ESSE SINE METU IN FACIE INIMICI TUI. TUENDAM INOPS ET FACERE NON MALI.
Category: History
On the morning of November 11th, 1918, American fighter ace Captain Eddie Rickenbacker defied orders, jumped in his airplane, and flew out over the front…to watch the war end.
I was the only audience for the greatest show ever presented. On both sides of no-man’s-land, the trenches erupted. Brown-uniformed men poured out of the American trenches, gray-green uniforms out of the German. From my observer’s seat overhead, I watched them throw their helmets in the air, discard their guns, wave their hands.
Then all up and down the front, the two groups of men began edging toward each other across no-man’s-land. Seconds before they had been willing to shoot each other; now they came forward.
Hesitantly at first, then more quickly, each group approached the other. Suddenly gray uniforms mixed with brown. I could see them hugging each other, dancing, jumping. Americans were passing out cigarettes and chocolate.
I flew up to the French sector. There it was even more incredible. After four years of slaughter and hatred, they were not only hugging each other but kissing each other on both cheeks as well. Star shells, rockets and flares began to go up, and I turned my ship toward the field.
The war was over.
O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!
What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin, Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland , through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words—
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!
On October 20, 1803, the Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase Treaty by a vote of twenty-four to seven. The agreement, which provided for the purchase of the western half of the Mississippi River basin from France at a price of $15 million, or approximately four cents per acre, doubled the size of the country and paved the way for westward expansion beyond the Mississippi.
Spain had controlled Louisiana and the strategic port of New Orleans with a relatively free hand since 1762. However, Spain signed the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 under pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte, a secret agreement retroceding the territory of Louisiana to France.
News of the agreement eventually reached the U.S. government. President Thomas Jefferson feared that if Louisiana came under French control, American settlers living in the Mississippi River Valley would lose free access to the port of New Orleans. On April 18, 1802, Jefferson wrote a letter to Robert Livingston, the U.S. minister to France, warning that, “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans…”
Napoleon, faced with a shortage of cash, a recent military defeat in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti), and the threat of a war with Great Britain, decided to cut his losses and abandon his plans for an empire in the New World. In 1803, he offered to sell the entire territory of Louisiana to the United States for $15 million.
Robert Livingston and James Monroe, whom Jefferson had sent to Paris earlier that year, had only been authorized to spend up to $10 million to purchase New Orleans and West Florida. Although the proposal for the entire territory exceeded their official instructions, they agreed to the deal. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was dated April 30 and formally signed on May 2, 1803.
The bounds of the territory, which were not clearly delineated in the treaty, were assumed to include all the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, at that time known as the Stony Mountains. Just twelve days after the signing of the treaty, frontiersmen Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, younger brother of Revolutionary War officer George Rogers Clark, set out on an expedition to explore the newly acquired territory.
The purchase of the Louisiana Territory and the Lewis and Clark expedition marked the beginning of a century of conquest. As explorers, speculators, adventurers, and settlers pushed the territorial boundaries of the United States westward toward the Pacific coast, the notion of America as a nation always pushing toward new frontiers took hold in art, literature, folklore, and the national psyche.
Today in history, on October 10, 732 A.D., an epic battle saved Western Europe from becoming Islamic.
Precisely one hundred years after the death of Islam’s prophet Muhammad in 632 — a century which had seen the conquest of thousands of square miles of formerly Christian lands, including Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain — the scimitar of Islam found itself in the heart of Europe in 732, facing that continent’s chief military power, the Franks.
After the Muslim hordes, which reportedly numbered 80,000 men, had ravaged most of southwestern France, slaughtering and enslaving countless victims, they met and clashed with 30,000 Frankish infantrymen under the leadership of Charles Martel, on October 10, somewhere between Poitiers and Tours. An anonymous medieval Arab chronicler describes the battle as follows:
Near the river Owar [Loire], the two great hosts of the two languages [Arabic and Latin] and the two creeds [Islam and Christianity] were set in array against each other. The hearts of Abd al-Rahman, his captains and his men were filled with wrath and pride, and they were the first to begin to fight. The Muslim horsemen dashed fierce and frequent forward against the battalions of the Franks, who resisted manfully, and many fell dead on either side, until the going down of the sun.
