An old codger residing on FL's Space Coast. "We fight, get beat and fight again."--Continental Army Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene to G. Washington, May 1st 1781.
Brevard County, Florida USA
Joined September 2025
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BREAKING 🚨Sec Scott Bessent stuns America by encouraging whistle blowers to expose fraud. They will receive 10-30% of the fines
THIS IS A MASSIVE WIN 🔥
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Many of the freedoms and comforts we enjoy today were considered radical just 250 years ago:
• Rights come from our Creator, not granted by a king
• The government answers to the people, not the people to the government
• We can criticize our leaders without being jailed
• A person can rise by merit instead of being locked into the class they were born into
• Leaders are chosen, and can be removed, by the governed
• People have the right to alter or abolish a government that turns tyrannical
Our Founding Fathers thought these ideas were worth risking everything for. May we never take them for granted.
In the summer of 1776 the Continental Congress took up a draft that treated rights as belonging to people rather than to rank.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the core claim and Congress kept it. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The next lines said governments exist to secure those rights and derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
That wording was a break with the political order the delegates knew. In Britain and across Europe rights still tracked from birth, title and property. Most men were subjects. A few were rulers by inheritance or grant. The Declaration denied that political rights began and ended with a privileged class.
In 1776 that was still an uncommon basis for a government and it is why the document read as a challenge to the old order rather than a restatement of it.
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By January 1781, Banastre Tarleton had a reputation for giving no quarter. When he cornered the Americans in the South Carolina backcountry, he expected another easy slaughter.
Daniel Morgan had other plans.
Morgan knew his militia would run from British regulars, so he used that to his advantage. He instructed them to fire two volleys, aiming for the officers, then fall back behind the Continentals waiting in the rear.
Tarleton saw them pull back, thought the line was breaking, and sent his entire force charging in.
Then the Americans turned. At close range, the Continentals fired one crushing volley, then charged with bayonets. William Washington's cavalry hit one flank, the re-formed militia closed on the other, and Tarleton's army was surrounded in minutes.
It was over fast. The British lost more than 800 men, most of them captured. Morgan lost around 150. Tarleton managed to escape with a handful of horsemen.
Cowpens was a resounding victory for the young country and a crushing defeat for Tarleton.
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When Lafayette was buried in Paris, his son covered the coffin with American dirt carried from Bunker Hill.
He had wanted even more than that. On his farewell tour of America in 1824, Lafayette collected earth from every state he visited, planning to be buried in all of it.
But the steamboat carrying it sank in the Ohio River, so he gathered soil from Bunker Hill instead and brought it safely home to France.
He died in Paris in 1834. His son spread the American dirt over his grave exactly as he had wished.
That son's name was Georges Washington de Lafayette.
Decades earlier, while Lafayette sat in a foreign prison during the French Revolution, George Washington had taken in the boy and kept him safe in America.
An American flag flies over his grave to this day. It never came down, not even when the Nazis held Paris.
No one from another nation ever belonged to America the way Lafayette did.
🇺🇸 George Washington had no son. For two years he raised Lafayette’s. As President of the United States.
In April 1795, while his father was locked in an Austrian fortress at Olmütz, Georges Washington de Lafayette was sent to America. He was fifteen.
James Monroe, the American minister in Paris, got him a passport.
Washington wanted the boy under his own roof. He could not take him yet. France and the United States were quarreling, and a president who housed the son of a jailed French revolutionary could be accused of taking sides. So Georges waited out of sight. He landed in Boston in August 1795 under the name Motier, then moved to a house in New Jersey, then to New York, where Alexander Hamilton watched over him and told Washington not to rush. In February 1796 the House backed the President. Georges moved in.
He lived with the Washingtons in Philadelphia and at Mount Vernon. Washington paid for a portrait of him. Georges also studied at Harvard.
Washington kept him until his father was freed in September 1797. He sailed home the next year.
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How did that get in there?
During the restoration of the Washingtons' Bedchamber, the Preservation team uncovered an 18th-century fork behind the north wall of Martha Washington's closet! Hidden for centuries, this piece of domestic history offers a rare and personal connection to the Washingtons’ life at Mount Vernon.
We know that Washington ordered cutlery of this type multiple times during the 1760s and early 1770s. These forks and knives likely graced the Washingtons' table during the height of their entertaining at Mount Vernon!
