Tag: British Empire

Bigger is Better? Not So Fast .. Liberty and Freedom Benefits from SMALL

26 Cantons in the Swiss Federation

Two articles (each dated by a year or five) caught my eye this week about small governments serving their people where happiness thrives. The first is Donald Livingston’s Abbeville blog post from JAN2019 that states:

Switzerland is regularly ranked by the UN’s World Happiness Report in the top ten happiest countries in the world. The top ten are usually always small states. The U.S. has yet to make the top ten.

The second one is a five year old Abbeville blog post (recently re-shared) that states:

In his time [Nathaniel] Macon was widely admired by Americans as the perfect model of a republican statesman. By republican I mean republican with a small “r.” I definitely do NOT mean the Republican Party, which, from its very beginning, when it stole the name from better people, right up to this minute, has stood for the exact opposite of what Nathaniel Macon meant by republican government.

It should be noted that the thirteen British colonies that seceded from the British Empire chose to fashion their guiding document, the Articles of Confederation from the Switzerland’s confederation documents. So when on Nov. 15, 1777, the Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, he articles vested the conduct of war and foreign policy in a Federal government, but left everything else to the States.

The Swiss Confederation was chosen in part due to it having been established more than four centuries earlier and was still intact and the federation in 1777 was still thriving. Historically, in 1315, the Swiss defeated the powerful Austrian empire in the Battle of Morgarten, when the men of Schwyz (one of the Swiss cantons / sovereign states) lured the Austrians into the mountains and ambushed them in a pass. The men of Schwyz killed 1,500 Austrian troops, drove hundreds more into Lake Lucerne and put the rest to flight. The country’s inhabitants were so grateful they changed the name of their nation from Helvetia to Switzerland. The country has remained free, independent and faithful to its own Articles of Confederation for nearly 700 years.

What this means is that the small republics, cantons, allow the people in a federation to tolerate differences across these unique cultures and lands. Smaller is better, but bigger can allow for protection from external forces, the problem is when there are internal forces that attempt to use the larger body for their own agenda.

The republics themselves have the following guiding principles modeled by the Greeks:

There are four principles to this republican tradition: First, republican government is one in which the people make the laws they live under. But, second, they cannot make just any law. The laws they make must be in accord with a more fundamental law which they do not make but is known by tradition. Third, the task of the republic is to preserve and perfect the character of that inherited tradition. And finally, the republic must be small. It must be small because self-government and rule of law is not possible unless citizens know the character of their rulers directly or through those they trust.

The Greeks created a brilliant civilization that was entirely decentralized. It was composed of 1,500 tiny independent republics strung out from Naples to the Black Sea. Most were under 10,000. One of the largest was Athens with around 200 thousand people. For over two thousand years, up to the French Revolution, republics seldom went beyond 200-300 thousand people, and the great majority were considerably smaller.

Having only 300,000 people to a republic, is small enough to personally kick the *ss of a politician who has done the people wrong. Large states have whole groups of people that live above the law and not under the laws they themselves get to create. Large states are also known for killing large amounts of their own people as in the case of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. It was not that long ago that the USSR disintegrated into 15 republics proving that they too found the downside of the large centralized state.

So we have the options of small republics and large nations, but it was a German Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1563-1638) that proposed a federation of small polities in a state larger than the classical republic, but smaller than a European monarchy. He called it a federation! In this structure, to prevent the central government from consolidating the smaller polities into a unitary modern state, Althusius introduces a constitutional right of secession from the federation. If a federation grew too large, it could always be brought back to a republican scale by secession.

This was why the founders, BEFORE the full force of the British Empire was on their shores, thought that this arrangement like the Swiss had (see below) would work across the cultures from New England to the Southern colonies:

Switzerland is so decentralized that its central government has no original taxing power. Its power to tax requires a constitutional amendment approved by a majority of the cantons, each of which has one vote, and a majority of individuals.

Switzerland (including all 26 cantons) would fit in South Carolina

After the revolutionary war, many founders abandoned the Swiss model as being too week and opted again towards the large-state model which is why we are in the mess we are in today!

