I don’t sit waiting on the next post by Max Velocity in order to critique it, but this came in the mail and I felt that it would be appropriate to weigh in with readers.
This is a bit of a combination post and is intended to get a few things off my chest, and challenge the narrative. I will mince no words when I tell you that the state of things in this country right now appalls me. We have just had July the 4th and as a (former) Brit I have seen my share of dumb statements that drive me nuts.
Anyway, this is what I think: I will ‘recast’ for you the American Revolution. I know you won’t like it, because you have been reared on your own historical propaganda. In simple terms, the events surrounding 1776 were a civil war between the British Crown and Aristocratic landlords in the US, who were British. The colonies were British and had been for a couple of hundred years. The beginnings of America were British.
In the 1776 civil war, there were various actors. The British Regular Army, Hessian mercenaries, the Rebels, the Colonial Loyalists, and the French Navy. When Paul Revere made his ride, what he was actually yelling was “The Regulars are coming.” Not the British, because everyone was British.
When the Regulars marched to Lexington, they were met by British Colonial Militia. Yes, yes, farmers with guns blah blah, but they were actually a militia, trained to be able to fight with the weapons of the day. However, nothing should take away from the huge achievement of the rebels. I won’t go on here about that fact that Britain was involved in a huge war with France, and that a tiny percentage of combat power was only ever able to be given up to fight in the American colonies. For the colonies, this was a life and death struggle; for Britain, it was a sideshow. Same with 1814 etc: for Americans relating this on July 4th, it is everything, for the British Empire at the time it was nothing but a side-show to achieve specific political objectives. In short, there is a lot of American Hubris over events about 200 years ago, not really tied to any general awareness of world events at the time. Much of this can be traced to American ethnocentrism safe behind the ocean walls that protect this country. Consider this: Britain was involved in a total war with the French Empire, which was not concluded until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. By today’s standards, the relatively small taxes levied in the Colonies were to help pay for that war. It was extremely self centered for the Rebels to pick that time to conduct a revolution: and don’t forget the large number of Colonial Loyalists who stayed loyal. I have not studied it, but given the war in Europe, I am interested to know who it was that Britain sent to the Colonies as Regular troops in order to fight the rebellion. What was their standard? Were they green troops or hardened veterans who were sent for a needed rest? It’s an interesting point.
If he’s right, it wasn’t self-centered, it was smart. But I don’t think he’s right. In fact, I think this analysis is very poor and perhaps suffers from his own propagandistic rearing. And no, I couldn’t care less who were the British regulars sent to prosecute war in the Americas.
We’ve dealt with this in just a bit of detail before, but I’ll recapitulate it. General Howe was hopelessly mired in operations in the North. The linchpin of the British strategy was General Cornwallis and his plan to take the important Southern port of Charleston, which he did after taking Savannah, and then move North through the Carolinas and eventually meet with General Howe. Despite several conventional victories, his forces suffered many casualties and lack of logistics mainly because of the insurgency in South Carolina (combined with the death of his plan to use loyalist troops in battle against patriots).
His intention was to march Northward, with the hideously awful plan of leaving loyalists in charge of land and assets taken in battle. This approach failed when loyalists evaporated and patriots multiplied. Cornwallis’ plan to march Northward became a plan to flee to Wilmington carrying wounded troops and attempt resupply. He was hauling wounded troops with a depleted force, and needed lead ball, gunpowder and virtually everything else. His retreat to Wilmington was unapproved, but he knew that his force couldn’t sustain much longer without rest and resupply.
At the height of the campaign in Afghanistan, I predicted the failure of logistics through Chaman and the Khyber pass, and because of the U.S. failure to engage the Caucasus region, supply aircraft left and returned from Donaldson AFB 24 hours a day, 365 days per year (Mr. Bob King, Instructor, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Department of Joint, Interagency and Multinational Operations, Leavenworth, encouraged my work in this area). Essentially, logistics were provided to U.S. forces in Afghanistan via air transport, which is no way to prosecute a war.
The American continent became the British Afghanistan times a thousand. Continued logistics were impossible. The expanse of the land made it too cumbersome, too difficult, too costly, and too involved. Furthermore, the temperament of the people was not conducive to rule by the Brits. It wouldn’t have mattered if The Brits had sent all of their armies. The campaign would have lasted longer, but in the end the outcome would have been the same.