Learn more about the find here: bit.ly/4ygjuEB
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It's time for more Trivia!
The basement crypt where Benedict Arnold and his wife, Peggy, are buried in St. Mary's Church in the Battersea district of London is now part of the church's kindergarten classroom, right next to the fish tank.
(photo credit: Jenna Fortunati
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At 19, George Washington had never been farther than 200 miles from the place he was born. That changed in 1751 when he sailed to Barbados with his older half-brother Lawrence.
Lawrence was suffering from tuberculosis and hoped the tropical climate would improve his health. The brothers spent more than six weeks crossing the Atlantic aboard a small trading ship.
In Barbados, Washington encountered a world unlike anything he had known in Virginia. He met British military officers. He studied the island’s extensive fortifications. Both experiences fueled his interest in the military.
He also contracted and survived smallpox, gaining immunity to a disease that would later devastate troops during the American Revolution. Learn more about the trip here: bit.ly/4hlzC0q
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Before William Penn founded Pennsylvania, he unintentionally got twelve jurors thrown in prison, helping to shape future American law.
In 1670 the 25-year-old Quaker stood trial in London for preaching to a street crowd. The Crown wanted a conviction. The jury denied it, finding only that he'd spoken in the street, not that he'd broken any assembly law.
The furious judge locked the jurors in a cell with no food, water or heat until they changed their minds. They came back Not Guilty. Again. And again. So he finally fined and jailed them too.
One of them, Edward Bushel, refused to pay and challenged his imprisonment. The Chief Justice ruled that a jury cannot be punished for its verdict, regardless of what the judge wants.
That principle crossed the ocean and became bedrock of American law: a jury answers to its conscience, not the state.
Not only did Penn give America a colony, he also helped give it a free jury.
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The most famous motion in American history was made by a man with no fingers on his left hand.
In 1768, Richard Henry Lee was hunting on his Virginia estate when his gun burst and tore all four fingers from his left hand.
The wound was seared shut. For the rest of his life he kept the hand wrapped in black silk. He did not hide the glove when he spoke. He raised it and pointed with it, almost using it as stagecraft.
They called him the American Cicero. Some ranked him the finest orator in Congress after Patrick Henry.
So when the moment came, on June 7, 1776, it was Lee who rose and moved that these United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”
He is barely remembered today. But the motion that created the United States was carried by a Virginian orator with no fingers on his left hand.
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The first commissioned officer of the U.S. Navy, Commodore John Barry died in Philadelphia #onthisday in 1803.
Read more about Barry's naval service in a #ReadtheRevolution excerpt from Tim McGrath’s book, John Barry: bit.ly/3eAZc2x
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Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside.
Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.
Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed.
Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged.
After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people.
So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway.
8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out.
He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here."
9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming.
He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life.
Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out.
2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde.
He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up.
The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.
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September 10, 1776 George Washington asks for a spy volunteer, Nathan Hale volunteers.
The fame of patriot Nathan Hale rests on a single quote, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." It takes nothing away from Hale's heroism to observe that he probably borrowed his famous last words from "Cato," Joseph Addison's 1713 play about the meaning of liberty: "What pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country."
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On this day in 1781, the American general Nathanael Greene fought the last great battle of the Revolution in the South, and once again he technically lost, and once again he won exactly what he needed to. It was a four-hour bloodbath in the blistering Carolina sun, and by the end of it the British hold on the Deep South was finished.
To understand Eutaw Springs, you have to understand Greene, one of the most underrated commanders in American history. After the catastrophe at Camden the year before, Washington had sent Greene to take over the shattered southern army. And Greene did something brilliant and counterintuitive. He kept losing battles, and kept winning the war. He would fight the British, bleed them badly, retreat in good order before he was destroyed, then come back and do it again. He famously said of his own campaign, "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." He could not beat the British in a single clean victory, so instead he wore them down until they had bled themselves out of the countryside.
Eutaw Springs was the culmination of that strategy. Greene came at a British force under Colonel Alexander Stewart camped near the Santee River. The Americans caught part of the British army out foraging and drove in hard. At first it went beautifully. Greene's lines pushed the British back, and for a moment it looked like a decisive American victory in the making, the British camp overrun.
