The Long Fuse - Thirteen Clocks

American Political History · Oct 10, 2023 · 29m

After the Boston Massacre, the great quarrel with Britain seemed to burn out. The soldiers sailed home, the boycotts collapsed, and London congratulated itself that the trouble was over. It was not over. In the three quiet years that followed, a failed brewer named Samuel Adams set out to solve the problem that had always doomed American resistance: thirteen separate colonies that had no way to act as one.

This is the story of how the clocks were wired together. It runs through the moonless night a band of Rhode Island merchants rowed out to burn His Majesty’s schooner Gaspee to the…