Posted on 01/05/2007 1:09:32 AM PST by Cato Uticensis
Yes. Which makes sense, since 1) the British abandoned Boston and 2) Philadelphia and NYC are only 100 miles apart on each side of New Jersey..
And yet, the Great Awakening, a religious movement several decades before the Revolution, had a great deal to do with
1) uniting the colonies and
2) contributing to the colonists' vision that they could have an individual relationship with God.
Rather than turning away from faith in God, the colonists became more actively religious and began to get the sense that they should be free to practice their religion the way they wanted.
A great number of them no longer felt they needed to rely on a particular religion to connect them with God.
In summary, a religious movement helped encourage the colonist's awareness of individual liberty.
True as that may be it does not change the fact that the government eventually established made sure it was religiously neutral on a national basis with no Established religion allowed, no religious tests for federal office etc. Establishing a theocracy was the last thing on the Founders' minds.
It makes sense because the centers of opposition to British rule and the centers of agitation against it were in the cities.
Exactly. Religiously neutral, although not antagonistic to religion as, say, the French revolutionists were.
The importance of New York's geographic location cannot be overemphasized.
American and British commanders alike had considered New York the strategic key to the continent, particularly if British forces in the city were to march north up the Hudson Valley to meet a British army moving south from Canada, as was planned.Such a convergence would divide New England from Pennsylvania and the Southern states and vastly complicate Patriot communication, troop deployments and the war for independence itself. However, such a strategic pincer movement failed to materialize.
And the claim was "New York captured the British rather than the other way around." British strategy did not understand that capturing a major city had little real impact on the rebellion since the country just wasn't that urbanized. Pigs freely roamed the streets in NYC until the 1840-50s.
General Howe's NY mistress probably did as much to (inadvertently) assure the American victory by keeping him in NY and distracted.
They knew they needed to capture more than New York City.
Capturing New York was part of a plan.
They roamed the streets of other cities, too.
"Actually it was in the big cities that most of the opposition to the Crown was centered as the names of the first battles indicate. Boston was the center and was the rallying point after the Crown put it under interdiction. The colonies rallied to its defense and that marked one of the first instances of unity among all the colonies against the Crown. For the first several years the movement to independence was centered in NY City and Boston. The hinterlands had nothing to do the rebellion until much later.
Tories were very strong in the western Carolinas not just Charleston. Any attempt to portray the back country as rebels and the cities as Tory is simply false."
I don't say they were 100% ironclad that way, only majority. If the cities were such hotbeds of revolution, then why did the New England countryside have to revolt and lay siege to Boston? Why not vice-versa?
Most of the Patriot Militiamen, like the Minutemen, came from among the "Country People."
Were there patriot urban dwellers? Yes.
Were there Loyalist people in the countryside? Yes.
But both were minorities.
""Alexander Hamilton grew up St Croix, a little island in the Carribean." Alexander Hamilton grew up in a CITY on the Island and left the Caribbean at the age of 17 to come to the Colonies to study. He lived in a CITY in NJ completing his college prep and for the rest of his life lived in the CITY of New York with an interval in Philadelphia when the government moved there. "
Before 1980, and by some standards even today, no such animal existed on St Croix. One of my teachers on St Croix said that in 1960 there was "Christiansted, Fredericksted, a dirt road between them and goats on either side." And to give you an idea, when I lived there in 1993, I was going into Christiansted and I said to this gal I liked, "I'm going into the city, do you want anything?" And her boss laughed at the notion of me referring to Christiansted as 'the city'. Point being, Alexander Hamilton grew up in a rural environment.
"Any city in 1780 except NY, Phil, Charleston, Boston was little more than a "country town" and some of the latter would be considered suburbs today. The isolated rural dwellers had little to do with the Revolution especially the beginning."
that isn't true, the militias that were laying siege to Boston were from the New England countryside. George Washington lived on the farm, as did most of his Virginians, who represented the real soldiery that came up to take charge of the Revolutionary Army.
"Most of the battles were in NY state and NJ as I said not ALL."
Commanded on our side by a Southerner and his Southern troops being the backbone of the Army.
"One of the reasons Cowpens and Yorktown were fought was because Cornwallis wanted to join forces with the Loyalist militia's in the Carolina's.
Your ideological blinders prevent you from seeing a true picture."
No, Cornwallis wanted to pacify the South so he concentrate on delivering a knockout blow to Washington. It wasn't accomplished because the South was in flames for Cornwallis.
You are mistaken, friend.
