Category: History

Original Thomas Jefferson letter will hit the auction block on July 4

A letter written by Thomas Jefferson will go up for auction on July 4. Estimators value the letter, which discusses the right to bear arms and the Treaty of Paris, at $90,000.

As America celebrates its 249th birthday on July 4, a unique piece of American history from one of the founding fathers will hit the auction block.

A letter written by Thomas Jefferson that asserts the rights of democratic citizens to “exercise in arms for defense of their country” will go up for bids in an auction from the Raab Collection. Estimators value the letter at $90,000.

This is the first time the letter has been made available for purchase since 1982.

Written on Dec. 31, 1783, and addressed to Benjamin Harrison, then the governor of Virginia and a fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, the letter addresses a number of topics. Jefferson muses on the spread of democracy across the world and the political fate of the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war between the U.S. and Great Britain.

The letter could be of particular interest to Second Amendment enthusiasts, which would be somewhat ironic since the Second Amendment would not be written until six years after it was penned. Despite that, Jefferson makes a passionate case for the right to bear arms in his note to Harrison, writing that Democratic citizens wanted “to exercise in arms for the defense of their country: of 80000 men able to bear arms among them it is believed scarcely any will refuse to sign this demand.”

Jefferson also expresses concerns that the Treaty of Paris might not be ratified by Congress in time for it to be sent back to Britain and made official.

“We have yet but seven states, and no more certain prospects of nine than at any time heretofore. We hope that the letters sent to the absent states will bring them forward,” he writes.

(Harrison, in a follow-up note that is not part of the auction, would write back to calm his fears that the treaty would pass.)

“This letter speaks to us today on many levels,” said Nathan Raab, president of the Raab Collection and author of The Hunt for History. “We can see the power and inspiration of Jefferson’s pen, as he can begin to reflect on the success of his work and the American Revolution and witness democratic ideals spreading worldwide.”

To Benjamin Harrison
Annapolis, Dec. 31, 1783.

Sir
Letters from Holland from the middle to the last of September inform us that the citizens of the Dutch states are all in commotion. The conduct of the Prince of Orange having been such as greatly to strengthen the republican party, they are now pressing in the firmest tone a restoration of their constitutional rights. Friesland, as usual, leads the way.

They have demanded of the sovereign assembly of the states that the power of the Stadtholder to change or reinforce the garrisons be limited or taken away, and that themselves be authorized to exercise in arms for the defence of their country: of 80000 men able to bear arms among them it is believed scarcely any will refuse to sign this demand.

The Hollanders have referred to a Committee in their last assembly the examination of the power by which the prince undertakes to appoint flag officers of their fleet, and that he be desired to abstain from the exercise of it. There happens to be vacant the place of admiral. The other states seem to be in the same temper, and are now regularly exercising themselves in arms under the ensigns of their respective towns. Tho each state is to chuse their Stadtholder out of the Orange family they consider themselves not bound to chuse the eldest, and of course that they may chuse different ones.

The state of Europe at present seems favorable to the republican party, as the powers who might aid the prince are either fatigued with the late war, or likely to be engaged in the ensuing one.

We have yet but seven states, and no more certain prospects of nine than at any time heretofore. We hope that the letters sent to the absent states will bring them forward.

Bunker Hill and the Right to Bear Arms

250 years ago today the last major action fought between the British Army and an army comprised of militia members took place just north of Boston. The Battle of Bunker Hill technically took place on Breed’s Hill, but the location matters less than the outcome. While the British technically won the battle by forcing the citizen army from the field, they paid an enormous price; suffering twice the number of casualties than the colonists fighting in defense of their liberties, including 19 officers killed and another 62 wounded.

Though the Continental Army had been created by an act of the Continental Congress just a few days earlier, the men who fought against the Redcoats on that steamy June afternoon were serving as militia members; part of the Army of Occupation created by the Provincial Congress in the days after the fighting at Lexington and Concord. George Washington wouldn’t arrive until July, 1775, and it was Artemus Ward who was the commander-in-chief of the militia forces during the fighting at Bunker Hill (though Israel Putnam and William Prescott were the ones in command on the battlefield itself).

Some of the citizen-soldiers who fought at Bunker Hill had seen the heat of battle before, but many were untested before they faced the might of the British Empire.