But the most profoundly wrong sentiment in the article I cited above isn’t the analysis of the campaign, but rather, the reasons and impetus for its advent. Whether there were aristocrats involved or engaged isn’t the point. Modern American community is fractured to the point of being nonexistent. Consider. In the expansive wilderness of the American frontier, if a man perished on the field of battle, he needed someone he could entrust with the lives of his widow and children. To whom could you turn today?
In order to understand history, one must turn to the primary source documents. Secondary source documents, along with the pronouncements of professors of history, can lead one astray. For both the American war of independence and the war between the states, my professors forced me to study sermons, and in fact read some aloud in class.
The city square was little visited compared to the church pew in colonial times. The place for philosophy, politics and theology was the pulpit, and the theologian-philosopher was the pastor. In order to understand why the American revolution happened, you must read the sermons of the day. Aristocrat-involvement or not, fighting men were needed, men who could entrust their families to aid from a dedicated community in the event of their death. Without fighting men, such an adventure as the American revolution is just a figment of aristocratic imagination.
The sermons were heavily focused on the breakage of covenant by King George. In fact, it has been said – and correctly so – that “The American revolution was a Presbyterian rebellion.” “Calvinists and Calvinism permeated the American colonial milieu, and the king’s friends did not wish for this fact to go unnoticed.”
As I’ve explained elsewhere:
In terms of population alone, a high percentage of the pre-revolutionary colonies were of Puritan-Calvinist background. There were about three million persons in the thirteen original colonies in 1776, and perhaps as many as two-thirds of these came from some kind of Calvinist or Puritan connection.
[ … ]
… by 1776, nine of the thirteen original colonies had an “established church” (generally congregational in New England, Anglican in New York, Virginia and South Carolina, “Protestant” in North Carolina, with religious freedom in Rhode Island, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Georgia) … While this did not necessarily mean that a majority of the inhabitants of these colonies were necessarily committed Christian believers, it does indicate the lingering influence of the Calvinist concept of a Christian-based civil polity as an example to a world in need of reform.
Every colony had its own form of Christian establishment or settlement. Every one was a kind of Christian republic. It was to them a monstrous idea … for an alien body, parliament, to impose an establishment on them. The colonies were by nature and history Christian … to read the Constitution as the charter for a secular state is to misread history, and to misread it radically. The Constitution was designed to perpetrate a Christian order.
Their experience in Presbyterian polity – with its doctrine of the headship of Christ over the church, the two-powers doctrine giving the church and state equal standing (so that the church’s power is not seen as flowing from the state), and the consequent right of the people to civil resistance in accordance with higher divine law – was a major ingredient in the development of the American approach to church-state relations and the underlying questions of law, authority, order and rights.
[ … ]
It was largely from the congregation polity of these New England puritans that there came the American concept and practice of government by covenant – that is to say: constitutional structure, limited by divine law and based on the consent of the people, with a lasting right in the people to resist tyranny.
It may be difficult for contemporary Americans to comprehend, but for colonial America, covenant was king, the roots of the revolution were largely theological, and the people were deeply religious whether the aristocrats were or not. There was going to be revolution with or without the aristocrats. The Brits in America and the Brits in England were far too different to co-exist under the same crown.
Before closing, there is one more odd statement in the article.
None of the above is to say that I don’t think that ultimately the events of 1776 – 1787, resulting in the founding of the original thirteen colonies of America as a separate united country, was a bad thing. It’s just important to look at it in it’s true light. My understanding is that a lot of loyalists moved to Canada – it’s pretty poor form that the US then tried to invade Canada! Consider also Washington’s put-down of the Whiskey Rebellion – how hypocritical. In fact, that makes you smell a rat at the very beginning of the formation of the country. It was about the first new American tax. Many of the rebels were war veterans who believed that they were fighting for the principles of the American Revolution; against taxation without local representation, while the new federal government maintained that the taxes were the legal expression of Congressional taxation powers.
I’ve seen this sentiment before and while tempting, I do not fully concur with it. If the power of taxation doesn’t extend to the payment of salaries for military service, it would never extend to anything. A conversation between a libertarian and me almost turned ugly at one point when he demanded that continued medical services for veterans was socialism.
