Posted on 12/04/2001 8:30:00 PM PST by Hopalong
Joseph F. Meany Jr.
Mountains, and the strategic corridors through them, were the central geographic conditions of colonial North America. The great mountain chain that rises just south of the Saint Lawrence River and parallels the Atlantic seaboard - combining the White and Green Mountains of New England, the Adirondack, Helderberg, and Catskill Mountains of New York, and the Alleghenies and Great Smokies of the Middle Atlantic and Southern colonies - comprised an impenetrable physical barrier a thousand miles in length that separated the coastal plain from the continental interior. This barrier, known collectively as the Appalachian mountain chain, was passable at water level in only two places where river corridors permitted transit to the lands beyond. As the late Edward Hamilton observed, "These two corridors were to become the great strategic routes of North America, the easy routes for trade and, practically speaking, the only ones for military effort."
Most important in the colonial period was the north-south corridor formed by the Hudson and Champlain valleys. Extending from tidewater on the Atlantic, it intersected the mountain barrier and continued into the heart of French Canada, to tidewater on the Saint Lawrence. Although the mountains sometimes pressed up to the water's edge, nowhere along their length did the lakes and rivers themselves reach an elevation of more than two hundred feet above sea level. The few barriers to travel, shallows and portage places, "were minor in view of the immense strategic importance of this vital waterway."
From the Richelieu River, the narrow waters of Lake Champlain ran southward between the mountains for a hundred miles without obstruction. Just west of Lake Champlain and its tributary, Lake George, the Hudson River passes within sixteen miles of the Champlain/Saint Lawrence watershed, then flows southward, "stretching almost like a tightened string," through the Catskills until reaching the Atlantic Ocean at New York City.
The second strategic corridor ran east to west from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, extending from the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers westward to Wood Creek and thence via Lake Oneida and the Oswego River to Lake Ontario. Beyond lay the Niagara River, Lake Erie, the Ohio Valley, and the vast continental interior.
Because these strategic river corridors were located within its boundaries, the Province of New York became a principal theater of colonial warfare. The Iroquois Indians knew it as the "Warpath of Nations," while Chancellor James Kent referred to New York as the "Flanders of America," doomed by its geography to be a continuous cockpit of conflict. Indeed, from 1689 to 1815, New York was the central stage upon which were fought four colonial wars (King William's War 1689-1698, Queen Anne's War 1702-1713, King George's War 1744-1748, and the French and Indian War 1754-1763), the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and a second war (1812-1815) against the former colonial power.
The European colonial powers, France and Great Britain, and subsequently the revolutionary Americans and the fledgling United States, sought to control the strategic river corridors by constructing forts at portages, narrows, and other "choke points." Examples include: Forts Crown Point and Carillon (Ticonderoga) on Lake Champlain, Forts George and William Henry on Lake George and Fort Edward on the Hudson River at the "Great Carrying Place," Fort Stanwix at the "Oneida Carry," Fort Ontario on the Oswego River, and Fort Niagara on Lake Ontario.
None of these were places of great strength by European standards. Most of the rather primitive fortifications could be reduced with relative ease provided the attacking force could reach the fortified place with the requisite troops, artillery, and supplies.
Thus the critical factor in all the colonial campaigns was logistics. The solution, in an environment of mountains, primeval forests, and the virtual absence of road-net, lay on the river corridors themselves and on the indigenous colonial water-craft called the batteau....
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So ...
The Iroquois made them stipulate to being a bunch a girls? Ouch.
Have you got anything to help me understand why at Gorbachev's World State conference in NY (9/2000, I think) there was so much emphasis on the Great Law of the Iroquois's having such a profound effect on the founding fathers and being a model for our founding documents?
Has that a firm basis in fact?
Well, to be honest ... particularly now that they're strong enough to suck us as they please into the bloody heart of the revolution that is Terror ... it only crystallizes many aspects of my musings to date.
Can't thank you enough for the reply.
Best regards.
This is close to utter nonsense. Nor did the Romans ever dump or push "difficult Teutons" into their nicely "villa"-ed and well-roaded Britain.
Indeed, the Roman conquest of Britain in the first place was the final response to sustained Celtic and Druid interference in Gaul. Caesar's earlier expedition and interests were similar.
As for who was serving in the legions based in Britain, you may find some interesting inscriptions in Chester and elsewhere.
For all that you yourself, and beyond Fiske, make some interesting if undeveloped points about the Mohawks and the Iroquois League, which had close relations with the Dutch, and about some of the other tribes.
There are also interesting parallels between how the Romans in some periods dealt with Celtic or German tribes and the different and several colonies' relations with such tribes in their spheres of interest and beyond.
So too with the relations of both the later Romani and the Eastern Romaioi with Gemans, Huns, Vikings, Slavs, and so forth.
New England was an unusual case—there was in fact a comparative dearth of natives when the "Pilgrims" landed, which some attribute to a smallpox epidemic, which in turn some also attribute to a landing by one of Gorges' ships a few years before.
There is no doubt the different Europeans all had technological superiority, but small firearms and crossbows were the least important of these, if superior at all. Ships and sail, navigation and maps, architecture and construction, mining and metallurgy, writing, cannon, horses and cavalry, road-building—all these and others much more decisive over the long run.
Also significant—before the Spanish and Portuguese and their employees invented them, there were no such entities as North and South "America" or "American Indian", even among the Iroquois in the North or the Aztecs and Inca in the South.
Pity Longfellow is no longer widely read, understood, or appreciated, and not just in regard to "Hiawatha."
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
For long decades I thought I was singular in disliking this insipid, shallow, and neo-Churchillian chiasmus.
My translation would be little different, however.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
If you are talking about the inroads of the Angles and Saxons into Britain, that is much later, and their success hinged on Roman withdrawal for reasons completely unconnected with their raiding.
First of all the Teutones were but one tribe.
Second, as with "American Indians", there is a real question whether there were any "Germans" before the Romans identified them as a "group", and Tacitus later idealized them in his Germania, which is as much about what he found unsatisfactory in the Romans of his day as it is about the "noble savages" he so eruditely anthropologized.
You might also investigate why the East Romans at one point made wearing trousers unlawful.
For the "Romanization" of Germans, a good start is Augsburg.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
Much like your arrangement of the Kennedy quotation as a pendant to Cleveland's.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
The proper term is speakers of "Germanic" languages, not "German-Speakers."
They are definitely a language group. They have no propensity for speaking English as a second language better than "we do" (native speakers), though admittedly many of them have a marked propensity to think they do.
Hilariously, much of the "bad English" the European variety criticizes in Americans is legitmate American English, including calques, derived from Germanic speakers in New York, Pennsylvania, and later Chicago, who brought habits of their native Germanic languages into American English.
By the way, many "Germans" have this propensity about the superiority of their speaking even second languages not only in English, but in other languages as well, even at times, French, hehe.
"Golden Age"—hehe. Tell me how did the Marcomanni fare in what Gibbon calls the "Golden Age"?
Now those Pannonians—some tough mothers.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
Great confusion here between "Germans" and who(m) the German tribes were running from.
Grammatical commentary, if you please....
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
Best regards. S&W R.I.P.
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