The first assault was begun by the column of light infantry on the far beach, the American left flank, and was followed by the cannonading of Charlestown on the right flank, which set the town in flames; then came the slow forward movement of the main battle line: two ranks of scarlet-clad grenadiers and light infantrymen, almost 2,000 in all, marching in full kit pounds of knapsacks, blankets, food, and ammunition—across irregular fields of knee-deep grass broken by fences and low stone walls.

The American troops—no more than 1, 500 men at any time, at the end only half that—held their fire until the first British line was within 150 feet of the barricades; when they fired it was almost at point-blank range, and the result was slaughter. The British front line collapsed in heaps of dead and wounded—”as thick as sheep in a field.” General Howe’s entire staff was wiped out in the main attack against the rail fence. Great gaps appeared in the once parade-perfect ranks, and the survivors spun back.

The British regrouped and once again made their way up the hill, only to be rebuffed by another wave of fire. On their third attempt, however, the Redcoats gained the upper hand.

Again the advancing line was thrown back by the defenders’ fire, and again great gaps were torn in the marching ranks. But this time the fire was less intense and it could not be sustained. The 700 exhausted defenders had been sent no reinforcements; they had no supplies except what they had carried with them the night before.

As the third charge neared the line of fortification their powder ran out, and though they fought desperately with everything they could lay hands on, they could no longer force the British back. Grenadiers and light infantrymen poured over the parapets and through the thin barricades, and dove into groups of defenders. The Americans turned and fled up over and around Bunker Hill to the roads that led to safety. So the battle came to an end.

The British had taken Bunker Hill, but they were still pinned down in Boston, and their position in Charleston offered them no tactical advantage against the tens of thousands of militia members in the surrounding fields and towns.

The colonists fighting for their rights as Englishmen, still more than a year away from declaring independence, saw the tactical loss as a moral and spiritual victory. Farmers, mechanics, and fishermen, along with lawyers, doctors, and merchants, stood their ground and held their own against a larger, better equipped, and far better trained army.

“ Up until the Battle of Bunker Hill, and really even following the events of Lexington and Concord, there was this pervasive opinion among the British military establishment that militiamen and colonials were not a serious threat.

In fact, one British officer in the runup to revolution remarked that he could march across the entire continent unscathed with just 5,000 men,” [American Rifleman Executive Editor Evan] Brune said.

“And those kinds of suppositions were quickly put to rest following the really true bloodbath that was the assault on Bunker Hill by British infantry. The British suffered more than 900 casualties trying to take these defensive fortifications over three assaults.”

The memories of Bunker Hill (as well as Lexington and Concord) were still fresh on the minds of many Americans when the Second Amendment was enshrined in the Constitution sixteen years later. They knew the value of the militia, but more importantly, they recognized the inherent right of the people to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves and their free states.

I’m guessing that most of the politicians on hand for today’s anniversary events won’t acknowledge that right in their remarks. Heck, most of the local politicians who’ll show up consider the Second Amendment a dead letter; an artifact of history that has no relevance today. The right of the people to keep and bear arms, however, is just as important and valuable today as it was in 1791; both as a safeguard for individual security and protection against tyranny.

Oh, I almost forgot. Today is also ‘Flag Day’ which was instituted in 1916, When President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation that designated June 14 as ‘Flag Day’.
In 1777 the same Second Continental Congress passed the Flag Resolution;
“That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”

Different people had their own interpretations of that specification and even the story of George Washington employing Betsy Ross to sew a flag doesn’t have much to back it up.  The nation didn’t have a ‘standard’ flag until the new U.S. Congress passed the Flag Act of 1794, when 2 stars a 2 stripes were added due the entry of Vermont and Kentucky into the Union.

Francis Hopkinson’s flag for the U.S.

Hopkinson’s flag for the U.S. Navy

The ‘Star Spangled Banner’ design which flew over Ft McHenry during the was of 1812 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write our National Anthem.

June 6: A walk across a beach in Normandy

Today your job is straightforward. First, you must load 40 to 50 pounds on your back. Then you need to climb down a net rope that is banging on the steel side of a ship and jump into a steel rectangle of a boat bobbing on the surface of the ocean below you. Others are already inside the boat shouting at you to hurry up.

Once in the boat, you stand with dozens of others as the boat is driven towards distant beaches and cliffs through a hot hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Boats moving nearby are from time to time hit with a high explosive shell and disintegrate in a red rain of bullets and body parts. Then there’s the smell of men near you fouling themselves as the fear bites into their necks and they hunch lower into the boat. That smell mingles with the smell of burnt gunpowder and seaweed.

