On this episode of the show, Patrick K. O'Donnell talks about the Declaration of Independence and the War for Independence, and the impact it had on American history. He also discusses the Revolution and the Civil War.
00:08:21.740I want to do this, but here's the reason.
00:08:23.740I want people to understand something.
00:08:25.740In the Revolution Civil War, these were fights.
00:08:28.740These were determined on the battlefield in political gatherings of conferences and British commons, in the halls of Congress, in the Civil War.
00:08:38.740But to pull it down, these were hard-fought kinetic wars.
00:08:45.740And you had a tremendous philosophy and debate and negotiations.
00:08:53.740But you must look at it because so many people forgot.
00:08:57.740And look, I love the fact of you're at the beach.
00:09:00.740The Jaws movie was about the Fourth of July weekend.
00:09:03.740You're going to baseball double hitters, hot dogs, the backyard barbecue, all of it.
00:09:09.740But so many people, particularly the younger generation, they think, well, hey, they came out and negotiated this great thing and wrote this great document.
00:09:16.740It spoke to all mankind, as Dr. Franklin and John Adams are telling Thomas Jefferson there.
00:09:24.740But, hey, that was kind of in the – that's kind of close to the railhead.
00:09:28.740You had things that led up to it and what drove it, and then they had this negotiation to declare the independence.
00:09:33.740But then you had, what, six, seven, eight years of a fight.
00:09:37.740And in the middle of that fight, we're fighting a revolution against an imperial power.
00:09:42.740Oh, by the way, we're also fighting an eternal civil war against ourselves between the Tories that were here and the patriots.
00:09:49.740And the one-third in the middle of kind of said, yeah, I'll see how this is coming out, and this is what modern America is.
00:09:55.740With that as a table setter, Patrick K. O'Donnell, take us back to 1769, sir.
00:10:00.740Yeah, I mean, Steve, the kinetic war or the battles led the political situation, and this would take – this would span years of war.
00:10:11.740It's America – America is made by war, and it's a miracle, absolute miracle that we achieved independence the greatest – against the greatest power at the time.
00:10:22.740But in many ways, it begins many years before the American Revolution.
00:10:28.740And I'll take you – the listeners back to 1769, and we're on board a small packet ship called the Pit Packet.
00:10:37.740And it's a merchant ship from Marblehead, Massachusetts, and they're returning from Spain with a cargo of salt.
00:10:44.740And they're just going on their way, but suddenly a royal frigate pulls up alongside them, and it's not a friendly visit.
00:10:53.740They are there to kidnap everybody on board and impress them in the Royal Navy.
00:10:59.740The Royal Navy is the largest Navy at the time.
00:11:01.740It's the most powerful, but they're in constant need of men to man their ships, the hundreds of ships that they have.
00:11:08.740And they're not only – they're not willing to pay them, they're willing to just kidnap people to do it.
00:11:14.740Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.
00:11:16.740Hang on as a naval officer and my beloved Royal Navy that was the – that was basically the forerunner of the American Navy.
00:11:23.740They're doing press gangs, and they're stopping ships and pressing sailors because there ain't a lot of people volunteering for this.
00:11:30.740And the reason they're not volunteering is just not to pay.
00:11:33.740This was one of the greatest institutions man's ever created.
00:11:37.740It basically was the foundational element of an amazing empire.
00:11:40.740And the institution itself is extraordinary, what it accomplished, et cetera.
00:11:45.740But man, oh man, you want to talk about the lived experience not being the best, Patrick K. O'Donnell.
00:11:52.740Why did they have to press gang them off of other ships?
00:11:55.740Because it was a life of service too. You weren't allowed to leave, and you were paid a pittance.
00:12:02.740It wasn't quite slavery, but it was darn near close to it.
00:12:05.740So can you imagine you're being boarded by the Royal Navy, and it's here that we have one of the first instances where Americans fight back.
00:12:15.740There's a British officer in his boarding party that boards the pit packet, and interestingly enough, a sack of salt spills out in front of the two groups that sort of are on the top of the deck of the ship.
00:12:30.740And Michael Corbett, who is a tough Massachusetts sailor, takes his foot and rubs it across the salt and makes a line and says, if you cross it, you are a dead man to the British officer.
00:12:44.740And the British officer is not at all dissuaded.
00:12:48.740In fact, he takes a little bit of snuff and just nonchalantly crosses that line, and he receives a harpoon to the neck as a result.
00:12:57.740And then the men then fight back with hatchets and whatever else they have, and it's a bit of a bloodbath.
00:13:03.740Corbett slays the officer, but eventually they're just overwhelmed by the massive number of Royal Navy sailors there, and they press them on the ship.
