“The enemy had thrown up three very extensive works”

Two hundred fifty years ago this morning Gen. William Howe looked across Boston harbor and saw that the Continental Army had erected fortifications on the heights of the Dorchester peninsula.

Those weren’t strong fortifications—they were primarily wooden, with fascines (bundles of sticks) lying between chandeliers (frames sticking up like the pickets of a fence). But Howe could see men at work strengthening those barriers with earth.

Sixteen days later, Howe described his response in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth:

On the 2d instant [i.e., of this month], at night, the rebels began a cannonade upon the town from Roxbury and Phipps’s Farm [in Cambridge], and threw some shells from both places, without doing any personal damage, and but little to the buildings; the same was repeated on the evenings of the 3d and 4th, by which only six men were wounded; the fire being returned from our batteries, but at such a distance as to be very uncertain in the execution.

It was discovered on the 5th, in the morning, that the enemy had thrown up three very extensive works, with strong abatis round them, on the commanding hill on Dorchester Neck, which must have been the employment of at least twelve thousand men in a situation so critical.

I determined upon an immediate attack, with all the force I could transport. The ardor of the troops encouraged me in this hazardous enterprise; regiments were expeditiously embarked on board transports to fall down the harbor, and flat-boats were to receive other troops, making the whole two thousand four hundred men, to rendezvous at Castle William, from whence the descent was to be made, on the night of the 5th, but the wind unfortunately coming contrary and blowing very hard, the ships were not able to get to their destination, and this circumstance also making it impossible to employ the boats, the attempt became impracticable.

The weather continuing boisterous the next day and night, gave the enemy time to improve their works, to bring up their cannon, and to put themselves into such a state of defence that I could promise myself little success by attacking them under all the disadvantages I had to encounter; wherefore I judged it most advisable to prepare for the evacuation of the town, upon the assurance of one month’s provision from Admiral [Molyneux] Shuldham, who, in this emergency, as he has on every other occasion, offered all the assistance he could afford.

The Continentals had actually armed their new forts with cannon on that first night. They had even brought the makings of barracks so that hundreds of soldiers could man those positions all night. It was a very well planned operation, a great contrast to the brave but ultimately unsuccessful improvisation that marked the provincial move onto the Charlestown peninsula the previous June.

Howe wrote that report on board H.M.S. Chatham, floating off the Massachusetts coast. The siege of Boston was over.

Archive in the Sky

In addition to the Freedom Trucks discussed yesterday, the federal government and its corporate donors are sending the Freedom Plane around the country bearing documents of national importance from the Founding period.

Those documents are listed on the plane’s own website. They are:

• William Stone’s 1823 engraving of the Declaration of Independence, which is both more common and more legible than the handwritten original. (This artifact is on loan from David M. Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group and collector of historical documents, while all the others are originals from the U.S. National Archives.)
• The Continental Congress’s Articles of Association from 1774, laying out the Continental Association boycott of goods from Britain.
• Oaths of allegiance signed by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr as Continental Army officers in 1778.
• The Treaty of Paris from 1783.
• A copy of the draft Constitution printed for delegates to the 1787 convention to debate and revise, this one with notes by David Brearley of New Jersey. 
• Chart of votes by states at that convention, including “The Constitution unanimously agreed to” (though Rhode Island didn’t send a delegation and New York’s was incomplete). 
• The Senate markup of the Bill of Rights in 1789, showing revisions of the language that came out of the House of Representatives. 

Legally the main omission is any form of the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which actually formed the United States of America into a single country. But we always overlook that. 

The plane’s itinerary is Kansas, Georgia, southern California, eastern Texas, Colorado, southern Florida, Michigan, and Washington. This national tour includes no stop in the Northeast.

“Touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop”

Among the Trump administration’s Sestercentennial initiatives are modern gladiatorial games outside the White House on the President’s birthday. Less decadently imperial are the Freedom Trucks mentioned yesterday.

These trucks were clearly inspired by the Freedom Train that traveled the country in 1947–49, giving citizens a look at 127 documents from the National Archives and other artifacts.

The most detailed list of those documents that I found is a Huntington Library catalogue description of “Heritage of Freedom,” the booklet given out to explain those items to visitors. The selection didn’t include the handwritten Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, or Constitution, but it did have the Congress-approved Bill of Rights, George Washington’s copy of the printed Constitution, and various letters and pamphlets from the Founding era. The display went back as far as the Magna Carta and Christopher Columbus, and as recently as the surrender of Germany and Japan.