To be sure, unearned entitlements such as SNAP and welfare is socialism, but as for what my son did in the USMC, he signed a contract with the U.S. government. The WCF has this to say about lawful oaths and vows.
Whosoever taketh an oath ought duly to consider the weightiness of so solemn an act, and therein to avouch nothing but what he is fully persuaded is the truth. Neither may any man bind himself by oath to anything but what is good and just, and what he believeth so to be, and what he is able and resolved to perform.
The contract signed by my son, and all veterans, and by the U.S. government, is a lawful oath. His education benefit, his medical benefits, and so on, were part of the contract. Failure to meet the stipulations of that contract is sinful. You can decide that you don’t like it and work through your elected representatives to change it, but you cannot revisit what has been signed. I repeat. It is a lawful covenant.
Equally sinful is the failure to pay for service rendered by the members of the continental army. The Whiskey tax was legally passed with local representation in 1791. Max’s objection that the rebels believed they were fighting against a tax that lacked “local representation” is fabulating. The members of the House approved it. They elected the members of the House.
To be sure, I would have chosen to do this otherwise (than a silly, nonsensical tax on Whiskey). But of equal importance, perhaps more important, is the question why America believed it could avoid the immorality of failing its obligations to fulfill covenants and contracts. That says as much about the times as does the Whiskey tax.
“You shall not muzzle an Ox when it is treading out the grain,” (Deut 25:4). So says God, whether you like it or not.
The final points on due remuneration to soldiers of the continental army are mostly beside the point except that they were addressed in the original article. Suffice it to say that I disagree with the spirit of the balance of the article.
I do concur that it is time for America to take note of what has been gained, what has been lost, and why we are where we find ourselves. But Max, while full of complaints, suffers from what I find in this community. Diagnosis of the problem is everywhere. Remedies are in short supply.
I intend to offer a few remedies of my own, and these are unrelated to the article that started this. I don’t want to leave the reader without hope and actionable ideas.
1] Resolve never to be disarmed. That is the least your family and community should be able to expect from you. This involves having a world and life view to support such a determination. You have no greater God-given duty than to your family for their protection and provision.
Libertarianism isn’t that world and life view. As R. J. Rushdoony observed:
“Modern libertarianism rests on a radical relativism: no law or standard exists apart from man himself. Some libertarian professors state in classes and in conversation that any position is valid as long as it does not claim to be the truth, and that therefore Biblical religion is the essence of evil to them. There must be, according to these libertarians, a total free market of ideas and practices.
If all men are angels, then a total free market of ideas and practices will produce only an angelic community. But if all men are sinners in need of Christ’s redemption, then a free market of ideas and practices will produce only a chaos of evil and anarchy. Both the libertarian and the Biblical positions rest on faith, the one on faith in the natural goodness of man, the other on God’s revelation concerning man’s sinful state and glorious potential in Christ. Clearly the so-called rational faith of such irrationalism as Hess and Rothbard represent has no support in the history of man nor in any formulation of reason. It is a faith, and a particularly blind faith in man, which they represent.”
Libertarianism is tyranny by substituting the government for the individual. A tyrant by any other name is still a tyrant, and tyranny can present itself in lawless behavior in the community just as it can in taxation. Classic libertarian politicians, like Ron and Rand Paul, care less about laws to protect the border than the democrats (who want voters) or republicans (who want cheap workers for the corporations). Libertarianism leads to lawlessness and breaking of covenants, contracts, vows, oaths and obligations.
Your basis for never being disarmed is that you were created in God’s image, and His law is immutable and transcendental. Anything else is shifting ground and will disappoint you.
2] Consider your community. If you cannot entrust anyone except family for the protection of your wife and children, not only is that a sad testimony concerning the state of America, but it makes a laughingstock of plans to conduct small unit fire and maneuver tactics. You need to look for a good church, one that values caring for widows and orphans more than it does large buildings and multi-media presentations.
3] Horace Mann laughs from the grave. If your children or grandchildren are in the public school systems of communist reeducation, you should consider home schooling. Incrementalism isn’t something we should reject in the patriot community. Practically and humanly speaking, the father of modern Christian education in America, Rousas J. Rushdoony, believed so thoroughly in Christian education and home schooling that he spent much of his life on it and believed it to be the only real hope for America.
I hope this engenders discussion, thought and study.