00:13:16.740But it's John Adams, who is America's really first super lawyer that defends Michael Corbett and the crew, and he gets them all.
00:13:27.740And later, it's atrocities like this that build up over time.
00:13:34.740And the next one is the Boston Massacre.
00:13:39.740When the Boston Massacre, Adams comes in and defends the British soldiers, does he not?
00:13:46.740He does, and he gets those British soldiers off as well in a trial.
00:19:01.740You can own cannons, by the way, during or before the American Revolution.
00:19:05.740And he had to have them to protect the ships.
00:19:08.740So he rolled a four-pound cannon into the foyer of his home.
00:19:12.740And as the mob surrounded it, he ordered men in the home to thrust open the door.
00:19:18.740And he was there with a lighted torch and a cannon next to him.
00:19:22.740And it was more or less get-off-my-lawn moment.
00:19:25.740And through his forceful words, he was able to disperse the mob that was about to assault him in his home.
00:19:33.740But this is just sort of another example of the grit of these patriots.
00:19:40.740And the thing is that the British, particularly with expeditionary forces, I mean, they – the whole Lexington and Concord started with troops in Boston that had to go and get to the arsenal.
00:19:52.740Just like Harper's Ferry, there's really one of the kickoff elements with John Brown in the Civil War.
00:19:57.740Arsenals are important because the government's got weapons in arsenal.
00:20:04.740And you can't make this stuff easily, and you can't transport it.
00:20:07.740So in these central locations, whether it's Harper Ferry in – at that time right up the Potomac from Washington, D.C., or whether it's in Lexington and Concord, those – they want to – people want to take control of those arsenals.
00:20:28.740But it's also about a political revolution that sweeps the colonies in 1774.
00:20:36.740It's our ideals of liberty and freedom.
00:20:39.740Elbridge Gerry, for instance, who's one of the founders, who's a member of the Indispensables, who's a congressman eventually from Marblehead, is instrumental along with his mentor, Samuel Adams, in coming up with our ideals of freedom and liberty, which are groundbreaking for the time.
00:20:58.740And this political movement is sweeping the times.
00:21:02.740And it's at this moment that General Gage and the Crown are threatened.
00:21:09.740Their power and control is threatened.
00:21:11.740And they realize that the colonies have guns, but they don't have the crucial element, which is gunpowder.
00:21:18.740And interestingly enough, there was arsenals that produced gunpowder during the French and Indian War, but they decided to outsource it because it was cheaper to India.
00:21:29.740So production in the colonies had practically ceased to exist, and gunpowder was exceptionally scarce.
00:21:36.740And it was this weak point, this Achilles tendon, Achilles heel, that General Gage seized upon.
00:21:43.740He wanted to seize all of the gunpowder that he could.
00:21:47.740And it becomes – Lexington and Concord is the last step of several arsenal raids that occurred months prior to that, where the Crown was stealing or seizing any gunpowder that the colonists had.
00:22:03.740And they knew that if Americans were not armed, they could easily be annihilated, just like they had done to all of the other elements of the British Empire that ever had rose up against them.
00:22:17.740And so they were seizing powder at all of the arsenals, the Somerville powder rate being a massive one in September 1774, which creates a massive uprising.
00:22:28.74010,000 people descend upon Boston itself, and the Crown is absolutely alarmed.
00:22:34.740And things kind of continue forward to Fort William and Mary in December 1774, where the first – arguably the first shots of the Revolutionary War are fired.
00:22:58.740And it's here that there are about five or six loyalist defenders and Americans in there that are loyal to the Crown that try to defend it against overwhelming odds, fire some shots, and eventually they seize the powder.
00:23:11.740But this all leads up to Lexington and Concord, as you mentioned.
00:23:14.740And it's a gauge that has perfect information as to where the Americans are assembling powder supplies and weapons, and they're at Lexington and Concord.
00:23:25.740And it's April 1775, and they send a surgical strike to seize those munitions and cannon.
00:23:57.740Misinformation coming from the committees of correspondence, which is nothing but the war room at the time.
00:24:02.740The shots came from the British, right?
00:24:04.740The British go to great lengths to say it wasn't them.
00:24:07.740Because remember, it's very important in war, whether that is the Revolutionary War to say at Lexington, at the Green there, the British fired first.
00:24:18.740It's very important for the Union to say in Lincoln to say the South fired first at Fort Sumner.
00:24:23.740It's very important in the – if you look at our three turnings, it's very important in World War II at Pearl Harbor to say the Japanese fired first.