It was at this point as the Revolutionary War ended that a reluctant Nathaniel Macon appeared on the scene:

Macon was born in 1758 on a plantation in Warren County, where he lived his entire life. He was a student at what is now Princeton when the War of Independence broke out in 1775. He left school and joined the New Jersey militia on active service, and then went home and joined the North Carolina troops. He was offered but refused a commission and he refused also the bounty that was paid for enlisting. He served in the Southern campaigns until he was elected to the General Assembly near the end of the war while he was still in his 20s. In the next few years he was offered a place in the North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress which he declined.

You can see Macon’s character here, refused a commission (G. Washington would never do that), declined a place on the North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress, but when the wheels started coming off the liberty and freedom wagon, he showed up!

As soon as the U.S. government went into operation, Hamilton and his Yankee friends, claiming that they were acting in behalf of “good government,” began to turn the government into a centralised power and a money-making machine for themselves by banks, tariffs, government bonds, and other paper swindles that would be paid for out of the pockets of the farmers, who produced the tangible wealth of the country. To oppose this Macon accepted election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the Second Congress. He served in the House 24 years and the Senate 13 years—representing North Carolina in congress from 1791 to 1828, from the age of 33 to the age of 70 when he retired voluntarily.

He was in this fight to the end as his own philosophy did not change at all from his farm in Warren County, North Carolina to the swamp (which it literally was in those days) called District of Columbia.

During all this time Macon was admired because he never changed from the principles with which he began. What were these principles? The federal government should be tightly bound by the Constitution. It should not tax the people and spend money any more than was absolutely necessary for the things it was entitled to do, nor go into debt, which was just a way to make the taxpayers pay interest to the rich. Eternal vigilance was the price of liberty. Power was always stealing from the many to the few. Office-holders were to be watched closely and kept as directly responsible to the citizens as possible.

Nathaniel Macon

His priority at all times was the people, not himself, not his agenda. He was a learned man who know the history of other peoples in different times and learned from their mistakes:

It might be nice to pay for everybody to go to college, or to build a fancy temple for the Supreme Court, or to issue bonds for rich people to invest in, or overturn a dictator 5,000 miles away. But the politicians had no right to take away the citizens’ earnings for whatever they thought was good. ..

History showed that the stronger and more centralised a government became the less free were the people. And the richer the government and its politicians and beneficiaries became, the poorer were the people. That was what had always happened, but America, with governments created by the people, had a chance to avoid the bad tendencies of government of the past.

It had a chance but even Nathaniel know the momentum was against those who saw the eternal vigilance against state powers was needed but was found wanting toward the end of his life:

By the end of his life Macon had realised that the cause of republicanism was lost at the federal level, and also that the North was determined to exploit and rule the South. South Carolina tried in 1832 to use “nullification,” state interposition, to force the federal government back within the limits of the Constitution. After he read Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against South Carolina, Macon told friends that it was too late for nullification. The Constitution was dead. The only recourse was secession—there was nothing left but for the South to get out from under the “Union” and govern itself.

Patrick Henry saw the American Republic die with the 1787 US Constitution when he said “I smell a rat”. Nathaniel Macon tried fighting the good fight until 1832 before he admitted that the Constitution was dead.  Lysander Spooner saw this all real clear by 1867 when he said:

It was over before any of us were even born. The American Empire is what is rolling on now to its eventual grave, which those in command trying to take as many tax slaves with us to potential early graves.

-SF1

Epic Lies: Bringing Democracy to the World & Mission Accomplished

Usually, when the bombs start to drop, it is really the middle of the story. The start of the story is usually hidden to the public at large, both intentionally and by sheer ignorance.

The “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq by US forces in 2003 was not the reaction to something Saddam did wrong, like having WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction), but was part of an agenda that was set in motion years if not decades before:

It’s surely clear to almost everyone now that we were lied into an illegal war which not only destroyed an entire country, but which also led directly to the rise of ISIS and helped bring terrorism to Europe too. – Ron Paul (2016)

While statism kills, empires kill on a whole different level. While nations like Germany (Jews) and China (farmers) and USSR (Ukrainians, etc) and USA (Southerners and American Indians) do their share of genocide, there is nothing like an empire that can take that to a whole different level.

