The Mysteries of History (July 4 Edition)
No Kings Day; Two Billion Gallons of Water; Old School Terrorist; Metal Martian
1776 — Declaration of Independence Adopted
public domain image from wikimedia commons
On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, formally and officially declared the Independence of the United States from Britain, rejecting George the third as their king.
The Revolutionary War had already begun. Almost five months prior, the “shot heard ‘round the world” was fired by a Patriot in Massachusetts as British soldiers were attempting to stamp out the rebellious feelings among many of the colonists.
Americans had become especially disgruntled even before that, in the mid-1760s, due to “taxation without representation” and other high-handed actions by the British government.
The first American agitators were not necessarily fighting to form a new Nation, though, but rather for the rights they felt they deserved to have.
Eventually, though, influential figures such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson promoted independence, and ultimately convinced others to join them.
The Revolutionary War last five years, until 1781, but it didn’t officially end, with a Treaty, until two years later, in 1783.
The following is what I wrote about the Declaration of Independence in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 1: 1620-1913:
“We have counted the cost of this contest and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery.”— Thomas Jefferson
“Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!” — Thomas Paine
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God, I know not what course others will take, but as for me, give me Liberty or give me Death.” — Patrick Henry
“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.” — Mark Twain
“A more impudent, false, and atrocious proclamation was never fabricated by the hands of man.”—Ambrose Serle, secretary of British General William Howe, writing of the Declaration of Independence
“The die is now cast. The colonies must either submit or triumph.”
—King George III of Britain
Although the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired on April 19th, 1775, in Lexington, Massachusetts, the Continental Congress didn’t vote for independence from Britain until more than a year after that, on July 2nd, 1776.
Two Thomases, Paine and Jefferson, had much to do with the revolution ary fervor in the American Colonies. In January, Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense, which contained reasons why the Colonies should separate from the mother country. After explaining why he saw no advantage in being apron-stringed to Britain, Paine noted some clear-cut disadvantages of Amer ica remaining tied to Britain:
But the injuries and disadvantages which we sustain by that connection are without number…any submission to, or dependence on, Great Britain, tends directly to involve this Continent in European wars and quarrels, and set us at variance with nations who would otherwise seek our friendship…
A million copies of Common Sense sold this year—quite a feat for a forty year old former customs official and maker of ladies’ underwear.
The erudite Jefferson was chosen to write the Declaration of Indepen dence. His first draft contained a repudiation of slavery. The anti-slavery wording was removed by the Continental Congress, though. The second draft, sans anti-slavery statements, was accepted two days after the vote for independence, on the 4th of July.
Although theoretically anti-slavery, in practice Thomas Jefferson was, and remained, a slaveholder himself. While asserting that all men had an equal right to “Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness,” Jefferson was withholding such from 175 human souls.
The earlier colonial wars that British Americans had fought against French Americans (the “French and Indian Wars”) had backfired on the British: they won the war, but the experience they thereby gained had taught the American Colonies that they could, united, accomplish a lot. The old fears, suspicions, and jealousies between the Colonies had been somewhat allayed through that shared body of experiences. In his book “The Colonial Wars: 1689–1762,” Howard H. Peckham puts it this way:
They had learned about military co-operation and spoken of the political unity necessary for its full accomplishment; they had developed a foreign trade of which they were jealous; they knew what kind of an army suited them, what tactics and weapons seemed most effective, and how to finance war by paper money; they could appeal to everyone through their numerous newspapers; above all they were not awed by regulars or professional officers. Neither meek nor inarticulate, they would define their position and resist coercion.
The genie was out of the bottle. It would be hard to keep the boys down on the farm now.
Some view the Revolutionary War as a Civil War, and call the one fought in the first half of the 1860s the “Second Civil War”. The reason for this is that an estimated one-third of the colonists were loyalists, not desirous of breaking ties with England, while one third were revolutionaries, and the final third were front-runners, fence-sitters, or simply apathetic.
It took the War with England to bind the thirteen colonies together. Prior to this they had considered themselves to be thirteen separate countries. Before the series of provocative events that began in earnest with the Stamp Act in 1765, each colony actually felt they had more in common with England than with one another.
When the decision was made to raise a Continental army, Virginian George Washington, enslaver of upwards of one hundred black souls and one of the wealthiest men in America, was chosen as General. This nomination passed over John Hancock, who felt the job should have been his, and expected to receive it. The reason for this choice was at least partly in order to bring the Virginians’ hearts into the affair. Up to then, it had been mostly the Massachusetts men who had been agitating for rebellion against England.
Much of the fighting carried out by the Americans was not actually against British soldiers, but rather Hessian mercenaries hired by the British government. One of the reasons for this was that the British military had lost many of its fighting men in the Seven Years War that had just ended thirteen years before, and the British were also engaged elsewhere fighting wars at the time.
Although the war for American Independence effectively lasted until 1781, when the British were defeated at Yorktown, Virginia, its official end did not take place until two years after that, in 1783, at the Treaty of Paris. Stipulations of the treaty were that Britain officially recognize America’s independence, and set the Mississippi as the western boundary of the nascent country, while retaining Canada for itself, and ceding Florida to Spain.
England’s age-old European antagonists France and Spain had also piled on to the dogfight against its old enemy Britain, hoping to extract a little vengeance while England was distracted with the pesky Americans. The war between Britain and France continued, even after Britain had surrendered America to the Americans.