00:24:44.740And then you've got a situation where these founders were also lawyers.
00:24:49.740And they wisely – after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, as they bring out in The Indispensables, it's the marble headers that are in charge of gathering signed affidavits from not only the members of the militia that were either wounded during – in the process, but also British soldiers.
00:25:10.740They construct the narrative, and they construct the narrative, and it's the narrative that is crucial.
00:25:16.740They also have to get the narrative across the Atlantic, which they do with the fastest shift that they can.
00:25:27.740Let's go back to one of the most American of all – when Franklin would say in these debates later in Independence Hall when they would say, well, we're British subjects.
00:25:39.740So Dickinson and others from Pennsylvania said we're at the beginning stages of the greatest empire in the world.
00:25:44.740You see what they're – Clive and these guys are doing in India.
00:26:02.740It's so massive that what these wildernesses are – the Indians themselves are a whole different type of both friend sometimes and ally and also a foe.
00:26:12.740The most American part of the early stages of the Revolutionary War is gauges – the British army is pound for pound the best professional army in the world just like the Royal Navy was the best.
00:26:25.740When they suck them out to Lexington and Concord, it's the trip back that you have the true American form of guerrilla warfare and insurgent warfare.
00:26:48.740This is called Battle Road for a reason, and it was a bloody gauntlet that the 750 or so British soldiers that were part of this expedition to seize the weapons and gunpowder had to endure.
00:27:04.740And as you mentioned, Steve, the men that were – the militia, which were thousands strong, had massively – they called it an alarm.
00:27:15.740They had massively assembled, and they then flanked the road and hid behind rocks and other trees, obstructions, and then basically pelted this British expeditionary force that had gone to seize the powder with everything they had.
00:27:34.740As this was happening, though, the British were also raiding people's homes, and there was a lot of sort of back and forth here and there on that that was very bloody.
00:27:47.740And the one home, for instance, was this bill of blood.
00:27:51.740Let me – we're going to take a short commercial break.
00:27:55.740One thing about reading Patrick O'Donnell's books about this time, The Indispensables and Washington Immortals, and other histories is the absolute brutality of the American Revolution.
00:28:09.740You can't separate them, and you have to understand – you have to immerse yourself in that to understand what the fight for liberty and freedom entailed.
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00:28:34.740Now, Jim Rickards, editor of the independent financial newsletter Strategic Intelligence and New York Times bestselling author, is warning about a coming event that could elevate this governmental surveillance to a terrifying new level.
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00:31:44.740We must come to terms with the mother country.
00:31:47.740No doubt the same s*** which carries forth our list of grievances will bring back their address.
00:31:54.740Mr. Dickinson, my wife and young children live on the main road to Boston, fewer than five miles from the full might of the British Empire.
00:32:09.740Should they sit and wait for Gage and his savages to rob them of their home, their possessions, their very lives?
00:32:36.740And I tell you, Mr. Dickinson, that to hold out an olive branch to Britain is a measure of gross imbecility.
00:32:43.740If you New England men continue to oppose our measures of reconciliation, you will leave us no choice but to break off from you entirely and carry on the opposition in our own way.
00:32:57.740I sit in judgment on no man's religion, Mr. Dickinson.
00:33:04.740But your Quaker sensibilities do us a gross disservice.
00:33:10.740It is one thing to turn the other cheek, but to lie down on the ground like a snake and crawl toward the seat of power in abject surrender.
00:33:20.740Well, that is quite another thing, sir.
00:33:26.740We will exhaust all peaceful approaches, Mr. Adams, and we will do it with or without the approbation of you and your Boston insurrectionists.
00:33:58.740I don't know if he ran that by Jamie Raskin first or not.
00:34:01.740Patrick here, Don, the power of this film, and I strongly recommend everybody watch the series John Adams and have your children watch it, is that the intensity of these debates is extraordinary.
00:34:29.740They were talking about an imperial power that had in the way they enforce their imperial power was by the finest Navy in the history of mankind.
00:34:39.740And a professional army that was pound for pound as as good as anything the Germans or the French could put forward.
00:34:47.740And Gage, you just heard right there, General Gage is called a barbarian.
00:34:51.740And it's basically his soldiers are called terrorists.
00:35:34.740And in fact, in, you know, there was a rebellion in Ireland, you know, near this time.
00:35:42.740And the crown was absolutely barbaric on how they they they squashed it.
00:35:47.740And they would draw on quarter people that were insurrectionists.
00:35:51.740And this is that death was the the solution.
00:35:56.740They also had a situation where there was collective punishment, for instance, something after the Boston Tea Party.