Entirely consisting of wild headlong charges, the Muslim attack proved ineffective, for “the men of the north stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword. The Austrasians [eastern Franks], vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight,” writes one chronicler. The Franks refused to break ranks and allow successive horsemen to gallop through the gaps, which Arab cavalry tactics relied on. Instead, they tightened their ranks and, “drawn up in a band around their chief [Charles], the people of the Austrasians carried all before them. Their tireless hands drove their swords down to the breasts [of the foe].”
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a more practical take:
When the sources speak of “a wall,” “a mass of ice,” and “immovable lines” of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable, with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop.
There are events that have occurred in our lifetimes that become engrained in our minds. We often ask ourselves, “Where were you when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon?” And over the last 21 years, I am sure many of us asked ourselves, “Where were you when the planes flew into the World Trade Center towers, and into the Pentagon, or into a Pennsylvania field?” Those of us who witnessed the planes flying into the World Trade Center on TV – that image, I will suggest, will be engrained in our memories forever.
On September 11 we saw fire fighters running into a burning building as everyone else was running out. On September 11 we saw the loyalty among fire fighters as they searched for their own within the tons of rubble. On September 11 we saw perfect strangers bond together in self-sacrifice, to deny the terrorists flying over Pennsylvania to complete their mission. On September 11 we heard men and women who knew of their imminent demise spend their final moments telling their families how much they loved them.
As General Casey said when he took the reigns as our former Chief of Staff of the Army … “We are locked in a war against a global extremist network that is fixed on defeating the United States and destroying our way of life. This foe will not go away nor will they give up easily, and the next decade will likely be one of persistent conflict. At stake are the power of our values and our civilization, exemplified by the promise of America, to confront and defeat the menace of extremist terrorists. At stake is whether the authority of those who treasure the rights of free individuals will stand firm against the ruthless and pitiless men who wantonly slay the defenseless. At stake is whether the future will be framed by the individual freedoms we hold so dear or dominated by a demented form of extremism. At stake is whether we will continue to expand freedom, opportunity, and decency for those who thirst for it, or let fall the darkness of extremism and terror.”
Sept. 11, 2023, will mark 22 years since the terror attacks on our nation. Two planes flew into the World Trade Center towers, another into the Pentagon, and another, likely headed for the U.S. Capitol Building or the White House, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
In the years since that dark day in America’s history, presidents have typically sought to mark the anniversary at events in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or the White House.
Well, all but one, anyway. According to a report from The Hill, Joe Biden will be in Alaska on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks to participate in a memorial ceremony there. Adding insult to injury, Joe Biden has sent Kamala Harris and her husband to attend a commemoration ceremony in New York City.
While 9/11 was a national tragedy, the decision to be in Alaska has many baffled. Joe Biden couldn’t be further away from New York, D.C., or Virginia and still be in the United States unless he was in Hawaii. Given his recently botched response to the wildfires in the Aloha State and the sour reception he got from locals, he certainly wasn’t going to go there.
When you consider how much effort goes into choreographing every move the president makes for the purpose of public relations, Biden’s absence from any of the three traditional observation sites or even the White House strikes many as odd.
One possible explanation is that they’re giving Kamala Harris an opportunity to shine, but I’m not buying that. I’ve never believed that Biden really wanted Harris as his running mate, and there have long been reports of tension between the Biden and Harris teams. So there’s little reason to believe that she’s being primed to take his place as the de facto nominee for the Democratic Party in the event he drops out, which many people are predicting is inevitable.
My theory is that it’s related to his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the most consequential moment of his presidency. Afghanistan sent his approval ratings underwater, where they have stayed ever since.
Biden ignored the advice of his military advisors and lied about the situation on the ground because he wanted to have a victory photo-op for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. As a result of Biden’s hubris, 13 American service members were killed in a terrorist attack at Kabul Airport, and the Taliban quickly took over the country, erasing all the progress we and our allies made in a twenty-year war.
One thing is for sure: Biden has to make some sort of public appearance on that day, and his location on the anniversary of 9/11 is no accident. He’s definitely trying to hide.
The film Oppenheimer has made a lot of noise in the run-up to the anniversaries this month of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and not just from Christopher Nolan’s bombastic soundtrack. As happens every year, these anniversaries prompt debate over the the decision to use atomic weapons, and whether they were necessary to end the war with Imperial Japan.
The film itself seems timed to influence those debates. As Axios reported over the weekend, it has at least stirred controversy in Japan, although perhaps not exactly as its producers intended:
“Oppenheimer” has generated backlash in Japan, for what critics argue is its failure to fully grapple with the destructive reality of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its celebration of the “father of the atomic bomb.”