In front of you, over the steel helmets of other men, you can see the flat surface of the bow’s landing ramp still held in place against the sea. Soon you are within range of the machineguns that line the cliffs above the beach ahead. The metallic sound of their bullets clangs and whines off the front of the ramp.

Then the coxswain shouts and the klaxon sounds. You feel the keel of the LVCP grind against the rocks and sand of Normandy as the large shells from the boats in the armada behind you whuffle and moan overhead. Then the explosions all around and above you increase in intensity and the bullets from the machineguns in the cliffs ahead and above rattle and hum along the steel plates of the boat and the men crouch lower. Then somehow you all strain forward as, at last, the ramp drops down and you see the beach. The men surge forward and you step with them. Then you are out in the chill waters of the channel wading in towards sand already doused with death, past bodies bobbing in the surf staining the waters crimson.

You are finally on the beach. It’s worse on the beach.

The bullets keep probing along the sand, digging holes, looking for your body, finding others that drop down like sacks of meat with their lines cut. You run forward because there’s nothing but ocean at your back and more men dying and… somehow… you reach a small sliver of shelter at the base of the cliffs. There are others there, confused and cowering and not at all ready to go back out into the storm of steel that keeps pouring down. And then someone, somewhere nearby, tells you all to press forward, to go on, to somehow get off that beach and onto the high ground behind it, and because you don’t know what else to do, you rise up and you move forward, beginning, one foot after another, to take back the continent of Europe.

If you are lucky, very lucky, on that day and the days after, you will walk all the way to Germany and the war will be over and you will go home to a town somewhere on the great land sea of the Midwest and you won’t talk much about this day or any that came after it, ever.

They’ll ask you, throughout long decades after, “What did you do in the war?” You’ll think of this day and you’ll never think of a good answer. That’s because you know just how lucky you were.

If you were not lucky on that day you lie under a white cross on a large well kept lawn not far from the beach you landed on.

Somewhere above you, among the living, weak princes and fat bureaucrats and rank traitors mumble platitudes and empty praises about actions they never knew and men they cannot hope to emulate.

You hear their prattle, dim and far away outside the brass doors that seal the caverns of your long sleep. You want them to go, to leave you and your brothers in arms to your brown study of eternity.

“Fifty years? Seventy-five? A century? Seems long to the living but it’s only an inch of time. Leave us and go back to your petty lives. We march on and you, you weaklings primping and parading above us, will never know how we died or how we lived.

“If we hear you at all now, your mewling only makes us ask among ourselves, ‘Died for what?’

“Princes and bureaucrats, parasites and traitors, be silent. Be gone. We are now and forever one with the sea and the sky and the wind. We marched through the steel rain. We march on.”

Tiananmen Square Anniversary: Chinese-American Warns U.S. to Protect Gun Rights

Today is the anniversary of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) troops storming Tiananmen Square to massacre the freedom protesters who had gathered there. A survivor of the CCP’s tyranny who now lives in the U.S. has a message for Americans this anniversary: Don’t give up your guns.

Lily Tang Williams is an American citizen now, an entrepreneur who is running for Congress in New Hampshire. But the self-described “Survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution” remembers all too well the nightmare of Communist rule in China, and on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, she emphasized how vitally important the right to keep and bear arms is in preventing such massacres by dictatorial regimes.

Williams took to X to commemorate the anniversary and reaffirm the United States’ Second Amendment. She included a screenshot of her previous post, which warned that the “champion of all the mass killings in this world is always a tyrannical government.”

 

Her previous post referred to the slaughter by the CCP troops of thousands of students at Tiananmen Square, and expressed regret that the students in 1989 did not have guns like the ones she is able to own now in America. “I am a Chinese immigrant and an American citizen by choice. I once was a slave before and I will never be one again,” Williams wrote.

The U.S. State Department and Secretary Marco Rubio put out a statement, too, honoring the “bravery” of the Chinese freedom protesters and explaining:

In the spring of 1989, tens of thousands of students gathered in Beijing’s largest public square to mourn the passing of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader who tried to steer China toward a more open and democratic system. Their actions inspired a national movement.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in the capital and throughout China took to the streets for weeks to exercise their freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly by advocating for democracy, human rights, and an end to rampant corruption.

The CCP responded with a brutal crackdown, sending the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to open fire in an attempt to extinguish the pro-democracy sentiments of unarmed civilians gathered on Beijing’s streets and in Tiananmen Square.

