Historically High - The American Revolution: Part 2

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

We left off with the shot heard round the world and we ate coming back into Lexington and Concord. While it is sorta known as the opening salvo of the Revolutionary War, it really wasn't. We had to have 2 continental congresses before we decides to declare independence. That is what started the Revolutionary War. A strongly worded letter to a pre-crazy King George III known as the Declaration of Independence. From then on the revolution was on. It didn't start out so hot, but eventually the Continental Army would find their footing under Washington&Co. Along with an assist by the French and Spanish the Colonies won their independence. Join us for part 2 as we get Historically High on The American Revolution.Support our Sponsors at https://www.flintts.com/Promo code: HISTORICALLYHIGH for 15% offSupport the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Last week on historically high, revolution. We're back, baby. We're back for part two of the American Revolution. And now things are starting to get a little bloody. Yes. Yeah, last week was just, it was, that was the courtship period. That was when you're filling each other out. You haven't slept together yet.

Now, tonight's tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we are getting to it. This one will probably be a little meteor, probably a little bit longer. just because it's long fucking war. Yeah. That very astute observation that was just given to my right, to my stage left.

He is the Washington to my stubin. You'll get these later on. He's also sometimes the Washington to my hand caught because I'm just so goddamn jealous of the way that he does our podcast. That's Professor Chris. I am Professor Adam and we're ready to go.

I feel like we got our blue coats on, we're ready to really see this blue coat, red coat thing out. I'm full in on the war side of this. It's such a big war. There's so many things that are going on. There's so many of these things that we're going to break down into their own episodes. We're not going to bounce around too much. We're going to go fairly chronological with how this goes.

There will be callbacks to other forts and different things that were taken, other battles that were happened. But really, this is just, again, we're starting the Revolutionary War. at the first shot that was fired, war still wasn't on anybody's minds. No kidding. And at this point, ladies and gentlemen, it's all gas, no break. Tell a friend, love our sponsors. We appreciate all the reaching out, all of the help that you guys have done to grow us where we're going to grow,

or that we've grown so far. We've got bigger aspirations. Still going to keep this same quality content flow, and we want to add more. And we can keep adding more as long as you guys keep loving us the way you do. we've added a new dimension now we're the podcast with the wettest mouths yep we are the wettest mouth podcast thanks to flintz and you can thank them as well with 15% off using historically high on their website i'd like what you did right there all right so where we last left off lexington has just happened the shot heard around the world no one knows who fired it one side says the other the other side says the other one when all said done in the smoke clears you have a total of of these militiamen laying dead. The rest of them simply just fucking run off and disperse. There's no way that these guys, after seeing that,

are going to stand against 700 of these red coats. Not only that, but unfortunately, the eight militia that died, there was only one British soldier that was wounded. It was like a grace in the leg. I mean, you're not trained. You have no idea what you're doing. That's true. And these smoothbore muskets, you know,

that take, can go off. any point because they said that once this happened, you know, everyone was loading because no one had theirs loaded. Then everyone started kind of loading it. Then they pointed at each other. Some of the witnesses that were there thought that the British were like celebrating after they had killed these eight people and chased the militia off because they were firing their guns in the air. They were just firing their guns in the air because once they started marching again, they didn't want guns going off and accidentally shooting somebody. I definitely don't think that these guys were celebrating the potential fact that they were starting a war based on the fact that they were

going to be the first people fighting the war. Yeah. Put me on the clock. Give me a minute and then you can correct anything that I know I'm probably going to be wrong about this. And go. So the way that these rifles work, these muskets were smooth bores just as Chris has alluded to, the reason that there's boring inside of a rifle is to spin a shell or a bullet in a straight direction. Firing a musket propelled by black powder out of these muskets when they're smooth on the inside. You have a round ball. Everything is smooth. So instead of, in essence, this is how I break it down, being a sports person, a musket ball fired out of a musket is much like a knuckleball. Yes, I was actually just going to tell you that with rifling, it comes out like a quarterback pass.

A nice spiral. It travels. Knuckleball is essentially how the muskets go. So these things, even at closer range, because when you see this standoff at Lexington, I mean, they're literally like 10 yards, 15 yards from each other. They could have thrown a rock with more accuracy. And you also have the fact that, yeah, the British are actually trained and drilled on how to fire these things. So they know that, yes, they're wildly inaccurate,

but they also know to keep the target somewhere between, midpoint between the head and the feet and then just try to, you know, not let it kick too much. You're aiming between knees and nipples. And if you hit anything outside of that area, it's still a good shot. You have militiamen that have never fired at anything, living aside from maybe like a deer or something like that. Which was more likely a bow and arrow because it was more accurate to fire a distance.

The training also, like when you think about just kind of the nitty gritty of it, when you go to fire a rifle and you see that initial spark and a little explosion as ignites the black powder, if you see that, you're probably turning your face away as much as you, I turn face away from the mic. You're probably turning your face away and you can't really even, and then that's jerking the gun up a certain direction. As a soldier, you probably are anticipating that. It's just, it's essentially pros versus Joe.

Yeah. Once you pop it off once, you don't just cock it and then fire again. Yes. You got to put that rifle down. You have to pull out your shoving. Ramrod. Ramrod. Team Ramrod. You have to fill up your black powder. You have to put your shot in there. You have to put your wad in there to make sure that all of the explosion going on from the gun powder is held behind. I think it goes powder wadding to tighten it around the powder. So it forces the, then the ball, ram it all down. Then you have to put a new cap on the, um, percussion cap or on the hammer. And yeah, and put that on the hammer, then raise it back up to fire again. I think they said that like the British military, like a professional soldier could do it maybe in like 20 seconds or so. Yeah. So none of this stuff is happening fast at all. Like it's it's a slow process that you are trying to do under the duress of standing a few yards away from the, these other guys that are fired directly.

The militia ran. Yeah. As soon as no one was sitting there trying to reload. If you got one shot off, that was probably a good day's work. So, I mean, what do you do at this point? If you're the British commander, you'd say, I just created a fucking incident. I should probably march my guys all the way back to Boston, file this with my superior, and make sure that I'm not causing any other shit.

Or, I mean, we're already done here. We might as well just keep going on the Concord, right? We came here for a mission. We came here to find this cache of weapons. and if we don't come back with anything, we're going to look so. What am I going to say? I didn't fulfill my mission because it ate dead colonists?

Yeah. Yeah, because one of my guys got grazed. I called a full-on retreat. No. You're going to keep marching. So from Lexington, they march into Concord. There are more battles that go on there. The Minutemen fare a little bit better in Concord.

And by a little bit better, that means that I believe it was in total. There were 73 red coats killed in 174. which is actually quite a bit. Yeah, so they end up marching into Concord because it's an additional five miles away, people had already been notified both places. So those that weren't coming to Lexington

were already going to Concord. And then after this happened, the British Army, they're not, because they're marching with 700 guys, it's not fast. They're not like galloping horses. People would then notified between Lexington and Concord

and there was a group of about 400 militiamen that were waiting for them in Concord in strategic positions. So once the Brits ended up getting into Concord, they split up into little divisions. One went to go actually search the farm of the guy they suspected of holding the weapons. They were all buried. They didn't find anything. The wife even actually served them tea or served them lunch.

She served them breakfast. Breakfast. So they showed up. They ate breakfast. The British general offered to pay the woman. And she, through her religion or something, says that we're always supposed to feed our enemies. Yeah. They say, okay.

That works. We're fine there. we still need to search your property because we know that there's guns and weapons here. So they go through, they search the entire property, they're not coming up with anything. They look out at the fields they're like, okay, well, they were just plowed,

they were planted, it's just regular crops and everything to that. It looks normal. They say, we're going to arrest your two sons because your husband is the leader of a militia and she says, you can't arrest my two sons, they didn't do anything wrong, they're not to bear the sins of their father. This is in a hereditary crime.

Nope. Turns out though, that the two brothers went ahead and when they plowed their field, they buried all their guns underneath it before they... Yeah, before they put the dirt and everything back over it. So there's just this cache of weapons that's sitting out in the field that these Brits may have actually just walked right over as they were looking for them. So in the town, they also have groups that are going actually through the houses in Concord. They're not like breaking anything and they're trying to be respectful because they know

they just killed eight people at the last stop. So maybe they're trying to not escalate the situation anymore. Still not at war. Yep. Still peaceful. Something happens to where one of the buildings actually catches fire. And they were trying to burn the building because they had found some like a bag, like a 500 bag of shot. And there was gunpowder in there too, I believe.

Gunpowder. And so they light the building on fire. Like, I don't know what the fuck you're trying to accomplish by that. And because they're close and they're made of wood, it starts to threaten like the buildings next to it. So all of a sudden you have the fucking redcoats trying to like fire brigade, Keystone, cop a bucket of water, put this fire out. You then have the militia who they don't know what's going on in town.

All of a sudden, they just see smoke coming out of the town and know that the British just shot eight of their countrymen and they're like, nope, fuck this. So they start coming down out of the mountains, start marching into the town. And there's a like a river there that is separating them from the actual town proper and guarding this. I think it was like 70 redcoats.

So there's a standoff. off for a little while, and then all of a sudden, shots are fired. And I think it was during that engagement that the first, like, British casualties happened during that, they were able to get into the town. And basically, the entire 20-mile march back to Boston, they were just harassed and fired at the entire time. It had to be a strategic retreat, because I see it as that there's a, um, like when you hear the trees start to cock their guns.

I imagine it is that scene in The Patriot when he's hiding behind the trees and taking out the company where, because literally the militia is just coming out of the hills. Oh yeah. And they know that these British are going to be heading back the same way that they came. So they are just fired at the entire time. What's amazing is during this entire time

despite being like constantly fired upon, 73 British are killed and then 49 Americans are killed. Well, and the other part of it too is, not every, your guards constantly up because you know what just happened is you're headed back to Boston. And technically, I would say that this would probably be more of a victory for the militias because they were able to send the red coats back. They never found the guns. They did find this cache of balls and powder.

But that's kind of a win. As the red coats are coming back and you're retreating. Easily replaceable stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But as the red coats are retreating back to Boston, and not everybody that they're encountering knows what just happened at Lexington and Concord.

So they're always on edge and always watching everybody that they pass by, but most of them don't know what just happened. And as far as like wounded goes, there were 39 Americans wounded, 174. So you're marching back and you've lost 73 killed, 174, wounded out of 700.

Just out of this little mission to try to go take these arms. Sure, that was kind of a deal. dead giveaway too and there was a bunch of wounded and dead Brits that are headed back to Boston. I see the guys walking with bandages over their head and like being carried and everything. Be like the fuck. What happened to you guys? Buffalo.

I don't know. Something bad just happened back there. So we get to and as they actually chase the British back, they're not done. They chase them all the way into Boston and the siege of Boston starts. So as this whole thing is occurring more and more As in a wider area All of these militias are being notified They're all gathering up their strength

And they're all marching toward Boston And they're basically because Boston Has that little neck that leads to it Where the fort's going to be in the town It's not very hard to pen the British in there No all you have to do is cut off that one route You're good to go So they end up cutting off this route

but what they also do, so you have that all going down on April 19th, you know, April 20th that time. We end up getting to, I think it was June 16th. Oh, no. Okay. May 10th. We have the second continental conference that meets.

Ah, yes, the second continental Congress. Pretty important deal here. As they meet that day on May 10th, they start discussing, raising this continental army, when you do that you're trying to raise auxiliary forces in these militias. You're trying to figure out if you want to keep the militias in places they are

or as men come to join the continental army you have to figure out a way to support them. Everyone's coming in with different ideas. There's not a lot that's off the table you're getting a ton of different suggestions from all of these delegates but they know something is going to have to be done. Well and there's the one thing that I think is on everybody's mind. We are not going to conscript an army. No.

Because we just left Britain, we're fighting against Britain, they're the kind of guys that conscript an army. The other thing, too, is they still didn't think they were going to war. Yeah. This was just an isolated incident in which could be cooled down. They would get to the bottom of it. They would petition the king again, yada, yada, yada, do all that shit. So they talk about that. They talk about strategies as to how they're going to raise money to support a continental army.

It becomes the de facto the second continental Congress, if you're looking at it before the formation of the United States and the United States Congress when we're officially a nation. This is the de facto government that is actually running the country and running the revolution, gathering or raising militias, like you said, directing strategy, appointing diplomats to go to other countries to seek aid and resources and trade because businesses still have to go on. Manufacturing has to go on. You have to process stuff you're going to need in the war. You're going to need to have someplace that can send you bullets and arms and all that stuff to supplement the stuff that you can't make yourself. And then also, they're still going to be needing to draft petitions, petitions, laws, things being sent back to London to try to talk this thing out. Again, fighting is the last resort. They're not going into this even after this incident in Lexington and Concord with the idea that this can't be resolved peacefully.

And along with that, if you're going to raise a continental army, you have to elect a commander-in-chief. So during this point in time, I believe it was June 14th. They have a meeting for somebody to speak up and start nominating commanders-in-chiefs. John Adams, a man from Boston, never been to Virginia, stands up. And there's a little guy kind of important to what we're going to be talking about soon. John Hancock. John Hancock is also in the building. John Hancock, I believe, is also from Virginia.

John Adams gets up. He goes, I'm going to elect a tall man who is given a lot to this country, who has fought bravely on behalf of our people, who will protect us and get the knowledge that he needs to, to be able to successfully defend us. John Hancock sitting there's like, wait a second. I'm from Virginia. I'm pretty tall.

I actually think John. Hancock was from Mass or New England. Was he? I'll look it up. He'll go on. So John Hancock's hearing everything that John Adams said. He's like, oh shit, he's about to elect me. He's about to nominate me to be the commander and chief of the army.

This is going to be so cool. This is going to be my moment. This is going to be everything that I'm known for. At the end of the speech, John Adams goes, that man that I nominate is George Washington. Hancock just is livid. He was the first and third governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Oh, okay. So, and I think he had him thinking he was going to elect him until he said Virginia.