But it was not always so. Take for instance a majority of the time the British Empire was a world power, as Eric S. Margolis in this article explains:

The British were always masters of efficient imperialism. In the 19th century, they managed to rule a quarter of the Earth’s surface with only a relatively small army supported by a great fleet. Many of their imperial subjects were so overawed by the pomp and circumstance of British rule that they often willingly cooperated, or at least bent the knee.

Call it colonialism 101. Ardent students of Roman history, the British early on adopted the Roman strategy of ‘divide et impera’, divide and conquer. The application of this strategy allowed the British Empire to rule over vast numbers of people with minimal force.

For over one hundred years, life in the American colonies were not bad at all actually. This is why there was 1/3rd of Americans that did NOT want to go to war with the British Empire, as up until the 1760s, the British ruled in a minimalist way!

When we reflect on the poor country of Iraq, and how it was somewhat abused by English power in the early 20th century especially after the discovery of oil, never really knew what was in store for them by 1990. From a post WWII transition that saw American influences in the Middle East region on the increase, and with Saddam Hussein in the employ and control of the CIA, even supplying Iraq with chemical weapons in its war against Iran in the 1980s, it is clear that the American Empire was in the driver’s seat.

In 1990, when the world was shocked that Hussein invaded Kuwait, there were those in the US Government that were not surprised as they gave him the green light. This even allowed the US Empire a “reason” to respond to this attack on an adjacent sovereign nation and allowed a “coalition” of UN nations to mount an attack on Iraq (Gulf War I) to place it under tighter control until the US again invaded 12 years later.

Eric S. Margolis goes on to explain:

I was in Iraq in 2001 and 2003 and saw how much it had developed in spite of the draconian rule of Saddam Hussein. I was one of only a few journalists trying to dispute the western lies about Iraq. The dim-witted Iraqi secret police threatened to hang me as a spy – after I revealed their germ warfare plant at Salman Pak had been set up and was secretly run by British technicians.

There was enough fake news in the early 2000s to convince the American public and the world that Saddam was bad and that the US and its allies were good.

Iraq, let’s recall, was the target of a major western aggression concocted by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Britain’s Tony Blair, financed and encouraged by the Gulf oil sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia.

Truth be told, these “leaders” are in fact war criminals still walking free.

Most people don’t understand that Iraq remains a US-occupied nation. We hear nothing about the billions of dollars of Iraqi oil extracted by big US oil firms since 2003. For the US, Iraq was a treasure house of oil with 12% of world reserves. It was OPEC’s 2nd largest producer.

Recall one of the leading neocons who engineered the invasion of Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, claimed the US could finance its entire invasion of Iraq (he estimated the cost at about $70 billion) by plundering Iraq’s oil. Today, the cost of the occupation has reached over $1 trillion. Wolfie is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, President Trump says the US will grab Syria’s oil fields.

It is all very sick, but the problems in Iraq do not make it into MSM these days:

Ever since the 2003 invasion, Iraq has been ruled by a succession of US-appointed figureheads who have proven as corrupt as they are inept. During the war, the US destroyed most of Iraq’s water and sewage systems, causing some 500,000 children to die from water-borne diseases, wrecking much of its industry and commerce, leaving millions of men unemployed. Public services have broken down.

Before the US invasion, Iraq led the Arab world in industry, farming, medicine, education and women’s rights. All that was destroyed by the ‘liberation.’

The fallout from this conflict and that in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have produced economic refugees that have invaded Europe and dispersed Christians out of the Middle East. Will we ever know the true statistics for all the chaos that was put into action in 2001 (Afghanistan) and 2003 (Iraq)?

How is that for the legacy of American Exceptionalism?

Blow-back (CIA term) is a thing, and we thought the 2000/2010s had seen enough terrorism as a result, just wait ..

-SF1

Most People Are Nice People – Why it is So Hard to Understand that the State is Organized Crime

If you had asked me 20 years ago if I thought that the US government was a criminal organization, I would have laughed and called you a conspiracy theorist (a CIA term to discredit those who have doubts about the official government narrative).

Since then I have read a lot about our history (American and pre-American) from a variety of sources that have links to established source materials. At the end of the day, I can say with certainty, that there are elements of our government, and some of the elite who pull the strings they have at hand, that pure evil does exist in this world. This evil prefers to operate behind the mask of the state to accomplish its evil deeds. All too willingly there are political minded people that start out to make the nation or world a better place then over time will either be blackmailed or bought out to follow along with this evil agenda, taking on a mask of themselves as being one who “helps” “the people”.

