-Caveat Lector-
> Great Britain taxed the colonists at far lower rates than Americans
>tolerate today --
True, but it was a combination of WHAT was taxed, and HOW the taxes were
collected that the colonists...especially those in Massachusetts colony,
found 'intolerable' (an additional 'Intolerable Act' was the fact that
King George disbanded the colonial parliaments and established his own
appointees from England in the offices of colonial governors, which had
previously been held by colonists)...
> Yet the colonists did rebel. It's hard to imagine, today, the faith and
>courage of a few hundred frozen musketmen, setting off across the darkened
>Delaware, gambling their lives and farms on the chance they could engage
>and defeat the greatest land army in the history of the known world, armed
>with only two palpable assets: one irreplaceable man to lead them, and some
>flimsy newspaper reprints of a parchment declaring: "We hold these Truths
>to be self-evident,
Well, as I pointed out in another post, the Declaration of Independence
wasn't written until more than a year after hostilities had broken out at
Lexington and Concord. And it was a hard sell...many colonists who
strongly objected to King George's policies towards the American colonies
and even understood and supported the fighting balked at making the final
break from England...most colonists still considered themselves loyal
subjects of England, even as they were firing upon the military forces of
England.
Today we refer to 'the English' when referring to whom we fought against
in the Revolutionary War...but not one colonist thought that way at the
time, because the term 'the English' meant the colonists too...
The American Revolution was in fact our first civil war...
> The War for American Independence began over unregistered untaxed guns,
To be precise, that was the spark that set off the powderkeg that had
been simmering for a decade over many issues...
>when British forces attempted to seize arsenals of rifles, powder, and ball
>from the hands of ill-organized Patriot militias in Lexington and Concord.
Where does the author get off calling the colonial militias
'ill-organized'; if the Lexington and Concord militias had been
ill-organized, the 'lobsterbacks' (which was the derogatory term that
American colonists used to describe the British troops) would have found
the local militia in bed rather than finding them standing in formation
on the town green...
It could be argued that the American colonial militias were BETTER
organized and BETTER trained than the British troops; granted, the
British army was considered one of the best armies of its day, but it
wazs trained in the strict rules of European warfare.
The colonial militias, OTOH, were responsible for maintaining law, order,
and the safety of their families on the frontier, especially from
occasional attack by local Indians. They therefore trained regularly,
and were extremely well organized.
>American civilians shot and killed scores of those government agents as
>they marched back to Boston. Are those Minutemen still our heroes? Or do we
>now consider them "dangerous terrorists" and "depraved government-haters"?
There was no question at the time...the 'lobsterbacks' considered the
rebel colonists as 'terrorists', and were quite put out that they did not
'fight correctly', meaning that the colonists waged what we have come to
label 'guerrilla warfare', tactics they had learned from their Native
American adversaries...
The 'lobsterbacks' considered such fighting 'barbaric'...it just 'was not
done'...and unfortunately afterwards the rebel colonial military leaders
decided that rather than be thought 'barbaric', they would fight 'by the
rules', which explains why 'we' didn't do so well after the initial
'victories' at Lexington/Concord, Bunker Hill, and Fort Ticonderoga...
If we'd maintained such guerrilla tactics, the war would probably have
ended in our favor much sooner...
June
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