And he's like, God damn it. And Hancock kind of held a grudge. He was a little salty about it. Upon hearing this, Washington actually walks out of the room. I'm assuming because he had enough respect for what was going on that he didn't want. I think he might have been out when they actually took the, like the vote, the actual vote, because he wasn't notified. He got it until they called him in and they officially.

This was just simply John Adams putting his name forward. Yeah, but I think the nomination and the reason that he left was so that they could talk about choosing him, pros and Collins not in front of him. So there wouldn't be any bias. Like, oh, he's here. I need to say something nice about him. So yeah, on the 15th, he shows up again. They continue debating. He leaves again.

And they bring him back in June 15th. Washington is nominated as the aptly named and something that we still use today in a different kind of way. the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. So again, not being like the president, they're not electing that. He's simply in charge of the Continental Army. He is in charge of fighting whatever may come. They're hoping that it doesn't come to that, but they need to be ready if it does. One thing that they, just to kind of talk about the Second Continental Congress a little bit more,

this is where essentially you get the people that are going to be signing the Declaration of Independence, such heavy hitters as Ben Franklin represent in Pennsylvania. Oh, I had it written right here, John Hancock, Massachusetts. You get Thomas Jefferson, and this is where it actually takes place at the Pennsylvania State House, which, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Independence that you're talking about, the Declaration of Independence ends up becoming Independence Hall. Yeah. Between that, we have some more skirmishes that happen again.

This happens in 1775. So what Chris just alluded to with a little DOI talk, we still have like an entire year plus before the declaration ends up getting signed. So again, we have a year of knowing that a war is not imminent. A war isn't something that's inevitable. A war is a long drawn off thought. And I think even past that war, there's still the aspect of freedom after that. Like you have to fight the war before you can decide if you want to be free or if you just want to continue under the rule. So the next day actually, it actually might have been on the 16th as well,

but basically in order to gain, you know, a full advantageous position around Boston because, again, the siege is still there, they're looking essentially at these soldiers and being like, you need to answer for these people that are dead. Like you need, you know, at this point, they're looking at them as essentially criminals in aspect. And again, the other direction, the Brits are looking at the, the Americans as criminals. This is a lot like what happened during the tea part,

or during the shit. What was the battle for tea in the east? Oh. The Opium Wars. Yeah. When the Brits went in and killed that shopkeeper, and the Chinese were like, hey, you need to bring those two guys out

that killed the shopkeeper. And Elliot was like, no, no, no. We're not letting those guys go. They're staying in here with us. We'll take them back to our country. we'll go ahead and try them for the crimes that you say they committed. Colin us, we're going to have that. Yeah.

So you have Boston, which is basically surrounded 90% by water with that little spit of land. Well, there's areas around Boston that are now actually part of the city of Boston that are like different neighbor, like Dorchester Heights and things like that. You also have Charleston. Charleston is essentially north of Boston, as I'm understanding it. And near Charleston, there are two hills. Is it Charlestown? Charlestown, I think, yeah. You have Breeds Hill, which is, and it actually kind of comes out on a little bit of a peninsula that is then just due north right across the water from Boston and also within cannon range of Boston as well.

So I believe it's the night of the 16th, an organized militia group actually goes up and takes Breeds Hill and establishes some fortified positions up there to be able to more, more, what am I trying to say? they securely keep an eye on Boston. Yeah. So they also have a little bit of a fortification on Bunker Hill, which if you're looking at a clock, bunker hill would be like to like the 10 o'clock position. So June 17th, all of a sudden the sun rises. And it's close enough to where they,

because cannons aren't like launching these cannonballs a huge distance. We're talking like hundreds of yards. Yeah. Basically. So the commander comes out of the British and is looking around and looks up at Breeds Hill and all of a sudden sees a bunch of militia up there establishing positions. And he's like, fuck. So he has to actually take his guys.

He ferries them across, I think, correct, over toward, like, Charleston, because they have it blockaded. The other siege is blocking the other direction. They take a number of troops, and there's still enough distance here between all of this, that it's not like the guys that are blockading the, I guess, like the neck is what you would call it, would be able to turn right around and run. over to where the hills are. It's still, you know, traveling on foot. You're still carrying weapons and all that kind of stuff.

So can maybe support each other, but not really. So you get the Battle of Bunker Hill, which should be technically the Battle of Breeds Hill. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the area is, I think, close enough. This feels like a, uh, uh, a Custer kind of deal. Yeah. Sort of just trying to take the hills and the stands that are happening. Um, redcoats end up running the continental army that is there, I guess the, the makings of the continental army, because they haven't fully established yet because they were just established two days ago.

Yeah, again, time. This is a situation in which there are literally weeks between communications. If you're dealing with stuff in England, it could be months before a document gets back and forth for orders and shit like that. Yeah, I mean, even in this situation, they're literally in Massachusetts while they're electing Washington, the commanders. Chief of the Continental Army in Philly. Like there's no communication back and forth between them. So these are just militias that are standing on top of the hill. There's no organization to them.

And again, the Redcoats take advantage of that. They run them off their position. They do, but this is kind of the first time where it's shown that these guys can actually fight against the British regulars. So you have these guys up in entrenched positions on this hill. And this is at a time when warfare is still that we're playing the drums and we're playing the flutes do do do and we're all marching and step the big lines just like off the

Mel Gibson movie warfare hasn't really adapted yet it's still the same type of like battle where you're just standing 50 feet across from each other firing into the mass of bodies and then whoever runs off first is the loser well and at that point in time too that's the way

the militias are trying to fight well at this point up on the hill because they were behind they're not in an open field when they're not in an entrenched or prepared positions yeah definitely they're fighting them one ready cross from the other. Is that called pitched battle? I can't remember what they turned for. I think so. But it just goes to show that

the successes of the revolution, in the beginning, they were trying to fight the same battle as the Brits. And the Brits' way of battle in a completely different kind of environment in the Americas

as opposed to over in England, everything changes. And until there's a material change in the strategy of the, Continental Army, they really can't ever get a foothold. They don't have the numbers. They don't have the training. Yeah. So we have 1,200 American troops that are on Breeds Hill or, you know, within the area.

And the guy that was commanding them, his name's William Prescott. So he's the leader of the militia. He ends up holding off two advances. So advances are basically when they march the lines up there. And the advance is until they break that advance and the troops end up falling back. So the Red Coats tried to advance on him twice. and are actually repulsed. And the only reason that they're able to successfully advance the third time

is these guys have been shooting so much that they're out of ammunition. And they end up staging a pretty strategic retreat. It's not like they were chased. You know, they ran out and they retreated off the hill. They were able to get a ton of guys out of there. And ends up being, although they had to retreat, so technically you would consider that a victory by taking the territory for the British, the casualties on the American side, I think were 450,

compared to over a thousand for the Redcoats. Not only that, 19 of their officers were killed. Those are militarily the guys that are in command of other people that are able to be supposed to take initiative and process orders and things like that. I think you can all, I wouldn't call it a big, but probably there's a number that you could assign to it having the high ground,

having the advantageous position. Oh, a prepared position, trying to march on a prepared position. And that's the thing too is you got to, you know, at this point and it's going to take a while for this to occur, but the British are looking at these militias and just being like, yeah, we do this for a career. It's like Sparta when we talked about Sparta.

Yeah. Like you have those British regulars. You're like, no, no, no, this is our job. We were trained. Like, we're the greatest army and navy in the world. against these militia guys who are like you fucking backwards people don't know what the fuck you're doing.

So there's a lack of respect there even despite like the advantage strategically, geographically that someone has that you just figure, hey, if we just throw enough of our soldiers at these guys, they're going to turn tail and run eventually. They're going to collapse before we collapse.

Yeah, they're playing chicken. They're playing war chicken. And here's the thing that kind of scares them a little bit is they just had over a thousand casualties on the redcoat side a little bit harder for the British to resupply their guys than it is for, you know,

the people there actually in the colonies. Now, you do have people that are loyalists that live there in the colonies that are going to serve in the British military and fight for the British. It's not all Americans when we get to the point of independence that are like, yeah, we should break from the crown. You're going to have a sizable portion of the population. They're like, no,

we're loyal to the king. We don't have quite enough faith in the potential of the continental army that we're just going to go ahead and hedge our bets and stick with Great Britain. Is that we cleared out on bunker? Yeah. So despite them actually taking Bunker Hill, the siege of Boston does end up continuing. It doesn't even end until March 17th of 1776. I'm just going to kind of explain that so we don't have to come back to the siege of Boston.

Yeah. So it ends up being that, okay, George Washington, made the commander of the Continental Army. He comes to Boston. That's where the action is actually. That's kind of where the only action is happening at the time. So he gets there. He's like, well, we need to go ahead and shore up the siege. We need to make sure it's more secure. They've already taken Bunker Hill, so we can't really go do that. But if you're looking at Boston, like a clock to about the four or five o'clock position is a location very, very similar to Bunker and Breeds Hill, where you have a position that is close to Boston, separated wide water, and has about a hundred foot elevation that overlooks the city of Boston. And no one is protecting

this. But they also know that as soon as they start fortifying that position, same thing's going to happen. They're not going to let them establish a strong point. The British are going to either, you know, go out and barges and land, or they're going to try to march out and stop you. So Washington ends up coming up with this strategy. It's one of his guys that actually comes up with it. And he's like, what we should actually do is we should build all of our defenses in pieces, make a modular. And then one on the night that we're going to go ahead and take that position, we just move everything up there. We fill, you know, barrels full of dirt that we can use for defensive fortifications. We build panels of wall that we can go and set up. We, you know, get the cannons to the point where they're more mobile to where we

can get them up there. And then one night, they end up using like 80 oxen. It ends up taking, I want to say, like 2,000 men going up there digging position, setting up all this modular stuff. And at 4 a.m., they finally finish. And 3,000 fresh troops end up coming up there to take their spot. Day breaks over, you know, Boston. And all of a sudden that guy in Boston, the commander looks out and he's like,

fuck. Some ghost army type shit almost. Mm-hmm. You can do all that work at night. Well, what ends up happening is this is such a defensive fortification that they've taken and they're able to fire their cannons into Boston. They do it a few times. They're still colonists in Boston.

In fact, John Adams family is actually in Boston. So it's not like the Continental Army is firing into Boston just as like terror bombing. There's a fort that they can fire into. They also have access in the big kicker. is that overlooks the Boston Harbor. They can fire any of the warships that are there in Boston Harbor. And what this ends up resulting is after 11 months of this, it forces the British to actually leave Boston.

And because of that, they allow them to leave, but the British actually are forced out of Boston. One of these figures that we get out of the siege of Boston, is a gentleman named Henry Knox. Are you familiar with Henry Knox? Knox is a bad motherfucker. Henry Knox had helped prior to this and the siege of Boston, there was a British fort up in New York called Fort Tycondoroga. It was a British fort. And this group of like backwoods militia dudes like frontiersmen all end up storming this fort and actually taking the fort from the British getting all the cannons, all of the guns, everything. And this Knox dude is like, I think, I think George would like, this stuff and organizes a 450 mile train to basically bring all of these cannons. I think they said it ended up being a total of like 65,000 pounds worth of cannons that this guy

was able to transport and ends up showing up and being like, I got your back, George. You know what he did before that? No. He was a bookseller. Oh, that's right. This badass that ends up getting named, what does Washington name him? Like Secretary of Artillery or something like that.

Serving as a chief of artillery. Chief of Artillery. So this guy went from being a bookseller to raiding Fort Tycond Roga to bringing all of these cannons down to Boston to becoming the chief of artillery. And do you know why he was able to do that? Because he had read a bunch of books on war

and strategy and put it all together. we had this access of information. So he might have been a shitty bookseller and all they had to do all day was read it. He said he was a pretty popular bookseller. Yeah. Yeah. And to put a little bow on Henry,

what is named for Henry? The place where we keep all the gold. Fort Knox. named after Henry Knox. So we end up, you know, while this is all happening, siege of Boston is going on, we come to, back to the Continental Congress.

They're all kicking around. ideas. They're trying to find any and all resolutions to this because while they may be sending certain petitions, information, Benjamin Franklin is still over there in London because nothing has officially been declared yet. While this is happening and they're sending this petition to try to get a fucking lit on this situation, they're having to come up with every contingency that they possibly can based on every, you know, um, decision that the king could make. Yeah. And so much of that going on, there's all of these other things that are happening. And there's all of these other things where it's, they're kind of like half-cooked ideas. Like December 30th through 31st,

Benedict Arnold leads forces all the way up to try and capture Quebec and Canada. Yeah, so Benedict Arnold is a higher ranking officer in the Continental Army. We probably won't go into great detail on him. What he's known for is essentially he's the American Revolution Judas. Yeah. Again, it's not as simple as just that. I'm not saying he wasn't a traitor. He was definitely a traitor by definition of it. It's just there's a lot of interesting shit that goes into potentially why he ended up becoming a traitor after having relative success in the Continental Army and being generally well liked. Yeah, because he was a jealous bitch. Yeah.

He's a cat-a-bitch. That's exactly what happened. But their whole idea was, if we can shake things up down in the colonies, we can get up to Quebec. We can talk Quebec into going ahead and flipping on the British. They're going to have another area that they have to cover. All these tentacles that are going out of the British Army, they're going to have to go up and fight up in Quebec, too. Unfortunately, old Benny doesn't make it up there. Some of the forces that had to evacuate Boston had gone up into,

Canada. Halifax, Nova Scotia, I think, is where they ended up taking all of their ships and equipment up to. It was basically a safe place for the British to be while it was still close enough for them to regroup and then retake the colonies once they had a plan to do so. So there's still a British presence that's going on up in Canada. There's still a British presence in Florida too, I believe. Yes. But that's far, but that's very far from where this is all going gone technically Nova Scotia would probably be closer. Well, and they also too, that never ever gets

talked about, but they have a bunch of their naval fleet down in the Caribbean because they want to make sure that while France and Spain both see the poking that's going on up there, they could maybe sneak down and

take one of the Sugar Islands. You're having to keep the wolves at bay everywhere and the Caribbean is fucking crazy because you have all of like Mexico and South America under Spanish rule, and then you have these places in the Caribbean under French rule, and then you have British rule. So there's Barbados, Antigua, Cuba, the Bahamas, I think. Yeah. But they're all their money coming from all of these sugar plantations, they're having to make sure they don't take their eye too much off the ball or make it seem like

they're committing too many resources to the Americas to where the French, don't sniff a little bit of weakness down there and start taking advantage. French still got an axe to grind. The result of the seven years war is that all that French held territory that wasn't then previous, prior to the actual signing of the surrender,

signed over to Spain. The British got a bunch of areas like up in Canada as well. That's why they're up there in Nova Scotia. What Adam was talking about when they go up to Quebec to try to get them to maybe turn against the British, you have people that still lived there that were there when it was under French rule

that might not be happy with the British that might be this 14th colony that they can add into this. They're just feeling them out. Just hey, this is what's going on down here. You guys want to join up. I know you're probably pretty angry that they made you start speaking English after French. We'll see what happens. January 15th, 1776.

