The
British wanted to win the Revolutionary War, but they had good reasons for not
trying too hard….
Read the full post on my new website:
Showing posts with label Revolutionary War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Revolutionary War. Show all posts
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Friday, November 18, 2016
Mr. Grumpy (235 years ago)
William Pitt the Younger
had nothing nice to say about the American Revolutionary War.
Read the full post on my new website:
Monday, October 10, 2016
The Revolutionary War didn't end at Yorktown
If you’re interested in early American history you probably recall that the British surrendered to George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.
Hold it. The Revolutionary War didn’t end there.
In the two years following Yorktown, there were hundreds of skirmishes and combat encounters, largely in the American South, between soldiers of the Continental and British armies, and among pro-American and pro-British militias and many American Indian warriors.
King George III didn’t get around to issuing his Proclamation of Cessation of Hostilities until February 3, 1783.
On the high seas, after Yorktown, there were continuing naval encounters involving privateers and both Continental Navy and Royal Navy vessels as late as March 1783.
The war ended officially when the Treaty of Paris was finally signed on September 3, 1783.
News traveled slowly in those days. The last contingent of British troops in North America left New York City on November 26, 1783.
Read this review of Don Glickstein’s book After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for American Independence:
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Book review: American Crisis
Book review:
William M. Fowler, Jr., American
Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783
(New York: Walker and Company, 2011)
340 pages
American Crisis offers many
teaching moments to students of American Revolutionary history.
 |
| Washington enters Boston, 1783 |
The war didn’t end at Yorktown. British troops finally left New York City more
than two years later.
Some might speculate that the war effectively ended before that
dramatic capitulation at Yorktown in October 1781, because the British never
allocated the land and naval forces that were needed to force the colonials to
give up. Certainly, the hostilities did not end when Cornwallis threw in the
towel.
Fowler weaves military, political and diplomatic details together in
describing “the dangerous two years” between Yorktown and the official signing
of the peace treaty in 1783.
 |
| Parliament during Revolutionary War |
It’s difficult for us in modern times, so accustomed to light-speed
communications, to understand the frustration and limitations faced by military
commanders, Congress, king and Parliament in the late 18th century.
A round trip across the Atlantic could easily take two months or more.
Washington could communicate with his officers and Congress only as fast as a
horse could travel. British commanders in America were largely on their own in
making tactical and strategic decisions. Parliament, the king and American
diplomats negotiating peace had to act in perpetual ignorance of recent
military actions in North America.
The feckless sloth and impotence of the Second Continental Congress,
and (after 1781) the Congress of the Confederation, is a central theme in
Fowler’s account. American troops went unfed, unclothed and unpaid for long
months and years. The troops committed technically mutinous disobedience about
50 times, and Washington’s officers pushed close indeed to open revolt in their
largely unsuccessful efforts to get paid as the end of the war draw closer.
The principal obstacle to forthright action in the congress was its
inability to raise money: national taxes needed unanimous consent of the 13 states,
which mostly never happened, and the individual states mostly refused to pony
up funds from their own resources to support the army. Thus, “the dangerous two
years”—if the British had had the military capability to defeat Washington’s
army, likely it could have done so. Luckily for us, the king and his ministers
never beefed up their army and navy enough to win the war in North America.
In effect, Washington held them off until they gave up.
Fowler says it much better than I can.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Friday, April 29, 2016
The “Bill of Rights” wasn’t
The
“Bill of Rights” wasn’t “The Bill of Rights” in the 1790s when it was first
proposed.
Simply,
no one called it “The Bill of Rights” then, not officially, not in print, not
in the often contentious debate that preceded its adoption in 1791, three years
after the Constitution was ratified.
Thomas
Jefferson, then Secretary of State, described “certain articles in addition and
amendment of the Constitution of the United States” when he sent out to the
states the list of 10 amendments that had been approved.
 |
| The first 10 Amendments |
In
fact, 12 amendments had been drafted to satisfy the concerns of the
Anti-Federalists, who had opposed the ratification of the Constitution itself
because they resisted the creation of a federal government with centralized
power.
It’s
not well known that the original Article 12 of the first batch was finally
ratified as the 27th Amendment in 1992. It states: “No law, varying the compensation for the services of
the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of
Representatives shall have intervened.”
The
original Article 1 has never been ratified. It proposed that members of the U.
S. House of Representatives should not represent more than 50,000 persons per
congressional district. In the first Congress formed after the Constitution was
adopted, each congressman represented about 30,000 people. Today, U. S. representatives
are elected from districts containing roughly 730,000 people—if the 50,000
limit were in effect, there would be almost 6,400 seats in the House.
Don’t
even think about it.
Source:
See
Pauline Maier’s books on the U. S. Constitution
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Our Constitution: the people did not speak
The U. S. Constitution is the primary legal and political document
in our history, our heritage, our political organization and our culture.
It was written largely by wealthy white men (about
two-thirds of them were lawyers), and about 4% of the population voted for the
delegates who ratified it.
Vox populi had nothing to do with it, just saying.
“We the People…” is a bit of an exaggeration.
I guess some folks may imagine that it was originally written
on tablets by those mythical great men, The Founding Fathers.
To make a very long story short, the Constitution
is a grotesquely politicized document that was conceived more or less on the
sly by colonial delegates whose mandate merely was to fix up the Articles of
Confederation and Perpetual Union (ratified 1781).
The Articles of Confederation permitted little centralized
power in the brand new republic, and they proved close to useless in the
initial efforts to effectively govern the independent colonies, defend their sovereignty
and manage their internal trade and civil affairs.
On February 21,
1787, the Congress convened state delegates in Philadelphia for the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of
Confederation" and to “render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government
and the preservation of the Union."