This propensity for evil to find power structures to use for their own personal agendas is nothing new. Reading the accounts of God’s own nation of Israel or even the atrocities of the Roman Empire can give you a flavor of the depravity of the human soul.

Assisting me in coming to terms with this reality, in light of my indoctrination fo American Exceptionalism in government school systems, have been articles and searches from Lew Rockwell’s site over the past almost two decades. I have always been amazed by the sheer volume of material available for free from his site or others like the Mises Institute that can help anyone research for themselves how the world really operates, as well as the United States government, the Deep State and even Deep Politics.

There has been an article that I bookmarked earlier this week that referenced another lengthy article that intrigued me earlier this year that I never had time to really look at in detail. Let’s just say, I am still overwhelmed by the HTTP links, books and articles that cover not only US history but also world history that unveils what has happened behind the curtain for so many decades and centuries. Let me just say, the trust factor of government in general just keeps ratcheting down the more I read. I think I now know how many of the founders felt when they attempted a “good version” of government after it’s War for Independence from the British Empire.

“Who Rules America: Power Elite Analysis, the Deep State, and American History” by Charles Burris helps to unpack the trajectory of powerful men who have heavily influence many things behind the scenes that shows the heart of government is in fact, organized crime.

Here is a clip of the historical events that led to the effort in the American colonies in the 1770s to try and accomplish something new:

Why Power Elite Analysis (Libertarian Class Analysis) is Distinct From And Superior to Marxist Analysis

  1. Libertarian Class Theory Antedates Marxist Theory
  2. The English Civil War (The Levelers)
  3. Jean-Baptiste Say,  Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer
    1. The Industrial Society Versus the Statist Society
    2. The Competitive Free Market Versus the Monopolistic Society
    3. The Free Market Pitted Against Mercantilism and Feudalism
  4. Henri de Saint-Simon and the Distortion of Class Theory
  5. From Saint-Simon to Karl Marx
  6. Elitism and the Myth of Pluralism
  7. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class
  8. Later 19th Century Libertarian Class Analysis
    1. Herbert Spencer: Military Society Versus the Industrial Society
    2. Sir Henry Maine: From Status to Contract
    3. Richard Cobden: War and the Interests

I have to admit, I have scrimped when it comes to researching history before the 1770s, and have found myself ill prepared to understand why the wheels came off the American Revolution’s “cause” so fast after the war had ended. In less than a decade, some of the same people that were pro-liberty, took up the reigns of government to be used as the British Empire did, to control the people, to enrich themselves at their expense, and establish a central strong government and central bank to keep people like them in power for generations to come in America. At the end of the day, America looked more like Europe with each passing decade. I guess the imperialism DNA is a strong thing to resist for even noble causes and honorable principles.

Even the honorable Thomas Jefferson tried to do the right thing as President of the United States and came away discouraged for how he had led this young country in those early years. As a older man he was actually thinking that yet another revolution could bring about two or three confederations out of the exiting united States.

In part two of Charles outline, he focuses mainly on the United States trajectory of becoming a hidden organized crime unit led by the power elite:

Part Two

  1. Early American Historical Overview

Theme of Liberty Versus Power –  (Ivan Jankovic, The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty: How Americans Resisted Modern State, 1765–1850); The Country Party Versus Court Party: The Declaration of Independence and the Revolution (Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics; The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Angelo M. Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About it)

  1. Counter-Revolution
    1. U.S. Constitution (Sheldon Richman, America’s Counter Revolution: The Constitution Revisited; John Taylor, New Views of the Constitution of the United States; Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States; Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828; What The Antifederalists Were For)
    2. Alexander Hamilton and the Plutocratic Federalists: “The Funding Fathers” (John McConaughy, Who Rules America: A Century of Invisible Government; Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – and What It Means for America Today; Brion McClanahan, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America)
    3. The Early Nationalist Period (Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815; Phillip H. Burch, Elites in American History: The Federalist Years to the Civil War)
    4. Republicanism: From Jefferson to Van Buren
  2. Jeffersonian Drive to Roll Back the Federalist Program and Rid America of its Powerful Ruling Elite (Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology)
  3. Failure of Jefferson/Madison Regimes and the Rise of the Old Republicans or “Tertium Quids” (Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the Age of Jefferson)
    1. John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia (John Taylor, Tyranny Unmasked)
    2. John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia
    3. The Panic of 1819, James Monroe, and the “Era of Good Feelings“