We finally come into the banner year. Again, blows my mind that all this stuff happened before 1776. Always thought the revolution started in 1776. January 15th, we get a little pamphlet published called Common Sense. First time Common Sense gets published, it is signed by an Englishman. And common sense was basically a call to action to kind of become independent from Britain. It promoted the ideas of an egalitarian government, where everybody had a level of equal. um representation in government uh the ability to go ahead and effect change to basically feel

like you had a hand in how you were living and for it to originally be signed as an englishman it's like oh wow okay so even these guys support what we should be doing in a sense he Thomas Payne was an Englishman had come over to the Americas i think in 1774 he wasn't there for long And ended up coming out with this pamphlet. It was, I think, 67 pages. And this thing just took off like wildfire because it was almost like it confirmed or was this book for all of the secret thoughts

that people had been having in the colonies. And it finally, you know, they were thinking to themselves, you know, what would we do without the king? How would that even work? And all of a sudden, now you have this pamphlet that explains this system of government that you're like, oh, shit, yeah, this sounds much better.

So you had the people that were already convinced that knew about it that this was blowing up with and people that were on the fence are looking at this being like, yeah, this shit sounds pretty good. There is almost a plan going forward. It got even far enough to where the fucking queen of England caught one of the princes reading it. Yeah, actually, I think that comes into play with our boy

that goes down to Valley Forge. No, it comes into play with Lafayette. Okay, that's right. So yeah, Thomas Payne. finally puts his name out there as this publisher of common sense as Chris said it takes off it was very very

popular as far as printings and all that goes Is he considered one of the founding fathers? He might be he actually didn't have a real great career after old common sense kicked out he went back over to Britain got run out of Britain was a loyalist of the French

and Britain ended up getting him back and imprisoning him everything that he wrote in like a in the time after common sense was kind of like he would take digs at anybody that he felt didn't give him enough credit for the work that he did so eventually after he was in erring in grievances based upon common sense

exactly yeah that's yeah I didn't even put it together but yes that's exactly what it is he looks back at Washington he's like well he wasn't that good of a general like he he lost in the seven years war and He wasn't really a gentleman and his teeth whistled when he talked like an asshole because they were wooden. Just all sorts of stuff like that. All the patriots are wearing him. He ends up dying, getting buried somewhere I believe in the Americas, ends up getting dug up by this guy that was a Thomas Payne super fan.

And then his bones are brought back to this guy's house. That guy ends up dying and all of his possessions are auctioned off. So there's literally just Thomas Paine's. Haines bones floating around in somebody's private collection. I think they said the last like known whereabouts were a collector in Australia had a hold of them. That's fucking cool. Yeah. So for for this guy to produce common sense such a like a landmark piece of literature in the creation of the Declaration of Independence,

that guy's bones are just somewhere in somebody's closet in Australia or wherever the hell they could be at this point in time. That's nuts. He had quite none ceremonies ending. But yeah, getting back in, we have another issue that we haven't really talked about, just because it's something that was kind of waiting in the background, and it was always kind of the second issue. July 1st, British agents activate Cherokee to attack along the southern frontier. So, along with trying to fight the British on one side along the seaboard,

you have these interior America attacks coming from the Cherokee people who are still loyal to the Brits because the Brits cut them that deal that, hey, the colonists wouldn't go past this line. You also got to think of from the standpoint of what they've seen. So you're basically saying that anytime you've seen a strong military presence, you know, as anyone with Cherokee, it's always been British. They've been wearing red coats. And they're wearing red coats.

And now of a sudden they're telling you that, the people that you haven't seen fight that often, and the people that are wives and children and farmers and all that stuff, those are the people that are fighting against them. As the Native Americans, you be like, oh, you guys are going to win. Yeah, we're going to, we'll do whatever you guys need to because once this whole thing is said and done,

you'll be making the rules. We watch the call on this play grab ass in the field over there on many days. We know that they're not going to be the ones that take us out. So, I mean, there's several different fronts that this war has, and we're not going to be able to go into detail on a mall we're just going to basically be talking about kind of the campaigns that take place in New England, the Chesapeake area, and then kind of what they

consider the southern colonies. But there is a lot of frontier war going on kind of also in like the what you would not get, not the Midwest, but the Ohio River Valley. Yeah. Kind of that type of area. We're just not going to be able to go too far into it because there's

so much other shit that happens. Well, and it just, it happens in the middle of these things, but it's kind of like a secondary thing. The, Native Americans aren't going to take them over. It's just going to be something where they have to be held at bay while we handle... You have to commit resources and men, it's something that you're having to actively fight against instead of being able to focus that attention else.

It's a distraction. Yeah. But also, July 1st, through July 4th, the Congress gets together once again, and they start debating and revising the Declaration of Independence, something that gets signed on the 2nd of and it is adopted and copied on the 4th of July. I was listening to a British podcast. It cracked me up listening to these two dudes because apparently over there,

they said that Americans don't celebrate the Declaration of Independence being signed. We celebrate the press release because it was signed on the second and then it was announced on the fourth. That is actually true. The Declaration of Independence, and we actually did an episode quite a while ago on it to go back and listen to that one for all the details.

It was based on this thing called the Lee Resolution, and I didn't write down its full name. I just put Lee Resolution. But basically, this was the first, everyone had kind of been talking about in their own little separate groups, and the word independence had probably come up at, you know, certain points. But this was him standing up and creating a resolution that independence was the way forward.

And it didn't take much convincing. It took a little bit of convincing on a couple colonies, but this had to have been actively on everyone's, mind because this thing went from the Lee resolution into creating the Declaration of Independence, which was written by Thomas Jefferson, and then brought back, torn the fuck apart. Thomas Jefferson had a whole portion in there about like slavery and everything, despite being a slave owner. He basically laid this whole thing out that King George was the reason that slavery had occurred

and why it was even a thing in the colonies and laying all this shit out. Well, they knew that they were also going to be sending this. declaration to the fucking king. So they're going through this and everyone's voting on what aspects you're going in. And they're like, yeah, we just need to leave out that slavery bit. Like, let's just handle that at a different time. Like, let's worry about the independence thing right now. And as this thing gets edited, it eventually gets passed on July 2nd, just like you said.

It gets edited again and then it's not ratified fully until July 4th. And so much of it, I mean, you brought it up. We can't really escape the irony. of the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be self-evident. Freedom for all men, basically. All men are created equal. All men are predately.

The right to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This was written by a man who did not see all people as equal, who did not see women as equals or anything like that, but it's going to look good and sound good. We can debate that later on.

It's just kind of a point that's interesting about it. It's a talking point in history. When we have discussions about this, I also tried to keep in mind, I know you do too, about the way we're looking at stuff through our lens of how society operates now versus what would have been considered progressive and groundbreaking in this society back then. I think for the time, Thomas Jefferson was someone that was probably against slavery, but only is so far as to stop doing it if he's the kind of guy that I think would be, because you know, him being such a constitutionalist, that if they were like, hey, no more

slavery, he'd be like, cool, and he wouldn't do it. But it would take something being put into action, and he would then obey that law. Maybe he had the intention of releasing his slaves or not getting any additional ones. But for the time that he was there, there were people that were staunchly abolitionists that were against slavery entirely. He He falls into the gray area. Yeah. Again, just with Jefferson, I actually like the guy. I think that he's a very interesting dude.

I think that his escapades in France were very interesting. The man loved himself a good meal. I can, I'm right there with it. But it'll never be, it'll never not be one of the first thing that comes. Yeah, he owned slaves. He owned a lot of people. He owned hundreds of slaves. And he also impregnated a bunch of slaves.

He also like to get down with them. Yeah. He, he, but these are just facts listed off about Jefferson. He had some great things about him. He also had some pretty horrific things that he had about him. But at the same time, he's a very interesting figure. Like, it's just, he's more of a captivating individual. You can't just call him a slave owner or you can just call him an individual.

Without being supportive of everything that they stood for. It's just a general interest in the human condition, I guess. Or of that person's character. Hitler is an interesting individual. Yes. I mean that I like him. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, as far as all that goes, it's, we have the Declaration of Independence.

We have done one in a quarter episodes about the American Revolution, and now is the time that we get to the point to where independence is declared and war is inevitable. Or I guess war is already in motion. Like, it took us this long to get to it because it's... Since we're already in it, we're fully in it. Because if we're going to fight, we're going to fight for something that people are going to fight for and we're going to it's we're betting the farm because all

of these guys that are putting their signature on this anyone that is linked to this if the British win it's treason and all of these guys are dead there's an actual like these aren't just guys debating something and being like oh if the bill doesn't pass it doesn't pass no

if this the whole thing fails what they're committing to they are all fucking either having their heads chopped off or they're meeting the gallows and up until this point in time if Great Britain had come to the negotiating table today, we'll pull everybody out of the Americas, we'll pull all of our troops out of here,

you guys can go back to doing your own thing, we'll cool it on the taxes, this may never have happened. And not to jump back too far, but back after Concord and everything had happened, because of that, they tried to get ahead of it by sending this thing called the Olive Branch petition.

And that was basically immediately rejected, and King George acted like he was fucking offended. that this was even being sent to him, that the colonies were, you know, trying to go ahead and get away with something. By August of 1775, so going back, you know, almost a year from when the Declaration of Independence is actually signed, the colonies were declared in open rebellion by Parliament. So that was their status as far back as August of 1775, is that these were people were all branded now as rebels. Yes, there are loyals in there. They're going to come into play.

They're going to fight against their fucking neighbors and everything. But the people that were rebelling when the colonies are recognized by Parliament in that act. Yeah. It's a very, that's a big step. It's a big step in the situation that's going on. One of the lesser-known skirmishes that also takes place during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, there is a skirmish between the Colonel Cricket-led British Army against the loyalists that are actually in Philadelphia. Turns out that Colonel Cricket bought a bad amount of guns that all jammed during a fight that they were having with the law or with the,

bottom off a couple of fur trappers, right? Named Franklin and Charlie. Franklin and Charles, yes. These guns end up jamming. Colonel Cricket ends up retreating into Patrick's pub where he is shot accidentally by Franklin with a gun that wasn't jammed. and in order to clean themselves of any wrongdoing against the British, they go ahead and load Colonel Cricket up onto a horse. They slap a pumpkin on his head.

They slap the horse's ass. It goes running down the street and ends up clipping one of the guys that's carrying the Liberty Bell, and that has how the Liberty Bell is cracked. And probably the tail of the headless forceman. Definitely, definitely. At the same time. Yeah, I mean, little known history fact. Not a lot of people bring it up.

It's like the Battle of Fruit Farms. Yep, yep. A lot of always sunny historians. are really the ones I think that'll get that and appreciate that. But pretty important event in history in case you're wondering how the Liberty Bell got cracked. Well, at the same time, everyone's celebrating this Declaration of Independence, General William Howe, who is essentially the guy in charge of the campaign in North America in the colonies. He's gathering up the troops. He's the guy that was in Boston at the time and then head to head into Nova Scotia.

He's gathering troops. You think they wouldn't let him go out and talk to the Native Americans? How? Yeah. Yeah. Ha ha ha ha. So he's gathering troops and mercenaries at this point to attack the, to basically launch a new campaign against New York and New Jersey. Some of these mercenaries that he hires, we may use the term Hessians.

Hesseans essentially are this huge group of like German mercenaries that make up like a pretty sizable portion of the British Army during the American Revolution. They're assholes for hire. All it reminds me of is the movie Sleepy Hollow. Christopher Walken's character, the actual Headless Horseman, was a Hessian mercenary that was, like, killed during the Revolution and then buried and cursed. I never seen it.

You should watch it. It's a good movie. It's Halloween. It's got Walking in it. That's good, too. Oh, yeah, he's creepy as fuck. Well. And he has no talking about it. He just growls, and he's like, yeah. Huh. He's really fucking creepy. You need to actually watch that movie. Okay. So, he's gathering troops to attack New York and New Jersey.

Now, he's not going to attack Boston because it's still fortified, but New York and New Jersey at this time the port of New York is one of the largest ports in the colonies. If they're able to control that and blockade that, it's going to not only put them closer to what technically is kind of the unofficial capital, which is Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress is going on at, but it's going to hurt the colonies and squeeze them.

They think at this point the war is still so new that it's going to be very, in its infancy, it would be very easy to just like snuff it out. And if they can take the port of New York, They think it'll be such a blow that essentially it'll kind of snuff the flame before it has a chance to turn into a fire. Well, it'll stop the spread of the disease in New England. Yes. And along with that disease, July 9th.

They're cutting it off. Yeah. They're cutting it off from spreading to the rest of the country. If you can get New York and you can get control of the Hudson River and you can get control of the bay, you can effectively cut off all of New England from the rest of the colonies. Yes. And then you just pinch them from the north and the south. Yeah. Along those lines, I don't know if we've already passed this date, but July 9th, after the Declaration of Independence gets signed, Washington actually reads the Declaration of Independence to the troops in New York.