Why it matters: While the film does chronicle J. Robert Oppenheimer’s guilt over the deployment of the weapon he helped create, it doesn’t truly show “what happened under the mushroom cloud,” Keiko Tsuyama, a former staff writer for Kyoto News who covered the aftermath of the bombing in Nagasaki, tells Axios.
It has also been deeply uncomfortable for some Japanese people and Japanese Americans to see the development of weapons that killed upwards of 200,000 people in 1945 become part of a pop culture phenomenon.
Part of this aims at Warner’s efforts to promote the tongue-in-cheek “Barbenheimer” social-media memes, which the living survivors understandably find offensively trivializing. Some of this, however, comes from efforts in Japan and the US to strip the decision to use the bombs from the context of the war, especially in the way Imperial Japan itself conducted its genocidal campaigns and their refusal to deal with the consequences and realities of their own choices.
The film contributes to this revisionist impulse, either intentionally or accidentally. In a scene between J. Robert Oppenheimer and Harry Truman after the war, Oppenheimer laments that “I feel I have blood on my hands,” an anecdote taken directly from the biography American Prometheus on which the film is based. Truman calls Oppenheimer a “crybaby” behind his back after trying to ease his conscience by reminding Oppenheimer that the decision to use the bombs was Truman’s.
The film, clearly sympathetic to that perspective, fails to explain why Truman made that choice, other than as a decision based on choosing between dead Americans and dead Japanese. That in itself is enough of a legitimate wartime calculation, but the issue was far more complicated than that, and even more complicated than calculations about the cost of an invasion.
The Korean War Armistice agreement was signed July 27, 1953 — 70 years ago this month. It’s a very iffy anniversary, for the Korean War remains unfinished business.
Internet factoids claim the armistice concluded the war with “a complete cessation of hostilities.” Dub those factoids “faketoids” — disinformation posing as historical fact. First point: an armistice is not a peace treaty. Second point: along the Korean peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the fighting has never stopped.
Examples abound. The DMZ Conflict is a collective name for skirmishes, raids and assassination attempts that occurred from October 1966 to October 1969. The fighting cost South Korea 299 dead and 550 wounded. Forty-three Americans were killed and 111 wounded.
The fighting included the January 1968 Blue House Raid. Thirty-one North Korean commandos infiltrated South Korea to assassinate South Korea’s president. They attacked the president’s residence (the Blue House) but failed to kill the president. Ultimately South Korea suffered 26 killed and 66 wounded; 29 communist commandos were slain, one captured. Call it “gray zone war” and you nail it.
At this immediate moment we see a kinda-sorta conflict lapse, except for nuclear warfare threats and missile launches.
This July 12 North Korea test fired an intercontinental ballistic that traveled some 650 miles and splashed into the Sea of Japan. The missile’s loft trajectory and flight time indicates it can hit Guam and Hawaii — a nuclear Pearl Harbor. Seattle, San Francisco and Phoenix, stay tuned.
The Biden administration’s Afghanistan skedaddle debacle has ongoing security consequences. The Taliban, however, hasn’t tested ballistic missiles and acquired nukes.
Was North Korea’s test a bluff? The Wall Street Journal quoted Sung-Yoon Lee (Korea expert at Tufts University) as saying “North Korea excels in pretextual provocations… resorting to illegal and menacing behavior while blaming the U.S. or South Korean actions or statements as the pretext for its kinetic ‘protest.'”
Lee believes North Korea “is gearing up for a major provocation.”
Which makes my third point: The Korean War isn’t over. When you hear TV talking heads call Afghanistan America’s longest war, click the remote and silence the ignorant poseurs.
On the armistice’s 70th anniversary, North Korea’s major export is the threat of war magnified by potential nuclear holocaust. It’s an international version of an alley bully’s extortion game. “Pay me off,” the punk waving the pistol says, “or I’ll burn your store.” The analogy, however, goes only so far. North Korea’s Kim waves a nuclear weapon as his miserable people suffer from endemic communist famine.
Maybe North Korea’s nuke is still a primitive fizzle nuke. But quick tech help could modernize the Kim regime’s nukes. Next door China is a possible culprit. Historical point: At its height the Korean War was a war between the U.S. and communist China.
The more likely nuke upgrade culprit– a desperate Vladimir Putin seeking political leverage. A nuke detonation in Asia might shake Ukraine.
