Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesSunday, October 18
From the desk
Start with 1775: Captain Henry Mowat gave Falmouth two hours to evacuate and swear loyalty to the King. The townspeople refused, so his ships poured incendiary shot into the town for nine hours until nothing stood above its foundations. Worth a longer look is 1867, when Russian and American troops paraded at Sitka and the Russian double eagle snagged on the flagpole, needing three soldiers to free it before the American flag finally went up. Puerto Rico's flag-raising in 1898 closed four centuries of Spanish rule the same day.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1775Featured · This day in history
Mowat's ships reduce Falmouth to ash after the town refuses to swear allegiance
On October 18, 1775, with the British army pinned down in Boston, and Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves wanted coastal towns punished for arming the rebellion. Captain Henry Mowat anchored off Falmouth, Massachusetts (today's Portland, Maine), on October 18, and gave the town two hours to evacuate and swear loyalty to the King. The townspeople refused. Mowat's ships fired incendiary shot for nine hours, burning the town to its foundations.
Washington called it "an Outrage exceeding in Barbarity & Cruelty every hostile Act practised among civilized Nations" in a letter to Hancock, and the burning, along with Washington's letter to Hancock, factored into the Second Continental Congress's vote to authorize its first warships on October 30. A coastal town with no way to answer naval fire became Congress's case for building a navy.
Did you know
QWhy did Captain Mowat's own service record later hide what he did at Falmouth?
Mowat spent the rest of his career quietly scrubbing the burning of Falmouth from his own history. He was passed over for promotion repeatedly in the years after 1775, and his official record from that period downplays or omits his role in the attack. The town that made him notorious in America became a liability in London, where a reputation for torching civilian property did not help an officer seeking promotion. He eventually did rise in rank, but only after the raid stopped following him on paper. He spent decades trying to keep that sentence out of his own record.
QWhat did Falmouth get from Massachusetts to survive that first winter without homes?
The Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent £250 and arranged corn shipments to the burned-out town, the only organized relief standing between roughly 160 homeless families and a Maine winter with no houses left standing. It was a modest sum against losses the town itself tallied above £50,000. By 1784, Falmouth had rebuilt only 40 homes and 10 shops. Full recovery stretched further still: by 1797, over 400 homes and municipal buildings were finally back. The congress's £250 wasn't restitution. It was meant only to get families through the cold months while the town figured out how to exist again.
QWhat newspaper line turned the attack into proof of British savagery for colonial readers?
The New-England Chronicle told its readers the raid showed Britain was "fully determined with fire and sword, to butcher and destroy, beggar and enslave the whole American people." That line ran alongside reports of the bombardment and did real work shaping how colonists outside Massachusetts understood what had happened on the Maine coast. Combined with Washington's letter to Hancock, it helped frame Falmouth not as an isolated naval reprisal but as a preview of what British policy intended for every port town that defied the Crown. Newspapers used the fire to build the case that no coastal town was safe.
The Daily Record · free by email
Tomorrow's edition in your inbox — one story, one quote, the flag.
1867government
At Sitka, the eagle flag comes down and the stars and stripes go up over Alaska
Six months after the Senate ratified a treaty few Americans understood, the paperwork finally took physical form. On October 18, 1867, Russian and American troops paraded before the governor's house in Sitka as Captain Aleksei Peshchurov told General Lovell Rousseau, "I transfer to the United States the territory of Alaska." The Russian double eagle snagged on the flagpole spar and took three soldiers to free before the American flag went up amid artillery fire from shore and ship. By nightfall, American soldiers stood guard at the gates of the Tlingit village where Russians had stood the day before.
The transfer made the United States a two-ocean, two-hemisphere power for a fraction of the federal budget. Critics mocked Secretary Seward's deal as "Seward's Folly" and "Walrussia," a joke that held for three decades until Klondike gold, and later oil, proved the price absurdly low.
Did you know
QHow many people actually lived in Alaska when the United States took possession of it?