And they're so overjoyed and they celebrate that there was a lead statue of King George III in that same town that then they ceremonially cut down and melted down into musket balls. Muscat balls, yep. So they had an idea that because Boston was already fortified, they knew that once England was coming back, roughly where they were going to be coming back at. The problem between Boston and New York is where Boston, you have to go into the harbor, and there are only certain places that you can land.

With New Jersey, New York, Long Island, Manhattan, there's so many places you can land, you can't defend everywhere. And once someone has a foothold, they can just land as many troops as they need. So Washington is actually trying. He's had to throw together. And again, Continental Army is approved back on June 17th. We're now kind of up in August at this point. He's had to try to put together these militias that were totally untrained people, not equipped very well, just bringing the rifles from home that they've had. He's having to try to put these guys together in a fighting force to essentially repel British. invasion, not the Beatles. He's had about a year and a half

because it was 1775 that there is the Army, which is still not long enough to do what he was supposed to be doing. Considering that if you think about what it takes to actually field an army, you're having to go into constructions for uniforms, equipment, rifles, ammunition,

black, I mean, you're having to build up stores in order to fill these, and then try to somewhat train these troops that have never fought together out of all these other colonies. Then figure out a way to pay them. Yes. Which becomes a pretty big issue. Yes.

Over a lot of time. So yeah, as Chris was talking about, this whole part of this blows me away to think that these were where these battles were happening. August 27th, the Red Coats defeat Washington's Army at Long Island. Battle of Long Island. It's so crazy. A battle the Long Island. Well, and it only gets crazier because after the defeat at Long Island, Washington goes ahead and escapes to Manhattan. Yeah.

Where there is another fight that happens in Manhattan. And this is sort of a kind of a weird, crucial time in the war because at this point, the Brits had a chance to kill Washington. Yeah. And that changes, that's maybe one of the biggest butterfly effects to ever happen. If you kill Washington, who knows who steps into that role? It's when they're at their weakest. Yeah.

They're attacking us when we're literally at our weakest. But you lose Washington. You lose that role of Commander-in-Chief. figure out who fills that position. But also, if you fast forward, a ways down the road, if they kill Washington, who's our first president?

Yeah. Like, who is entrusted? Yeah. Thomas Jefferson or John Adams, probably honestly. Do you think it would go to them next? Yeah, it would go to one of those two guys. Johnny Hancock, maybe, I don't know.

Yeah. So Washington escapes to Manhattan in the night. September 15th, the Brits occupy New York City. The British occupy New York City. This battle of Long Island, is the largest by scale of number of soldiers and everything. It is literally the largest battle in the entire

Revolutionary War. Yeah, like Adam said, the Brits do end up winning. There's actually a really good, like, counterattack or, like, hold at, like, Harlem Heights or something like that. September 16th. He's able to put up as, like, a delaying tactic. But he's able to, you know, there's these battles that we're going to be talking about, these are larger groups and sometimes they can be

when I say larger I mean like for this time sometimes 20,000 like in the Battle of Long Island it was 20,000 British 10,000 American troops there were 400 British casualties 2,179 American casualties so the first big battle we get hit pretty hard at a time than we really can't afford to get hit hard at

by World War metrics that's you're probably coming out doing pretty good. Yeah, but a lot of these battles will just have like 30 guys killed. It's just about like retreating strategically and everything. Well, what did we decide?

I think it was in the Hannibal episode that if you lose 10% of your fighting force, it's considered like a major loss. Yeah. Something along 10%, something like that. While all this is going on, September 19th,

old Benny Arnold gets defeated again at the Battle of Valcour. So he is now over, two, which is kind of starting a trend one way. I just like bashing this guy because he's just not a good dude. No. But the stand that they have at Harlem Heights that Washington has in Harlem Heights really kind of starts to prove that or prove Washington's medal as a leader.

It's the bright spot. Yeah. It's the polished turd in the pile of turds. But it's something that they can look at like, see, we didn't get steamrolled. We put up a little bit of a fight right there. So if we can keep doing that, then, you know, we're going to be okay. Oh, go ahead. I was going to say Washington eventually retreats back into Pennsylvania.

One thing that I didn't even think of. Was it Pennsylvania or New Jersey? He gets into Pennsylvania at this point. He eventually gets into Pennsylvania when he ends up retreating. So he's starting to lose men because after seeing a demoralizing defeat like that, you're probably like, fuck, that's what they're coming at us with. Like, we have no chance. Like, we saw what just happened back there.

It's a lot of dudes. He loses men to desertion. He also loses a ton of guys because when they first formed the continental army, they don't do long enlistments. One year. One year. And so at this point, the enlistment time is coming up for all of these people that initially signed up when, you know, patriotism was at its fervor. Belief in this thing is at its fervor. And now you're having to get people to reenlist or enlist the first time at a time when you just kind of got your ass handed to you.

Yep. The losses kind of continue to mount up in New York. October 28th, Continental Army has to retreat from White Plains, New York. November 16th, the Hessians that Chris mentioned earlier, capture Fort Washington in New York. So New York is falling at a pretty high rate. November 20th, right around that same time, a guy who will show up a little bit later on, General Cornwallis. Pretty sweet name. I like Cornwallis.

I fucking hate that name. Really? Uh-huh. Is it because of this or? I just say it was such disdain. He ends up capturing Fort Lee in the north, which is kind of a surprise because he will be known more about the South.

And this may be coming up on what you would call the most important painting ever done of the Revolutionary War. Dramatization, a fictionalized dramatization. Yeah, it wasn't true. Well, it was true that it happened. but not the picture version.

So the enlistment is getting ready to actually end at the end of the year. We have Howe, who is the British commander, he ends up wintering in New York. You're not fighting during the winter. You're trying to actually encamp, wait till spring when you can actually travel and not lose all your guys to fucking frostbite. So there's a little bit of skirmishes. There's not any full on battles throughout the winter. You're not dedicating a lot of forces for a huge fight.

and Washington, because he's getting ready to lose all these men at the end of the year, he's like, I got to fucking do something to swing the pendulum the other way and actually build up some hype. Hell Mary. Yeah, get people thinking about something. So they devise a plan. A couple of the places that the British had kind of expanded out to were a place called Princeton and then Trenton, Trenton, New Jersey and then also Princeton, New Jersey, right? Yep. So they had taken part of New Jersey.

So Washington comes up with this fucking ballsy-ass plan that is portrayed in the crossing of the Delaware painting that you guys know the one. It's the one where Washington is standing at the bow of the boat with one leg up and all the guys are rowing around him. And there's, you know, a couple of different people from like there's a black guy in there. And then he's holding like he's pointing toward the other shore. Well, that shit didn't fucking happen. Because first of all, they're crossing like this 850 foot stretch of Delaware River. it's in the fucking winter so there's ice chunks and flows everywhere they're on these huge barges that I think the barges held something like 60 guys

and they just were standing together and then they would have like 18 guys with these huge ores like moving ice chunks and paddling them across so they end up moving a ton of these guys across the Delaware in the dead of night and the first battle that occurs is on I believe it is the 25th or the 26 it's Christmas Day boxing day Boxing day. They snuck over on the 25th. Gotcha.

So the Battle of Trenton was a forward base that the Brits had established and had just a ton of like the Hessian mercenaries at. Washington's troops ended up catching him by surprise. They win the day. It's a huge victory. Balsy move is paying off. And they're able to capture a ton of these.

Was it like 2000 that they ended up capturing? I believe so. It was a pretty fair amount. And then gained all. gained not only this little fort that they had here in control of this town, but also gained all the weapons and cannons and all that shit that these guys had. So what do you follow that up with? You retreat back, right?

You don't go further. You don't try to overplay your hand. Don't try to move in on Princeton, do you? Unless you're George Washington. So January 3rd, 19... 1777, we come to the Battle of Princeton. And this is where old douchebag Cornwallis kind of first pops his... head in and George Washington ends up rallying the men inspiring the men and everything like that

he's out there on the front on his white horse he's like six foot two so he's like very tall for the time so he stands out like a sore thumb and leads these these newly formed continental army to another victory at the battle of Princeton vibes are fucking through the roof at this point I might be wrong about this and I'm sure you can correct me on it one of of the problems that they ran into was when they were taking these prisoners of war, you don't have enough people

to be able to sustain all these prisoners of war. So one of the agreements that they made, I don't remember if it was here or at Saratoga. It might have been Saratoga now that I think about it, but after the surrender, instead of taking them back as hostages, the deal that they cut

is that they're to be taken back to Britain, and once they're in Britain, they aren't allowed to come back to the Americas. But since they're taken back to Britain, they can be dispatched to go fight and other places in Europe. Yes.

And replace people that were fighting in Europe that can then be brought back to the Americas because those weren't the guys that were kicked out. It's like a year-long process. Yeah. Which I mean, because this thing does last longer at some point, you've got to imagine that that is

probably something that's going on. On the other side of it, colonists that were actually taken prisoner were basically asked if they were renounce or like swear allegiance back to the king and then that was supposed to be good enough that was your word. I wonder how many people are just like yeah yeah yeah I swear allegiance to the king they're like all right get out of here rascal and like the next day he's like I'm going to go back out and shoot these fuckers. Did we talk about that during the Declaration of Independence in this?

The Declaration of Independence was the first turning point from them blaming parliament to them calling King Georgia tyrant. Yeah. Okay. Or at least suggesting it. Yeah the Declaration of independence almost swaps the blame and it's like okay we've given you enough chances we've told you that everything is going wrong over here if you're not going to help us maybe you are the enemy yeah and i think that plays a little bit into king georgie's psyche because after this whole war is over he kind of goes to shit mentally but it's a situation where it's a bad strategy to send the troops back to great britain to then get replenished but it almost buys you enough to where if you can get a foothold

or if maybe you can do something impressive enough to get an ally involved, then you're going to be able to overrun them. If you're going to do that, you're just going to take the troops from New England and move them down to Florida and then take the troops from Florida and move them up to New England.

You're probably pulling. I don't know. I don't know how the honor system of this thing works. What I do know is that America's feeling it. They're like, we can do this. Well, some are of six. 77 ends up rolling around and Howe is like, you know what, I'm just going to go ahead and try to nip this thing in the ass. And he's just head straight for Philadelphia.

He's like, this is what their capital is. I'm going to go and try to kidnap or I'm going to try to abduct or basically cut off the Second Continental Congress, take the head off the snake. This thing will be done. Well, because of, of course, they're tracking all of their movements as well as they can for the time. Second Continental Congress, of course, gets wind to this and heads to Baltimore. There's a lot of, I don't know, I would say big moments for the founding of our country, the least of which is Benedict finally gets on the board with a win in Connecticut, April 27th. June 14th, we get the flag resolution, and that is where we adopt the Stars and Stripes,

the Stars and Bars with the 13 stripes and the, I believe it was still 13 stars in the circle. Yeah. But we have a national identity now that we can put up a flag bowl. We have almost something that people can look to and say, this is ours. This is loosely based off of a British design, but we've completely changed it around to something that we are our own.

We're looking back and saying we'll use our former flag, the jack, whatever they called. Union Jack. But we want something that's our very own. Flags are cool. I like flags. It's just something for symbolism. Yeah. Something to rally behind. It's something important that happens along the way that you kind of need to

mention. July 27th. Yeah, buddy. This guy arrives. The Marquis de Lafayette. This dude arrives from France. Now, because we had diplomats, and we were putting out feelers, we're getting ready to go to war and all that good shit.

We need allies. We need money to fund this war. We need supplies. We need people that know what they're doing and have fought wars, especially against England. So while Thomas Jefferson is over there in, Benjamin Franklin was over in France for a while too, I believe.

I think they both were. Okay. So, God, they fucking had to have torn it up in France. Oh, yeah. So I wonder how many French people can trace their descendency back to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Is this a gangis con type thing?

I would love to fucking know that Okay, anyway So they had this deal with France That had any person in the military Or French military Go over to serve in the continental army They would automatically be made like an officer So you have this guy come over

That's the Marquis de Lafayette And he comes over And is commissioned as a major general Now this dude is a fucking badass You know why he came over, right? He was having dinner with King George George's son. And King George's son was singing the praises of the continental army and talking about what kind of a fighting force they were and about how they were going to give his own home country of England a run for their money.

And Lafayette hears King George's son talking about it. It's like, well, damn, these guys sound like they could probably be somebody that I could learn from. You want to know the other reason? Huh. his father had been killed in the seven years war by a British artillery commander and that guy was still alive. And that comes into play later because at one point he is near location in which this guy is at. So he's hunting. I feel like there is probably a little bit of that too.

Little retribution. But this guy comes over and so this kind of starts to show you the, the other countries are watching. You have countries that are constantly, you know, trying to weaken Britain in certain ways, weaken their empire, especially France and then Spain as well. That's their main competition. So what's bad for England is good for France and Spain.

Oh, yeah. So they're not really, they're not helping by contributing their Navy or troops or anything like that, but the French are allowing, like, the Americans to use their ports to bring all kinds of supplies. lies back to, you know, that are needed for war. They're providing, like, war materials.

They're kind of doing a lend-lease thing like we did to Britain at the beginning of World War I. Or sorry, World War II. Yes. So that's kind of what it is. And once this guy arrives, he kind of gets his own little militia group and everything and starts getting him trained up. Well, he kind of became like a son to Washington. Yeah. Washington absolutely loved Lafayette.

A lot of people end up becoming like a son to Washington. He didn't have any kids, and there's a lot of people that are like, he viewed all these people as like, he wanted them to do it like in a fatherly way. And people looked up to him in like a very fatherly way as well. Well, that's a big thing. He showed that he cared. And when you have a leader that cares about you, I think you're going to get the most out of him. He was out there in front, man. Like you, again, it's separating certain aspects of the person, but as a leader and everything, when he was elected or when he was told he was.

was, you know, put forward as the candidate for the commander in chief, he was like, I don't think I'm up to this. And whether, and I believe he was smarter than he would let on. I believe he did have ambitions. And I believe he learned that the best way to get what you want is to act like you didn't want something. But at the same time, once he was in that role, I don't think he was wrong for that role. No.

