Chapter 1

New Year’s Day 1775

Throughout Great Britain’s thirteen American colonies, New Year’s Day 1775 dawned with grave feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Relations with the colonies’ mother country had grown increasingly strained over the last decade—too many taxes; Crown troops quartered in colonists’ homes; intransigence at every turn when some measure of compromise might have better served both sides. And no matter which side one was on, there was an uncomfortable feeling of sitting on a powder keg and watching a fiery fuse burn ever shorter.

The thirteen colonies stretched more than one thousand miles along the Atlantic Seaboard from Georgia northward to Massachusetts, which still claimed Maine as its own. The many ranges of the Appalachian Mountains generally marked the colonies’ western boundaries, although a few frontier outposts had long been established beyond the mountains. The first complete census of these provinces would not be taken until 1790, but in 1775, the population was an estimated 2.5 million. About a fifth of them were enslaved.