Back during the pre-invasion discussion about whether to send troops to Iraq to overthrow the government of a sovereign country, France caught a lot of heat for opposing George W Bush’s plan to invade Iraq to destroy the Weapons of Mass Destruction and implement regime change. People in “right wing” talk radio, the Fox News Network and some Republicans started urging people to rename French Fries to “Freedom Fries” and the like. Francophiles responded with “Don’t you understand that if it wasn’t for France, the United States wouldn’t exist?”.
Is that true? Let’s refresh our memories – the U.S. education system trains you to remember things for 12 hours to take tests and then immediately forget it.
The Tea Act was passed in 1773 to reduce the smuggling of tea from the East Indies. Tea previously had been required to go through London and be assessed a stiff duty, and then exported to America. This resulted in massive (and lucrative) tea smuggling.
The Tax act ended the requirement of tea to go through London and elimination of most of the duty tax on the tea. The East India tea company was sitting on 18 million pounds of unsold tea and wanted to dump high quality tea at bargain prices on the American colonies. The East India Tea company was on the verge of economic collapse.
The objective was to reduce the price of the high quality East India Tea in the colonies which would put the tea smugglers out of business. The consequence of this Act to reduce taxes was the Boston Tea Party. Were you taught or believe the Boston Tea Party was about the British increasing taxes on tea? The Boston Tea Party unified all the parties in England that something had to be done about this rebellion in Massachusetts.
In 1763, France and England had ended the Seven Years war (the American portion was called the French and Indian wars). France ceded “New France” (French territory in Canada) to English control. The Quebec Act was passed in 1774 to deal with the problems that England taking over the former French land and settlers had created. Among its provisions was more tolerance for Roman Catholics (The Church of England is neither Catholic nor Protestant). The colonies were concerned the Quebec Act would become the prototype for reworking the governance of the 13 other colonies to reconsolidate power and control over the administration of the colonies.
The skirmishes at Lexington and Concord occurred in 1775 = before the writing of the Declaration of Independence. The “Patriots” were not acting based on the authority of the words of Thomas Jefferson – they were motivated by the First Continental Congress, an “extralegal” gathering of minds to discuss how to organize opposition to the “Intolerable Acts” of 1774 imposed in response to the Boston Tea Party. There was much difference of opinion in the First Continental Congress – Joseph Galloway in particular led the faction opposed to an all out separation from England.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Continental_Congress
There were few British troops outside of New England, so the Loyalists (politically Conservative people who tended to be older, more wealthy, people who followed the law, and not wanting change) either fled the country or hid their opposition to the rebellion. The Tories were about 1/3 of the population in the American colonies.
Estimates are that about 40-45% of the colonists supported the war, 15-20% fought with the British and the rest hid their opinions. (After the war, many of the Loyalists were killed or fled the country – many winding up in Eastern Canada)
When the Second Continental Congress was called, internal opposition had been eliminated and the colonies were mostly aligned with the patriots – but did not want to provide money through taxation or create a strong Federal government to run a war. They created the very weak Articles of Confederation which had no ability to tax people and hence relied on the 13 states to make cash contributions and state militias to fund and fight the war. The states failed to come up with the full amound of cash they agreed to.
The war did not go well. George Washington had almost no gunpowder – 90% of what his Army had by 1776 came secretly from France, most of the rest stolen from English supplies. While the Patriots took control of Boston Harbor using canons seized by Benedict Arnold from the fort in Ticonderoga, their adventure to invade Quebec was a miserable failure and alienated the support there was remaining in the British Parliament for negotiating with the Colonies, and turned Benedict Arnold against the Revolution. He fought the rest of the war for the British.
Once the British regrouped, they quickly took back New York and defeated George Washington in August 1776, and Washington withdrew across the East River, then to White Plains then to Valley Forge by 1777. The Continental Army had no Navy – the only vessels they controlled were merchant ships that were seized.
In February 1778, with prodding mostly from Benjamin Franklin, France came out in the open and formally entered the war and started sending troops, naval war ships and military supplies. Spain and the Dutch would later join the effort against England in Europe, for largely the same reasons of diminishing England’s power in Europe.
By 1781, Washington’s forces were demoralized. The British controlled Boston, New York, and Cornwallis was marching through the South. The French landed 6,000 troops in Rhode Island, and had a plan – they would march to White Plains, meet up with the remaining Continental troops under Washington and march South to meet and engage Cornwallis. The French Navy would surprise the British Navy (pinning them down in New York with a fake attack plan) and force the ships in Chesapeake Bay to flee – cutting off supplies and a way for the British troops to retreat back to New York by sea.
George Washington rejected the French plan. He wanted to march back to New York and directly attack the strongly fortified and well supplied British positions. French commander Comte de Rochambeau, who was an experienced military officer and veteran of prior wars with the English – including the Seven Years War – eventually convinced Washington to follow his plan – probably aided by the desertion of many of Washington’s troops who had not been paid. An infusion of French money helped keep some of the Continental Army around for the march to Virginia
The plan to trap Cornwallis worked, and the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown essentially ended the military conflict. The reinforcements from New York arrived 5 days after Cornwallis had surrendered.
The dead at Yorktown were 21 Americans and 60 French. The British would continue a naval trade blockade until 1783. The war officially ended in 1784 when the Congress of the Confederation accepted the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
Without the ability to tax and without an executive branch, the Congress of the Confederation was unable to manage the United States. The paper currency issued by the government quickly became worthless. Several groups of Continental Army veterans threatened the government if they weren’t paid and their pensions honored.
Alexander Hamilton led the Federalist movement that called the Constitutional Convention to replace the Articles of Confederation with a stronger Federal government with the power to tax and make laws that tell the States what they have to do.
Hamilton strongly backed the idea of a government chartered national bank held in private hands patterned after the Bank of England (The Bank of the United States).
At the time, Alexander Hamilton had founded and was running of the Bank of New York. George Washington appointed Hamilton as the first Secretary of the Treasury. The forces opposing Washington, Hamilton and the Central Bank aligned under the Democratic-Republican party led by Thomas Jefferson, who would become President in 1801. (You thought George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were political allies?)
The Anti-federalisst forced the adoption of the 10 amendements, including the 9th and 10th amendements which incorporated the anti-federalist language into the Constitution. Only then was it adopted by all 13 states in 1790.
Hamilton got his bank in 1791. The Southern states were concerned about the concentration of economic power in the NorthEast and a strong central government, which would come to a head about 70 years later.
While it is nice that Glenn Beck is taking his high school history lessons seriously now, he is doing so by searching out the ideas that support his (or is it Pat Gray’s?) theories and closing his eyes to those things that disprove it.
You can’t read Thomas Payne’s Age of Reason and understand deism and the Enlightenment and and conclude that religion and the Law of Moses was the foundation of the Founding Fathers and the Country. It’s simply not true. Read another voice here
But such is the nature of “history” (and religion). I enjoyed Beck much more when he knew he is just a “rodeo clown” entertaining people on a cable TV network run by a Globalist and funded by money from Saudi Arabia.