This exhaustive set of links ends with the current era highlighting the Obama and Trump administrations:

It is beyond a doubt, that even if one were to investigate only a fraction of these things, it would remain as the tip of the iceburg as to what was really accomplished via politics in secret.

What I appreciate about Charles Burris is that he then goes on to outline some of the historical events that were made possible by the power elite. Going back from the present to WWI, one can only imaging the lives lost or scared by these sociopaths in our midst:

The question for someone in the present is not whether the US should have intervened in these conflicts but what have we learned from this previous century of war, destruction, and the needless death of millions?

What we now know concerning the horrific wars of the previous century, as well as 21st century conflicts such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, provides us with a historical template to guide us in making future principled decisions concerning intervention or non-intervention.

Briefly, working backwards, what have revelations concerning non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction, deliberately falsified intelligence from the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, and an elaborately coordinated media disinformation campaign done for the case for US intervention in Iraq in 2003? For falsified (and/or still classified) information concerning the September 11th attacks leading to intervention against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan?

What has declassified revelations from the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Venona files in the United States done to totally reshape the narrative story of espionage and the Cold War?

What has archival revelations concerning the Pentagon Papers and the deliberately contrived Gulf of Tonkin Incident done to spurious justification for the massive intervention in the Vietnam conflict?

What has fifty years of revelations concerning the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and brutal murder of President John F. Kennedy by Lyndon Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State done to totally reassess the dynamic behind the change in US policy toward Vietnam within days of JFK’s assassination? How have the powerful behind-the-scenes revelations concerning the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 aided in seeing a more complete picture regarding Kennedy’s murder and the subsequent change of policy toward Vietnam?

How have incisive revelations concerning the birth of the National Security State in 1947 impacted the story of the Cold War? How have revelations concerning the use of former Nazi intelligence officers in the Reinhard Gehlen organization grafted upon US military intelligence and the CIA, been shown to have provided unreliable and provocative disinformation which fueled early Cold War tensions?

How have decisive revelations concerning the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor reshaped the narrative of US intervention into WWII?

How have revelations concerning the Hitler/Stalin Non-Aggression Pact and the joint German and Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 affected our historical portrait of the larger story of how the Second World War began?

How have revelations concerning American and British financial, corporate, and political elites substantially aiding and rebuilding the Nazi war machine in the years prior to WWII as a bulwark against the Soviets change our view of the deep historical background?

How have revelations of the decades of joint military training and cooperation by intelligence services between Germany (during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich) and the Soviet Union impact upon the lead up to WWII?

How did the Treaty of Versailles and agreements such as Sykes-Picot affect the interwar course of events leading to the Second World War?

How did the internecine network of secret treaties, entente cordiales, and clandestine military alliances drawn up prior to the First World War lead to this conflagration?

To this legacy one can only conclude that maybe America is not really exceptional at all, but just another self-serving nation who stuck their nose in other nation’s business totally contrary to the wishes of even the very statist George Washington!

The great American Experiment has indeed run its course. It would be nice if the next revolution was one of minds and hearts and not violent, however, man is prone toward the shortcuts of utilizing sanctions and war to accomplish the ‘greater good’.

-SF1

28SEP1781: Siege at Yorktown Begins – Thank the FRENCH/SPANISH Strategists! Peak Liberty Achieved!

Capt. Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis, Spain’s New World Forces strategist

Popular history lavishes praise on George Washington for cornering the British at Yorktown and having the French navy arrive to bottle them up. While the French allowed this myth to prevail, probably due to Washington’s ego (anyone who has really researched GW knows how fragile his ego was), the truth needs to emerge.

This does not take away the accomplishments of George Washington, as he tactically delayed a British victory in the northern colonies for years, but appreciation for French involvement is necessary to understand the true context of this conflict, which was only a minor part of the global conflict going on in 1781 between the British Empire, and the French with their allies, the Spanish.

