In my last post toward the end I made the following suggestion:
.. while at the same time to be grounded in the reality that without some divine intervention, this whole thing could end real bad ..
I understand very well why many will be skeptical. This broken world with broken people have made it difficult to think that there might be a divine presence that is an active force against evil. Religion has also not helped make the case for a divine force that is good, or is at its core love. I am not here to convince you of anything, but only to ask to consider the thought, without accepting it.
There are two American historical occurrences that come to my mind when I think of when evil almost wins and good (or better) prevails. One is the efforts I have been writing about where Francis Marion leads a militia (volunteer) that ends up frustrating an empire’s army enough so that they decide to quit. You and I both know that another fleet of ships and 10,000 more men could have been sent by the British to make 1782 a tough year and have no need for a Treaty of Paris in 1783 with each of the thirteen colonies signing. The other occurrence is that of Gen. George Washington’s retreat from Brooklyn (there was no bridge there until the late 1800s) to Manhattan in the colony of New York on the night of 27AUG1776 and into the next morning.
Getting 9000 troops across the East River before the British could discover their retreat was a daunting task considering the lack of boats to make the effort. The fact that there was no wind that night or the next morning meant that the British fleet could not come up the East River to trap the Continental Army either.
To flesh out in more detail about this predicament I will pull some quotes from this article on HistoryNet:
Washington now called on Colonel John Glover of Massachusetts, who commanded one of the army’s crack regiments. Glover’s ‘Marvelous Men from Marblehead’ were well trained and wore smart blue-and-white uniforms. They were seamen and fishermen, so they were accustomed to shipboard discipline and were quick to carry out orders…
… Washington knew that Glover was just the man to get his army out of its desperate situation. He also knew that there were spies in the ranks — one soldier had already been tried and hanged for his treachery and several others had been found guilty and put in prison — so he sent a misleading message to General William Heath on Manhattan: ‘We have many battalions from New Jersey which are coming over this evening to relieve those here. Order every flat-bottomed boat and other craft fit for transportation of troops down to New York as soon as possible.’ Then he ordered his quartermaster ‘to impress every kind of craft on either side of New York’ that had oars or sails, and to have them in the East River by dark. Anyone intercepting the messages would think that Washington was planning to bring reinforcements to Long Island; in reality he hoped to evacuate his entire army before the British realized what he was doing.
The weather was still on Washington’s side. A drenching storm kept ‘Black Dick’s’ fleet out of the river and provided cover for the boat gathering. Late in the afternoon Washington met with his staff to tell them his real plans. As Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge wrote in a letter, ‘to move so large a body of troops with all their necessary appendages across a river a full mile wide, with a rapid current, in the face of a victorious, well-disciplined army nearly three times as numerous seemed . . . to present most formidable obstacles.’ The colonel was guilty of understatement.
The entire Northern Theater of the Continental army was at risk. George Washington’s strategy was not working in his favor as they had their backs against a river like this.
The August nights were short, and Washington knew that if Glover had miscalculated the time required for the Herculean job, he would lose any troops unlucky enough to remain on the island at dawn. He had faith in the ‘tough little terrier of a man,’ and to help him he assigned a regiment of men from the Massachusetts towns of Salem, Lynn, and Danvers, sailors all.
The seamen began their work as soon as it was dark, about ten o’clock. The drenched Continentals left their entrenchments unit by unit and moved to the boats in darkness and in absolute silence. Each unit was told only that they were being relieved and were going back to Manhattan. They did not know that the entire army was doing the same thing. By the time any disloyal soldier discovered the truth, it would be too late for treachery. The quartermaster’s men had found only a few sailing craft, so there was much rowing to be done that night. At first the winds were favorable and the boats swiftly made the round trip to Manhattan, despite darkness and unfamiliar waters. Seamen in the rowboats plied them back and forth without a stop, oars muffled, across the fast East River current.
Washington stayed in the saddle, weary though he must have been. For several hours the situation looked favorable, but then the wind changed, blowing in combination with the unusually strong ebb tide. The sails could not overcome the two combined forces. Washington’s despair was partially alleviated when the men rigged the sailboats with temporary tholes, found oars, and rowed. But the tired general realized that many rearguard troops would still be on the island when dawn broke. Their loss would be a serious blow. Yet the seamen continued their race against time. ‘It was one of the most anxious, busy nights that I ever recollect,’ Benjamin Tallmadge recalled, ‘and being the third in which hardly any of us had closed our eyes in sleep, we were all greatly fatigued.’ At one point a rearguard unit under Colonel Edward Hand mistakenly received orders to move down to the water. Its movement left a gap in the lines that the British, had they been aware of it, could have used to smash through the American defenses. But the British didn’t know, and Washington, when he saw what had happened, hurriedly ordered the unit back into place.
In a few more hours luck rejoined the patriots. The wind changed direction and Glover’s men could again use their sails to speedily make the crossings and return. The tempo of the evacuation picked up, but the fickle wind had done its damage. As the dim first-light appeared in the cloudy, gray eastern sky, part of the rear guard was still on the wrong side of the river. As the sky lightened, however, a dense fog rolled in, obscuring the operation’s final movements. Colonel Tallmadge was in one of the last units to leave, and with regret he left his horse tied on the Long Island shore. Safe in New York, the fog as thick as ever, Tallmadge said, ‘I began to think of my favorite horse, and requested leave to return and bring him off. Having obtained permission, I called for a crew of volunteers to go with me, and guiding the boat myself, I obtained my horse and got some distance before the enemy appeared in Brooklyn.’ When the morning fog began to lift and the British patrols warily came to check on the American breastworks, they found them empty. Washington and the last of the rear guard were aboard the boats and sailing to safety. George Washington’s faith in John Glover and the seagoing soldiers had been vindicated. In about nine hours they had whisked 9,000 men and their supplies and cannon out from under the noses of the British. The Revolutionary cause lived on. Later that day, August 30, 10 British frigates and 20 gunboats and sloops finally sailed up the river. They were too late.
Not unlike the thunderstorm and tornado that made the British burning and sacking of Washington DC on 24AUG1814 stop prematurely, this “act of nature” changed the course of history.
“Incredibly, yet again, circumstances – fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often – intervened.” – Historian David McCullough from his book 1776
I will leave it to y’all to decide in your own minds.
Just my two cents .. your mileage may vary.
-SF1