Reading 3 of 12 free1776 Club · all 12 storiesSunday, July 5
From the desk
Start with 1814 and Chippawa: British General Riall looked at Winfield Scott's gray-clad troops and guessed militia, easy work. Twenty-five minutes of volley fire later, his lines broke, and the U.S. Army had proof its regulars could stand toe to toe with Britain's best. Also on this date, Task Force Smith's rout at Osan opened the Korean War at a brutal cost.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1814Featured · This day in history
War of 1812: The Battle of Chippawa
By early 1814, Napoleon's defeat in Europe freed British veterans to sail for Canada, and Secretary of War John Armstrong Jr. wanted an American victory before they arrived. On July 5, near the Niagara River at Chippawa, Ontario, Brigadier General Winfield Scott's brigade met British Major General Phineas Riall's Right Division in open ground. Riall, mistaking Scott's gray-clad regulars for militia, advanced his troops into a crossfire and watched his lines break after roughly 25 minutes of volley fire. It was a landmark demonstration that trained American regulars could hold their own against British regulars in a standing fight.
Chippawa proved the U.S. Army could be built, not just raised, and Scott's rigorous drilling at Buffalo became the template for professional training that followed. The lineage runs forward literally: ten current U.S. Army infantry battalions still perpetuate regiments that stood in that line, and the 6th Infantry Regiment carries the motto "Regulars, by God" in tribute.
Did you know
QWhy did Winfield Scott's men fight in gray instead of the Army's regulation blue?
A supply mix-up diverted the blue uniforms meant for Scott's brigade elsewhere in the quartermaster system, leaving his men to march on Chippawa in gray roundabouts intended only as a stopgap. Scott, notoriously particular about appearance and discipline, had separately blasted the black coatees given to the 21st US Infantry as "a disgrace to the uniform and soldier of the army of the United States" and given away his own spare blue coats rather than let them wear it. The gray cloth turned into an accidental piece of battlefield deception: British commander Phineas Riall glanced at the color and assumed militia, not trained regulars. West Point's cadet gray uniform is often said to trace its origin to this same battlefield mix-up.
QWhat happened to Winfield Scott before the battle even started?
While breakfasting in a farmhouse near his outposts, Scott came close to being captured by British light infantry, militia, and allied Indian forces who had begun sniping at his pickets from the surrounding woods. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Pearson's covering force had been driven back the day before, on July 4, as Scott advanced north from Fort Erie; the sniping and near-capture of Scott on the morning of July 5 came from a separate British light infantry, militia, and Indian force preceding Riall's main body. It was a brief, largely overlooked skirmish before the main battle began later that morning.
QHow badly was the British 100th Regiment hurt at Chippawa?
Official returns listed heavy British losses across the board, but the 100th Regiment's collapse was recorded in particularly stark terms: after the battle it was left with "one Captain and 3 subalterns doing duty, with 250 effective men." A separate U.S. Army document signed by Assistant Inspector-General Azariah Horne recorded the numbers of captured British wounded and unwounded prisoners, while Captains Bird and Wilson were separately listed in the official British casualty return as wounded and taken prisoner. Modern research suggests the actual kill count was lower than the official 148 reported dead, closer to 74 regulars, 18 militiamen, and 16 Indians, with more men captured than originally recorded.
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1775government
Congress Adopts the Olive Branch Petition
By July 1775, colonial militia had already fought the British at Lexington and Concord, but Congress still hoped to avoid a full war. Meeting in Philadelphia, delegates approved the Olive Branch Petition on July 5, a direct appeal to King George III affirming loyalty while asking him to repeal the Intolerable Acts. John Hancock and the other delegates signed it on July 8, and envoys Richard Penn and Arthur Lee carried it to London. The king refused even to read it.
The Petition was the last formal attempt by American colonists to stay British subjects. Its rejection, followed by George III's Proclamation of Rebellion, handed John Adams the argument he needed: reconciliation was dead, and independence was the only option left. That pivot, argued in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, set the colonies on the road to July 4, 1776.