The 1940s Freedom Train previously inspired the American Freedom Train of the Bicentennial period, 1975–76. This one carried Washington’s copy of the Constitution again, the original Louisiana Purchase, and other documents, but also one of Judy Garland’s dresses from The Wizard of Oz, Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit, and a Moon rock. It was like a rolling Smithsonian.

What will be in the Freedom Trucks? The New York Times reported:

The truck exhibits were designed in collaboration with Hillsdale College, a conservative school in Michigan, and PragerU, a company that makes conservative educational materials. . . . The trucks prominently feature quotes from Mr. Trump and a video he filmed inside the Oval Office.

On 27 February, the New Yorker offered a story by Jessica Winter about PragerU’s projects:

Last year, PragerU unveiled the Founders Museum, a “partnership” with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education featuring A.I.-generated video testimonials from luminaries of the American Revolution. These include a digitized John Adams who ventriloquizes the words of the right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro, almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.”

PragerU is also supplying the multimedia content for the Freedom Truck Mobile Museums, a travelling exhibition of touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop that will chug across the country on tractor-trailers throughout 2026, in celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the battle over who defines good and evil—or, at least, over who defines American history—will be waged, in part, from the helm of an eighteen-wheeler. . . .

Prager’s nonprofit is just one of dozens of conservative organizations, many of them Christian, that are named as “partners” in the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which is overseen by Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary. The coalition has the secular task of developing programming for America’s birthday, such as PragerU’s Founders Museum and the Freedom Trucks, the latter of which received a fourteen-million-dollar grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. (In March, President Trump signed executive orders to dismantle both the I.M.L.S. and the D.O.E.; they remain alive, albeit in shrunken, ideologized versions of their former selves.)

Other America 250 partners include both of the major pro-Trump think tanks (the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation), a Christian liberal-arts school (Hillsdale College), the Supreme Court’s favorite conservative-Christian legal-advocacy group (the Alliance Defending Freedom), the Christian-right-aligned church of Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), and something called Priests for Life.

Another notable detail from the New York Times: “Both institutions [Hillsdale and Prager U] said that they had not received any of the $10 million in taxpayer money and that they had funded their work with private donations.” That $10 million, you may remember from yesterday, was shifted by the White House from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to America250 and then to Freedom 250, ostensibly for these very trucks. What pocket is that money sitting in now?

TOMORROW: Up in the air.

The Sestercentennial as a Civil War?

Yesterday I quoted a couple of news stories about how the White House was using America250 to raise money, and how it set up another group called Freedom 250 to raise more money with fewer rules.

Boston 1775 readers may remember these reports from September of America250 fighting off a Trumpist staffer’s attempt to commandeer its communication channels. The White House lost its plant within that organization then. After that, it appears, the administration promoted a rival organization to suck attention and taxpayer funds away from America250.

Freedom 250 was originally named Task Force 250, an initiative ordered up within the Department of Defense in January 2025. (The administration has of course also tried to rename that government department, without congressional authorization.)

The Mother Jones article by Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore reported that the top of the National Park Service is now telling employees to replace all America250 references and logos with Freedom 250 insignias. There are competing sets of merchandise. (The internet working as it does, there’s also merch from Freedom250.net, a domain registered in September 2024 and operating out of Sandwich.)

The New York Times story by Kenneth P. Vogel, Lisa Friedman, and David A. Fahrenthold says: “About $10 million in taxpayer funds has already been redirected to Freedom 250 from America250 for a fleet of six mobile museums called ‘Freedom Trucks’ that rolled out last month.”

Where did that $10 million come from? The conduit is the Institute of Museum and Library Services. At first the Trump administration tried to shutter that agency entirely, but federal judges ruled that illegal—so the administration is exploiting that channel instead.

Kelly Jensen of BookRiot reported, “IMLS’s new leadership has decided that nearly all of the $14.1 million allocated to the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program is going to a single recipient, the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission for its America250 project, even though the America250 project has nothing to do with the Leadership Grant’s requirement that the grant recipient’s work ‘involve or directly impact libraries’.”