Far-fetched? Let’s hope so. However, dictators experiencing a crisis of authority grasp at horse hairs — an indirect reference to the Sword of Damocles.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a column reflecting on the Korean War armistice’s 50th anniversary. In 1951 my father was in combat in Korea. My mother told me that year more than anything she wanted a quick end to the Korean War.”
Dad fought in the Punch Bowl, a collapsed volcano where the Chinese and American armies slugged it out in a series of bitter attrition battles. He censored his own letters. He didn’t tell Mom about the human wave assault that overran his bunker, with Chinese soldiers racing past him as he fired his pistol at fast shapes in the night.
For years, Dad’s commentary on Korea amounted to little more than “I was always too damn cold.”
Korea wasn’t the first post-World War Two “war of integration and disintegration.” That distinction arguably goes to China, where the fighting never stopped. Red China still wants to invade Taiwan.
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Soldiers of the 9th Infantry Regiment made a desperate retreat as North Korean troops closed in around them. A wounded, 18-year-old Army Pfc. Luther Herschel Story feared his injuries would slow down his company, so he stayed behind to cover their withdrawal.
Story’s actions in the Korean War on Sept. 1, 1950, would ensure he was remembered. He was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor, which is now displayed alongside his portrait at the National Infantry Museum, an hour’s drive from his hometown of Americus, Georgia.
But Story was never seen alive again, and his resting place long remained a mystery.
This undated photo shows the late Army Cpl. Luther H. Story. The Army said Friday, May 19, 2023, that the remains of Cpl. Luther H. Story will be buried May 29 at Andersonville National Cemetery near the soldier’s hometown of Americus, Georgia. President Joe Biden announced last month that scientists had positively identified Story’s remains. (U.S. Army via AP)
“In my family, we always believed that he would never be found,” said Judy Wade, Story’s niece and closest surviving relative.
That changed in April when the U.S. military revealed lab tests had matched DNA from Wade and her late mother to bones of an unidentified American soldier recovered from Korea in October 1950. The remains belonged to Story, a case agent told Wade over the phone. After nearly 73 years, he was coming home.
A Memorial Day burial with military honors was scheduled Monday at the Andersonville National Cemetery. A police escort with flashing lights escorted Story’s casket through the streets of nearby Americus on Wednesday after it arrived in Georgia.
Picture shows headstone of Luther Story at Andersonville National Cemetery, Wednesday, May 17, 2023, in Andersonville, Georgia. Army Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was awarded the Medal of Honor after he went missing in battle during the Korean War is being buried on Memorial Day near his hometown in Georgia. Wounded Story was last seen on Sept. 1, 1950, when he stayed behind to cover his infantry unit’s retreat. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
“I don’t have to worry about him anymore,” said Wade, who was born four years after her uncle went missing overseas. “I’m just glad he’s home.”
Among those celebrating Story’s return was former President Jimmy Carter. When Story was a young boy, according to Wade, his family lived and worked in Plains on land owned by Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr.
Jimmy Carter, 98, has been under hospice care at his home in Plains since February. Jill Stuckey, superintendent of the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park, said she shared the news about Story with Carter as soon as she heard it.
“Oh, there was a big smile on his face,” Stuckey said. “He was very excited to know that a hero was coming home.”
Story grew up about 150 miles (241 kilometers) south of Atlanta in Sumter County, where his father was a sharecropper. As a young boy, Story, who had a keen sense of humor and liked baseball, joined his parents and older siblings in the fields to help harvest cotton. The work was hard, and it didn’t pay much.
“Momma talked about eating sweet potatoes three times a day,” said Wade, whose mother, Gwendolyn Story Chambliss, was Luther Story’s older sister. “She used to talk about how at night her fingers would be bleeding from picking cotton out of the bolls. Everybody in the family had to do it for them to exist.”
Judy Wade, niece of Luther Story, shows memory scrapbook of Luther Story, that her mother put together, Thursday, May 18, 2023, in Americus, Georgia. Army Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was awarded the Medal of Honor after he went missing in battle during the Korean War is being buried on Memorial Day near his hometown in Georgia. Wounded Story was last seen on Sept. 1, 1950, when he stayed behind to cover his infantry unit’s retreat. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)The family eventually moved to Americus, the county’s largest city, where Story’s parents found better work. He enrolled in high school, but soon set his sights on joining the military in the years following World War II.
In 1948, his mother agreed to sign papers allowing Story to enlist in the Army. She listed his birthdate as July 20, 1931. But Wade said she later obtained a copy of her uncle’s birth certificate that showed he was born in 1932 — which would have made him just 16 when he joined.
