American History

Posted by Roger Saunders

Although it was many times to quench the thirst of the soldiers the most important reason to have a continuous supply of water was to keep the artillery (cannon) cooled off.

During the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778, Mary Hayes was observed by private Joseph Martin supplying this valuable service. Sadly, her husband, one of the artillery officers was killed in battle. Unflinchingly Mary quickly stepped in to take over her husbands duties. Martin related this story about Mary's service in his diary,

"While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet spread as far before the other as she could step, a canon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower portion of her petticoat. Looking on it with apparent unconcern, she observed that,

'It was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else' "

Private Martin then goes on to say that she just ...

"continued her occupation."

Isn't that par for the course for many of Mary's brave male and female descendants in this proud country. In the face of overwhelming sorrow with the death of a loved one, she not only had the courage to keep fighting for a cause that was greater than herself, she also found the grace and temerity to make light of that most dangerous situation.

Posted by Roger Saunders

Many people, with just a passing glance, view the John Adams administration as a failure, if only because he was not elected to a second term. There were some glaring mistakes in his presidency. The number one mistake being the passage of the Alien and Sedition Act which severely limited the freedom of speech that the constitution was supposed to protect in the 1st Amendment.

A closer look tells a different story. The main reason that Adams was not reelected was because members of the Federalist Party didn't like the way for the way he handled the crisis with France. It almost came to a declared war and was all but that on the high seas.

Adams had to stand up to his own party in order to cool the ardor for war. He held the conviction that diplomacy and patience would win in the end. It was very close but he turned out to be right.

He sacrificed his own ambition to remain president in order to make sure that his young country would not have to go through a war that it was not ready for. Historians tell us that if he had followed his ambition rather than his conscience, Americans could very well be speaking French today. It was only a few short years later that Napoleon came on the scene.

If we had gone to war with France, Napoleon's rise to power would most assuredly have hastened. If we had lost that war, the French had a very ambitious plan to take over North America and make it part of the French Empire.

So, while Adams had some policies that were not positive, overall, I would say his presidency was successful. He left the country in better shape, from a foreign affairs point of view, than he found it!

Posted by Roger Saunders

This famous song transitioned from a song of derision to an ad hoc National Anthem during the Revolutionary War but this was not the origin of the term. Yankee came from a Dutch term (Jhonki) describing hardworking, thrifty Puritan Englishmen who traded in Dutch ports of call during Oliver Cromwell's protectorate. The name stuck to these folks who resided mostly in the East Anglia. As Puritans migrated to North America, their thrifty hardworking moniker followed and became synonymous with New Englanders.

In the American Revolution, Britain saw these New England firebrands as instigators of the Revolution as they had been during the English Civil War. This is why all Americans who fought the British were called Yankees. Prior to the American Civil War many Abolitionist groups headquartered in New England. Southerners pinned the entire north with the Yankee moniker, deriding them as puritanical and self righteous. During the two World Wars when the United States sent men to fight in Europe, the entire country earned the name Yank. The term Yankee had now gone full circle from a term of derision to one that Americans bore proudly. This is evident in the popular American song that goes,

I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a Yankee Doodle, do or die; a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the fourth of July.

Interestingly enough, in present day New England the term Yankee still retains some of its rancor. It describes someone who is tight fisted and will not part with their money without a fight! Of course, it is also a term of derision in the areas where the Boston Red Sox baseball team is strongly supported because these fans have a very healthy hatred of those Yankees who throw the old horsehide around in New York!

Posted by John Crandall

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, is a very complex historical picture. Some say his lifelong dislike of and opposition to slavery led directly to the Emancipation Proclammation. That is an oversimplified and rather narrow view. In fact, as President he held his duty to the Constitution and established traditions of republican government and "states' rights" to exceed his views on slavery in importance.

Not only this sworn duty, but the need to pacify the barder states where slavery was still somewhat prevalent led to his initial policies of supporting slavery by upholding the existing laws. This made little or no difference in the states that had seceded, because to them his Presidency was invalidated by their declaration of indepence from the old union and formation of a new confederacy.

The course of the war, and his personal determination that the union must prevail, along with the eventual realization that the slaves were actually one of the great strengths of the south, and its primary labor force led him to believe that depriving his enemies of this resource was not only an obvious, but a crucial step to winning the war. Thus the Emancipation proclamation, with its qualification that it only applied to states that were "in rebellion" againt the United States. Hence many historians proclaim that he only freed those who he technically had no jurisdiction over. However the emotional response, and the acceptance of negro soldiers that found their way to union lines made a huge impact on both the outcome of the war and the reconstruction period which followed.