00:36:03.740There was the Boston Port Act where they closed the entire port, throwing thousands of men out of work.
00:36:09.740And then they would then they installed royal judges in the courts, which the you know, the colonists had been more or less on their own electing judges, you know, for over 150 years up until this point.
00:36:23.740So this they knew that, you know, things were being stacked up against them and it was one thing after another.
00:36:29.740And then it breaks with the the powder alarms where they start to seize the gunpowder, which the men, you know, the colonists knew that they had plenty of weapons, but not enough gunpowder.
00:36:41.740And gunpowder would become a scarcity in the indispensable to actually make that a character because it leads to just a variety of things that occur in different paths that we take as as an army.
00:36:54.740But also it forms the creation of the Navy for the for the Continental Navy with Washington.
00:37:01.740The the the the the the the siege of Boston and particularly the the defense of a bunker in Breeds Hill, the British knew that by then that, number one,
00:37:14.740we were great guerrilla fighters and great kind of insurgents can fight an insurgency.
00:37:20.220But we also had the ability, although not perfect, because the Continental Army wasn't particularly trained to stand up toe to toe to the best of them in a fight.
00:37:28.640That's when they realized. Then you had independence.
00:37:31.640I want to make sure we get all this in, is that at the same time in the British and in commons, they're having these intense fights, too.
00:37:38.440There are a lot of people in commons that say, look, we either got to give them their freedom or let's cut the best deal possible.
00:37:43.240We're not going to the beginnings in commons and British commons of people talking very much like the Vietnam War.
00:37:49.760A lot of people saying this is, you know, it's too far away.
00:37:52.640How are we going to defend this? It's just going to suck up all our resources trying to do this.
00:37:56.640Talk to me about where you're having this intense debate and we're going to get to the actual vote here in a while.
00:38:02.560As you get this intense debate leading up to the Declaration of Independence from the Continental Congress in England, they're already prepared.
00:38:12.800I mean, the Declaration of Independence is fine. And yes, that crossed a line.
00:38:16.000And it was it's much bigger in American history than it is in British.
00:38:20.820They didn't need a signed document. They'd already that that group right there already petitioned the king to, hey, maybe you haven't focused on this or maybe you have bad advisers.
00:38:30.380But here's where Englishmen, this is just we want. And what he sent back was so brutal, so dismissive that the British and what they did is get the largest.
00:38:38.940And correct me if I'm wrong, from the best Navy in the history of mankind, they set up the largest expeditionary force ever to send not to Boston.
00:38:49.720They said the linchpin of this thing is New York City and New York City was not that big at the time.
00:38:54.280They weren't going to Philadelphia. They weren't going to Boston.
00:38:56.780They say we're going to cut this thing in half. We're going to take New York City and we're going to take the Hudson River in the Hudson Valley.
00:39:03.620We're going to cut off. We're going to cut off the the bacillus.
00:39:07.500We're going to cut off the problem we got in New England from the rest of America.
00:39:11.640And we'll settle this afterwards. But talk to me about already where they were sent the size and scale of the Armada and the British expeditionary force.
00:39:19.960They were going to send to America not to negotiate, not to have a debating society, not to go to a courthouse and put down some writ.
00:39:27.520They had done it. They had had it. They tried with the patriots. The patriots were determined to win.
00:39:33.180They sent over the most massive expeditionary force, I think, in mankind's history at that time.
00:39:39.900It was. It was a it was a giant. This was a they assembled the largest force that they possibly could.
00:39:47.660The bulk of the British army was was assigned to this force and they knew that they didn't have enough numbers.
00:39:54.500So they basically leased German troops from the princes of Prussia and Hessian, the areas of what's now Germany, because they would basically loan out their troops for money.
00:40:08.120And these were the Hessians. And there were over 10,000 of these men that were assembled to create a massive force, a sledgehammer to crush the colonists.
00:40:20.300And this is the summer of 1776 that is in New York City.
00:40:27.560As you mentioned, New York City is a hive of loyalists.
00:40:31.620There's also the governor of the time is a loyalist.
00:40:35.820He flees to a massive ship in New York Harbor.
00:40:40.700There's it's a 74 gun battleship, if you will, of its time.
00:40:44.200And it's from his lair that he plots different schemes.
00:40:48.100And he's, you know, within this mix, before the expedition actually arrives, Washington's guard or the lifeguard is influenced by Governor Tryon and his men to basically have a decapitation mission and assassinate Washington.
00:41:04.800And I bring that out in The Indispensables, which is which in many ways is a largely unknown story.
00:41:13.200The lifeguard was a, you know, a picked force of about 100 or so men that came from various regiments.
