Step One: Essential Education Day 2 A Treatise on Restoring the Primacy of Rule of Law over the rule of men to ensure Liberty prevails over tyranny They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor safety. —Benjamin Franklin Sons of Liberty -- The Fight for Freedom The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. --Thomas Jefferson On December 16th, 1773, radicals from Boston, members of a secret organization of American Patriots called the Sons of Liberty, boarded three East India Company ships and threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. This iconic event, in protest of oppressive taxation and tyrannical rule, is immortalized as The Boston Tea Party. Resistance to the British Crown had been mounting over enforcement of the 1764 Sugar Act, 1765 Stamp Act and 1767 Townshend Act, which led to the Boston Massacre and gave rise to the slogan, No taxation without representation. But it was the 1773 Tea Act, under which the Crown collected a three pence tax on each pound of tea imported to the Colonies, which instigated the Tea Party protest. In turn, that uprising galvanized the Colonial movement opposing British parliamentary acts, as such acts were a violation of the natural, charter and constitutional rights of the British colonists. In response to the Colonial rebellion, the British enacted additional punitive measures, labeled the Intolerable Acts, in hopes of suppressing the burgeoning insurrection. Far from accomplishing their desired outcome, however, the Crowns countermeasures led colonists to convene the First Continental Congress on September 5th, 1774, in Philadelphia. By the spring of 1775, civil discontent was at its tipping point, and American Patriots in Massachusetts and other colonies were preparing to cast off their masters. On the eve of April 18th, 1775, General Thomas Gage, Royal military governor of Massachusetts, dispatched a force of 700 British Army regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, with secret orders to capture and destroy arms and supplies stored by the Massachusetts militia in the town of Concord. However, Patriot militiamen under the leadership of the Sons of Liberty anticipated this raid, and the confrontation between militia and British regulars en route to Concord, was the fuse which ignited the American Revolution. Near midnight on April 18th, 1775, Paul Revere, who had arranged for advance warning of British movements, departed Charlestown (near Boston) for Lexington and Concord in order to warn John Hancock, Samuel Adams and other Sons of Liberty that the British Army was marching to arrest them and seize their weapon caches. (Notably, the catalyst that launched the eight-year struggle for American independence had its beginnings with an effort by the government to disarm the people.) After meeting with Hancock and Adams in Lexington, Revere was captured, but his Patriot ally Samuel Prescott continued to Concord and warned militiamen along the way. In the early dawn of April 19th, the first Patriots Day, 77 militiamen under the command of Captain John Parker assembled on the town green at Lexington where they soon faced Smiths overwhelming force of British regulars. Parker did not expect shots to be exchanged, but his orders were, Stand your ground. When a few links away from the militia column, the British Major John Pitcairn swung his sword, and said, Lay down your arms, you damned rebels! Not willing to sacrifice his small band of Patriots on the Green, as Parker later wrote in sworn deposition, I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse, and not to fire. But the Patriots did not lay down their arms as ordered, and as Parker noted, Immediately said Troops made their appearance and rushed furiously, fired upon, and killed eight of our Party without receiving any Provocation therefor from us. The British continued to Concord, where they divided up and searched for armament stores. Later in the day, the second confrontation between regulars and militiamen occurred as British light infantry companies faced rapidly growing ranks of militia and Minutemen at Concords Old North Bridge. From depositions on both sides, the British fired first on the militia, killing two and wounding four. This time, however, militia commander, Major John Buttrick, yelled the order, Fire, for Gods sake, fellow soldiers, fire! Fire they did, commencing with the shot heard round the world, as immortalized by poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Farmers and laborers, landowners and statesmen alike, pledged through action what Thomas Jefferson would later frame in words as our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor. In the ensuing firefight, the British took heavy casualties and in discord retreated to Concord village for reinforcements, and then retreated back toward Lexington. In route to Lexington, the regulars took additional casualties, including those suffered in an ambush by the reassembled ranks of John Parkers militia -- Parkers Revenge as it became known. The British were reinforced with 1,000 troops in Lexington, but the Kings men were no match for the militiamen, who inflicted heavy casualties upon the Redcoats along their 20 mile tactical retreat to Boston. Thus began the great campaign to reject tyranny and embrace the difficult toils of securing individual Liberty. [T]he People alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government and to reform, alter, or totally change the same when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it, wrote Samuel Adams. By the time the Second Continental Congress convened on May 10th, 1775, the young nation was in open war for Liberty and independence, which would not be won until a full decade later, at great cost of treasure and blood. Of the contest for Liberty, Thomas Paine noted, These are the times that try mens souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. On May 15th, Congress adopted a resolution calling on the states to prepare for rebellion. In its preamble, John Adams advised his countrymen to sever all oaths of allegiance to the Crown. On July 6th, Congress approved the Declaration of the Cause and Necessity of Taking up Arms, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson, which noted: With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves. The Patriot Post (PatriotPost.US)
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 02:46:14 +0000
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