The fact that the civilians were unarmed is precisely what Williams was warning about in her statements.

On her website, Williams says, “I grew up under Mao’s cultural revolution in China and fled communism for the freedom of the United States. Now, I fear the country I love is becoming the country I left.” It is a fear that many of us have experienced in recent years as we witnessed the attacks on our rights by the Biden administration, and now the increasing dictatorial activism of the judiciary. But one way to deter government tyranny is to exercise our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, to be ready always to stand up for ourselves and our liberties, as the Founding Fathers were.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto IJN:
“In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”
Well, after the disaster of the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942 the Japanese never had success. Their Imperial Navy suffered a blow from which it never recovered. Although the war continued for three more years, from that day on, America was headed for victory.

May 29: The Last Day of the World

“On May 29, 1453,” the state-run Turkish broadcaster TRT World reported happily on Thursday, the 572nd anniversary of the fateful day, “a 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II led the Ottoman army to a decisive victory over the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Istanbul remains a shining jewel in the crown of the Ottoman Empire.” Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s desire to restore the lost glory of that empire is well known, but those who are the children and heirs of the victims of its bloody expansion look on this anniversary with somewhat less enthusiasm than TRT World displayed.

Some Greek Orthodox Christians to this day refer to May 29, 1453, as “the last day of the world.” In a very real sense, that is exactly what it was: the end of over two thousand years of the Roman Empire, the end of what had for centuries been the world’s foremost power and leading Christian state. The conquest of Constantinople meant the eclipse of Christianity in Asia Minor, which had been such an important center of the faith that three of Paul’s New Testament epistles — Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians — were addressed to Christian congregations there.

Constantinople had been the center of Christianity in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and the second see in the Church, after only Rome. After the East/West schism of 1054, Constantinople was the heart of Orthodox Christianity. As “The History of Jihad” recounts in detail, however, on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II finally broke through Constantinople’s defenses after a long siege, marking the end of the great Christian Roman Empire.

The conquerors were extraordinarily brutal, raiding monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundering private houses. They entered Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in July 1453, saying that Constantinople had been “sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.”

When the slaughter and pillage were finished, Mehmed II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and declare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the ranks of the dhimmis; others were enslaved, and many were killed.

Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, “churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.”

It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World. Ever since, many Greek Christians regard Tuesday as unlucky. The world has forgotten what happened on Black Tuesday and on so many other days like it from India to Spain, and today persists in the fantasy that Islam does not contain an imperialist impulse and that Muslims can be admitted without limit into Western countries without any attempt to determine how many would like ultimately to subjugate and Islamize their new countries, the way their forefathers did to Constantinople so long ago.

Related: Is the West Suffering From an Absence of Islam?

There are, however, some people who remember — and they want to do it again. Back in 2008, Sheik Ali Al-Faqir, former Jordanian minister of religious endowment, said this on Al-Aqsa TV: “We proclaim that we will conquer Rome, like Constantinople was conquered once…” Hamas MP and Islamic cleric Yunis Al-Astal said this, also on Al-Aqsa TV several years ago: “Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad.”

The man who was the most popular Islamic TV preacher until his death several years ago, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, also remembered. In writing about “signs of the victory of Islam,” he referred to a hadith: “The Prophet Muhammad was asked: ‘What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?’ He answered: ‘The city of Hirqil [that is, the Roman emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first’ – that is, Constantinople… Romiyya is the city called today ‘Rome,’ the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil [that is, Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered].”

Mehmed the Conqueror was motivated by exactly the same religious ideology that motivates the Islamic warriors of the contemporary era. They remember, and still celebrate, what happened in Constantinople on May 29, 1453. For free people in the West and elsewhere, May 29 should be a day for all those threatened by Islamic jihad and Sharia oppression to redouble our efforts to resist, so that more such catastrophes may never again destroy the lives of free people.

A Memorial Day Prayer 

Lord who grants salvation to kings and dominion to rulers, Whose kingdom is a kingdom spanning all eternities; Who places a road in the sea and a path in the mighty waters – may you bless the President, the Vice President, and all the constituted officers of the government of this land. May they execute their responsibilities with intelligence, honor, and compassion. And may these United States continue to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

May He bless the members of our armed forces, who protect them from harm on the land, air, and sea. May the Almighty cause the enemies who rise up against us to be struck down before them. May the Holy One, Blessed is He, preserve and rescue our fighters and their families from every trouble, distress, plague, and illness, and may He send blessing and success in their every endeavor.