I think he was the person that needed to be in that position. I think it took him a little bit to get his feet underneath him, but just like everything else kind of leading up to that point that he had been involved in war, like it was all kind of learning on the fly. And it was putting your best foot forward and kind of being prepared to learn. And I think that that was a big strength of Washington.

I know it sounds like we're just sucking him off at this point, which you kind of deserve some points. Listen, we've been conditioned to learn towards Washington for a long time. It's hard to shake that shit off. But he was one of his biggest assets, I think, think was his ability to adapt and learn from other people. And that's huge when you're a leader. We end up, the other thing is, just like you were talking about with the French and the Spanish,

they're not fully committed yet, but God, they're so close. They're just looking for a sign. They're looking for some sort of positivity to come out of this. Show us. Show us you can make this thing a thing. Show us you can fight. Show us that we will join the winning side. And that's kind of what is coming down the pike. September 11th. the Redcoats end up winning the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania, and that's a pretty big win. Their kind of main plan now is to continue cutting off New York. So they kind of move in this, what would you call it, like a pinter style?

Yeah. So from the north, there's this guy named General John Berguyen. Bergoin. John Bergoin was a fancy man. John Bergoin had a wagon train of all. of his shit that he brought along on this journey through these battles that was like a mile long behind the just a wagon train of his stuff he was a guy that was used to the finer things if you have a wagon train a mile long just for your shit there's a great chance your army is

moving very very slowly and very noticeably oh yeah yeah so he's coming down out of the north there's another leader i forgot his name that's supposed to be coming up out of the south their plan is to envelop new york to take over this area well they already had new york I think it's more of like Pennsylvania type area. Like the Hudson River Valley, New England. They're basically just trying to pinch in on New England, I think. So they end up meeting up with the Continental Army in George Washington, September 9th, at the Battles of Saratoga.

Was it the 9th of the 19th? It was the 9th and then October 11th, I believe. So yeah, that's why it's the battles of Saratoga. Yep. So I think John Bergoin ends up having between like 7,200 to 8,000 men. and basically they're trying to take Albany. And I'm trying to remember exactly why Albany was like a strategic position, but it's not coming to me right now.

I think it was just Northern New York. Gotcha. So Burgoyne ends up winning the first of the skirmishes or the first of the actual battles in September. Now, the Americans actually strategically retreat, build up a stronger force, and then end up coming back at them during the second battle in October, and Bergoin ends up having to surrender. And during that surrender, they end up capturing, I think I want to say... More than 6,000.

Yeah, 6,200 of the British Army were captured. Well, British Army and then the Hessians that were there to... Correct, they're mercenaries. They're German, or sorry, not German, but the British fighting force. 6,200 of these guys are captured. Now, this battle right here is kind of like a midway-ish turning point. It's still going to be a very long war. But this basically convinces, you know, the foreign powers they start to believe.

They see the Danny Glover, Christopher Lloyd Angels in the outfield wings starting to spread on America's back. And again, because France wants Britain weak, it's easier to handle shit over there. If they have the resources trying to, you know, fight something on the other side of the ocean, France and Spain starts smuggling more stuff to us. Yeah. So they're starting to provide more stuff. And at the same time, they're starting to kick around the idea. start to negotiate what it would take to officially join this and to help us a little bit more.

And that brings us to February of 1778 when France signs the diplomatic and commerce treaty with the United States along with what's called the Treaty of Alliance. Basically, the diplomatic and commerce treaty is France's way of unofficially recognizing the United States as its own thing and that it will treat an established commerce and diplomatic relations with the United States or with the 13 colonies as an entity. They're not going to go through Britain. They're saying, no, we're going to deal with them directly. And that's how we're recognizing them as kind of a sovereignty.

They recognize the Declaration of Independence. Yes. And probably the biggest factor beyond getting the Navy is they open their pocketbook. Yep. And when that flow of money starts coming into the troops, things kind of start to change. prior to that happening during Saratoga September 25th

General Howe and the Red Coats end up occupying Philly so Philly is now off the board for the colonial side but December 19th is a pretty big day because December 19th and I know it's not going to sound that way but December 19th

Washington and everybody in his army go ahead and winter at a place called Valley Forge. We fuck something up, and I just realized it. What? So, we're going to have to go way back on this one. In the South. Take me back.

Yeah. We're going to hit Rewind here. In the South, during this point in time, this was, I'm trying to remember the exact place it was. this was after Bunker Hill, I believe. So November 7th, 1775, so we're jumping a year back. A guy named Lord Dunmore, who was down, I believe, in Virginia. Must have been Virginia.

Yes, he was in Virginia. He was the governor of Virginia. The last royal governor of Virginia. A loyal to his governor. Yep. Yeah. He ends up getting run out of Virginia. He's basically living on this British flotilla that's out in the harbor.

And he issues something called the proclamation. And we have an emancipation proclamation. Well, it was called the Emancipation Proclamation the first time. Dunmore's Proclamation. This was essentially a proclamation put out to all of the slaves in Virginia that were owned by revolutionaries, that if they left the revolutionary farms and they came and fought for the British side that they would be given freedom. And that was huge because in that proclamation, he states specifically, if you are the slave of a revolutionary, you will be set free if you come fight for us.

So if you're a loyalist slave, we don't want you. We want you to stick on your own farms. We want you to continue working for the loyalists and take care of them. But if your slave masters are revolutionaries, come join our side. Yeah. So we're going to hurt you. Stay with the loyalist masters. Don't leave them. Yeah.

But this kind of hurts Dunmore's cause in Virginia because you have to remember the loyalists that are there that are still slave owners don't like slaves. Yeah. So the idea getting out that there's potentially freedom if you're able to escape. they don't want any slaves running around the state free because that could cause revolutions on their plantations. Yeah. So the loyalists in Virginia are kind of like, ugh, maybe we don't.

You mean Virginia does like slavery? Yeah, they love slavery. Oh, you said they don't like slavery. Well, they don't like slaves running free. Oh, gotcha, okay. So if they don't like non-slavery. Yeah, exactly. They don't like free black men.

So in this scenario, even though he was trying to do it to bolster the British side, which he ends up doing. I think there were like 800 to 1,000 of the black slaves, I guess I can just say slaves, from the revolutionary plantations in Virginia that ended up joining up with the British. Now, he puts them into something called the Ethiopian Regiment. Probably because he didn't know where they were from

in the only country that he knew in Africa was Ethiopian. So everybody became the Ethiopian Regiment. But this is kind of a bad shot. And again, we're way in the past here. But it's kind of a bad move because Great Britain, who I don't think has emancipated their slaves yet, is trying to control another foreign affair in the colonies. And so even the loyalists in Virginia, like, I don't know if I like this. It's not great. It's not good that this is happening.

Yeah. And there's also kind of. the stink of like you're just trying to cause fuckery. Yeah. Like you don't really believe this. You're just trying to cause like chaos within the country. Like people can kind of see what's going on. You're definitely, you're messing with some stuff for sure. So one thing that also came along with the Treaty of Alliance

is basically now France was saying that being allied with the United States that they'll also fight for their interests. What this does is this basically takes Britain's focus and attention and puts it now split between the Revolutionary War with the colonies and now watching France, but also having another eye on the area down in the Caribbean,

where they also have holdings with the French and the Spanish right there too. Now, the Spanish never signed anything with us, but what they do allow is a lot of access through New Orleans, because they control that at this point up the Missouri or up the Mississippi River, and we're able to bring in a ton of equipment and bring it into Pennsylvania like that because apparently you can get from there to Pennsylvania. Yeah, it would have to go through the Great Lakes, but you could still get there for sure. Yeah, but it was just another avenue in which, you know, if they blockaded ports,

the British did that along the East Coast, they could still get supplies and, you know, relief and everything. So at this point, we, because, you know, shit's not really going super well for the Brits here with the French coming in and them having to split that attention and resources, they're going to need to make a change. And before we find out what that changes, let's take a bathroom break. Well, hey there, all you sexy high story. How are you guys doing?

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All right, so a change needs to be made for the lobsters. So, Howe is Out, and they bring in a guy named Sir Henry Clinton. Did you call them lobsters? Yeah, that's what they called them, because they were Red Coast. They would call them lobsters. Did you also know that back

then lobsters were considered like a trash animal. That's probably why they called him that. And because, yeah, because it was an animal that poor people would go out. Yep. Yeah. It was like a cockroach of the sea. People looked at it. One of the most expensive things on the planet nowadays.

So he ends up coming in, consolidates kind of all of his forces in New York, is trying to kind of figure out what he has. On June 18th, so that was May of 78 is when he gets replaced. June 18th of 78, the Brits leave Philly. and have to abandon it with the Americans kind of like chasing behind them. So it doesn't make sense for them to essentially stay there because Continental Congress isn't there and it's kind of too spread out for them. So as they're leaving on June 28th,

they end up getting, you know, the Americans catch up to them and you get the Battle of Monmouth. Now, this was kind of an inconclusive battle because the losses were kind of within the same scope, but it was considered an American-Mondmobile. moral victory because of essentially the way that the Americans fought. Yeah. And this wasn't Washington's fighting force because Washington's fighting force had retreated

December 19th, 1777 to Valley Forge. They don't come out until June 19th. So they're sitting in Valley Forge over a pretty bad winter. It sounds like Valley Forge is a pretty bad winter. bad place. Yeah. I mean, it was strategically protected, which is why they chose it, but it was still like, in the winter, in like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, you're still going to deal with winter. Yeah. A lot of people died of cold. A lot of people died of sickness. But there was one shining light that I think we might agree on would probably be the best thing that we learned about somebody coming out of the Revolutionary War. You're coming out of pressure for sure. Straight out of Prussia, we get Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. We get Stubes.

Now, Stubes, I'm trying to think of who to compare Stubes to. Stubes is a Prussian, so basically, like, German, and comes in and is made like a major colonel or something like that, because he has military experience. But this dude just whips the fucking Continental Army into shape. He becomes, like, right-hand man with George Washington. Patches O'Hulahan? Yeah, maybe. Someone that you can't understand, though, because he didn't speak, he would speak French. He was German or Prussian that could speak French, but no one else understood French,

so he would have to have the soldiers or his officers that spoke French, then translate rapidly, because he would get really pissed off if people were doing stuff wrong, but he'd learned certain American words. He'd learn, like, God damn it. But anything else was like in French, not being even his first language, and then the translators happened to try to tell. like all the soldiers. But he ends up like taking them back to square one of like how to march to a uniform 75 paces per minute, all of this shit. And he gets them into like a crisp, effective fighting force that's going to be more on par with how the British are trained.

How did we get so lucky? How did we get so lucky to get Stubes over here? I don't know. I can't remember. Stubbs is a general in the Prussian army. And there were rumors that. Stubes was a gay man. And once the rumors got to the higher-ups in the Prussian army, they went ahead and dismissed

him from the army and kicked him out upon these rumors of him being gay. Can't confirm it. I'd like to believe it just because it's something that doesn't really get talked about back then as far as homosexuality or anything like that. But yeah, he ends up leaving Prussia to come over here to America to first. Also, I think he probably had a little bit of an axe to grind because I think Prussia was on the French side of the Seven Years War. So he might have had something to come back to Great Britain against. But it's awesome to think that a Prussian queen came over and just whipped us into shape.

Yeah. That brought us to the super fighting force. I also have to imagine that, you know, England kind of pissed off everybody when they were fighting. Yeah. At some point, English, England had to have pissed off Prussia or fought with. Prussia. And so he's like, you're fighting against England? Cool, I'll fight against England. I got nothing else to do. Yeah, they don't want me back in Prussia. They're going to discriminate against me, so I might as well come put my talents to work. And Stubbs was awesome.

Stubes came over and he, when you were talking about kind of the turning point of the war during Saratoga, that was great and that was big. But as we were talking about earlier, the Continental Army wasn't great at fighting in this British style. That's why they weren't ever consistent. That's why they could never take an advantage. What Stoops taught them to do was more of a guerrilla warfare type effort where you're going to hide in the bushes. You're going to ambush. Look at all this shit around you.

Look at what they have to travel to to get anywhere, these narrow roads, hills on each side. There's a ton of trees and everything. Like, you're not going to beat them playing the game because not only is it a stupid fucking game and just standing in lines and firing each other. but why don't you, you know, get into entrenched positions, flanking maneuvers through trees, stuff like that, play to your guys' strengths. You guys lived here. You're used to this terrain.

Yeah, you're never going to outman these guys until the end when you get Russian helps or French help. So you might as well do what you can do best. And that's really what they come out and do. And it's kind of, I wouldn't say a route after that, but this new continental army that comes out of Valley Four, is something that the Brits just weren't prepared for. And while this Battle of Monmouth is inconclusive,

the reason it's considered an American moral victory is that the Americans held the ground. The British were already going back to New York, but they're the ones that left the battlefield first. So it was also at a time when, throughout this entire war, continental Congress is trying to run things. There's always questions coming up

about the leadership of George Washington. You know, with these battles going either way, there's skirmishes that, you know, you'll end up in the same position four weeks later, but you went back and forth three or four times with, you know, these fights. And there are always people that were recommended to take his place. And when John Adams, one of the things, too, going back to when John Adams suggested him and put him up for the role is John Adams is a New Englander. John Adams made that decision strategically to make sure that the person leading them was somebody that wasn't a New Englander so it would attract other soldiers and militias

from where Washington was and also from those southern areas if they needed to. So he had to kind of be somebody in the middle and with these losses, some of these battles not going the way they want them to, there were some misgivings about how effective Washington was as the commander-in-chief. So they were able to present the Battle of Monmouth as a victory because losses were on par with the British. Strength was on par with them, so they were able to fight them evenly, but the British ended up leaving. So this kind of also solidified a little bit more faith in Washington to be able to leave this continental army.