The new American government had different designs for itself, though. Now that it was finally free from European control, and did not have to dance in lockstep to the martial beat of the British drum, it set out to distance itself from the old world’s divisive political struggles. In Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America, British historian John Keegan puts it this way:
…a new nation…would shortly embrace a policy of high-minded detachment from the strategic and military entanglements of the old world across the Atlantic. The United States had fought a war to win its liberty, but its Founding Fathers sought no wars in America’s future. Washington’s independent United States would be left with scarcely an army or navy at all and its people to depend on the remoteness and expanse of their enormous national territory as its defence. The notion that a war might arise between the states themselves was unimaginable. The thought that the upturned earth of the trenches and redoubts at Yorktown, already returning to nature in the spring of 1782, might be fought over again by soldiers who all called themselves American defied imagination itself.
That would be the case, though, in just eighty years time. Near enough in time was the Revolutionary War battle at Yorktown to the one in the same place during the Civil War that one aged plantation slave told Union com mander Philip Kearney that he could recall hearing cannon fire at Yorktown back in 1781.
It is likely that John Gorham (son of Joseph, grandson of John Gorham III), although thirty-six or thirty-seven years of age, was involved in the revolution. Many “rebel” soldiers were both younger and older than one would expect to find on a battlefield in modern times. John’s son William was not born until 1788.
There were reportedly thirty Gorhams engaged in the Revolutionary War—this according to the January 15, 1895 issue of the Hyannis Patriot. All of the Gorhams in America at that time were said to have descended from Capt. John Gorham (husband of Desire Howland). How many were Loyalists and how many Revolutionaries, or Rebels, is not known, though.
Although the French had been defeated by Britain during the Seven Years War/French and Indian War, competition between the two nations persisted for another half century. Many Americans who had earlier fought for Britain now fought against her. Indians who were formerly enemies were now allies, and vice versa. The French, against whom the Americans had fought just a decade earlier, now became allies also.
Having been kicked out of America herself, France now reveled in her role as spoiler. If she couldn’t have a piece of the American pie, she sure didn’t want her old rival England enjoying it, either. Helping the Americans was not an act of affection on her part for the upstart Yankees, but rather a vengeful thrust against her old nemesis. The Netherlands also helped out the Ameri cans, providing financial support.
When the revolution began, though, the outcome was by no means a fore gone conclusion. The Americans, in fact, were underdogs if there ever were underdogs. It was not a year of parades and “photo ops.” To say the pivotal year 1776 was no walk in the park for the Americans is an understatement. After providing the details on why he writes such, David McCullough concludes his book “1776” with these two paragraphs:
The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.
Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning—how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference—the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.
Questions: Had you been living at the time, would you have been a Patriot (backing American independence), a Royalist (staying loyal to Britain), or would you have stayed out of it as much as possible, and just tried to survive the conflict without getting involved?
1817 — Construction of the Erie Canal Begins
image generated using Google Gemini
The Erie Canal wasn’t dug or dredged in a day, but it started in Rome (Rome, New York, that is) on this date in 1817.
Thomas Jefferson was not bullish on the project, opining that building a 350-mile-long canal through the wilderness was a borderline insane idea. Jefferson was wrong about that, though. The Canal was completed eight years later, in 1825 (two hundred years ago now).
Connecting the Empire State to the Midwest, in those pre-dynamite, pre-steam shovel days, the Erie Canal was arduously and painstakingly dug by hand utilizing nine thousand pick- and axe-wielding laborers. The forty-foot wide, four-feet deep ditch ended up being 363 miles long, with a capacity of over two billion gallons of water.
As a result of the economic boon brought about by the Canal, New York became the largest city in the Nation with the busiest port. Other cities along the banks of the Canal significantly grew, too, such as its terminal point Buffalo as well as Rochester and Syracuse.
First railroads, and later (in 1959) the St. Lawrence Seaway, gradually eclipsed the importance of the Canal, but its affect on the region was long-lasting.
Questions: Have you heard Pete Seeger’s version of the song Erie Canal? Have you heard Bruce Springsteen’s version of the song Erie Canal?
1940 — World’s Fair Bombing
“true-to-spirt” but not historically accurate image generated using Google Gemini
In the early evening on this date in 1940, a bomb exploded at the World’s Fair in Flushing, New York, killing two police officers and wounding fiver other men.
Although there were suspicions that the bombing had to do with World War 1, in which the United States was not yet officially involved — possibly planted by fascists — it was never proven who was behind it, even though New York had 1,500 police detectives working the case.
Questions: Had you heard of this bombing before reading this?
1997 — Pathfinder Lands on Mars
image generated using Bing Image Creator
After traveling more than 300,000 times the length of the Erie Canal through outer space (120 million miles), the Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars on this date in 1997.
Pathfinder came to rest on remotely-deployed airbags after floating down to the surface of the Red Planet by means of parachutes. This low-tech, cost-saving method caused the craft to bounce sixteen times before finally coming to rest.
The returns from the $150 million investment were rock and soil samples and thousands of images of Mars.
Questions: Do you think space exploration is a good investment? How is your life different as a result of these scientific experiments? Is it better, worse, or the same as it would be had these missions not been undertaken? How much money has come from your pocket (via taxes) to pay for these things? Even if your tax burden would have been the same, what other projects or programs were not implemented because of the cost of these forays into space? By the way, I am neither strongly for or against space exploration. I’m simply raising the questions.
