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Document: The Crown vs. Patrick Henry.  See: Hour 4, Blocks A & B, Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots by Thomas S. Kidd.

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 1, Block A: Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy by Thomas J. Schaeper (1 of 2)  THE HISTORICAL LEDGER gives famous spies and traitors a celebrity they rarely sought in their own lives. For Americans, treason and Benedict Arnold are synonymous. When we admire noble patriotism, we think of Nathan Hale, executed by the British as a spy in September 1776, regretting that he had only one life to give for his country. But the most accomplished spy of the American Revolution, Edward Bancroft, was a man whose name is known only to scholars. It took a whole century for knowledge of his espionage to become part of the history of the Revolution.

Bancroft was originally recalled as a minor but patriotic figure in diplomatic history, on the basis of his apparently unpaid service as an unofficial secretary to the American diplomatic mission in Paris. Only the publication in 1889 of Benjamin Franklin Stevens’s great photographic reference work, Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773-1783, demonstrated the key finding: that Edward Bancroft and the mysterious “Dr. Edwards,” who was a prime source of British intelligence, proved to be one and the same person. From April 1777 through the peace negotiations of 1782-1783, Bancroft kept the British government fully informed of the work of the American diplomatic mission in Paris. Throughout the war, King George III and Lord North knew far more about what the American diplomats in Paris were doing than the Continental Congress ever belatedly learned. Yet while Bancroft doubtless worried about his security, neither the Americans nor their French allies ever suspected that he was the source of the leaks that seemed to spring and even gush freely from the Franco-American friendship.

Thomas J. Schaeper’s biography is the first work of scholarship that gives Bancroft’s career the fair and properly inquisitive treatment it deserves. In many ways, this is a model biography, not so much in telling the full story of Bancroft’s life—significant parts of which remain elusive—but in carefully assessing what we do and do not know about his activities.

          In contrast to the detractors who have described and disparaged Bancroft ever since his treachery was revealed, Schaeper weighs the allegations and the charges against him one by one, and in doing so he repeatedly illustrates how history should properly be written. Schaeper takes no statement about the past for granted. He insists that every claim rest on some documented foundation.  Bancroft was born in January 1744 to a Massachusetts farming family. His father died of a seizure in a pigsty before Edward was two, and a few years later his mother remarried. Edward’s stepfather kept the family shuttling between Massachusetts and Connecticut before opening a tavern in Hartford. Edward must have shown strong intelligence as a youth, because at the age of fifteen he became a student of Silas Deane, a young Yale graduate who later became the first diplomatic commissioner whom the Continental Congress sent to Paris.  In 1760, Bancroft became an apprentice to a Connecticut physician, and began acquiring the distinctive intellectual interests he pursued thereafter. In 1763, as the Seven Years War ended, he skipped out of his apprenticeship and sailed off, first to Barbados, and then to Dutch Guiana on the South American mainland. Here he quickly parlayed his medical learning into employment as a “surgeon” to European plantation owners. By 1766, with his savings in hand, he left his medical tasks behind and began journeying through the surrounding countryside, keenly observing the flora and fauna. A year later he sailed briefly back to Barbados and New England before heading off to London, which became his permanent home until espionage drew him to Paris.  . . . 

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 1, Block B: Edward Bancroft: Scientist, Author, Spy by Thomas J. Schaeper  (2  of 2)  . . . All this might seem a mere prelude to Bancroft’s real life in diplomatic treachery. But grasping the course of Bancroft’s life is essential to Schaeper’s larger project. As his subtitle—Scientist, Author, Spy—suggests, the proper way to understand Bancroft is to ask how his plunge into espionage followed his prior activities. For Bancroft’s three years in Guiana became the basis for his initial success in metropolitan London. His first genuine claim to fame came with the publication in 1769 (when he was all of twenty-four) of his Natural History of Guiana, a work full of keen observations of natural life, including the behavior of aboriginal inhabitants, whom he viewed in dispassionate terms. By promising a glass of rum to any native who brought him a snake, Bancroft soon gained a collection of three hundred reptiles. His most celebrated observation was the recognition that the “torporific eel” (as he called it) stunned its adversaries with an electrical shock. In 1769, Bancroft also published a pro-American pamphlet on the imperial controversy over Parliament’s claims to jurisdiction over its colonies. He followed that four years later with a three-volume novel, The History of Charles Wentworth, set in England and Guiana.  For a provincial youth from an extremely modest background, this was an extraordinary record of accomplishment, and Bancroft was honored with election to the Royal Society in 1773, when he was still twenty-eight. One of his sponsors was Benjamin Franklin, the leading American in London, who naturally showed particular interest in Bancroft’s work on the electrifying eel. Franklin remained his patron thereafter, which accounts, of course, for his inclusion in the American embassy in Paris. Yet what Bancroft and Franklin also shared was an Atlantic identity that . . .  [more]

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 1, Block C: James Madison by Richard Brookhiser (1 of 2) “Richard Brookhiser has written a lively, deeply informed, and penetrating look at the small man who played such a big role in America’s founding.  Father of the Constitution, prime mover behind approval of the Bill of Rights, trusted advisor and confidant to the young nation’s first president, and its fourth chief executive himself, James Madison is also our country’s first practical politician.  He founded not just the first American political party, but also the American system of party politics itself.  For James Madison had come—after long study and extended practical experience—to believe deeply in majority rule, public opinion, and a government of, by and for the people.” -- Karl Rove  