And then the American army's own hunger nearly cost them everything. As the Continentals and militia broke into the British camp, the starving, ragged soldiers found food and rum and stopped fighting to plunder it. The attack lost its momentum in the enemy tents at the worst possible moment. The British rallied, made a stand around a stout brick house and a thicket, and turned the tide. The fighting became a savage, close-range slaughter in the heat, some of the most vicious of the entire war, until finally both exhausted, gutted armies pulled back from the field.
On paper it was a British victory. They held the ground when the smoke cleared. But it was the emptiest kind of win. Stewart's army had been so mauled, so bled of men it could not replace, that it had no choice but to abandon the field the next day and limp back to the safety of Charleston, and there the British stayed, bottled up, for the rest of the war. Greene had lost another battle and, in doing so, had driven the British almost entirely out of the South. After Eutaw Springs, the vast interior of the Carolinas and Georgia belonged to the Americans again.
Think about the arc of it. All summer the war down here had swung back and forth, Rocky Mount, Hanging Rock, Camden, Kings Mountain, Cowpens, the long grinding partisan struggle of Marion and Sumter and the overmountain men. Eutaw Springs was the last great pitched battle of that campaign, fought just weeks before Cornwallis, the man who had once seemed to have conquered the whole region, was trapped and finished at Yorktown. Greene never won a battle outright. But he took a lost cause in the South and, fight by bloody fight, won it back. Eutaw Springs was where that long, patient, brutal work finally paid off.
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On September 8, 1781, Major General Nathanael Greene attacked Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Stewart's British and Loyalist army at Eutaw Springs in the South Carolina lowcountry. The clash was the last major open-field battle of the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas. It grew out of Greene's year-long campaign of attrition after he took command of the Southern Department. Rather than gamble everything on one decisive fight, he used mobility, militia, and costly engagements at Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirk's Hill, and Ninety Six to wear down British strength until Stewart's force was the last substantial enemy army still operating in the interior. Greene marched from Burdell's Plantation before dawn with about 2,200 Continentals, state troops, and militia, including units led by Francis Marion, Andrew Pickens, Henry Lee, and William Washington. Stewart had roughly 2,000 regulars and Loyalists encamped near a brick house and palisaded garden. That morning he sent out a large foraging party; Greene's vanguard captured many of those men and then pressed the main British line. The Americans advanced with militia in front and Continentals behind, a formation Greene had refined through earlier southern battles.
The militia delivered opening volleys and fell back as planned. Continentals then drove Stewart's troops through their own camp. For a moment the British position seemed about to collapse. Stewart rallied around the brick house, where Major John Marjoribanks's flank battalion held a key sector. American soldiers who reached the tents began looting instead of finishing the attack. Heat, thirst, and disorder compounded the problem. After two to four hours of close fighting, Greene withdrew, leaving two guns behind.
Both sides suffered heavy losses for the numbers engaged. American casualties exceeded 500 killed, wounded, and missing; William Washington was wounded and captured and Pickens was wounded. British losses were even higher in proportion, with more than 80 dead, hundreds wounded, and hundreds more captured or missing. Marjoribanks was mortally wounded. Stewart held the field and claimed victory. Greene had again failed to win a conventional battle, yet his army remained intact while Stewart's was too damaged to stay in the open.
Stewart soon retreated toward Charleston. After Eutaw Springs the British no longer fielded an army capable of controlling the Carolina interior; they were confined to coastal posts at Charleston and Savannah. The fight therefore completed Greene's strategic object even though he left the ground. It also denied the British any remaining southern field force that might have aided Cornwallis, who surrendered at Yorktown the following month. The last major battle in the South ended British hopes of reconquering the backcountry.
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Major General Nathanael Greene, who had command of the forts on Brooklyn Heights since June 1776, fell critically ill a week before the Battle of Long Island and was taken off to Manhattan under the care of Dr. John Morgan. With his brother, Kitt, Nathanael could hear the battle from his sick bed and received reports.
On August 30, 1776, Nathanael wrote, “I have not the vanity to think the event would have been otherwise had I been there, yet I could have given the commanding general a good deal of necessary information.”
Colonel Henry Knox agreed in a September 25 letter to John Adams reporting on the battle of Long Island:
“We had one chance and only one for the defence of New York and that they completly put into our hands, and which some of our Ge [nerals?], most vilely miss’d improving. The ignorance of the Grounds and the not occupying the passes on that Island sufficiently has been the sole and only cause of our subsequent Retreats and —— had General Greene been fit for duty I flatter myself matters would have worn a very different appearance at present.”
