“The Embattled Farmers Stood…
April 19th, 2009
And fired the shot heard round the world…
April 19, 1775
What made the farmers fight in 1775? Judge Millen Chamberlain in 1842, when he was twenty-one, interviewed Captain Preston, a ninety-year-old veteran of the Concord fight: “Did you take up arms against intolerable oppression?” he asked.
“Oppression?” replied the old man. “I didn’t feel them.”
“What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”
“I never saw one of those stamps. I certainly never paid a penny for one of them.”
“Well, what then about the tea tax?”
“I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.”
“Then I suppose you had been reading Harington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”
“Never heard of ‘em. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ Psalms and Hymns, and the Amanac.”
“Well, then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?”
“Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.“
The Oxford History of the American People by Samuel Eliot Morison (212-213).
April 19th, 1775 ~ Patriots’ Day
The Old North Church ~ Paul Revere’s Ride ~ Hartwell Tavern
The Battle of Lexington ~ The Battle of Concord
Meriam’s Corner ~ Battle Road ~ Parker’s Revenge
Blogging the Revolution ~ Blogging the Redcoats
Crossposted to BeJohnGalt and RedState Member Diaries
Posted in 3 Responses to ““The Embattled Farmers Stood…”
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Too bad our currently elected officials forget why our nation was founded. We want to govern ourselves, and anything silent in the Constitution is supposed to go to the individual states to decide whether or not to pass a law and what law it will pass. The Supreme Court ruling in Roe v Wade is illegal for this reason. The Constitution does not address abortions but does say we all have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Kind of hard to have any of them if you’re not considered a human being.
The constitution is also silent on bailouts of industry, whatever they may be, and taxes enough to defend our country and run it, not make unconstitutional laws and fascisism/socialism our way of life.
Our founders must be rolling in their graves with the way the people of this country are just acquiescing to anything O and his congress want.