May the God of overflowing compassion, who lives in the highest and all worlds, give eternal rest to those who are now under his Holy sheltering spiritual wings, making them rise ever more purely through the light of your brilliance, and may he bless their souls forever and may he comfort the bereaved. May those of us who remain free never forget their sacrifice. On Memorial Day, may we as a nation remember those who gave their lives to protect America and our freedoms, and may their memories always be a blessing. May we spend some time today remembering those who sacrificed and praying that God protects their souls and comforts their bereaved loved ones.

May 8, 2025

80 years ago, today, the Germans surrendered to the Allies, ending World War 2 in Europe. As the veterans called the ‘Greatest Generation’ steadily succumb to the ravages of time, let’s not forget the sacrifice of those few still living and dead.

VE – Victory in Europe DAY. Under terms of the surrender by Germany, the order for “all German military, naval and air authorities and to all forces under German control to cease active operations” takes effect.

“The western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of freeborn men. They have violated their churches, destroyed their homes, corrupted their children and murdered their loved ones. Our armies of liberation have restored freedom to those suffering peoples, whose spirit and will the oppressor could never enslave.”
— President Harry S. Truman, V-E Day Proclamation, 8 May 1945

 

Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day, a popular misconception.
Instead, it commemorates a single battle.

In 1861, Benito Juárez—a lawyer and member of the Zapotec tribe—was elected president of Mexico. At the time, the country was in financial ruin after years of internal strife, and the new president was forced to default on debt payments to European governments.

In response, France, Britain and Spain sent naval forces to Veracruz, Mexico, demanding repayment. Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew their forces.

France, however, ruled by Napoleon III, decided to use the opportunity to carve an empire out of Mexican territory. Late in 1861, a well-armed French fleet stormed Veracruz, landing a large force of troops and driving President Juárez and his government into retreat.

The Battle of Puebla
Certain that success would come swiftly, 6,000 French troops under General Charles Latrille de Lorencez set out to attack Puebla de Los Angeles, a small town in east-central Mexico. From his new headquarters in the north, Juárez rounded up a ragtag force of 2,000 loyal men—many of them either Indigenous Mexicans or of mixed ancestry—and sent them to Puebla.

The vastly outnumbered and poorly supplied Mexicans, led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza, fortified the town and prepared for the French assault. On May 5, 1862, Lorencez gathered his army—supported by heavy artillery—before the city of Puebla and led an assault.

The battle lasted from daybreak to early evening, and when the French finally retreated they had lost nearly 500 soldiers. Fewer than 100 Mexicans had been killed in the clash.

Although not a major strategic win in the overall war against the French, Zaragoza’s success at the Battle of Puebla on May 5 represented a great symbolic victory for the Mexican government and bolstered the resistance movement. In 1867—thanks in part to military support and political pressure from the United States, which was finally in a position to aid its besieged neighbor after the end of the Civil War—France finally withdrew.

A repost:
Dachau; I’ve been there. Everyone walked around in silence, and when people did speak, it was always in near whispers, even during the liturgies in the memorial chapels that had been built years later.

I don’t know about today, but 30+ years ago, you could walk right into the building where the gas chambers and crematory ovens are, and feel the hair rise up on the back of your neck as you looked into the black insides of those ovens that burned uncounted dead.

Murder. Mass murder. Concentrated, premeditated murder on a scale that makes the ‘mass shootings’ the mewling liberal proggies wail about in their rants for gun control, pale in piddling comparison.
And although you could walk right up to multiple little mass grave plots the size of a postage stamp front yard, marked Grave of Thousands Unknown this was ‘merely’ a concentration camp. Not one of the camps in Poland designed for industrial level mass slaughter.

80 years ago the U.S. Army liberated Dachau, a concentration camp operated by Nazi Germany during World War II.

On April 29, 1945 the U.S. Army’s 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow), now a part of the New York Army National Guard, uncovered the concentration camp in the town of Dachau, near Munich Germany. According to a press release by the New York National Guard, the frontline soldiers in the Army unit knew there was a prison camp in the area, but knew few details about the camp’s true nature.

“What the Soldiers discovered next at Dachau left an impression of a lifetime,” the division assistant chaplain (Maj.) Eli Bohnen wrote at the time, according to the release. “Nothing you can put in words would adequately describe what I saw there. The human mind refuses to believe what the eyes see. All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated.”