From that point, it's just kind of a smattering of fights that end up occurring, and we'll just kind of go through a couple of them, not really have to go into great detail. we end up coming to the Battle of Rhode Island. So it's not always the same forces that are battling because they have to split up their forces to cover more ground and to be in different strategic positions. But the Battle of Rhode Island ends up being not really a major battle as far as did it determine, you know, any portion, like was the war hinging on it or anything like that? it definitely wasn't but when you're still trying to kind of with stoop's help find your bearings as a fighting force it goes a long way to be able to have even fights where you're not winning battles but in just one year you've gone to standing your ground and drawing toe to toe with this strongest military in the world it's i don't want to compare it to our podcast but i'm going to when we saw the number

of listeners we got in that first year to the second year, you look at that and you're like, what can we do in like the third year? If we're already this good and we've had one year of legitimate training, think of how we're going to be fighting next year. So it starts to really inspire other people to try to join up and try to kind of grow the forces of the army itself. I'm not checkers players,

so you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but don't you win at checkers by clearing the other person off the board? Yes. This is, to reduce it down, none of these fights or battles or skirmishes or anything like that we're going to talk about for a little bit, or like you were talking about, they weren't game winners, but they were clearing the board. And it's really, really important to start trying to take back any of the area that you, any of the land that you had seated. It's like the same principle on a much larger skill of what they did in Boston. They had to force them

off the fucking continent and the more ground and the closer to the east coast you're able to push them yeah you're going to be gaining that and then you try to defend that ground and not give it up you know some of these battles don't have huge casualties despite the amount of troops like Rhode Island the strength of the American forces

was about 10,000 to about 7,000 for the British it was like 30 killed on the American side and 38 killed so this just shows you as well as like how ineffective these fucking muskets were I'm just wondering at what point Like what was the number that people had to just be like

Okay shit we need to run now Was it when you got into bayonet range It's just like okay it's probably time to kind of maybe turn around And head the other direction Wasn't one of the calls during the battles Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes That was something that they had said I can't remember if it was at Bunker Hill

Or Breeds Hill But there was an engagement where someone said It was either don't fire until you can see the whites of there was something that they wore on their shins. It was the area between the knee and the foot where they wore that white like stirrup type sock shit. And so I think they said don't fire until you could see those whites because they were coming up over a hill.

So that would mean that they were elevated in better firing, bigger bodies to fire at. But then I think it might have got misquoted as whites of their eyes because it fucking sounds cooler. Yeah, but you got to be real. Don't fire until you see the whites of the pantaloons. You got to be really, really close range to see the whites of somebody's eyes.

So you're firing off a musket. Oh, definitely. July through September of 79, there was this thing called the Sullivan expedition against the Iroquois in basically response to raids. And that was kind of over in the Ohio River Valley. It's what they considered like the Western Front.

And this was, fuck, this was like a scorched earth type fucking thing from the Americans. They basically just tried to like destroy everything they could to force them out of that area. I mentioned it because it fucking sucks. I don't know what else to say about it. Yeah, there's not a whole, whole extra amount to say about it just because it's, we'll get to that stuff.

We'll get to those episodes eventually. I got to be in a mindset. Yeah. Yeah, to do that stuff. Are we in 1779 or are we still hanging out in 1778? Yeah, so we're in 1779 now because July through September of 79 is when the Soul of an Expedition happened. Yeah. A little rewind on that.

December 29, yeah, December 20. 29, 1778. And again, this is just sort of a little bit of foreshadowing. The red coats occupy Savannah, Georgia. So we're starting to see that after Saratoga happens, once Saratoga kind of goes south and they lose that area, that second pincer that was supposed to be coming up from the south to meet up with Cornwallis.

No, the guy with the long wagon truck. Bergo? Bergoin. Bergoin? Yeah. They didn't come up and meet them there. They decided to justify that order. So you didn't have any sort of reinforcements up there.

You still have a certain amount of troops that are hanging out back kind of in New England, but you have guys like Cornwallis that have reversed position and now they're coming up into the south. So we couldn't control New England. We tried to control New York. That didn't work. We tried to control Boston. that didn't work. We got kicked out of Philly.

All of our luck in the north is not going well. If we can make it down to the south where they're supposed to be more loyalist because those are newer colonies that have shown up, we might have a chance to take the bottom and not necessarily win the war, but if we can keep three or four of the colonies and not let patriotism and the revolution reach them. Are you talking about from like the British perspective? Yes.

Okay. Yeah, I was going to say I was hope. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we're on the same page on that. So, yeah, so they just moved essentially out of Florida, like Captcha Slaviana at the end of 78. And they didn't do it with a huge force of just British regulars because they figured, like you just said,

they were going to gather so many of these loyalists down in these areas because they were more newly populated and everything. And they probably also had, I would assume, from the tobacco trade and everything, probably a different type of, like, merchant. Commerce. For sure, yeah. British, but you end up getting the loyalist estimates being inflated. So they kind of thought that they were going to be getting more people and have a bigger pool of people to pull from when they needed these, you know, when they needed these troops.

There were some minor battles that were kind of taking place down there. And then in June, or sorry, sorry, not to jump too far ahead, going back up to like New England, we get to winter 1779 to 80, which just, is a whole new level of sucking ass. This is when, again, there's doubts about every, it seems like every time they stop fighting. It's like if you end the year on a loss,

that's what you're going in with the mentality of for the winter and what you're going to do. Super low morale. The war was, you know, going a little bit longer than they had wanted to. You're three of the war at this point. You're four of the war. So public support was kind of at an all-time low

because once you're this far into a war, It's affecting everybody. Commerce. We're going to go over the, you know, the casualties and everything like that. And because it's fought on our home turf, a lot more civilian casualties. So people are starting to suffer and really feel this. So public supports going down and then you get essentially the colonial dollar just takes a complete shit and it's completely worthless. So you're getting guys that are supposed to be being paid in your Continental Army that are unable to be paid.

Even so on all those fronts with as bad as it's looking. The previous year, the 1779, I don't remember if you had mentioned it or not, not only do we have France on the hook on our team, June 21st, Spain declares war on Britain. So now we're getting Spanish influence into the war as well. I'm sure they're looking at more key strategic reserves down in the Caribbean to take over some shit down there. Yeah. But we have support. from Mexico, from the whole basically West Coast,

or the western side of the... They don't even have to really provide support. They just have to allow us access to be getting stuff in. Well, and to be able to put pressure on Great Britain, because... In other arenas. Yes, yeah, I got you.

When Great Britain finds out that Spain's in, it's like, oh, okay. A few of those atrocities, before we get back to the winter, July 8th, the Red Coats burned down the entire city or the entire town of Norwalk, Connecticut, just burned it to the ground. Not great, pretty bad luck.

There's a lot of atrocities that go on during this war, and we haven't really talked about it. I'm sure when we get down into actual battles, it'll happen that way. August 29th, American forces burned down to Native American Village, and this was in response to massacre attacks that were happening on Newtown, New York.

October 9th, the Continental Army fails to recapture Savannah, so they lost it December 29th, all the way up until October 9th, they still can't get it back. Then, yeah, we're right up into November. And did you already say that it was, they've gone back and done the records on it? And it was the harshest winter of the 18th century in New Jersey? I think so. Yeah, dude.

Can you imagine just the timing? You have 100 years. You have 99 years, however they go about calculating that for the harshest winter to happen. And like you said, we're years into this war, morale's fairly low besides gaining all of these allies. There's still supply issues because all your funding is coming through the Continental Congress and because the fucking dollar, the fucking bottom drops out of that thing. There's desertion. There's mutinies. There's a situation in which there are a few larger mutinies through the Pennsylvania militia, that portion of the Continental Army. And they end up giving them what they want.

and then that all of a sudden they're like shit that sets a precedent and Washington was just like okay if another mutiny rises he's like you need to go take care of it and just take off the you know troublemakers they end up killing two guys

that were like leaders of this mutiny but you're in war and at this time anything that's going to affect your survivability or shrink you're not going to fucking tolerate it's fucking war and these people are also members and have signed up for the continental army and so there's certain things that they're not allowed to

The Stomte Malicia where you can just go as you please. Well, and if the winter turns to shit and your contract is up at the end of that year, are you staying on for the next year? The guys in Pennsylvania, they even allow them to like, if you'd like to take a six-month furlough, you can also do that as well. Not a bad move. So like you were talking about, kind of in 1779, before I jump ahead to the winter, sorry about that. Yeah, so you end up getting Savannah being taken over. You then get some half-ass assault at the Brits launch on Charlton. South Carolina, and they end up getting repelled

and they're back to Savannah. And then because of that, I think the Americans maybe think that the Brits are a little weaker and then that's where you get the Continental Army. And also it was a combination continental French army trying to take Savannah and end up failing to do that. It's just not

they do have a bit of a foothold at this point down in the south. It kind of shifts theaters. Not a lot of stuff is happening. You get Clinton that's up in New York that's just kind of sitting there maybe consolidating forces are kind of orchestrating other things. Spinning his wheels.

Well, and the other thing, too, is maybe he figures at this point because they haven't really pushed the needle one way or another in New England, maybe they try a different method and they start to, you know, launch some campaigns in the South. That kind of continues because in May of 1780, so we're coming out of the winter and everything, we get Clinton basically gets Cornwallis and sends him down, I think, like 3,000 or like 2,000.

and troops to give him enough of a force so he can actually go and take Charleston. So they're also just trying to move up. This is kind of like I think what you're saying is like a Pinscher maneuver where if they're holding firm in New York and then all of a sudden you start getting movement coming up from the south, then that force from New York can kind of come out and try to assist it once you push them to a certain point. You're just, for lack of a better term, you're opening up a new theater of the war. And Charleston is an insanely huge loss for

the Continental Army because like 5,000 plus prisoners of the Continental Army and the French Army end up getting taken prisoner. It basically, whatever military force that the Continental Army had in the South, it basically just destroys any of their ability to do anything. It pretty much destroys them as a functional fighting unit. Well, and along those lines from May through August, it's just both sides volleying back and forth, South Carolina. The Brits will take one. then the continental army will come up and take another and it just, there's no clear winner. It's almost like a battle

of attrition. I feel like the Brits because of the fact that they're advancing and everything, despite maybe not taking the kind of losses you'd expect. I think they're getting more big wins. They're in May of, on, sorry, May 29th of, I can't fucking talk.

May 29th of 1780, the Brits end up beating an American army that's like almost three times its size. That's tough. That's a bad look. That's a horrible look. June, possibly because of that, kind of building off that momentum, Clinton ends up sending 6,000 Brits to take Jersey,

but they run into some Jersey boy militias who basically put up enough of a fight to turn back whoever was commanding that. And he's like, you know what, I don't think we can take Jersey. And so that operation kind of falls apart before it starts. Do you think part of the reason why the ball gets fumbled in the south is because a lot of that training that the Continental Army was getting up north

just never reached the troops in the south. I mean, it's definitely possible. It's just like you only have so many resources and so many people, commanders that you can send for this type of training. You can't get everyone just together and be like, we're all going to do a uniform training. It's you're doing the best you can

with what you basically have down there. Well, there's no way that they were shipping up troops from South Carolina and Georgia to fight up. up north, they were standing down there to make sure that if they enlisted, they were down there, if anything pops off. It was around this time, too, that this guy named Horatio Gates, who was kind of a foil for George Washington, but was like officers, he could select certain people for positions, but if

people were appointed by the Continental Congress to be a major or something like that, he couldn't deny them from putting them in those positions. So there was a guy named Horatio Gates And he Kind of talked some shit about Washington During the Army, he actually wanted Washington's job He ends up taking over as the commander in the South Sometime between like June and July of 1780

And also at this point, in July of 1780, Washington appoints good old Benedict Arnold To actually command the fortress of West Point So at this point as well Kind of going and talking a little bit about Benedict Arnold. So as early as November of 1778, there was a guy name, what was Green's first name? He was like the other one of Washington's other right-hand man.

He was the guy that ended up coming into the south and turning it around for the Continental Army. I can't remember what his first name was. Last name was Green. So he ends up kind of becoming aware of this not really relationship, but he's a little relationship, but this proclivity for Arnold and kind of taking it easy on like the British

and everything, he thinks there's something kind of weird going on there. In May of 1779, Arnold actually offers his services through kind of like some backdoor channels to the British. And his wife, Peggy Shippen, she came from a loyalist family,

I think in like New York or something like that. And so they still had close ties to, you know, the Brits and British command. She was actually passing, or he was passing letters and offers to assist the British through her and like through kind of that inner circle. Now, he ends up writing some type of like fucking manifesto explaining the reasons why he did this shit. I didn't read it. Did enough research regarding this that I couldn't take on anymore, but a man that felt slighted by not getting the recognition that he should have, despite what his perceived accomplishments were, I don't

know, but what ends up happening is in July of 1779, he ends up starting at that point of providing the British information, troop movements, strength of, or like armories, forts where they're keeping certain supplies. He's fucking providing damaging, damaging shit that can really set them back. And part of his big plan is that he's kind of arranging this thing where the West Point is in a very strategic location of protection for like vital waterways. in area in Virginia. Is it in Virginia? I thought it was in New York.

No. We look it up. Yeah. Nathaniel Green. Nathaniel Green, that's right. I did write that somewhere because it's the last name is, or it's not Nathaniel, I-A-L, it's, like, E-A-L, and then it's three E-E's and green. Yeah.

So Arnold has this plan where he's actually going to turn over the fort to the British. So they'll gain this huge strategic position. So he's not keeping up on essentially like what the fort should be doing to keep it at like peak readiness to defend itself. He's putting certain positions like guys in certain positions that are kind of inept about it. And he ends up sending meeting up with this guy who has a British ship waiting out like in the sound where like it empties out into like the ocean. And this guy ends up meeting in like this town with Benedict Arnold. They discussed this plan. And oh yeah, it is a new.

North, nice. S curve of the Hudson River, that's what it controls. So Hudson Bay is where the ship he came in on is waiting. He gives this guy plans for the actual fort and some additional information about dates and when this shit's all going to go down.

Well, American ship ends up coming upon this British ship in the Hudson River launches a few volleys at it. It scares it enough to get the fuck out of there. So now this guy that Arnold or Benedict Arnold was talking too fast. He was talking to has no way to get out.

