American History

Posted by Roger Saunders

I feel older all the time. It seems like technology is flying faster and faster. At dinner last night one of my kids made a sarcastic comment about Bob Barker's game show being on TV for 85 years. When I immediately retorted that TV wasn't even invented 85 years ago, it hit me that the pace of technical innovation is staggering.

It was a few short years ago, with my ten year old son (bright enough to have just graduated from the US Air Force Academy) that we stopped at a garage sale. We browsed the various items and he walked up to me with an old telephone with a rotary dial. He looked up at me quizzically and said, "Dad, this looks like a phone ... but how would you use it?"

That's when I first felt it!

Just a few days later, we were moving into an older home without a microwave oven. This same son asked me how the previous owners could cook anything without one and I heard these words come out of my mouth,

"Well, when I was your age, we didn't even have ..."

I wanted to reel those words back in as soon as the realization hit me. "I've become my father!"

Seriously, do the words telepresence, bluetooth, haptic interface and neural network even mean anything to you? If they do, then you are in the thick of the progress. If your not quite sure what most of these things are, then welcome to my world! As a history geek, I have been accused of living in the past and I can live with that. I just hope that all of this technology doesn't lead us down a path where there is no past for me to live in!

Posted by Roger Saunders

Patrick Ferguson was the man! He developed the breech loading rifle in 1775 but was called to service during the Revolutionary War before he could fully sell it's benefits to the British Army which decided to only make 100 of the rifles to test. Why it wasn't an easier sell? Who knows? Then again, with guys like Howe, Clinton, Sandwich and the Coward of Minden, Lord George (Sackville) Germain in charge, it isn't any wonder! The first field test of the rifles was on American soil and failed when the rifles began to explode because they were issued the wrong size ammunition.

The story is told that Ferguson did have General George Washington in his sights with the breech loader before the Battle of Germantown but decided it would have been ungentlemanly to pick off the officer whose back was turned to him!

Ferguson was also the commanding officer (and ONLY British Regular present) with the Tories who were mowed down at the Battle of King's Mountain, where he was still innovating, using a whistle to direct his troops because severe injuries to both arms left him holding his horse's reins in his teeth, not allowing him the luxury of opening his mouth to shout orders.

The brave Colonel Patrick Ferguson died during the Battle of King's Mountain and was buried there.

The "downfall" of Ferguson's breech loading rifle was that warfare had not developed past throwing more bodies at the enemy than they could. Also, the never ending enemy of progress, "that's the way we always do it" prevailed. Finally, there were many who thought such weapons inhumane because, believe it or not, it was not a "fair" fight. This would be analogous to our present world view that weapons of mass destruction are evil!

Posted by Roger Saunders

This person listed the five goals as

1) Establish justice 2) Insure domestic tranquility 3) Provide for the common defense 4) Promote the general welfare 5) Secure the Blessings of Liberty

My response was that the most important goal was missing.

In order to form a more perfect union!

Many framers knew they had it wrong on the issue of slavery but felt unity was more important. We may disagree with this value judgment but at the time I think they truly thought they were doing the best they could while keeping the infant country unified.

History is easy to judge based upon what we know now. We must carefully try to understand history’s cultural thinking. This does not mean that we might not have a better idea about how to correct the problem, but we do have 230 more years of experience to help us make better judgments.

The simple fact is that the constitution was designed to allow the US to become a more perfect union. That goal is the only way the other five could be accomplished. Gouveneur Morris wrote the preamble for the constitution while distilling all of the convention's decisions into one document. He did the country a great service when he added "in order to form a more perfect union" because those words are the life blood of the US Constitution.

It has taken too many years and bloodshed to accomplish that goal but it is something that as Americans we can continue to work on in a free country until we get it right. This country has made more progress in its existence than any other with the same amount of time in history. We still have a long way to go but the Constitution has proven to be the vehicle to take us there.

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..