to exist?
The Society of the Army of the Potomac was founded in 1869, four years after disbandment, and held its last reunion in 1927 — sixty-two years after the army stood down and sixty-six years after the first men had mustered in following Bull Run. The veterans outlasted the army by more than six decades of annual gatherings. By the final reunion, the Civil War had receded past living memory for most Americans, but the men who had marched in the Grand Review were still showing up. The society ran longer than the army itself had existed by a factor of more than fifteen.