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The Battle of Rhode Island was fought on August 29, 1778. General Nathanael Greene wrote to George Washington between August 28 and 31 to tell him about the American army’s dispositions on Aquidneck Island and about the Count’s (French Admiral d’Estaing) decision to leave for Boston to refit. Greene continued the letter on August 31 and described the battle. He did not mention the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, a segregated unit composed of white, Black, and Native Americans, that his friend Sammy Ward, Jr. and his third cousin Colonel Christopher Greene commanded at the battle. Nor did he mention Colonel John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners who ferried troops from Tiverton down the Sakonnet River to Aquidneck Island.
To George Washington from Major General Nathanael Greene
Camp near Newport [R.I.] August 28[–31] 1778
Sir
In my last I communicated to your Excellency the departure of the Count de Estainge with his fleet for Boston. This disagreeable event, has as I apprehended ruined all our operations. It struck such a panic among the Militia and Volunteers that they began to desert by Shoals. The fleet no sooner set sail than they began to be alarm’d for their safety. This misfortune damp’d the hopes of our Army and gave new Spirits to that of the Enemy...
…Our strength is now reduced from 9000 to between 4 and 5000. All our heavy Cannon on garrison carriages heavy & superfluous Stores of every kind are removd to the Main & to the North end of the Island where we intend to entrench and attempt to hold it and wait the chance of events. General Hancock is gone to Boston to forward the repairs of the fleet and to prepare the mind of the Count for a speedy return. How far he will succeed I cannot pretend to say…
Your Excellency may rest assurd that I have done every thing in my power to cultivate and promote a good understanding both with the Count and the Marquis (Lafayette) and flatter myself that I am upon very good terms with them both...The Marquis is going to Boston also to hasten the Counts return and if possible to get the French Troops to join the Land forces here which will more effectually interest the Count in the success of the expedition...
…General Sullivan has done every thing that could be expected and had the fleet cooperated with us as was at first intended and agreeable to the original plan of the expedition we must have been successful. We had every reason to hope for success from our numbers and from the enemies fears. Indeed General Pigot was heard to say the Garrison must fall unless they were speedily relievd by a British fleet...
Augt 31—Camp Tivertown [R.I.]
On the evening of the 29th the Army fell back to the North end of the Island. The next morning the enemy advanced upon us in two Columns upon the East & west road. Our Light Troops commanded by Col. Livingston & Col. Laurens attacked the heads of the Columns about 7 oClock in the morning, but were beat back, they were reenforced with a Regiment upon each road. The Enemy still provd too strong. General Sullivan formd the Army in order of battle and resolvd to wait their approach upon the ground we were encamped on, and sent orders to the Light troops to fall back. The Enemy came up & formd upon Quaker Hill a very strong piece of ground within about one mile & a ¼ of our Line. We were well Posted with strong works in our rear and a strong redoubt in front partly upon the right of the Line.
In this position a warm Cannonade commenced and lasted for several hours with continual Skirmishes on front of both Lines. About 2 oClock the Enemy began to advance in force upon our right as if they intended to dislodge us from the advance Redoubt. I had the command of the Right Wing after advanceing four Regts and finding the enemy still gaining ground I advanced with two more Regiments of regular Troops and a Brigade of Militia and at the same time Gen. Sullivan orderd Col. Livingston with the Light Troops under his command to advance. We soon put the Enemy to the rout and I had the pleasure to see them run in worse disorder than they did at the battle of Monmouth...
…The enemy fell back to their strong ground and the Day terminated with a Cannonade & Skirmishes. Both Armies continued in their position all Day yesterday Cannonadeing each every now and then. Last Night we effected a very good retreat without the loss of men or Stores…We have not collected an account of the kild and wounded, but we judge our loss amounts to between two & three hundred and that of the Enemies to much more...
…I would write your Excellency a more particular account of the battle & retreat, but I immagin General Sullivan & Col. Laurens has done it already. and I am myself very much unwell have had no sleep for three Night & Days; being severely afflicted with the Asthma. I am with great respect Your Excellencys Most obedient humble Servt
Nath. Greene
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On August 27, 1782, while serving under General Nathanael Greene, and as part of the Light Corps directly under the command of General Mordecia Gist, Colonel John Laurens was shot from his saddle and died in a rice paddy as he led a reckless attack on British ships that had sailed up the Combahee River in South Carolina on a foraging expedition.
