Episode Details

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 waterline, and the threat to ship Americans across the ocean for trial that turned one colony’s crime into every colony’s fear. It runs through the committees of correspondence, the modest machinery of letters that became the nervous system of a revolution, and through young Dabney Carr of Virginia, who proposed the network that bound the colonies together and was dead within weeks, buried by his friend Thomas Jefferson. A revolution, John Adams said, that had already happened, in the minds and hearts of the people, before a single shot was fired.