Posted on 07/04/2017 2:32:11 PM PDT by Eagles Field
I always savor the insight Freeper History Buffs offer, especially the spirited difference in opinion. The easy answers are Washington, Jefferson, the like. Who are the ones unsung, where the tide may not have turned without?
Mel Gibson???
I couldn’t resist it...
Timothy Murphy
Mordecai Gist and Hyam Salomon to name just two. Most people have never heard of them.
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Perfect, this is what I hoped. No, I never heard of and I consider myself a history buff. Well, I did ... off to research.
According to the History Channel, it must have been General Pickett
He shot General Simon Fraser at the battle of Bemis Heights(second battle of Saratoga).
Brian Williams. They parachuted him behind British lines at Yorktown.
Dan Morgan
Not even close. Washington was the indispensable man, as Flexner has called him. While the victories in the south were important, there were four British armies operating in or above Virginia.
Had they bagged Washington’s army at any point, the Revolution would have collapsed.
Thomas Jefferson? He ranks among the most expendable. Jefferson eschewed warfare, thought it beneath him, and favored talking his foes into submission.
Revolutionary war service
In 1776, Gist was appointed major of a battalion of regulars, and was with them in the Battle of Long Island where they fought a delaying action at the Old Stone House (Brooklyn, New York), allowing the American army to escape encirclement.
In January 1779, the Continental Congress appointed him as a brigadier general in the Continental Army, and he took the command of the 2nd Maryland Brigade. He fought stubbornly at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina in 1780. At one time after a bayonet charge, his force secured fifty prisoners, but the British under Lord Cornwallis rallied, and the Marylanders gave way. Gist escaped, and, a year later, he was present at the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. (Gist appears (back row, right side) in John Trumbull’s painting Surrender of Lord Cornwallis which hangs in the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.)
He joined the southern army under Nathanael Greene,[3] and he was given the command of the light corps again when the army was remodelled in 1782. On August 26, 1782, he rallied the broken forces of the Americans under John Laurens after they had been defeated by a small British foraging party.
Three indispensable men to the RevWar: Washington for military strategy and leadership; Thos. Paine for the ideas and writing advocating the Revolution; and Ben Franklin who gave it international legitimacy.
I forgot Mrs. Loring. She kept General Howe “occupied” long enough for General Washington’s army to survive.
I think I agree with you. without those victories in the South, we never would have had Yorktown.
There were were a lot of Tories in the South. I saw a program on “The History Channel” about Rachael McAdams and her family’s ancestors fled America to Canada because they were loyalists.
We were one of the 96 Rangers from VA that Morgan recruited to fight at Quebec in 1775. We were wounded.
Haym Salomon (also Solomon; April 7, 1740 – January 6, 1785) was a Polish-born American Jewish businessman and political financial broker who immigrated to New York City from Poland during the period of the American Revolution. He helped convert the French loans into ready cash by selling bills of exchange for Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance. In this way he aided the Continental Army and was possibly, along with Morris, the prime financier of the American side during the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain
Sympathizing with the Patriot cause, Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. In September 1776, he was arrested as a spy. The British pardoned him, but only after requiring him to spend 18 months on a British boat as an interpreter for Hessian soldiers – German troops employed by the British. Salomon used his position to help prisoners of the British escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert the war effort. In 1778 Salomon was arrested again and sentenced to death. Again, he managed to escape, making his way with his family to the rebel capital in Philadelphia.
General Green in the south. Wore out Cornwallis and forced him into the Yorktown trap.
Franklin had a remarkable paramilitary career in his fifties, on the frontier of eastern Pennsylvania, including Easton Pa. The colonists were being terrorized by Indian attacks, and he rode up there to help stiffen their spine, and make other arrangements as well, I presume.
The story I read said that he went down to Easton and found all the men drinking in a tavern, waiting for the end. I guess he rallied them in a positive manner.
There really was military stuff involved, but of course he was more of an organizer than a leader in battle, nevertheless I do believe that he was instrumental in turning things around, and his reputation endures to this day in southeastern PA, even if obscurely.
I personally like the story that on his trip to France, he was escorted to the dock through the streets of Philadelphia by his personal militia, with sabers drawn!
What might one give to have seen that sight.
Agreed
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