Replies

If you like history you'll enjoy this. Its the examination of Ben Franklin by the house of commons regaurding the colonial resistance to the stamp act. I personally love the final answers.

Q. If the Stamp Act should be repealed, would it induce the assemblies of America to acknowledge the rights of Parliament to tax them, and would they erase their resolutions?

A. No, never!

Q. Are there no means of obliging them to erase those resolutions?

A. None that I know of; they will never do it, unless compelled by force of arms.

Q. Is there a power on earth that can force them to erase them?

A. No power, how great soever, can force men to change their opinions.

Q. What used to be the pride of the Americans?

A. To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain.
Q. What is now their pride?

A. To wear their old clothes over again till they can make new ones.

Franklin's Examination Before the House of Commons

The refusal to buy british was a beautiful act of defiance. Overall the similarities between the causes of the revolution to the situation we find ourselves in now is striking. What we lack now is the willingness to sacrifice.

There is an interesting aspect to the minuteman training which I have come across in my reading on this subject. General Gage of the British army was so concerned about the minutemen that he initiated a daily march beginning in 1774 whereby the British army would muster and march to all of the nearby towns as a show of force and also for practice. In reality the minutemen used this procedure to their advantage by shadowing the Brits and rallying all of their fellow minutemen along the route. When the Brits reversed direction and arrived back in Boston, the minutemen would go home for dinner. The original Patriots Day on April 19, 1775 started out as one of these impromtu drills and turned into the Battles of Lexington and Concord after the killing of minutemen on Lexington Green. Our forefathers knew tyranny when they saw it and they took action. The rest is history.