00:41:21.140Washington, you know, examined each one of these gangs as a picked pick man.
00:41:26.100And some of them, though, were actually former British soldiers, including a guy by the name of Hickey and another guy by the name of Green, who was a drummer.
00:41:34.560They kind of meet up in a tavern with one of these conspirators who's a gunsmith by the name of Forbes.
00:41:41.940Forbes has a plot to infiltrate his excellency's guard, the lifeguard.
00:41:47.340And they they recruit about eight men.
00:41:49.720And what happens next is sort of accidental.
00:41:52.160Accidental, they're about to spring this plot as this massive expeditionary force of, you know, hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men are arriving in New York Harbor.
00:42:05.180It's at this point that they're about to spring the plot.
00:42:07.800But Hickey, who's one of the lifeguard members, passes off some bad bills.
00:45:42.720A lot of it is about 3,000 or 4,000 men are on the heights of Buonis.
00:45:46.260This is now current-day Greenwood Cemetery.
00:45:49.020Right in front of one of the gates of Greenwood Cemetery was something called the Red Lion Inn.
00:45:53.380And it's here that there was a watermelon patch in the back of the Red Lion Inn.
00:45:57.520And it's the scouts from the British Army that seized these watermelons, and they want to get a real refreshment or whatever.
00:46:07.720And it's the American riflemen from Hans Rifleman's Corps that pepper them with lead.
00:46:14.500But this is a sort of a diversion, if you will.
00:46:17.800Well, the main force at this time under General Howe and Cornwallis is marching a flanking maneuver around the heights of Buonis to surround it.
00:46:29.660And as the night unfolds, the Americans, specifically the Marylanders and Washington's immortals,
00:46:38.860who are in a nearby house, a stone house called the Becht House, that's where their camp is located.
00:46:44.860Then the alarm is sounded around 2 or 3 in the morning, and the bulk of these forces go down towards Greenwood Cemetery,
00:46:55.680And these men take up positions, and initially they appear to repulse the British under General Grant.
00:47:03.040But Grant is only a sort of a holding force, a diversion, as the hammer is coming around in a flanking maneuver under Cornwallis.
00:47:12.120And it's in the morning as they are engaging between the British that they realize in their utter horror that they are being flanked and surrounded.
00:47:20.700So they literally have to fight for their lives back to their position, which is near this stone house.
00:47:26.800And the entire, you know, a third of the American army is about to be cut off and annihilated.
00:47:32.580And it's here that the American Thermopylae, Washington's immortals, men of honor, family, and fortune,
00:47:41.660from the finest families of the South in Maryland, specifically Maryland itself, and then many in Baltimore.
00:47:49.640They formed the first company in Baltimore in 1774 to defend their brothers in Boston because of the Boston Port Act, things that are occurring there.
00:48:02.220And it's here that they make arguably one of the most important stands in American history.
00:48:09.140They are outnumbered by 10, 20, or more to one.
00:48:16.100And they form up in ranks because they know that the American army is about to be annihilated.
00:48:23.760They form up in ranks in an attack called Moss.
00:48:27.720And it's Washington's immortals that saved the army.
00:48:31.380They make a number of bayonet charges.
00:48:33.900They're eventually referred to as the bayonets of the revolution or Washington's immortals.
00:48:39.140Or the immortal 400, because of the stand that they make.
00:48:44.740They make a number of charges, and they're being literally cut to pieces by thousands of Hessian soldiers and Highland grenadiers, which are near the house.
00:48:55.080But these stands force the British to not unite the wings of their army and also create a gap that allows the rest of the army to escape to a series of fortifications.
00:49:07.540Mordecai Gist, who's in command of the Marylanders, and about nine men escape.
00:49:18.820The book, you know, all of the stories that I've ever written have found me in one way or another.
00:49:23.560And this book found me when I found the old sign that said,
00:49:25.880The year lie, 256 continental soldiers, Maryland heroes.
00:49:30.420The bodies of these men are buried somewhere in either New York or, in some cases, they were captured on floating and then imprisoned on floating prisoner of war camp ships.
00:49:42.480But what we know of the American Thermopylae, they held this – the British office of the American army could escape to then have their Dunkirk.
00:49:56.580What we know is that the bulk of them are –
00:50:02.560And if they hadn't have done it, and the reward for that, for their fellow Americans, they are buried in an unmarked grave in somewhere, we think, underneath a parking lot or a tavern in Brooklyn.
00:50:15.420We don't even know the exact location of it.
00:50:18.360The American Thermopylae, some of the greatest heroes in the history of this country, who gave all in late August of 1776.