America's First Chaplain is a biography of the life of Philadelphia's Jacob Duche, the Anglican minister who offered the most famous prayer and wrote one of the most infamous letters of the American Revolution. For the prayer to open the First Continental Congress, Duche was declared a national hero and named the first chaplain to the newly independent American Congress. For the letter written to George Washington imploring the general to encourage Congress to rescind independence, he was accused of high treason and sent into exile. As a result of this apparently irreconcilable contradiction...

In the summer of 1813, as war with Britain intensified, President James Madison secretly dispatched an envoy to the Regency government of Spain with the urgent goal of thwarting a feared British bid to use Spanish Florida as a base from which to attack the United States, and with the further hope of acquiring that territory for America. The man Madison sent to pursue those challenging tasks was Anthony Morris, a friend of Dolley Madison's from their youth in Philadelphia and a devout Quaker lawyer who had never before journeyed abroad. Morris, a widower, had willingly accepted the president's...