It is August, 1680 in New Mexico. The rebelling Pueblo Indians have sprung their ambush and quickly killed 400 Spaniards. About 2500 survivors have concentrated in two groups, at the government buildings in Santa Fe, and 70 miles to the south at Isleta Pueblo. Each has reason to believe that everybody else has died, and they are alone. The Indians beseige Santa Fe, but Governor Antonio de Otermín leads a successful defense. Still, they are isolated and out of food, and determine to retreat to the recently established mission at El Paso. The southern group, under Lieutenant Garcia at Isleta, make the same decision. This is the history of that harrowing retreat, another amazing story of survival in the European settlement of today’s United States.

It is also the only time in American history that rebelling indigenous peoples entirely expelled an established European settlement from their territory. The Spaniards would, of course, eventually reconquer New Mexico, but not until 1692.

The settlement of the New Mexican refugees at El Paso would make it – for the moment – the third most populous settlement of Europeans in North America, and the functional beginning of the eventual New Spanish territory, Mexican state, Republic, and American State of Texas.

Maps of the Pueblo Revolt

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Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in 1680,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, October 1911.

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Retreat of the Spaniards from New Mexico in 1680, and the Beginnings of El Paso, I,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, October 1912.

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Retreat of the Spaniards from New Mexico in 1680, and the Beginnings of El Paso, II,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January 1913.

In August 1680, an alliance of Puebloan peoples, led by a mysterious religious man named Po’pay (also spelled Popé), launched a surprise attack that forced the Spanish entirely out of New Mexico 82 years after they had first settled it. Po’pay’s rebellion would combine elements that will remind longstanding listeners of King Philip’s War in New England and Opechancanough’s surprise attack in Virginia in March 1622. Unlike the Wampanoags and the Pamunkeys, however, Po’pay would achieve his war aims.

Along the way we examine the causes of the revolt, the preparations for the ambush, and the terrible first days setting up the siege of Santa Fe, which will be taken up next time.

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#98 A Kingdom of God on the Rio Grande

Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

John L. Kessell, Pueblos, Spaniards, and the Kingdom of New Mexico

Charles Wilson Hackett, “The Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico in 1680,” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, October 1911.

Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest

Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680

David Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spaniards

In 1677, the longtime residents of the old and remote county of Albemarle in northern Carolina, a collection of cranks and dissidents who had fled from Maryland and Virginia and were used to living free of interference from the Carolina proprietors and the Crown’s tax collectors, revolted against new attempts to collect duties on tobacco. Quite astonishingly, they succeeded! And not without some history comedy along the way.

In the long history of the Americans, it is easy to ignore Culpeper’s Rebellion. Virtually all surveys of American history do. Albemarle was small, a literal backwater, and not even the most important part of Carolina. Historians of North Carolina, however, see it as a truer reflection of the American Revolution, a century later, than the other colonial upheavals of the 1670s. The Albemarle rebels were an early example, in their democratic tax-avoiding free-trading don’t-tread-on-me resistance, of ideas that would later be taken up throughout English North America.

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#158 The Free County of Albemarle

#160 The Official Founding of North Carolina

Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Lindley S. Butler, A History of North Carolina in the Proprietary Era 1629-1729

Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713

Hugh F. Rankin, Upheaval in Albemarle: the Story of Culpeper’s Rebellion, 1675-1689

Twenty-five year-old bookseller Henry Knox, his 19 year-old brother Will, and teamsters led by John Becker, Sr., move a long “noble train” of 59 pieces of salvaged artillery from Fort Ticonderoga to Cambridge. The route crossed frozen rivers and the not-dreamlike Berkshire Mountains under unbelievably arduous conditions. As word spread, crowds of Americans would turn out to cheer them on, and serve them cider and whiskey.

The artillery, when hoisted to the commanding heights of Dorchester above Boston, would drive the British from their long occupation of that city, and they would never return.

It is a story of initiative, ingenuity, tenacity, survival, and charismatic leadership, and was perhaps the first miracle of many that would bless the American Revolution.

Map of the Noble Train’s route (not reflecting all the river crossings discussed in the episode):

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Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

William Hazelgrove, Henry Knox’s Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller’s Heroic Expedition That Saved the American Revolution

Thomas M. Campeau, Major, U.S. Army, “The Noble Train of Artillery: A Study Comparison of Current Doctrinal Concepts of the Mission Command Philosophy in History.” (Master’s thesis, pdf)

Exactly 250 years ago, a rotund twenty-five year-old Boston bookseller named Henry Knox was riding his horse between Springfield and Worcester Massachusetts, on his way to George Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge. Washington’s ragtag, ill-equipped Continental Army had kept the British garrison under General Thomas Gage bottled up in Boston and Charlestown since the summer of 1675.

Washington had a whole load of problems, including insufficient arms for his men, many with expiring enlistments that threatened to shrink his force by half or more. He also had almost no artillery, just 12 small cannon that Henry Knox, among others, had learned to operate while training with the local militia.