Posted by John Crandall

Thomas Malthus was famous in Elizabethan England for theorizing that the population of a country, or an island such as Britain, was determined by definite factors such as geographical space, and food production capabilities. Population pressures unabated were certain to lead to emigration. In the England of the time of colonizing America there was surplus population. Many of the unemployed, under-employed, or impoverished emigrated to America as indentured servants. This acted as an outlet valve for excess population in the British Isles.

Once settlements in America had developed productive agricultural communities, America was more than just an outlet valve it was large unsettled country drawing on population surpluses of not only Britain, but Germany, the Low Countries, and even France and other countries to a lesser extent. The land use patterns and agricultural capacities of the native North American Indians were far different, and even the population they were capable of supporting was decimated by imported European diseases.

This trend continued throughout the colonial period, and on into the the mid 1800s accelerating dramatically through this later period. Time was to come when America despite being sparsley settled would consider immigration to be burdensome. Although I believe Malthus was largely correct in his theories, urbanization, and mechanized farming were to dramatically increase the amount of population that could be supported.

Posted by John Crandall

I am in the process of moving to new living accomadations. I am going to be very busy adjusting to my new choice of living on my 28 ft. cabin cruiser. It is apparently going to be something of a challenge to get a slip convenient to where I want to be, and get internet, phone, cable, and all those sorts of things. I am moving along on getting everything set up, but it will be another week or two before I am comforatably typing blogs and articles from my own home.

One note on the bright side is that I currently have more time to read history books, and am reading both for articles planned on here, and to get acquainted with certain books I have always meant to read. I'm readinf some James McPherson, David, Donald, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and going some Charles and Mary Beard. I hope no one is too upset that I am unable to participate on the discussion forums as much as i might like to, but I promise to try and catch up as soon as possible.

Posted by John Crandall

I've been going back through some of my old books, and rereading with a focus on Colonial America. There is so much to cover, and my articles are so short that I could spend months on this period, but in the interest of keeping a diverse and interested audience, I may try to move forward and come back a little bit more. My real specialty and area of greatest personal knowledge is the 1850s, secession, and civil war. My second major area of interest is the Revolution and founding of the United States. I may try to begin a rotation doing an article from each period as I refresh my colonial knowledge and get my favorite views of the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers into article form. With installments from my mid 19th Century researches.

I really love the ideologies, and like to seek paralells and differences in ideology from one period to another. It is very informative to seek the consistencies from widely divergent periods, and also the differences. I am very much a believer that there are always different ways of perceiving the same information, and how the historiography of various ideals and beliefs demonstrates the perspectives of the Historians and their times. History itself is both the facts of the past that have been recorded in various ways, and the perspectives of Historians who have lived in differingt time periods..

Posted by John Crandall

It's propbably all the historical study of the Founding Fathers that did it to me, but I'm not a liberal or a conservative in the modern American sense. I do tend to beleive that our government is somewhat off of its ideal course, and that our history could teach us some important lessons if we would but pay attention. Ideologically I have always been opposed to communism and socialism on the basis that they have never proven themselves viable systems, and that their sttempts to regulate the economy are rarely if ever as efficient as Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Economies are hugely complex and unpredictable things, but for any planned economy to work the predictions must be close enough to reality that the system does not totally break down. If the whole ideological point of the system is equity for all citizens, i would hold that inequities resulting from party favoritism, and government subsidies and priorities generally displace the concept of equity in such systems.

For that reason i cannot place myself in the liberal camp today, nor can I place myself in the conservative camp since the "conservatives" have in general embraced large portions of such a system with the caveat that they have also retained ties to business and industrial interests, and tend to use the government to aid those interests.

The Libertarians make the most sense to me from the perspective of governmental ideology (i.e. limited government at the federal level, low taxes, no corporate welfare, etc.) However, on social issues they tend to rub me the wrong way coming very near to what James Madison might have called license instead of Liberty. So, it is a complicated thing, but when I watch C-span (as us old school historians who haven't totally given up and turned completely to social history sometimes do) I find myself most convinced by the arguyments of Independents in Congress. So for these reasons I would classify myself as a Independent with Libertarian leanings.