So Arnold gives him a bunch of signed documents that allow him to get through certain checkpoints in areas so he can work his way back to New York to turn this information into Clinton so they can come and take over this fort. Is it John Andre? It might have been John Andre, I think, is the guy that was working with him. So what ends up happening, though,

is Mr. Andre ends up getting... and himself caught with all of that documentation. And because of this, Arnold ends up finding out that this guy has been caught and has to fucking abandon the fort. He ends up getting out to and taking the same boat. This other guy was supposed to take because, like, the boat came back and all this happened so rapidly. And he took it straight to New York and was like made a general in the British military

almost like immediately. Benedict Arnold's heel turn. was all time legendary so much it's it's applied to it's like it's like calling someone judas well judas probably has more of a worldwide recognition of it than beniput you call someone benedicarnal in the country they'd be like the fuck is that it's i think still a burn in here or here and in great britain probably yeah so support for you know the british in kind of the south it ends up getting undermined by what they consider these coercive measures that the commanders down there kind of start putting on people. They're starting to not treat the populace too well.

They're starting to upset some people. And so it's kind of losing them support when they overestimated how much support there they were going to have in the first place. So things aren't going exactly how they want. They're having some skirmishes in South Carolina. And on August 16th, Gates, Horatio Gates who'd come down there, ends up defeating the Brits at the Battle of Camden. And basically, oh, sorry, Gates is defeated by the Brits. I think Cornwallis may have been like the commander in charge. Ends up getting defeated by the Brits at Camden, which leaves North Carolina completely open for Cornwallis to invade. So they were in Georgia.

They have Georgia. Now they're moving their way to North Carolina things. You know, they're not going well. one thing that Horatio Gates did do well was make funny quotes. And this is one that I would like to read. If Old England is not by this lesson, oh, well, I don't know if I wrote it correctly, but there's one part of it that I did. He said, if Old England is not by this lesson taught humility,

then she's an obstinate old slut bent upon her ruin. And I think that he may have said that actually like after Monmouth or something like that, but just the fact that someone said Obstyn old slut was kind of funny in an actual old-timey colonial quote. Dwight, you ignorant slut. Talk about Spanish assistant around New Orleans and the Mississippi

like you were talking about. That starts to chime in at this point and whether it be, I don't know if there was a ton like we were saying of manpower provided by the Spanish, but the simple fact that they were able to draw resources by increasing their presence in the Caribbean

made it to where the British had to send more ships down there. and this is actually going to come into play huge at the end of this decisive battle that's going to determine this thing, the fact that the Spanish were helping out down there allows the French to do something pretty fucking cool. Well, and it's, you almost get like a, what were the Spanish Armada? It's like a hybrid model between the Spanish Armada and the French Navy together working with these boats. And a big part of having that is not necessarily a blockade that they can,

put out, but if a British ship is coming over to resupply or to bring more troops and you encounter a French ship and a Spanish ship along the way, if you can't get those resources over there fast enough, that's a problem, but if those resources never reached there,

it's a complete waste. If you're having to be in Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and that's where your supplies are coming in to support those troops, the Spanish and the fucking French can be right around that area. Just patrolling the coast.

If you're flying a fucking British merchant flag or anything like that, they're probably going to be taking your shit considering it's wartime. So they're making it also hard on the Brits to be able to resupply and everything down there. It's not having a huge impact right at the moment, but that's stuff that actually wears on you with time.

October 7th, we get the Battle of King's Mountain. This was an American win, basically versus an army of American loyalists. It was primarily made up of people that were native to the fucking continent, but we're fighting on the crown side.

After this battle, it kind of just dispersed any of the loyalist support that they had left in the South, and so at that point, they weren't really able to muster a lot of loyalist troops. It was pretty much backed down to

just like the British regulars that they were able to field. Well, along with that, that battle at King's Mountain, Cornwallis lost a third of his army. Yeah. To lose a third of your fighting forces, it's a big loss.

Yeah. Especially how close these battles are determined by not a ton of losses. Like having those extra men out there is fucking key. Well, at this point,

kind of probably still stinging from Camden in December of 1780, Washington gets to do what he's probably wanted to do for a while and it ends up replacing Horatio Gates, that old cunt.

Oh, it wasn't cunt. What was it? Slut. Oh, shit. Have I said that on this podcast before? Or a pro-Australia podcast. They use it. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, they love that. shit there. Well, this is when Nathaniel Green actually comes into the picture because he's the one that ends up taking over from Gates. Positioning throughout this whole thing, because being able to get somewhere quickly is a little bit trickier.

You end up also getting like a sandwich effect. You'll have British troops taking North Carolina or Georgia. Then you'll have an area held up the coast by the Continental Army. Then on top of that, you'll have more fucking British troops, then you'll have more continent.

Like, there's no area in which they're just like, they're just kind of in these pockets. They're trying to play Connect 4 and they just cannot get 4-0. So there ends up being the presence of Redcoats in Virginia, and guess who's fucking leading them now? Green? Washington. No, there's Redcoats. Oh, Cornwallis?

Arnold. Oh. Fucking Benedict Arnold comes back in New York and ends up leading this British force into Virginia. Now, this is also when Lafayette is down there doing his thing, Marquis, and he ends up kind of in a position where Washington's trying to figure out his next move. He ends up sending Lafayette down there because they originally planned to try to launch, like, an attack on Virginia to try to push those guys out. That ends up kind of falling through, and so Lafayette's just down there, like,

what the fuck am I supposed to do? I can't remember if he does it without orders or he's just doing it. it because he hasn't received communication, but he finds out, I think, that the Red Coast are marching for Richmond, and he ends up getting there a day before them and being able to go and put up a defense for the city. This is where he also, I think, learns that one of the people that is serving or coming into Richmond is served during the Seven Years War on the British side, and actually was part of the artillery unit that killed his father. So it's a real a Ningo Montoya's situation

that Lafayette is hoping to find himself upon to be able to get revenge on this guy. I don't like that. I didn't never, that didn't pop up in my research. That's cool that he came back with that family acts to grind.

The guy ends up dying of like sickness or something like that. Still count. He died like five days before. They even got to Richmond or anything, but it was like very like tight. It was actually pretty close timing. You think Lafayette was fighting with guys

like hand to hand trying to stay out with bayonets. He goes, hey, do you know... My name is Marquis de Lafayette. You killed my father. Prepare to die. Do you know where Clifton, Richmond is? That guy killed my dad. Yeah, exactly.

He's like, hey, died five days ago. And Lafayette's... So, once Green is down there in the south, he actually divides his army, and he does this because he basically knows that he can't really beat Cornwallis in a straight up, just like, pitch battle-type fight.

But what he can do is he understands that Cornwallis has a harder time being resupplied than he does. So he splits his army and just basically has these little like pestering actions against Cornwalls and makes him chase him pretty much all around like Virginia or like North Carolina or Georgia where they're at basically just like exhausting them in their supplies. And so on March 15th of 1931, we're already into 31, we get what's called the battle of. 1781.

17. I wrote 19. I was even in that zone when I was taking my notes. Did you say March 13th? March 15th. Okay. Cut off quick. Okay. Something I didn't know. Something that makes me think that we were very, very confident that this was all going to work out in our favor at this point in time. March 2nd, 1781, the Articles of Confederation are adopted. So we've created the first pre-constitutional form of government. We had to play like we were playing to win. Yeah. to not have that. The guys that were doing this knew that there was no alternative. Like, either they were going to do this and this was going to be the way it was if they won, or they were dead and they didn't have to worry about it.

Yeah, and if by a chance they come out on the other side, they probably want something established to be able to work off of. And I do think, too, once you establish the articles of confederation and you kind of have more of a structured government, that's going to help in all aspects of fighting this war. Because if you have that structure built up and you have sort of a system to get information out to people of troop movements, of bringing troops down from the north, from the Chesapeake Bay, anything like that, that's pretty important. Oh, yeah. So we come to March 15th.

This is the Battle of Goldford Courthouse, largest battle that actually took place of the revolution in the South. Cornwallis had like 2,100 Brits, and they beat, I'm doing the air quotes here again, Green's 4,500 American troops. Well, by beat, it means that Green left the field first, but not before there were 500 British casualties, which I don't know if this was the same one you were talking about. He loses 25% of his fighting force. That might have been after King's Mountain. It would have had to have been.

Okay, so yeah, yeah, it was at the Battle of Goldford Courthouse that he ended up losing. It was just like those were like the two big battles that were like one right after another. That had to be a huge courthouse. So, yeah. Well, it's like the surrender at Appomattox because it was the closest courthouse to where they were for the Civil War. Cornwallis ends up having to retreat back to Wilmington, North Carolina, basically to just resupply and try to like recruit and build up his forces again. So we're going to consistently at this point, it pops off pretty quick during this like southern campaign. like stuff is happening very quickly.

April 15th of 31, the Americans recapture this place called Fort Watson and also Fort Mott. The reason that this is important with these little forts and everything is it gives these places, especially when speed and maneuverability and trying to get your army somewhere before somebody else is with better equipment, having these forts allows you to place a bunch of supplies there so when an army comes by it, it can resupply quickly because stuff is stored there. It makes it easier on your legitimate. Trane and even talking about World War II and everything, we know how important and how much that can grind down and destroying army is just not having your supplies. So they're making steps to try to work their way and recapture the South. June 31, and I know we have different like information, so stop me if I get ahead of certain stuff on yours.

Yeah. June 6. Is that what you're shooting for? We get general, it is, did you have this one too? About Augusta? Yeah. General Andrew Pickens, who by the way, If you look at a picture of this guy, he looks like a fucking Sith Lord or a bad guy from Star Wars. This guy is fucking weird looking. But he ends up beating the Brits and capturing Augusta, which he's all right in my book. So basically at this point, the only presence of the red coats in Georgia or in South Carolina is in Charleston and Savannah. So those are kind of their strongholds at this point. Yeah, I mean, it's the noose is kind of tightening.

There's momentum. And it's weird because there was so much back and forth in the north. But as soon as the South campaign happens, there's some pretty big victories and there's a lot of momentum. And, you know, this is kind of when Washington is still up in the north. He's still doing his thing and probably training troops and everything. But Green is doing a lot of this stuff. And so is this Pickens guy.

It's a good thing that Benedict went ahead and defected, so he couldn't have screwed up anything in the South, at least for our side. You also got to remember, too, while they're down there in the south and they're competing for this area, there's still troops that are being drawn away into Florida fighting the Spanish. There's still troops that are being drawn away to the Caribbean that are trying to fight down there. There's more French troops coming in. Yep. There's more naval vessels coming in from France.

It's a hell of a lot easier for the French to launch their vessels down in the Caribbean when they have places like St. Domingue to stop, refuel, replenish. There's this debate, and once you kind of study the topic and learn a little bit more about it, I don't think it's much of a debate, is would America have won the Revolutionary War without the French? I think firmly no. No. I don't think that that's something that would have happened just essentially because we didn't even have a Navy at that point. We had a very, very small Navy as far as like what they call ships of the line, ships that are essentially the three-tier 120 cannon big man-war. ships. We had none of those. We had little raiding ships that we could try to use, but

in essence, we cannot stop the British from bringing in more supplies when it came down to it. Align with the France, although, or lying with the France, they may not have contributed an insane amount of ground troops, but what they provided in like naval support, it

it's, we're on the coast. It's a two-phase war, ground and sea. And that sweet, those ducats, that sweet, sweet, sweet money, that we used to buy all the fucking supplies we needed for war. Yeah, you can't fight a war. We fought a war on credit. You can't fight a war without that financial backing.

And not to, I mean, Franklin never picked up a gun in the war. Jefferson never picked up a gun on the war. But what they did do was they were over there greasing the wheels of the guys that had deep pockets to be able to fund what we were doing. Because there was a lot of times where there were wage disputes with, the guys you were talking about it earlier in the Continental Army where they weren't getting paid on a regular basis and if those guys aren't getting paid

and you're not living up to your end of the contract those guys are going to be more willing to walk away. There's so much that goes into it. It's not, it's there's fights within fights within all this kind of stuff that like it's insanely complex and the way that we're taught about it is just like you would assume everyone was just fighting for free for the kind of

America. No, you're fucking fight like the same the same way nowadays if people are like yeah I join the army and I have nothing but respect for people that it served. But I have had somebody tell me that they would have done it, even if they wouldn't have been paid for it. And I called bullshit on that because you're not going to dedicate active duty years of your life to never making a cent just off of national pride.

Sorry, it doesn't work that way. There's incentive, and you took that incentive, and you did it because of that. Yeah, and not to say that that's wrong. I mean, it's... No. It's what you need to do. You're still doing something that puts you in danger and that you're doing because you love your country and everything.

So, yeah, I have a ton of respect for... But just be realistic about also one of the... the incentives of why you're doing it. The only guy who said that he wasn't going to take a salary, the main man. George Washington. When he got picked as the commander in chief, he gave this grand speech. I think you were talking about him not talking about being up to the task and up to the challenge.

He ends a speech by saying that he doesn't want to be paid for his service. His only request is that he keeps like a... Covers incidentals is what it basically was. Well, it was like he had to turn in an experience. expense report and he expected them to pay his expenses. Yeah, that's what it was. Cover my expenses. So in August, we get some commands from Clinton, who's still up in New York and he's telling Cornwallis, he's like, listen, things aren't really going great in the South.

What I want you to do is I want you to find someplace in Virginia, fortify it, and I'm going to be sending down the Navy to basically evacuate your guys. We're going to consolidate our forces and we'll come up with a new plan to probably like attack from the north. We'll be able to use all your troops and do that kind of stuff. So in August, Cornwallis ends up going to Yorktown and basically turns this place into a fortress. It backs up to the sea as a port that all the ships could come in and they could load all their equipment and get all the soldiers out. So September 8th of 31, Cornwallis.

Huh? 81. What did I say? 31. 31. My writing is very small. It's been a long recording session. It has been a long recording session.