The U.S. Army unit uncovered thousands of bodies of men, women and children held in the concentration camp.

“There were over 4,000 bodies, men, women and children in a warehouse in the crematorium,” Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz, commander of the 1st Battalion, 222nd Infantry, said in his report. “There were over 1,000 dead bodies in the barracks within the enclosure.”

“Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling high with tangled human bodies adjoining the cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac’s woodpile,” wrote Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, a division public affairs NCO in the 42nd Division World News, May 1, 1945.

“Dachau is no longer a name of terror for hunted men. 32,000 of them have been freed by the 42nd Rainbow Division,” Creasman wrote of the liberation.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum places the estimated number of those freed from the camp at more than 60,000.

To the shores of Tripoli….

On April 27, 1805, during the 1st Barbary War, after a march of over 500 miles from Alexandria, Egypt, U.S. Marines, and allied troops under the command of U.S. Army Lieutenant William Eaton, diplomatic Consul to Tripoli, and U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, staged an assault, supported by U.S. naval gunfire, on the port city of Derna, Cyrenaica, on the Mediterranean sea shores of Tripolitania, taking the city in a little over an hour.

 

 

I had never heard of ‘LapuLapu Day’ before, but it turns out we all here have a sort of connection to the festival.

Lapulapu or Lapu-Lapu, was a Datu (chief) of Mactan, a Philippine island. Lapulapu is known for the Battle of Mactan in 1521, where he and his men defeated Spanish forces led by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage of circumnavigation. Magellan’s death in that battle delayed the Spanish occupation of the islands until the expedition of Miguel López de Legazpi reached the islands in 1565.

Captain John Parker’s statement about the events on Lexington Common.

Lexington April 25th, 1775

I John Parker, of lawful Age, and Commander of the Militia in Lexington, do testify & declare that on the 19th Instant, in the morning, about one of the Clock, being informed that there were a Number of Regular Officers riding up and down the Road, Stopping and insulting People as they passed the Road, and also was informed that a Number of Regular Troops were on their March from Boston, in order to take the Province Stores at Concord, ordered our Militia to meet on the Common in said Lexington, to consult what to do, and concluded not to be discovered nor meddle or make with said Regular Troops (if they should approach) unless they should insult or molest us — and upon their sudden Approach I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse and not to fire — Immediately said Troops made their Appearance and rushed furiously, fired up-on and killed eight of our Party, without receiving any Provocation therefor from us,

John Parker

Middlesex April 25th, 1775.

The above named John Parker personally appeared, and, after being duly cautioned to declare the whole Truth, made solemn Oath to the truth of the above Deposition by him subscribed

William Reed

Josiah Johnson

William Stickney

Justices of the Peace

CCRKBA CELEBRATES 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF LEXINGTON, CONCORD: 2A BIRTHDAY

BELLEVUE, WA – This Saturday, April 19, 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the date which could easily be recognized as the birthday of the Second Amendment, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms calls on all freedom-loving Americans to join in the celebration.

“April 19th marks that day in history when the government of the era sent troops to seize the arms of Americans, and our ancestors replied with a decisive ‘No’,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “While the Declaration of Independence didn’t happen for another 15 months, the Revolutionary War actually began at Lexington Commons and the Concord North Bridge in the Spring of 1775, and it can honestly be said Americans have been fighting hard and shedding blood ever since to defend not just their natural right to be free from tyranny, but to protect and perpetuate what was and remains the uniquely American concept of freedom and liberty.

“The events of that April morning didn’t just show the British that our forefathers had drawn the proverbial line in the sand,” Gottlieb continued. “The two battles solidified the importance of our fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms, and we honor the wisdom of our Founders to make it the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights.

“The Second Amendment,” he observed, “isn’t enshrined in our Constitution just so people can hunt ducks and deer. The right protected by the Second Amendment guarantees that Americans can defend themselves, their families and their homes from oppressive tyranny, and from crime and brutality. The Amendment doesn’t give us anything. Instead, it protects the fundamental rights we are born with from government infringement.

“The Founders knew what they were doing,” Gottlieb said. “They gave us a Republic, and the means to keep and protect it. They provided guarantees for our freedoms of speech, religion, the press and our privacy. We cannot be compelled to testify against ourselves, nor can we be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, or deprived of legal representation. The right to keep and bear arms is our insurance policy that all of these other rights will not be trampled, nor turned into government-regulated privileges.