Story left school during his sophomore year. In the summer of 1950 he deployed with Company A of the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment to Korea around the time the war began.
Judy Wade, niece of Luther Story, points out a Luther Story from a school year book, Thursday, May 18, 2023, in Americus, Georgia. Army Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was awarded the Medal of Honor after he went missing in battle during the Korean War is being buried on Memorial Day near his hometown in Georgia. Wounded Story was last seen on Sept. 1, 1950, when he stayed behind to cover his infantry unit’s retreat. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
On Sept. 1, 1950, near the village of Agok on the Naktong River, Story’s unit came under attack by three divisions of North Korean troops that moved to surround the Americans and cut off their escape.
Story seized a machine gun and fired on enemy soldiers crossing the river, killing or wounding about 100, according to his Medal of Honor citation. As his company commander ordered a retreat, Story rushed into a road and threw grenades into an approaching truck carrying North Korean troops and ammunition. Despite being wounded, he continued fighting.
“Realizing that his wounds would hamper his comrades, he refused to retire to the next position but remained to cover the company’s withdrawal,” Story’s award citation said. “When last seen he was firing every weapon available and fighting off another hostile assault.”
Portrait of Judy Wade, niece of Luther Story, with memory scrapbook of Luther Story, that her mother put together, Thursday, May 18, 2023, in Americus, Georgia. Army Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was awarded the Medal of Honor after he went missing in battle during the Korean War is being buried on Memorial Day near his hometown in Georgia. Wounded Story was last seen on Sept. 1, 1950, when he stayed behind to cover his infantry unit’s retreat. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
Story was presumed dead. He would have been 18 years old, according to the birth certificate Wade obtained.
In 1951, his father received Story’s Medal of Honor at a Pentagon ceremony. Story was also posthumously promoted to corporal.
About a month after Story went missing in Korea, the U.S. military recovered a body in the area where he was last seen fighting. The unidentified remains were buried with other unknown service members at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
Judy Wade, niece of Luther Story, shows memory scrapbook of Luther Story, that her mother put together, Thursday, May 18, 2023, in Americus, Georgia. Army Pfc. Luther Herschel Story was awarded the Medal of Honor after he went missing in battle during the Korean War is being buried on Memorial Day near his hometown in Georgia. Wounded Story was last seen on Sept. 1, 1950, when he stayed behind to cover his infantry unit’s retreat. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, more than 7,500 Americans who served in the Korean War remain missing or their remains have not been identified. That’s roughly 20% of the nearly 37,000 U.S. service members who died in the war.
Remains of the unknown soldier recovered near Agok were disinterred in 2021 as part of a broader military effort to determine the identities of several hundred Americans who died in the war. Eventually scientists compared DNA from the bones with samples submitted by Wade and her mother before she died in 2017. They made a successful match.
President Joe Biden announced the breakthrough April 26 in Washington, joined by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.
“Today, we can return him to his family,” Biden said of Story, “and to his rest.”
Less than half of Americans know the true meaning behind Memorial Day, according to a survey taken a few years ago.
The survey of 2,000 Americans revealed just 43 percent were aware it’s a holiday honoring those who died in service while in the US Armed Forces.
Twenty-eight percent mistakenly believed Memorial Day was a holiday honoring all military veterans who have served in the US Armed Forces — which is actually Veterans Day.
It was revealed to be a common mistake: A third of respondents (36 percent) admitted to being unsure of the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day.
Conducted by OnePoll on behalf of University of Phoenix, the survey tested Americans on their knowledge of the holiday.
“For many Americans, Memorial Day is a much-needed day off to relax and enjoy their family. It is important to understand that it is also a solemn day of remembrance. For me, as a combat veteran and for military members and their families, this day holds great significance. Not everyone I served with was fortunate enough to return home,” said Brian Ishmael, senior director, University of Phoenix Office of Military and Veteran Affairs and former US Army sergeant.
Even though there’s some confusion about the holiday, 83 percent of Americans believe it’s important to do something to commemorate Memorial Day.
2nd amendment history
So often heard is “Why would Founding Fathers want people to have arms? The 2A is obviously about state militias!”
Well, here is correspondence from the Revolution which shows why.
The Continental Army couldn’t arm recruits, and recruits showed up unarmed.
Four guns for 100 men!
It’s a constant refrain. Arms needed. Cartridges and lead needed.