Posted by John Crandall

My naming FDR as one of our worst Presidents, is of course, sparking some debate. I feel rather strongly that the government of our country was drastically changed, and not necessarily for the better by FDR and the New Deal. I'll let the economists argue whether mechanized farming and mechanized industry causing mass unemployment of the unskilled (or removing the need for many skills), or the Federal Reserve rather drastically shrinking the money supply, or other factors, or a combination of all of the above was responsible for the Great Depression.

I was taught in school as a youngster that FDR was among our greatest Presidents, and told as much by my Parents and Grandparents, and I used to believe it until I studied the man and the period seriously. I was fresh off a study of the Early Republic and my mind was full of Jeffersonian and Madisonian quotations as well as the words of men like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and I was stricken at how drastically everything that America under FDR did seemed diametrically opposed to the beliefs and reccomendations of the founding period. Not only that, but the warnings as to what would undo the value of our system of government from the founders were often exactly what was being done. Now those are simple enough facts, and can be confirmed by anyone who takes the time to check them, but the usual answer from the modern History Professor is that the world became different and the maxims of the founders no longer held true. I tend to disagree with that point of view on the basis that the whig and republican ideologies of the founding generation were the keys to America's rise to greatness, and that under the current set of beliefs America is in a state of decay and/or decline. The reasons that I believe this are rather simple. America since 1940 has become a strange hybrid social democracy with a few vestiges of the original system to be found here and there. It wasn't just the government structure that changed in the mid-20th Cenury it was the economic system.

The socialist element of a social democracy scares me from my laissez-faire capitalist point of view because it rewards non-producers thus discouraging production which is the direct basis of economic strength. In a totally unregulated free market without what the British call "the dole" these non-producers would be forced to produce something for whatever wage the market would bear. This would automatically set the minimum wage at what an unskilled worker could produce, and the wages of skilled workers would go up from that minimum in a graduated way based on the value of their skills in the market. Under the dole, a semi skilled worker who feels self sufficient enough to not apply to programs he may be technically eligible for is actually producing more, but may be recieving less economic benefit than the unskilled worker who does not work at all. To this worker unemployment is actually a more intelligent choice than employment, and he may discover as much during an ecomonic downturn that puts him out of work. The loss of this production actually reduces the economic strength of the nation while increasing the cost of social programs. Unchecked such a scenario would lead to a spiraling cycle where production on which the government's source of income depends upon is eroded while the burden of its payouts are increased.

I'm trying to make this as clear as possible, FDR and the New Deal didn't just get us out of the Depression (although WWII may be more responsible for that) and change our government's style. They changed the economy from a free market to a subsidized regulated system wherein inequities can easily exist that the free market itself would prevent by its natural mechanisms of supply and demand. Another such inequity is the medical profession. Before 1940 it was not at all unusual for a country doctor or dentist to perform their services on an as needed basis with the understanding that the patient would pay by whatever means they could until the two agreed that the debt was settled. Under such a system there is no need for health insurance, the doctors are more likely to use their skills pro bono in their communities based on observed human needs and a non-mercenary outlook, and prices are locked to what the patients themselves can actually pay. Under the current system the only control on price is what the government and/or insurance companies will pay, doctors are more mercenary, and expect to maintain two or three residences, travel globally, and otherwise enjoy the priviliges of their favored economic staus. The value of the services of the doctor did not change, the laws and regulating forces upon the market in which those skills were employed did change.

After much thought, and for these and many more related reasons, I changed my views on FDR and the New Deal, and I would welcome more discussion of this topic or related topics although it is far ahead chonologically of where the focus of my articles is at this point.

Posted by John Crandall

As I look at all the discussions and contributing writer articles on the site, I find myself very tempted to spend more hours than I have available responding and writing articles on topics related to the contributed articles. I do want to participate in the discussions, but I will try to make my posts count, and may not have something to say in every thread.

I am browsing new shelves at the libraries around here, thinking about a lot of things I learned a few years ago working on my Masters. It will take me some time to get organized enough to jump around, and so for now I am going to stick to a roughly chronolgical plan for my articles. I may jump back and get Christopher Columbus and maybe even the Consquistadors, but right now I am working on the first settlements, and plan to soon have a piece ready on both Jamestown and the lost colony at Roanoke.

I'll try also to cover the Powhatans, and other native American tribes and stories. I should be through precolonial in about a month and a half, and will then move on to Colonial America. I'm enjoying this even more than the Transportation, so far, and I look forward to hearing from everyone in discussions or e-mails.