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 1, Block D: James Madison by Richard Brookhiser (2 of 2).   “Madison is remembered today as one of the key framers of the Constitution and the drafter of the Bill of Rights; as the husband of the vivacious Dolley Madison; and as the president who barely escaped capture by the British punitive expedition that raided Washington during the War of 1812. But he deserves to be remembered for a great deal more. Richard Brookhiser, in the latest in his series of concise and highly readable books about the Founding Fathers, conveys the man in full and files a strong paternity suit pointing to Madison as the father of American politics.” -- Wall Street Journal

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 2, Block A: "The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America [Hardcover] Scott Weidensaul"  (1 of 4) “With a novelist's flair, he conveys the experiences of ordinary people pitted against powerful and unpredictable nature. . . Mr. Weidensaul invites readers to imagine the bloody ground beneath modern America's apparently tame landscape.”—The Wall Street Journal

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 2, Block B: "The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America [Hardcover] Scott Weidensaul"  (2 of 4)  Braddock’s defeat also served to catapult Washington into the first rank of colonial personages even though he was only 23 years old. He had achieved fame throughout the colonies for his expedition with Christopher Gist to carry a demand that the French evacuate the Ohio Valley. He achieved international notoriety for his conduct at Jumonville Glen and Fort Necessity. The French labeled him a cold blooded killer after the Iroquois chieftain Tanacharison tomahawked Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville and washed his hands in his brains over an insult he had received from the French commander at Fort Duquense.

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 2, Block C:  "The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America [Hardcover] Scott Weidensaul" (3 of 4). Author and naturalist Scott Weidensaul, who grew up in the heart of the old Eastern frontier, has written more than two dozen books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist, Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds

The attack on Fort Duquesne was part of a large-scale British expedition with 6,000 troops led by General John Forbes to drive the French out of the contested Ohio Country (the upper Ohio River Valley) and clear the way for an invasion of Canada. Forbes ordered Major James Grant of the 1st Highland Regiment to reconnoiter the area with 850 men. When Grant proceeded to attack the French position, his force was outmanouevred, surrounded, and largely destroyed by the French and their native allies led by François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery. Major Grant was taken prisoner and the British survivors retreated fitfully to Fort Ligonier.

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 2, Block D:  "The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America [Hardcover] Scott Weidensaul", 4 of 4

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 3, Block A:  LAURENCE BERGEN, COLUMBUS: The Four Voyages (1 of 2). Laurence Bergreen is the author of several award-winning biographies, including those of Louis Armstrong, Al Capone, Irving Berlin, and James Agee. He has written for many national publications including Esquire and Newsweek, taught at the New School for Social Research, and served as Assistant to the President of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. Bergreen has also served as a nonfiction judge for the National Book Awards and as a judge for the PEN/Albrand Nonfiction Award.   Voyage to Mars was an NBC-TV television movie that premiered in spring 2002. Bergreen lives in New York City.

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 3, Block B:  LAURENCE BERGEN, COLUMBUS: The Four Voyages (2 of 2)

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 3, Block C:  EMMA CHRISTOPHER A MERCILESS PLACE: The Fate of Britain's Convicts After the American Revolution.  (1 of 2) "It is a rare pleasure to review a book that will appeal not only to the specialist in the field, but also to the general reader. A Merciless Place is such a book, a work of original scholarship that clearly indicates years of hard labor in the archives, and also a beautifully crafted literary endeavor, one that should attract anyone who appreciates excellent writing . . . Thoroughly researched, brilliantly written, deeply humane, A Merciless Place is a model of modern legal scholarship." --H-Net

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 3, Block D:  EMMA CHRISTOPHER A MERCILESS PLACE: The Fate of Britain's Convicts After the American Revolution. (2 of 2)  Emma Christopher is an Australian Research Council Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Slave Trade Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1807 and co-editor of Many Middle Passages. She has been a Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library and a Gilder Lehrman Fellow at Yale University

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 4, Block A:  Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots by Thomas S. Kidd  (1 of 2) An Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, winner of a 2006–2007 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and author of numerous books on American religious history, Thomas S. Kidd lives in Waco, Texas. 

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 4, Block B:  Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots by Thomas S. Kidd  (2 of 2)

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 4, Block C:   DAVID S. REYNOLDS, MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.  (1 of 2) “Consistently enlightening. . . . Mightier than the Sword deftly explores the social-intellectual context and personal experience out of which Stowe’s novel evolved into a grand entertainment and a titanic engine of change.” --Dan Crye, Boston Globe

Thursday 4 July 2013 / Hour 4, Block D:  DAVID S. REYNOLDS, MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.  (2 of 2) David S. Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author or editor of 15 books, including "Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America," "Walt Whitman's America," "John Brown, Abolitionist," "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson," "George Lippard," "Faith in Fiction," and "Beneath the American Renaissance." He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been interviewed some 80 times on radio and TV, on shows including NPR's "Fresh Air," "Weekend Edition," and "The Diane Rehm Show," ABC's "The John Batchelor Show," and C-SPAN's "After Words," Brian Lamb's "Book Notes," and "Book TV." He is a regular contributor to "The New York Times Book Review" and is included in "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in American Education," and "Who's Who in the World." David Reynolds was born in Providence, Rhode Island. For much of his childhood he lived in West Barrington, Rhode Island, in a home attached to the Nayatt Point Lighthouse (built in 1828). His father, Paul Reynolds, sold life insurance and later became an artist. His mother, Adelaide Koch Reynolds, was an artist, art teacher, and sometime-illustrator who designed newspapers ads and Hallmark greeting cards. David Reynolds attended the Providence Country Day School, where he later taught for a year after his graduation from college. He received the B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught American literature and American Studies at Northwestern University, Barnard College, New York University, Rutgers University, Baruch College, and the Sorbonne-Paris III. Since 2006, he has been at the CUNY Graduate Center. Besides writing and teaching, he enjoys songwriting and tennis as hobbies.

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