Generally,
the delegates were the same elite group of men—wealthy and politically
connected—who dominated the state legislatures after the Revolutionary War.
They
went hog wild and cooked up the Constitution with centralized “federal” powers
that were feared by many political and commercial interests. They did back room
bargaining and political horse trading in Philadelphia and among the states to
ultimately engineer ratification of the Constitution by state legislatures or specially
convened assemblies in 11 states in late 1788. North Carolina and Rhode Island
finally joined the crowd in 1790.
By
the way, there was no popular vote on the Constitution. In fact, only about
150,000 white men voted for the delegates to state conventions that ratified
the document. In 1787, the total white population of the 13 former colonies was
about 3,671,000.
Copyright ©
Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
The Revolutionary War didn’t end at Yorktown
If you’re interested in early American history you probably
recall that the British surrendered to George Washington and the Marquis de
Lafayette at Yorktown on October 19, 1781.
Hold it. The Revolutionary War didn’t end there.
In the two years following Yorktown, there were hundreds of
skirmishes and combat encounters, largely in the American South, between
soldiers of the Continental and British armies, and among pro-American and
pro-British militias and many American Indian warriors.
King George III didn’t get around to issuing his
Proclamation of Cessation of Hostilities until February 3, 1783.
On the high seas, after Yorktown, there were continuing naval encounters involving privateers and both Continental Navy and Royal Navy
vessels as late as March 1783.
 |
| Washington enters New York City in November 1783 |
The war ended officially when the Treaty of Paris was
finally signed on September 3, 1783.
News traveled slowly in those days. The last contingent of
British troops in North America left New York City on November 26, 1783.
Read this review of Don Glickstein’s book After Yorktown: The Final Struggle for
American Independence:
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
You won’t hear this in the debates
Our politicians today don’t talk about ideas and ideals the
way some pols did in days gone by.
I’m not saying—no way!—that politics and politicians were
somehow better in the mythical “good old days.” The sham and the shenanigans
and the shame have always been there.
Every so often, at least, lip service is given to the notion
of doing the right thing for the right reasons.
How about this:
“Public good is not a term opposed to the good of
individuals. On the contrary, it is the good of every individual collected. It
is the good of all, because it is the good of every one.”
I think that’s a decent approximation of the common sense
meaning of “the common good.”
p.s. The quote is from Thomas Paine, 1778. He’s the guy who
wrote the blockbuster Revolutionary War pamphlet, Common
Sense.
Source:
Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (London:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 89.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Book review: An Empire on the Edge
The
British wanted to win the Revolutionary War, but they had good reasons for not
trying too hard….
This post has been moved to
my website:
Monday, October 13, 2014
Book review: Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership . . .
Book review: Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership from the Idealist General
by Marc Leepson (b.1945)
Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011
202 pages
I’m a first-time reader of
Lafayette biographies, so I’ll acknowledge that Leepson entertains by
re-stating the obvious: Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de la Fayette
was a national, military, political and, indeed, a paternal hero to millions in
America and France during the American and (several) French revolutions.
There is no doubt that, despite the fact that he was one of the richest French nobles of his time, he was publicly and privately dedicated to republican government and a social/economic order that was far more egalitarian than the monarchical and aristocratic structures that prevailed.
Was Lafayette a great man? Leepson, like many of his biographers, says yes. Lafayette was a courageous battlefield leader, he was an enlightened manorial lord who enhanced the lives of his peasants, and he was both outspoken and fearless, repeatedly, in literally dangerous political situations for a couple decades in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Leepson amply demonstrates these lifelong characteristics of the man Americans called “our Marquis.”
I feel obliged to call attention to some countervailing factors that Leepson fully describes but does not adequately interpret.
Lafayette put his money where his mouth was. He repeatedly used his great personal wealth to pay and outfit the troops he commanded, when government funds and supplies ran low. I suggest a case could be made that the Marquis, almost uniquely among American commanders, paid for his military success in the Revolutionary War. Throughout the war, the options and operations of colonial commanders were significantly hindered by short funds and short supplies. If Lafayette had not been able to pay, feed, clothe and arm his troops with his personal resources, could he have been as winning a general as he was? I suspect the answer is “No.”
Some biographers refer to Lafayette as the “victor” at Yorktown in 1781. Leepson says that Lafayette’s campaigning in Virginia in the spring and summer of 1781 “led to the victory at Yorktown.” Lafayette was not the only American general at Yorktown, and he wasn’t the only French general. Lafayette did use his small force to isolate Cornwallis in Yorktown, but he had to wait until Washington, Rochambeau and others arrived with sufficient forces before he participated in the final assaults.
Was Lafayette a great man? Yes. A successful general? Yes. Was he a really lucky guy? Yes. Did he and his reputation benefit immensely from great wealth and fortuitous circumstance? Yes. Did he live up to his potential in serving France and the French nation? Maybe not.
A final note: for my taste, neither Leepson nor Gen. Wesley Clark (in his Foreword) lives up to the promise of sifting “lessons in leadership” from Lafayette’s battlefield and political exploits, or his largely exemplary personal character. I think the fact is that almost all of the notable events in Lafayette’s public and private lift were as much circumstantial as anything else. Certainly, in the worst of times during the French Revolutions, when he could have demonstrated compelling leadership for the lasting benefit of his countrymen and nation, Lafayette came up short.
"...that
some men are created equal..."
Wha?! Patriots without guns?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014
Wha?! Patriots without guns?
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Lafayette: a hero, not a saint
Book review: Lafayette by Harlow Unger.
He was a great man. Also rich and
lucky.
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my website:
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