It needs to be noted that it is at this time in this republic’s history that Americans were the most free. As noted by Albert Nock in the 1930s in his epic book called “Our Enemy, the State” he says:

When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving.

This is the sad reality. The abandonment of the Articles of Confederation towards the adoption of the US Constitution only accelerated the move AWAY from liberty and freedom. Albert Nock continues:

As well as one can put a date to such an event, the surrender at Yorktown marks the sudden and complete disappearance of the Declaration’s doctrine from the political consciousness of America. Mr. Jefferson resided in Paris as minister to France from 1784 to 1789. As the time for his return to America drew near, he wrote Colonel Humphreys that he hoped soon “to possess myself anew, by conversation with my countrymen, of their spirit and ideas. I know only the Americans of the year 1784. They tell me this is to be much a stranger to those of 1789.” So indeed he found it. On arriving in New York and resuming his place in the social life of the country, he was greatly depressed by the discovery that the principles of the Declaration had gone wholly by the board. No one spoke of natural rights and popular sovereignty; it would seem actually that no one had ever heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the pressing need of a strong central coercive authority, able to check the incursions which “the democratic spirit” was likely to incite upon “the men of principle and property.”

The American Revolution was effectively hijacked by other interests. We have seen that in recent times as well with that of the Tea Party and other freedom movements that are infiltrated by those who are not friends of liberty and freedom but place their hope in the state.

But I digress.

On this anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Yorktown toward being a French-American victory started 238 years ago today, I should probably share some truths about the events leading up to this battle.

Gen. George Washington’s personnel and persistent dreams was to knock out the British forces in New York City with the French navy’s assistance. A pretty good article from the Daily Beast (please pardon all the advertisements) outlines the behind the scenes military and political maneuvering that preceded this strategic decision.

The Franco-American alliance was more than two years old, in July 1780, when the Rochambeau-led Expédition Particulière arrived in Rhode Island with 5,500 troops, some long-range cannon, and a relatively small fleet. The alliance had already had two large military disasters, at Newport in 1778 and at Savannah in 1779. Rochambeau wasn’t sure what he could accomplish either, having been forced to leave behind a good chunk of his army and ships, and being burdened with a set of instructions from Louis XVI, dictated by Lafayette, that in unequivocal language put him under the command of General Washington and made the French troops and ships no more than auxiliaries of the Americans.

There was not much hope at this point in the arrangement. As will be seen, George Washington ended up being one of the most challenging roadblocks toward a decisive victory over the British:

Washington had dreamed of this moment, and of having naval superiority over Great Britain. He had long believed that the only way to end the war was to capture a significant British stronghold and army, and for several years he had been fixated on New York as the most likely target for such an attack. Now, with the French fleet, it could be achieved! But to Rochambeau, an attack on New York seemed difficult and dangerous, as likely to end in the capture of his and Washington’s armies as in the capture of British commander Henry Clinton’s. In Rochambeau’s view, he didn’t have enough ships and men to assure himself and Washington of victory.

When one researches Washington’s life, one will see the many times he wished things to be true that only ended up in disaster. In fact, as a young British officer, his decisions led directly to the start of the French-Indian War. His surprise breakfast massacre of French troops, whom he was to “meet up with and negotiate with” in the Appalachian mountains, led to a war that ended up raising taxes in the colonies that started a revolution.

Again, I digress. Back to the decision on Yorktown vs. NYC.

Washington and Rochambeau first met in Hartford on Sept. 20, 1780, at the home of Washington’s former commissary general and longtime supporter, Jeremiah Wadsworth. To this conference, Washington brought an eight-page plan for the attack on New York. Rochambeau came with a neatly written series of 10 questions, with space on the sheets to record Washington’s answers.

The French queries were an elegant, Socratic trap. By answering the first one honestly, Washington would be led, inexorably and through his own logic, to the only possible conclusion, the one chosen ahead of time by Rochambeau.

So Washington was asked whether naval superiority was essential to a big victory over a target defended by the British Navy. When he responded truthfully, “There can be no decisive enterprise against the maritime establishments of the English in this country, without a constant naval superiority,” his fate was sealed because the French fleet was not yet strong enough.