The Kentucky Supreme Court has overturned lower court rulings that allowed leaders in Kentucky’s largest city to remove a Confederate statue from a prominent location three years ago.
The 6-1 ruling issued Thursday said Louisville violated due process in getting approval to remove the John Breckenridge Castleman monument from Cherokee Triangle, news outlets reported.
The statue was vandalized several times over a few years before it was removed from its pedestal in June 2020 following a decision from Louisville’s landmarks commission.
A group called Friends of Louisville Public Art filed a lawsuit challenging the landmarks commission ruling. They argued the statue was a local landmark and said some commission members should not have been allowed to vote because they have a conflict of interest.
While the group acknowledged Castleman’s Confederate ties, they argued that he later renounced his allegiance to the Confederacy. Castleman later served as a brigadier general in the U.S. Army. He was partially responsible for establishing Louisville’s park system and fought to keep the city’s parks and playgrounds open to Black residents.
Kentucky’s Court of Appeals upheld a Jefferson Circuit Court judge’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit. The appeals court ruled that there were “no facts to support the conflict of interests claim.”
The Supreme Court disagreed. Chief Justice Laurance B. VanMeter said it was a “patent” conflict for city employees to vote on the application to remove the monument.
“… Their employment and their being asked to sit in review of an application filed by their employer were sufficient to raise a reasonable question of impartiality such that recusal was required as a matter of law,” he wrote for the majority.
Plaintiff Steve Wiser said he was pleased with the court’s ruling.
Kevin Trager, a spokesman for the city, said officials were reviewing the opinion before deciding how to proceed.
While it took 111 years to happen, by SCOTUS in Bruen, in October 1911, the editor of Forest And Stream (which later merged with Field And Stream), predicted the overturning of the Sullivan Act of New York by incorporation under the 14th Amendment.
If there were any justice today would be a national holiday at least as big as Independence Day. I’m not kidding.
Back in the 1770’s an unrest that had started more than a century before–with Colonial reaction to the English Civil War, the Catholic reign of James II, and the Glorious Revolution that followed–was growing in the American colonies, at least those along the Atlantic Seaboard from New Hampshire down through Georgia. Protests over taxes imposed without the taxed having any voice in the matter, complaints about a distant monarch and legislative body making rules and laws over people to whom they are not beholden.
There had been clashes which fed that unrest, including the famous “Boston Massacre” where British troops fired into a rioting mob resulting in several deaths. Think of it as the Kent State of the 18th century.
In an effort to quell the unrest, or at least have it be less of a threat to British officials, General Thomas Gage, Military governor of Massachusetts, under orders to take decisive action against the colonists, decided to confiscate firearms and ammunition from certain groups in the colony. His forces marched on the night of April 18, 1775.
The colonists, forewarned of the action (the Longfellow poem, which children learn in school–or they did when I was in school “Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”–is historically inaccurate, but it sure is stirring, isn’t it?), first met the British troops at Lexington Massachusetts where John Parker, in command of the local Colonial Militia said, according to the recollection of one of the participants, “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
Whether Parker actually said those words, the first shot was fired. No one knew who fired it, whether British or Colonial. In the ensuing, brief battle the British regulars put the Colonial militia to flight.
The British then turned toward Concord.
A small unit of militia, hearing reports of firing at Lexington marched out but on spotting a British unit of about 700 while themselves only numbering about 250 they returned to Concord. The Colonial militia departed the town across the North Bridge to a hill about a mile north of town where additional militia reinforcements continued to gather.
The British reached the town and began searching for the weapons they came to confiscate. They found several cannon, too large to be moved quickly, and disabled them. Other weapons and supplies had been either removed or hidden.
On seeing the smoke of the burning carriages from the cannon, the Militia began to move. It is not my purpose here to go into detailed description of their movements but in the end the British regulars found themselves both outnumbered and outmaneuvered. They fled, a rout that surprised the Colonial Militia as much as the British regulars. Again, I simplify but in the end they marched back to Boston continuing to suffer casualties from what amounted to 18th century sniper fire from the surrounding brush. The frustration of the British soldiers led them to atrocities, killing everyone they found in buildings whether they were involved in the fighting or not.
Eventually the British forces fought their way back to Boston where they were besieged by Militia forces numbering over 1500 men.
And the Revolutionary War had begun.
And so, on this day in 1775, the nascent United States took the course that would lead eventually to Independence.
And that’s why April 19 deserves to be a National Holiday on a par at least with Independence Day. The latter was recognition of what became fact on the former.