Did you know
QWhy is Georgia missing from a petition meant to represent all thirteen colonies?
Georgia had not sent delegates to the Second Continental Congress when the petition was drafted, so the document names only twelve colonies. The youngest and most exposed of the British colonies, Georgia relied on royal troops for protection against Creek and Cherokee raids along its frontier and was slower than its neighbors to embrace a break with the crown that might leave it undefended. Georgia would eventually join the Continental cause, but its absence from the Olive Branch Petition is a small reminder that the thirteen colonies did not move toward revolution in lockstep. Some had far more to lose than others.
QWhat happened to the private letter John Adams wrote dismissing the petition he had just signed?
Adams wrote to a friend that the petition was pointless, that war was already inevitable, and that Congress should be raising a navy and taking British officials prisoner rather than pleading with the King. British officials intercepted the letter before it reached its destination and had it published, using Adams's own words to paint the entire American delegation as insincere negotiators. It was an early lesson in how private correspondence could become public ammunition, and it did nothing for Adams's popularity among the petition's genuine supporters in Congress.
QWhat exact procedural excuse did the British government give for never answering the petition?
Lord Dartmouth, the Colonial Secretary who accepted the document from Richard Penn and Arthur Lee, gave an answer that was really a non-answer: no reply would be given because the King had not received the petition while seated on his throne. It was a technicality dressed up as protocol, a way of declining to engage without the political cost of an outright public refusal. The petition itself now sits in London's National Archives, filed away as a diplomatic dead end rather than the reconciliation it was written to secure.
1859exploration
Captain Brooks Claims Midway Atoll for the United States
Nine years before the transcontinental railroad, American ships were already looking past California toward Asia. On July 5, 1859, Captain N.C. Brooks of the sealing ship Gambia sighted a tiny atoll roughly a third of the way from Honolulu to Tokyo, Japan and claimed it for the United States under the Guano Islands Act of 1856. He called it the "Middlebrook Islands." No one ever mined a scrap of guano there, but the claim would eventually contribute to Midway becoming the first Pacific island formally annexed by the United States, though that annexation did not occur until Captain Reynolds's visit in 1867.
Brooks's guano claim looked like a footnote for decades, but the atoll's location, equidistant between North America and Asia, made it indispensable once technology caught up: a Pacific telegraph relay station in 1903, then a naval air station. That same geography turned it into the site of the June 1942 battle that broke Japan's carrier fleet and turned the Pacific war.
Did you know
QWhy does Midway run on a completely different clock than the rest of Hawaii?
Every other island in the Hawaiian archipelago runs on Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time, but Midway keeps Samoa Time (UTC-11:00), an hour behind its neighbors. Midway is also one of only three islands in the Hawaiian Islands chain that isn't part of the state of Hawaii; its exclusion traces back to the 1867 annexation making it a separate U.S. possession, a status later confirmed when the Hawaii Admission Act of 1959 explicitly excluded Midway from the new state's jurisdiction. So a bird flying from Honolulu to Midway crosses a state line and a time zone without ever leaving American soil.
QWhat were the three landmasses Brooks and Reynolds actually claimed?
Midway Atoll is really three islands arranged in a rough circle around a central lagoon: Sand Island, Eastern Island, and Spit Island. Only Sand Island has ever been inhabited or developed, and it still has an airstrip today. Eastern Island has no facilities and no residents. Spit Island is barely more than a narrow reef poking above the waterline. The entire atoll totals about 2.4 square miles, a footprint smaller than many American shopping districts, yet it produced one of the most consequential place-names in Pacific War history.
QHow old is the volcanic rock beneath Midway's lagoon?
The atoll formed roughly 28 million years ago from an extinct shield volcano that has long since eroded and subsided beneath the Pacific, leaving only the coral rim visible today. In Hawaiian, the atoll carries two older names: Kuaihelani, meaning "the backbone of heaven," and Pihemanu, "the loud din of birds," a nod to the enormous seabird colonies that still nest there. Brooks's 1859 claim was, geologically speaking, staking a flag on the tip of an ancient underwater mountain.