But that was back in September. Now, it appears, at least $10 million of that library money has been shifted over to Freedom 250 for trucks.

TOMORROW: About those trucks.

Sestercentennial for Sale

Here’s an excerpt from Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore’s article “Trump’s War on History,” in the March–April Mother Jones:

Uniformed troops were handing out free bottles of Phorm Energy—a beverage launched nationally the month before by Anheuser-Busch and Dana White, a vocal Trump supporter who runs the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Phorm, which bills itself as the “ultimate energy drink,” is an official sponsor of America250, a government-funded nonprofit organizing a series of celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday, culminating on July 4 this year.

When asked, a soldier explained he had been ordered to hand out the samples—despite Defense Department rules that bar the military from endorsing “a particular company, product, service, or website.” The Pentagon didn’t answer questions about this apparent violation.

So it goes with the Trump administration’s approach to the country’s semiquincentennial. Congress is expected to allocate some $150 million for the festivities, but that’s not enough to fulfill Trump’s vision. So corporations with links to the president or his inner circle—UFC, Palantir, Oracle, Amazon, Coinbase—have signed on as sponsors, pouring in millions of dollars alongside companies like Chrysler, Coca-­Cola, and General Mills.

The promise of all that cash and spectacle helped America250 lure a flock of political operatives with Trump ties. Chris LaCivita, who helped steer Trump’s 2024 campaign, joined as a strategic adviser. Campaign Nucleus, founded in 2021 by former Trump campaign honcho Brad Parscale, helped organize America250 events. So did Event Strategies, which staged Trump campaign gatherings in 2020 and 2024, as well as the January 6, 2021, rally near the White House that preceded the attack on the US Capitol. America250 said in January that it’s no longer working with these contractors but hasn’t disclosed how much they were paid.

America250 and the White House insist they are planning nonpartisan festivities for all Americans, rather than creating a slush fund to throw the president militarized birthday parties and advance hard-right ideology. But in reality, American history is being subordinated to Trump’s cult of personality. The president’s face is suddenly ­everywhere—next to George Washington on America250-themed National Parks passes; alongside Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on giant banners hanging from federal buildings; on a $1 coin under consideration by the US Treasury.

Faced with sporadic pushback from a congressional commission overseeing America250 and from career officials at various agencies, Trump is now seeking to evade even these modest constraints. In December, he launched a new organization, Freedom 250, that could implement his most outlandish anniversary events without the inconvenience of legislative oversight or mandatory bipartisanship. For the president’s 80th birthday this year, Freedom 250 will help organize a UFC fight on the White House lawn.

More about Freedom 250 appeared in the 8 February New York Times article “For $1 Million, Donors to U.S.A. Birthday Group Offered Access to Trump” by Kenneth P. Vogel, Lisa Friedman, and David A. Fahrenthold:

President Trump’s allies are offering access to him and other perks to donors who give at least $1 million to a new group supporting flashy initiatives he is planning around the nation’s 250th birthday, according to documents and interviews. . . .

Freedom 250 has also emerged as another vehicle, akin to the White House ballroom project, through which people and companies with interests before the Trump administration can make tax-deductible donations to gain access to, and seek favor with, a president who has maintained a keen interest in fund-raising, and a willingness to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters.

Several of Freedom 250’s planned events and monuments lack obvious connections to the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or other seminal moments in the nation’s founding. Rather, they are tailored to Mr. Trump’s political agenda and his penchant for spectacle, personal branding and legacy. They include the construction of an arch overlooking Washington, an IndyCar race through the nation’s capital, a national prayer event and an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn to coincide with the president’s 80th birthday.

Meredith O’Rourke, the president’s top fund-raiser, is amassing private donations for Freedom 250. Her team is circulating a solicitation, obtained by The New York Times, offering “bespoke packages” for donors.

While there are inconsistencies in the solicitation language, the detailed breakdowns of packages for donors indicate that those who give $1 million or more will get invitations to a “private Freedom 250 thank you reception” hosted by Mr. Trump, with a “historic photo opportunity.” Those who give $2.5 million or more also are being offered speaking roles at an event in Washington on July 4.

TOMORROW: Team of rivals?

(The photo above shows the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., displaying a large portrait of a man convicted of multiple felonies intended to influence a Presidential election.)