"True as that may be it does not change the fact that the government eventually established made sure it was religiously neutral on a national basis with no Established religion allowed, no religious tests for federal office etc. Establishing a theocracy was the last thing on the Founders' minds."
Who says a Godly nation is necessarily a theocracy? Only Liberals and Socialists (sorry for the redundancy).
Our Declaration of Independence plainly states that we are endowed by certain inalienable right by our Creator. the Constitution refers to "preserving the Blessings of Liberty" in the Preamble. What were these Blessings of Liberty? They were the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness endowed by Our Creator spoken of in the Declaration of Independence.
American Socialists say that the Constitution has a "Separation of Church and State" in it, and that this was so very important to the Founding Fathers. But this makes absolute zero sense for several reasons.
First, if it was so important to them, then why did they not say "Separation of Church and State" plainly so that it didn't have to be discovered only by a Liberal judge 158 years after the fact?
Second, why did they put this concept in an Amendment? If it was so important to the Founding Fathers, then why not put it in an article of the Constitution?
Third, how does one reconcile the fact that the Bill of Rights was passed to appease Anti-Federalists (Patrick Henry, a devout Christian, was the leader of the authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers and arguably the best example of an Anti-Federalist, if the Federal Government came to his town and told him he had to remove his 10 Commandments monument, they'd get hot lead from him in response) who wanted to limit Federal power with using Federal Power to tyrannize localities into things like removing their monuments or teaching Intelligent Design? The Anti-Federalists of yesteryear were like the Conservative Republicans of today. How can anybody believe that they'd back the ACLU and the Soviet model of Separation of Church and State?
The fact is, the Establishment Clause says "Congress shall make no law RESPECTING the Establishment of Religion." (emphasis mine). What that means is, Congress has no right to get into questions of Establishment of Religion, for or against. And if Congress can make no law, the Federal Court has no jurisdiction in this question unless some Federal Agency is Establishing a religion. Thus, the only violators of the Establishment Clause are the ACLU, the Southern Bolshevik Law Center and the corrupt judges who seem bent on giving them whatever they want, no matter how flagrantly Unconstitutional.
"It makes sense because the centers of opposition to British rule and the centers of agitation against it were in the cities."
they weren't at all. But big cities were often filled with Country people coming to market and such. They were important commerce centers for ALL people.
There were NEVER any mass uprisings in the cities during the Revolution. The Brits never had to fight the Battle of Hue. Once Boston, New York and Philadelphia were occupied by the British Army, things were mostly quiet in these cities. Just as the dwellers of these cities today are content to lick Kofi Annan's boots, they were happy in 1777 to kiss the hem of their redcoat masters' robes.
"And the claim was "New York captured the British rather than the other way around." British strategy did not understand that capturing a major city had little real impact on the rebellion since the country just wasn't that urbanized. "
Capturing a major city had little impact on the rebellion because its centers of gravity were in the countryside.
"So, in answer to your query about the Korean War, the Democratic Party was doing its utmost to prove that it was as Anti-Communist as the Republican Party
What you wrote makes a good deal of sense. I need to learn more about the period immediately after WWII."
Ann Coulter wrote quite a bit about it in "Treason." Get yourself a copy of that, it is most illuminating.
One of the big events was that 1946 was like 1994, the Republicans swept into power and they forced a change in direction on the New Deal Democrats. New Deal Democrats wanted to continue the Alliance with the USSR and together build a socialist world. 1946 forced a changing of the Guard in the Democratic Party to the GI Generation Democrats, like JFK, RFK and George Smathers. That's why Kennedy stood up to the Reds during the Cuban Missile Crisis and RFK helped Joe McCarthy. RFK was the second man of so-called "McCarthyism." It wasn't until the late '60s that the Democratic Party returned like a dog to its own vomit and began loving Communism again. Remember that JFK opposed the Big Left establishment from the New Deal, and we all know what happened to him and his brother, Liberal propaganda notwithstanding.
Back to 1946. The Democrats had had a virtual lock on power since 1932. In that year they took both Houses of Congress, the presidency, most of the Governorships and state legislatures. The same hypocritical Democrats who bellyached about a "one party state" in 2002 and 2004 look back on the New Deal Era as halcyon days, and in those days America really was a one party state. Republicans didn't even have one hundred members in the House, much less two hundred. Suddenly the GOP has a majority again and so they went about major changes in tactics. See the Republic of Utica's previous post "The Great Left Wing Manpower Shortage" for more on that. But the main thing they did was give control, for a time, over to Anti-Communist WWII vets, people who were like Zell Miller (a Korean War vet, same generation, just a couple years too young for WWII).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.