Roughly 60,000 people, and the vast majority were not Russian. The territory held about 8,000 indigenous residents and 2,500 of Russian or mixed descent clustered around 23 trading posts, with Sitka (called New Archangel) and St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands as the largest outposts. Outside Russian jurisdiction entirely lived an estimated 50,000 Inuit and Alaska Native people who had no part in the sale and no say in the ceremony at Sitka. Washington had effectively bought sovereignty over a population it barely counted and a land it had not surveyed.
QWhat turned the seal-hunting grounds of Alaska into steady money for the federal government?
Fur seals. From 1870 to 1890, the Pribilof Islands rookeries that Russia handed over yielded 100,000 seal skins a year, a harvest that became one of the first reliable revenue streams to justify the $7.2 million purchase price before gold or oil ever entered the picture. The harvest mattered politically: critics who mocked the deal as a frozen wasteland had to reckon with a commodity market generating steady income within three years of the flag-raising. It came three decades before the Klondike rush, but it was the first hard evidence the purchase might pay for itself.
QWhy do some Alaska Native communities treat October 18 as a day of mourning rather than celebration?
Because the holiday marks a transaction they were never party to. Alaska Day became an official observance in 1917 when the territorial legislature declared it, but the sale it commemorates was negotiated entirely between St. Petersburg and Washington, with no Tlingit or other indigenous representatives at the table. Some Alaska Native communities today view the holiday as commemorating the erosion of their sovereignty rather than a transfer worth celebrating, since the deal rearranged control over their homeland without their consent nearly a century before Alaska became a state. The anniversary carries two opposite meanings depending on who is marking it.
1898government
Spain's flag comes down in San Juan; the United States takes Puerto Rico
By the autumn of 1898, Spain's war with the United States had already been over for two months, settled by an armistice signed August 12. On October 18, the last Spanish troops left Puerto Rico and American officers raised the flag over public buildings in San Juan, formally transferring sovereignty of the island to the United States. Roughly 400 years of Spanish colonial rule ended that day. Puerto Rico's status as U.S. territory would not be settled on paper until the Treaty of Paris took effect the following April.
October 18, 1898, opened the unresolved question of what Puerto Rico actually is to the United States. The island became an unincorporated territory, governed by Washington without statehood, its residents granted citizenship in 1917 but not full representation in Congress. That unfinished arrangement, born on this date, is still being argued in Congress and the courts.
Did you know
QWhy does Puerto Rico's own name for itself have nothing to do with Spain or the United States?
Puerto Ricans often call their island Boricua, a term drawn from the Taino word Boriquen, meaning roughly "Land of the Valiant Lord." The name predates both Ponce de Leon's 1508 colonization and the 1898 change of flags by centuries, surviving the near-total collapse of the Taino population under Spanish rule. Spain never managed to erase it, nor did the United States try. Today Boricua functions as a term of cultural identity used by Puerto Ricans on the island and in diaspora communities alike, a linguistic holdover from the people who lived there before either colonial power arrived.
QWhy did Spain start handing out land deeds to foreigners decades before it lost Puerto Rico?
In the 1800s the Spanish Crown revived the Royal Decree of Graces of 1815, a policy originally meant to lure new settlers to the island with land and tax incentives. By the late 19th century, officials leaned on it again for a different reason: diluting the population with newcomers loyal to Spain was seen as a way to blunt the independence movements gaining strength across Puerto Rico and neighboring Cuba. The decree had nothing to do with the eventual American takeover, but it shows Madrid was already worried about losing its grip on the island long before Admiral Wainwright's gunboat ever appeared off Guánica Bay.
QWhy did the U.S. government spell Puerto Rico's name wrong for more than three decades?
After the Treaty of Paris took effect in 1899, American officials rendered the island's name as "Porto Rico," dropping the first "u" in a simplified Anglicized spelling. That version stuck in U.S. law, maps, and currency for 33 years. Congress only restored the original Spanish spelling, Puerto Rico, in 1931. The reversal came well after the Foraker Act of 1900 had already set up civil government, decades before the political status debates that still dominate discussions of the island today reached their current form.
$17.76 your first year · then $39.99/yr · cancel anytime
Quote of the day
“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.”