Geographically, the Boston of that era was essentially a bubble of land connected to the mainland by an incredibly narrow neck at Roxbury. Two hills loomed over the city from across the water – Breed’s Hill in Charlestown to Boston’s north, which the British had captured at great cost in the summer, and Dorchester Heights, to Boston’s south, which the British had not captured.

This is why it was very important – world historically important – that Henry Knox, on that day exactly 250 years ago, was commanding a convoy of artillery comprising 58 pieces and weighing more than 60 tons, pulled on purpose-built sleds by teams of oxen and horses all the way from Fort Ticonderoga, 300 miles away, over rivers and the Berkshires, during the coldest winter in memory. Within just a few days those guns would be in Cambridge, and not long after that, on the sixth anniversary of the Boston Massacre, would be entrenched on Dorchester Heights and open fire on the city and ships below. Henry Knox’s big guns would drive the British from Boston, for good.

The tale of that “noble train” of artillery, as Knox famously referred to it, is one of the more astonishing stories of military innovation, indefatigable perseverance, and inspired leadership in a war that had more than its share of such moments. It was also among the most important, because it came at a desperate period when the Americans needed a victory or the entire project of the Revolution might have fallen apart.

Map of Boston in 1775:

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Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

William Hazelgrove, Henry Knox’s Noble Train: The Story of a Boston Bookseller’s Heroic Expedition That Saved the American Revolution

Thomas M. Campeau, Major, U.S. Army, “The Noble Train of Artillery: A Study Comparison of Current Doctrinal Concepts of the Mission Command Philosophy in History.” (Master’s thesis, pdf)

Alexander C. Flick, “General Henry Knox’s Ticonderoga Expedition,” The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association, April 1928.

In the last episode on the Timeline, “Bacon’s Aftermath 1: Diplomacy and Conspiracy 1677-1685,” we looked at the political and geopolitical aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. This time we tackle the changes inside Virginia’s society and economy in the years following Bacon’s Rebellion, some of which may have been because of the Rebellion, and others of which probably would have happened anyway.

The first half of the episode looks at the governorship of Thomas, Lord Culpeper, and his deft efforts to give effect to the Crown’s desire “to substitute the benevolent despotism of the king for the rapacious local despotism that had brought on one rebellion and threatened to bring on another.” In the second half, we consider the rise of Black slavery in Virginia and the decline of indentured servitude in the quarter century following Bacon’s Rebellion, the economic foundations of the shift, and the untended and somewhat surprising social consequence that by the early 18th century Virginia was a much more stable society than it had been when it had depended on English indentured servants.

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Primary references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

John C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” The William and Mary Quarterly, July 2011.

“An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (Virginia, 1705)

Matthew Restall is an historian and author of over forty books, focusing on the Spanish Conquest era in the Americas; on Aztec and Maya history; on the history of colonial Mesoamerica, primarily Yucatan but including Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; on the historical African diaspora in the Americas; and on the history of popular music. Matthew is most recently the author of The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, the topic of and inspiration for this conversation. Finally, he is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director of Latin American Studies, at Pennsylvania State University.

We discussed the phenomenon of “Columbiana,” the vast mythology that has befogged the history and biography of Christopher Columbus, the man, almost entirely for purposes that he himself would not have understood. His book, which I quite recommend, addresses nine such “lives” and the historical mysteries around them. We touch on the four of those that I thought would most appeal to longstanding and attentive listeners – his early life and his pitching for the funding for the “Enterprise of the Indies” – which are the first two lives, and the curious resurrection of Columbus in the 19th century as the founding “grandfather” of the United States, followed by his last “life” – so far – as the great hero of Italian-Americans. This last leads to a discussion of the perception of Columbus today. Along the way we go down numerous rabbit holes, including that there is, even today, a direct descendant of Columbus who bears the title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea.”

Other relevant links

Matthew Restall, The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus

History Impossible Podcast, “War for the Frontiers of History and America (w/ Jack Henneman of The History of the Americans)”: Apple and Spotify

Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus

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This episode looks again at the causes of Bacon’s Rebellion in light of what we have now learned, before turning to the region of the Chesapeake in the years after the Rebellion.

There are two big themes in the post-Bacon Chesapeake. The first, the subject of this episode, is geopolitical. After Bacon, what changed in intercolonial affairs, in the relationship between the Chesapeake colonies and England, and between those colonies and the indigenous nations? The second theme, for part 2, is essentially domestic. How did Virginia itself change politically, economically, and socially, with a special emphasis on the terms of labor and the types of people performing it?

Along the way we look at the crazed conspiracy theories that roiled not only Virginia and Maryland, but England, how they affected the various protagonists, led to the negotiation of the “Covenant Chain” between the Iroquois and New York and the other English colonies of North America, and how the end of Bacon’s Rebellion unleashed explosive growth of the trade in enslaved Indians from the Carolinas and points south.

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Selected references for this episode (Commission earned for Amazon purchases through the episode notes on our website)

James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Josias (Josiah) Fendall

Other episodes mentioned

Notes on Virginia 1644-1675

The Free County of Albemarle

Rogues and Dogs and Fendall’s Rebellion