“The Second Amendment is part of our heritage,” he added. “Today it is sad there are so many willing to erase it, while at the same time it is gratifying there are so many more willing to protect it. The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is going to make sure we keep it that way.”

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
− Ralph Waldo Emerson, ” Concord Hymn “

On this day, the British colonial government attempted to confiscate the firearms of the citizens of two backwater farming communities in Massachusetts.

The response was the “shot heard round the world” at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The British officer in command of the field in Lexington and Concord, Major John Pitcairn, would be killed within two months at the Battle of Breed’s Hill (also called Bunker Hill). Felled by a shot fired by a freed slave, Peter Salem.

Exemplifying James Burgh’s earlier observation: “The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave.” Although the English Constitution of 1689 enumerated the Rights of Englishmen to keep and bear arms, practical history has shown that we only have the Rights that we are willing to fight, and if necessary, kill for.

It is the character of the individual that society produces, not the tools that those individuals employ. It is also the character of the individuals in government who either seek to empower the individual to self defense, or seek to operantly condition society to be defenseless against aggression, that matters.

We can be a nation of Minutemen, rising to the occasion to aid our fellow man in defense, or we can be a nation of sheep, always in need of protection by government programs to provide a “sense” of safety, while providing a reality of servitude.

“Both Oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the People and therefore deprive them of their Arms” -Aristotle

 

BLOODY NEWS.

Early this Morning, we were alarmed, with an Express from Newbury-Port, with the following Letter, to the Chairman of the Committee of Correspondence in this Town.

SIR, Newbury Port, April 19, 1775.
THIS Town has been in a continual Alarm since Mid-day, with Reports of the TROOPS having marched out of Boston to make some Attack in the Country. The Reports in general concur, in part, in having been at Lexington. And it is very generally said they have been at Concord. We sent off an Express this Afternoon, who went as far as Simons’s at Danvers before he could get Information that he thought might be depended upon– he there met two or three Gentlemen who affirmed, the Regular Troops and our Men had been engaged chief of the Morning, and that it is supposed we had Twenty-five Thousand Men engaged against Four Thousand Regulars; that the Regulars had begun a Retreat. Our Men here are setting off immediately And as the Sword is now drawn, and first drawn on the Side of the Troops, we scruple not, you will give the readiest and fullest Assistance, in your Power And send this Information further on In Behalf of the Committee for this Town,

Your humble Servant, / JAMES HUDSON, Chairman.

By the Express who brought the above Letter, we hear the Attack began at Lexington, (about 12 Miles from Boston) by the Regular Troops, the 18th Inst. before Sunrise, when there was but twelve Hundred Regulars, who fired on the Watch or Guard that was placed at the House where Col. LEE & Major ELBRIDGE GARY kept, and killed Eight. From thence they proceeded to Concord, where they made a general Attack, and burnt the Meeting House, and other Buildings. The Provincial Forces that had assembled,  obliged the Regulars to retreat, after Numbers had been slain on both Sides. A Reinforcement of Regulars came out of Boston, & made up in the whole about Four Thousand, leaving one Thousand only to guard the Town.

Thursday One o’Clock. Another Express from Newbury Port informs, That there was Sixteen Hundred Regulars in the first Body that marched out of Boston, but for what particular Purpose do not learn. At Concord it is said they took 500 Barrels of Flour from the Provincials, knocked out the Heads, and destroyed it on the Spot–30 Regulars and 40 Provincials were kill’d. the Regular Army has retreated back to Winter Hill in Charlestown, and are surrounded by the Provincials.

Our Committee immediately on receiving the above Intelligence, sent off Expresses to all Quarters.

The foregoing is the different Accounts we have receiv’d, but how far and what Part is authentic, Presume not to determine.

Thursday Evening 6 o’Clock, another Express, who came to Rally the whole Country informs, that General Haldiman, was sent out of Boston, with the first Party, in order  to take some Gentlemen Prisoners, & if they met with any Difficulty, Lord Piercy, with  the main Body was to follow after, which he did, when a general Engagement ensued, and the Provincials obliged them to retreat to the Place mentioned in a Paragraph above, where they are almost surrounded by 30,000 of the Provincials ; that there had been and was a  constant firing on both Sides.

Great Numbers are gone and going from all our Towns above, and no doubt 50,000 are now assembled.