Washington was being played, but for his and the 13 colony’s own good. The French knew the big picture, the global paradigm and GW was myopic in focusing on only brute force to displace the British from NYC.

After the 10 questions had been answered, Rochambeau insisted that there would be no attack on New York in 1780, and none until Louis XVI dispatched more troops and a larger fleet to America. And he was able to induce Washington to co-sign a letter to the king to that effect. It was the only real product of the conference.

That the French were content with this meant that their focus was on the global situation. They were well aware of their own resourcing issues, and rightly so, they had to protect their own interests first. Nations and empires that want to survive need to know how to hold them, know how to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run (from the military strategist Kenny Rogers).

Eight months later, on May 21, 1781, came the Washington-Rochambeau conference at Wethersfield. In American lore, this is where and when the leaders jointly decided to attack Yorktown. But that’s a myth.

This myth is the key point in all the state approved history books that have been printed in the last couple centuries in the United States. There is nothing you can trust in these books until you have done your own research. The state is convinced that that effort is so labor intensive, the most people will just adopt the history book’s contents as true, because it is easier and it fits the narrative. Happy slave, happy life.

Rochambeau asked: If and when the new and larger French fleet arrived from the Caribbean, “What are the operations that we might have to view at that Epocha?”

Washington’s response: “Should the West India Fleet arrive upon this Coast—the force thus Combined may either proceed in operation against New York, or may be directed against the enemy in some other quarter, as circumstance may dictate.”

Still NYC-centric .. even the next day after a night’s reflections:

The next day, Washington rote in his diary that he had “Fixed with Count Rochambeau” to proceed with a campaign against New York, to begin once the French had transferred to the Hudson River to join his Continentals. He added, almost as an afterthought, that he had agreed to “extend our views Southward as circumstances and a naval superiority might render more necessary & eligible.”

Washington was not budging. This was his fight, it was his terms, and Rochambeau was technically reporting to Gen. George Washington!

Maybe we should shift toward looking into the real strategist’s mind, that of Rochambeau:

In late July, when Rochambeau did move to the Hudson River, just below Peekskill, where his forces encamped next to Washington’s, the French left behind in Rhode Island the resident fleet and the largest of the cannon, which they believed would be wrecked if dragged over Connecticut’s roads. The cannon would have to be brought by ship to whatever target. To my mind—although no documents say so—the abandoning of the cannon argues that Rochambeau had already decided they would soon be transferred by ship to the Yorktown peninsula.

Actions speak louder than words. The excuse Rochambeau had would have convinced Gen. Washington who at this point was just giddy that maybe this was the year that the French navy would arrive.

Indeed, by mid-July Rochambeau had made a significant end-run around Washington’s cherished objective. He, and his new Newport fleet commander, de Barras, and the French plenipotentiary at Philadelphia, La Luzerne, had all sent word to Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse, then in the Caribbean, that the best target in America was the large British force on the relatively exposed Yorktown peninsula, where it could not long survive without naval reinforcement.

Inside the French chain of command, this strategic sharing of information sets the tone for what is about to come. From July to November is peak hurricane season in the Caribbean. This might be good timing to get the French assets (ships, guns and men) out of the Caribbean for an alternative mission.

Around that time, aboard the majestic Ville de Paris at Cap-Français, Haiti, de Grasse was meeting with Captain Francisco de Saavedra, a former theology student who had become Spain’s New World forces strategist. They laid out a two-punch plan for ridding the hemisphere of the British. The first blow would be against Yorktown, the second, once de Grasse had returned to the Caribbean and in conjunction with the Spanish fleet there, would be against Jamaica. To enable de Grasse to depart for northern waters, Saavedra committed the Spanish fleet to act as guardian for the French-controlled islands in the Caribbean. As Saavedra put it in his diary, they “could not waste the most decisive opportunity of the war,” to take the Cornwallis army while it was at its most vulnerable.

Who knew that the decision about Yorktown was actually made in Haiti, with French and Spanish strategists? You don’t read any of that in most US History books now do you?