Laurens was on an independent intelligence assignment when he heard that enemy shipping was sailing up the river. Gist had already thrown up a redoubt 12 miles downriver at Tar Bluff on Chehaw Neck when Laurens arrived and insisted that he take command. Gist told Laurens that he could go downriver with fifty infantry and a howitzer. Gist had no idea that Laurens was riding into a trap. The British had already come ashore or were about to. Gist learned of this and conducted a forced march to aide Laurens but it was too late.
John is buried in the Laurens Cemetery at the beautiful Mepkin Abbey on the Cooper River, formally the Laurens' plantation, in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. My photo December 2021.
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What most people don't realize is that John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners were at the Battle of Rhode Island in August 1778. He ferried troops and supplies from the American camp at Tiverton down the Sakonnet River to Aquidneck Island for General John Sullivan who was in command of the American forces. The prelude to the battle dragged out for a month during which time, French Admiral d'Estaing's ships were damaged in a storm and then a naval battle with Admiral Richard, Lord Howe. Nathanael Greene, Lafayette (who left a few days before the actual battle on August 29, 1778 to pacify d'Estaing who had left in a huff and rightly so, to get his ships refitted in Boston), General James Varnum, the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, Colonel Christopher Greene, and others depended on Glover for transportation. This is my photo of John Glover's statue on Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay, Boston.
Here is a man who never won a famous battle, whose name is on almost no monuments people visit, and who may have single-handedly saved the entire American Revolution, not once but twice, using nothing more glamorous than rowboats and the skill of fishermen. His name was John Glover.
Glover was not a professional soldier. He was a merchant and mariner from Marblehead, Massachusetts, a hard little fishing town north of Boston. When the war came, he raised a regiment from his own community, and it was unlike anything else in the army: a unit made up almost entirely of sailors and fishermen, men who had spent their whole lives handling boats in cold, dangerous water. The rest of the army sometimes looked down on these rough seamen. They were about to owe them everything.
The first miracle came in August 1776. Washington's army, thousands of men, had just been badly beaten at the Battle of Long Island and was trapped with its back to the East River, penned against the water with the massive British army in front and the Royal Navy poised to seal off the river behind them. If the British closed the trap, they would capture Washington and his entire army, and the Revolution would simply be over, that fast, in its first summer.
So on the night of August 29, in silence and darkness, Glover's Marblehead men went to work. All through the night they rowed back and forth across the East River, boat after boat, hauling soldiers, horses, cannon, and supplies from Brooklyn to Manhattan, right under the noses of the British. They worked in the dark, in shifting winds, some men making the crossing again and again without rest. A fortunate fog rolled in near dawn and hid the last of them. By morning roughly 9,000 men, the whole army, had vanished across the river to safety. The British woke up to find the trap empty. Glover's fishermen had quietly saved the Revolution in a single night.
The second miracle came four months later, at the lowest point of the war. December 1776, the army beaten and shrinking, the cause nearly dead, and Washington gambling everything on one desperate throw: a surprise attack across the Delaware River to hit the enemy at Trenton. But the Delaware was a nightmare that Christmas night, choked with jagged ice, in the middle of a howling nor'easter of sleet and snow. Ordinary men could not have crossed it. Glover's Marblehead mariners could. Again they manned the boats, and through the freezing dark they ferried thousands of soldiers, plus horses and artillery, across that treacherous, ice-jammed river. The victory at Trenton that followed breathed life back into a dying cause, and it happened because a regiment of fishermen rowed an army across an impossible river.
Twice, at the two moments when the Revolution could have ended for good, John Glover and his men were the difference between survival and annihilation. They did not do it with brilliant charges or dramatic last stands. They did it with cold hands on wet oars, doing a hard, unglamorous job better than anyone else alive could have done it.
Glover went on to serve capably for the rest of the war and retired a general, then went home to Marblehead and lived out his life quietly. He is barely a footnote today, which is almost absurd when you consider that without him, Washington might have been captured in 1776 and there might be no United States at all. Some heroes win the war with a sword. John Glover won it with a fleet of little boats and a crew of fishermen, and then let history forget his name.
