Tag: British Fleet

Character Flaw: US Government Has Lied Us into War of 1812 All the Way to the War on Covid-19

While Canadian children learn all about this fairly well in their government schools, the version that is taught in the US government licensed public and private schools is that the British were to blame for this war and we (US) beat them good. Nothing can be further from the truth.

From what I can recall from my own schooling in the 1960s/1970s, there was mention of the British navy “impressing” US sailors into service on British warships. Well, the truth is that this had been happening since the end of the US War for Independence in 1783 by BOTH the British and the US navies as well as navies all around the globe. In fact, the main mission of the US Marines was to go into port and get able bodied sailors for US ships, kidnapping was encouraged for the greater good. There is no way this issue alone triggered this war.

Since war is the health of the state, power and money are usually the top two reasons states go down this path. The lies told to the public citizens so that they will go along and give up their teen and 20-something men to fight in this just cause is justified because the ends justify the means.

To set the stage and context for this war initiated by the US, one has to find the trigger to resort to this decision. Most of what is covered here is readily available in Wikipedia or its equivalent or conversely, one could listen to this podcast by Bad Quaker (Ben Stone) starting at 17:00 until 49:00.

Regarding the money angle for the US to decide to annex/invade Canada by crossing at Fort Detroit in July 1812, one has to know that since the mid-1780s the US enlisted and licensed privateers to confiscate British merchants goods from the high seas. These were not the Johnny Depp or Errol Flynn versions seen in movies of independent pirates going about their plundering but incorporated business more like present day Iraqi War – US Invasion companies like Halliburton, General Dynamics and Blackwater that thrive in times of conflict.

So up until 1805 with the Battle of Trafalgar, where the British navy whipped both the Spanish and French fleets, the US privateers (considered pirated in other countries) had free reign in the Caribbean and Atlantic due to the 600 ship British fleet focusing on other areas of the world. The Americas was a “backwater” area that did not really rate high on the priority of British global interests.

Complicit in this plundering was the fact that when the privateers brought the booty into US ports (mainly NYC and Boston) the US government got their cut from US constitution decreed taxes before the privateers sold these goods to Americans or even sometimes to the British themselves.

After 1805 the US government’s revenue stream from this activity started to dry up and there was much angst around the economic health of the US and its government by 1812.

 

Power was another angle that has to be considered as there had always been talk of expanding the US both north and south as well as west. During the US Revolutionary War an attempt to get Canada onboard was thwarted, but it seemed to some people who desired empire-building that Canada must be annexed.

It wasn’t enough that the US was able to obtain the Indian Confederacy land in the old Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan) as this had been the intent since George Washington commanded ownership of large land swaths in the Ohio Territory.

So on 12JUL1812 US troops invaded Canada and was met with still resistance by the Canadians mainly (50% of the forces as militia) as the small number of British military leaders had no real skin in the game. Most of the elite thought that the US could just walk in .. even Thomas Jefferson!

The acquisition of Canada, this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching. – Thomas Jefferson AUG1812

At the same time the US was an ally to France’s Napoleon who decided to invade Russia in 1812 and empire building elites in the US eyed Russian holdings from San Francisco bay up to Sitka, Alaska. When Napoleon failed in this endeavor, the US had to back off from their expansion dreams to the west.

The moneyed elites also looked with greed at all the land Spain still had from Mexico all the way to Panama! It is apparent that the immature US government bit off more than they could chew.

Looking just at a comparison of naval vessels, the British Empire had 600 ships at their disposal including some “Ship of the Line” types that had three decks of large cannon numbering from 100-120.

However, they decided to place only the following near this “backwater” region at Halifax, Nova Scotia:

  • 1 old Ship of the Line
  • 7 frigates
  • 9 sloops

The US had the following:

  • 8 frigates (including the USS Constitution which is still commissioned and still afloat)
  • 14 sloops

Know that the USS Constitution had ONE gun deck and 44 guns, no match for the larger British ships and its fame was won by capturing a 16 gun schooner and a 20 gun sloop!

In fact the British Empire fought a defensive war that only sought to protect trade to the West Indies while the Canadians fought bravely and actually beat soundly the US’s invasion attempt.

The Treaty of Ghent on 23DEC1814 awarded the British and Canadians with all their territories returned that they possessed in JUL1812 while the British offered a condolence prize to the New England fishermen who threatened to secede during the war with prize fishing grounds in British waters off the Canadian coast.

The Treaty of Ghent was the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain. Both sides signed it on December 24, 1814, in the city of Ghent, United Netherlands.

The victory won in early 1815 at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson was mainly fought by US privateers and British commanded Canadians and made no difference in the war’s outcome having come after the treaty was signed in late 1814.

The US gained more war debt and no more territories as a result of this conflict. The US had twice as many killed and wounded than the British/Canadian forces. Would this be a lesson learned or would this repeat itself in another generation?

Stay tuned.

Peace out.

-SF!

28AUG1776: Divine Intervention?

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

Big Picture – When an Empire Starts Invading Your Region (Part 2 of 2)

This post is Part #2 of an overview that shows how South Carolina fought to keep the British Empire at bay. This is a continuation of Part #1 where in my previous post I showed how twice South Carolina, specifically the port of Charleston, was able to resist the British advances to date. However, in my last paragraph I mentioned how the American Continental’s unsuccessful siege at Savannah, Georgia in the fall of 1779 caught the attention of British general Clinton in the port of New York City who decided the time was right to send part of his fleet and troops south to the Carolinas and roll them all up the coast to finally crush this rebellion.

Clinton assembled an 8500 man expeditionary force on this large flotilla of ships that would take six-weeks in bad weather to reach the shores of South Carolina about 25 miles south of Charleston. The June 1776 attempt to enter the port taught the British that maybe the land approach would be more successful. The British had to throw all their horses overboard in the rough Atlantic Ocean weather and so targeting replacement horses in South Carolina would be one of the first orders of business.

The British landed on February 11th near Beaufort, South Carolina and joined the British forces from Savannah in an attempt to encircle Charleston, lay siege to the city and force a surrender.  The people of South Carolina were not real excited about the defense of Charleston as the militia refused to deploy there for fear of smallpox, the locals refused to have trees cut down to keep the British from having cover during the siege. Cooperation was at an all-time low.

In early April 1780 the British had laid siege to Charleston and by mid-April, Continental General Benjamin Lincoln ordered all officers without an assigned command and any who were unfit for duty to leave the garrison and retire to the countryside. Francis Marion, who had injured his ankle attempting to escape an officer’s party that had turn into a drunken affair, retired to his plantation 50 miles north and inland from the port of Charleston. On 14APR1780 the noose tightened as the British cavalry commander Tarleton surprised a larger force of American Continentals at Monck’s Corners 30 miles north of Charleston and secured 400 horses for the British. The American commander in Charleston with 5000 men had been requested to defend Charleston at all costs and now had no escape route.

By early May 1780, Charleston was indeed cutoff from the rest of the colony and the British almost had free reign of the land routes throughout the region. Charleston ran up the white flag on 11MAY1780 and the next day the entire Continental force under Lincoln surrendered. The power vacuum was quickly replaced by the British as the following towns also were occupied in the next three days by 15MAY1780:

Monck’s Corners, Cheraw, Orangeburgh, Ninety-Six and Dorchester. The port of Georgetown would be occupied by July 11th.

The next major town to be occupied would be Camden by August 16th and this would be the low-point of the patriot cause in South Carolina during the Revolutionary War or better described as the War for the Independence of Thirteen Sovereign Colonies from the British Empire!

SF1