As de Grasse set out for the Yorktown peninsula, he sent ahead a letter to Rochambeau. Forwarded to the Hudson by de Barras, it reached Rochambeau and Washington on Aug. 14. It said that de Grasse was en route to the Yorktown peninsula, “the spot which seemed to be indicated by you, M. le comte, and by MM Washington de la Luzerne and de Barras as the surest to effect the good which you propose.”

Some sources say that Washington was disappointed but then committed his forces to join in the march to Yorktown. Other sources say that Washington lashed out at this news and then went and pouted for an hour before recomposing himself and getting on with the PLAN, the French Plan. In either case, eventually he came around and supported this plan.

Before Rochambeau and Washington’s armies arrived at Yorktown, the battle was essentially won by de Grasse, whose fleet outmaneuvered the British and then, along with de Barras’s, occupied Chesapeake Bay. That forced the British fleet to return to New York, leaving Cornwallis and his army utterly exposed.

At this point it was just a matter of time in defeating the British forces under Cornwallis at Yorktown since there was no re-supply line afforded them. This was NOT the end of this conflict as both Charleston and NYC would not be evacuated by the British until over a year after the Yorktown victory was secured on 17OCT1781. Peace itself was not secured until the Treaty of Paris was signed on 03SEP1783, almost TWO years after Yorktown!

Now you know.

-SF1

1775 Snapshot of South Carolina: What Triggered SoCaroxit?

Post French-Indian War – Proclamation 1763

We are all very familiar to Brexit, and other exit movements with the EU here in 2019. Back in the 1770s, there had been seeds of an effort toward self government in South Carolina for well over a decade. The book ‘South Carolina and the American Revolution‘ by John W. Gordon does a good job at painting the social, military and economic climate in this colony that pitted the success of this colony due to Mother England against a very typical desire for autonomy of the political class present at this point in time.

This post represents the first of several in which I hope to capture the overarching issues at play when people, families and communities risked their own lively-hood for the dream of self-governance and self-determination that liberty minded people rightfully act on out of love for themselves, their children and generations to come.

We should know that the roots of political conflicts, known as wars, usually run back in time to previous wars and their treaties and compromises. Such is the case of setting the state for 1775 in South Carolina. The 1763 Treaty of Paris (not to be confused with the 1783 version that settled the American Revolutionary War) was the culmination of seven years of fighting not just in North America, but among the three global powers in the world at the time, Spain, France and England. While the English technically won the conflict and received various territories as a result, this empire also took on much debt toward that result.

England gained Florida from Spain and Canada from the French but were restricted from settling areas beyond the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains as seen in the map at the top of this post:

“We do therefore, with the Advice of our Privy Council, declare it to be our Royal Will and Pleasure, that no Governor or Commander in Chief in any of our Colonies of Quebec, East Florida, or West Florida, do presume, upon any Pretence whatever, to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass any Patents for Lands beyond the Bounds of their respective Governments, as described in their Commissions: as also that no Governor or Commander in Chief in any of our other Colonies or Plantations in America do presume for the present, and until our further Pleasure be known, to grant Warrants of Survey, or pass Patents for any Lands beyond the Heads or Sources of any of the Rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West and North West, or upon any Lands whatever, which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us as aforesaid, are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.”

Since the British empire had a large navy and a rather small army, and was most interested in sail trade, the priority of lands far removed from the oceans were just not high enough on their list. With the war over, it was now time to settle the war debt which included imposing new taxes on the thirteen American colonies as they had benefited from the protection from the French and the Indians.

If you look closely at the map at the top of the post, you can see where Indian lands are in 1763 South Carolina in the upstate region. The Cherokee, which inhabited much of the state in previous decades, had sided with the British during the 1758-1761 French & Indian Wars and were rewarded with protection by the British empire with this Proclamation of 1763. This is what upset the pioneer spirited settlers of South Carolina as they moved west as more people came to the colonies in the decade to follow. This “penned in” action helped the settlers to decide rather quickly if they wanted to stick with the British Empire, or to risk the path to independence.

By 1775, with similar rumblings in the northern British Colonies in America, South Carolina decided that they had what it took to manage their own affairs, even if it meant they no longer had the naval protection the British Navy offered from overseas forces that could threaten their independence.

Obviously, this independent spirit for liberty lingered on through the generations all the way to December 1860 when once again, South Carolina would attempt another “SoCaroxit”