Cornwallis forces, not directly under commanding. of him end up stopping Greens advance at this thing called the Battle of Utah Springs, but because of this, Cornwallis' forces do end up having to withdraw to Charleston. So just in the same way that the Civil War kind of has eerie similar parallels that this stuff repeats itself, it's starting to happen where, you know, these guys are starting to get bottled up and forced closer and closer to the sea. Throughout most of 1781, Clinton's just in New York, basically because he can't figure out, the best course of action to go about.

He's clashing with basically his counterpart in the Navy, who if he wants to go anywhere on sea, he's wholly relying upon. And so this guy and him aren't even on speaking terms. Like, I don't even know how that happens in the military where you're just like, I'm not talking to the fucking Navy

anymore, yet I'm in a city where I'm surrounded by water. You would think at that point somebody would step in and just replace the guy, that the, that pissed off the naval command. Yeah. Just, just get rid of him.

Navy ends up losing something pretty big September 15th because the French Navy rolls in and drives the British out of Chesapeake Bay. I love, did you hear about this story? Uh-uh. Okay. So there's this guy that came in once the French started providing troop supports and everything.

It was his fucking, like, badass general name like Rochambe. Oh, yeah. So Rochambeau and Washington. Rochambe is basically. the commander of the French forces during this Washington's commander of the Continental Army. Rochambeau's men aren't going to do anything unless Rochambeau tells him to.

So they're trying to figure out they're like, what's going to be our big next move? Are we going to attack in the south where Cornwallis is? Or are we going to go and attack New York where Clinton is? And Rochambeau's like, Cornwallis has been having to move around a lot. He doesn't have a lot of stability. He hasn't been able to fortify himself.

New York is a fortress. They've had nothing but the run of that place since they lost it. We need to go down and attack Cornwallis. And Washington's like, I think we need to do New York. So finally, Rochambeau's like, okay, fine, we'll do New York. And one of the, he still had the intention of doing the attack on Cornwallis' forces. So, and it's very, very good that he did not tell Washington about this because Washington

ends up writing a letter about it. The letter gets intercepted and within a week. Clinton, it has the letter in his hand in New York, and now believes that they're coming to attack New York, but knows that they don't know that he knows. So this just feeds into also this paranoia that he's had, that this is obviously where they've got to attack. Rochambeau gets a hold of this French naval colonel,

or admiral, who basically has this insane, like, fleet. Like, I think they said, like 19 ships of the line. His flagship was a three-tier. 120 canons called like La Francais or something like that. This guy's a fucking badass. His men say he was six feet and his men say when in battle he grew to six foot six. I don't know why it's impressive to grow an extra six inches, but maybe that's a lot in France. As a six-six guy, I understand.

So he's in communication with this guy and he's like, hey, what are the chances that you could get away and maybe get as far as, I don't know, Yorktown, like in Virginia? and the guy's like, yeah, I could probably do that. So because the Spanish have been contributing with more of their ships down in the Caribbean, this opens up this French armada to basically like, you can have us till October. And so we're sitting here around, I think like September or so. And they're like, so Rochambeau goes to Washington. And he's like, listen, we can have naval support, which is key if we're going to be able to take Yorktown.

but it can only get as far as Yorktown because we have to be done with them by October. And Washington is like, okay, yeah, I guess we have to do your plan. So they end up going down and starting basically this siege. And during this whole time frame, as the French Armada is coming up the coast, they end up getting there, I think like on, I had the date written down here. They end up getting into Chesapeake Bay, which is where it was at right.

Chesapeake Bay on August 31st. The Royal Navy didn't end up leaving till August 31st to go down and ferry all of Cornwallis's people out. Cornwallis was like, I'm going to be getting rescued. We're going to get all our troops out. And he didn't establish lines of defense. He didn't man all of the defensive fortification.

that he should have just because he was expecting to be extracted. Well, guess what? When you have the French armada already sitting there when this rescue party ends up sailing in, you end up getting on September 5th, the Battle of Chesapeake Bay. And they said I think it was like a 90-minute battle. And I didn't even think about this when it comes from like a naval warfare back then perspective

because everything we think about is like World War II ships being under like their own power. they said to like prep to get everything ready you had to get in position the wind had to be favorable and you had to the way they didn't they called it a ship of the line

is because you would get into a parallel line with the other ships in the other side and you would just fire fucking back and forth so to get your ships in line and to get them in position

behind each other fighting the wind and doing all that it took them a while to set up but they basically fought the British to a stalemate

and then all of a sudden another portion of French Armada, like a smaller portion, ended up coming in, adding more ships to that, and Clinton's fleet that he sent down there was like, now fuck it, we're out, and ended up sailing back for New York. So Cornwallis hadn't set his defenses correctly, and now his right home is gone. So we come to the siege of Yorktown, which ends up taking place September 28th and last till October 19th. Yeah, this is where everything finally starts to close in. This is it. Well, yeah, I mean, a bad part of Yorktown as where he had holed up was yes, it was good because it did back up to the sea. Unfortunately, your ride that you were going to hitch home is now gone. And now the sea isn't safe because now you're taking cannon fire from those fucking French warships out there.

A lot of swamp. Swamps not anywhere that you want to set up because you can't get a good footing or anything like that to be able to defend yourself and once Washington ends up showing up at Yorktown yeah? Yes, so they end up, he ends up they started marching down there as soon as they heard

that the Navy was committed to coming up there him and Rochambeau marched their land forces down there and set up the siege. They were already like launching and like heavy bombardment of the city you know because this is lasting weeks at a time they probably weren't packing a ton of supplies in there ready for a long CG either. So supplies started dwindling. And at that point,

when it comes to, I think, it was like October 18th, Cornwallis finally ended up sending out somebody to start negotiating terms or to basically let them know that he was willing to talk terms of surrender. 12 hours of negotiating with this fucking douchebag and the surrender was finalized. Well, the other part that I forgot to mention about why you love Corn Wallace? No, I just like his name. Probably because Wallace isn't spelled the way you thought it would.

But being in the swamp, what do you have to contend with? Mosquitoes. And mosquitoes carry... This is the biggest enemy of the war. Yep. Mosquitoes carry malaria. Malaria is not something that the British have ever had to deal with. And once malaria sets in on...

Cornwallis's troops. There's a lot of them that die. I think you were talking about when he came out to do the negotiations. Cornwallis actually said that he was too sick to go do negotiations, which he was going to surrender. And the way that you surrendered back then was your first in command would come out with his saber. You would hand the saber over as I guess a sign of submission and then they would hand the saber back to you and they would work it on through. well, Cornwallis gave his saber to his second command to go out and negotiate the surrender. And once Washington realized that it wasn't Cornwallis, he goes, I'm not going to accept that.

That's not taking your fucking sword. That's not going to happen. So Washington, since his second commander is probably green at the time or maybe probably not Rush Ambo, but probably green, to go out and accept the surrender. After they negotiate the surrender and get it all done, they go in to get Cornwallis as true. troops, when they surrender, what they're supposed to do is they're supposed to set all their guns on the ground. And the British were so pissed off that they just lost and had to surrender that they were like spiking their guns and trying to break. They were just throwing a tantrum basically to try to make sure. Nothing to be used.

Uh-huh. Yeah. We're going to deny you these. So a part of that was surrender happens. I believe it was the war These numbers surprised me at the end But this is just because of the French troops There were 8,000 9,000 continental army troops

There were 10,800 French troops that showed up Now a huge portion of that are on the 29 warships Yeah That were there because when you boil down the numbers Of like who contributed what Like the number compared to the land forces That the French contributed, it's like three times as many sailors.

So that was their big contribution was the guys on the ship, which worth fucking every penny. Yeah, still 19,000 guys show up compared to 5,000 Brits and 3,000 Hessians. Yep. You're just, you're outmanned, you're outgunned. There's nothing that you can do. So you got to surrender. You're eating rats.

Probably. The big kicker here is the number, it's not killed or wounded or anything like that. It's the fact that they captured around 7,500. prisoners, effectively probably cutting in half the troops for the British on the continent or not on the continent, but probably within New England and New York all combined.

Well, after they got run out of Chesapeake Bay, I think they picked up a fair amount of the troops that were in New York and took them up to Halifax as well to get them kind of in safer territory. After all this happens, war is so odd to me back then, But after the surrender happens, Washington and his generals sit down for a dinner with the British generals and basically like feed them one last nice meal. They talk about everything.

And of course, everybody on the British side is very salty. But at the same time, they're kind of taken aback because they were invited to a party of their own surrender. That's a fucking baller move. Yeah. That's a power move is you bring them there to eat the food. but then force them just to listen to you shit talk them the entire time. I'd just be like, so what was like, explain to me the strategy here? Like I'm curious because you had to think that this was going to work,

but was it like a trick? Like, hey, they're going to think we're manning the defenses, so we're going to not man the defenses. Like, is that what that was? So you got to understand that that was just a lot of side eye glances, a lot of little laughs, a lot of little elbow nudging to like all of the, Continental Army guys and just salty as fuck Brits. Probably a lot of rum, a lot of Madeira being drank.

They were just having themselves a good old time. Not going to spend a lot of time on it. October 25th, Washington issues an order stipulating that all of the slaves who had joined the British side be rounded up in jailed before they were returned to their enslavers. Again, Washington is of a different time. He's of a different era. There's, I think, a misconception that there was a lot of, like, Christian leaders of the founding fathers.

Not exactly true. Like we were talking about Dickinson and most of the guys that came out of Philly, they were going to be Quakers. There were a lot of them that were just deists that believed in a god. It was a place that people that wanted religious tolerance

for all the different types of religions were coming. So everybody kind of had a different aspect of what they believed in as far as how this was going to go. Washington had actually lost one of his slaves that was in the Ethiopian regiment that our guy earlier,

not our guy, but the British guy had created with the Emancipation proclamation. But he felt that that was colonial property and it needed to be returned.

There were actually some African ex-slaves that were picked up on a boat and then taken back up to Halifax. as well and given their papers of freedom. So the British actually did follow through on some of that. But all in all, after that happened, we're not talking about the end of the war because this happens what...

So the siege of Yorktown ends on October 19th, 1781. Yeah. So a few things actually happened kind of off that. I'm trying to think of the timeline in my head. So you get your, let's just say November. So November, you're probably notifying as quickly as you can. I'm sure that as soon as the Navy turned around and headed back up to New York, they basically told Clinton, they're like, hey, we couldn't get Cornwallis.

He's like, okay, those guys are fucked. Probably reported back to London. Hey, we just lost 7,000 troops. London hears this news and it's like, fuck. So it doesn't take long because in January of 1782, law of parliament forbidding British offensive action in the colonies goes into effect. So at that point they're just like, stop what you're fucking doing. We're not going to go ahead.

But again, that takes some time to get back to the states. So they may have signed it in parliament kind of halting all their offensive action. Again, offensive action. That's campaigns. That doesn't mean they can't play defense like in New York and everything. Well, their big deal now. they've shifted focus. They lost the continent. Now they have to make sure that all of their moneymakers in the Caribbean are safe. Yes. So their British Navy shifts away from continental Americas down into the Caribbean to try to protect against the French and Spanish that are just swarming on everything.

Oh yeah. The French just personally saw you take 7,000. That's 7,000 people not available to go to Fend down there if something happens. So even though there's right around a two-year lull between any. 81 and 83, they're still down there fighting a naval battle and a naval war against the French and Spanish. The French and Spanish have both aligned with the colonies, so you can't ever come to a peace treaty until the Navy has settled the Caribbean. So you have another two years almost essentially of fighting down in the Caribbean to make sure that you can secure everything that you needed. And really, by the end of everything, the Brits didn't feel like they came out too bad in this deal. Because I think... They made it seem like they felt like they didn't come out too bad in this deal.

I think they said there were 29 total colonies that they had in the Western Hemisphere and they lost 13. They didn't lose their biggest cash cows. And the reason that I say this is because leading up into the treaty, they felt like they were in a good enough position to give us a better deal. Because for as much as they talk about how Jefferson was like the deal maker, he didn't ever counter the British offer. Yeah, I think it comes down to a couple different things. I think with... So essentially, like, as soon as this thing starts to kind of die down, France is like, hey, we'll host your guys' negotiations. Neutral site.

That had to have just pissed the fuck out of England. But they're like, hey, it's closer. You guys don't have to travel as far. Last time we were here, we were signing a peace treaty that we won. Yeah. So British and American negotiations in Paris basically sign a preliminary agreement of what going to be laid out as far as the terms go. Now, going back to what you were saying about them not seeming to but hurt that they just lost

these colonies, I feel like this is like X type shit. Like, you just figured out, like you got dumped, but now you're trying to say, well, I didn't even like her that much anyway. When in actuality, you know for a fact that you just committed how many fucking years of trying to stamp this out and now at the very end of it, you're saying, you know what, looking back on it, I probably wouldn't have done that. They could have just done it. You're just fucking bitter. That's what you're saying that for.

At the same time, you are now having to switch your thought process to be like, what can we salvage out of this? We still need to be able to use all of the stuff that we've been getting traded with that's coming from the colonies that we're now becoming reliant upon that might not come from our other colonial interests. We have to leave this in a position where we're leaving ourselves open to not having a consistent enemy like France because what's going to happen if they shut off all type of trade with

Britain, they lose out on all the tobacco, what's going to keep us from gaining a little bit of power and then all of a sudden turning with the French and being like, you guys want to divide those islands up? They had to try to fucking nip it. Yeah. And finalize it as much as possible and offer favorable type terms and everything just for the simple fact that they needed to try to keep fucking buttered up because in actuality we probably could have taken in a couple years had we

kept building up our forces probably wouldn't have been easy but with french and spanish help being right there in our backyard where they could resupply and we could do all that kind of stuff the british would have lost those islands well yeah to use your girlfriend metaphor i feel like this is a situation more like uh you knew the breakup was coming but you still wanted your ex to throw you a pity bang every once in a while after you've broken up. Yes, exactly. So you want to make sure that they're on your side

because they're still a valuable trading partner. What kind of falls out from this whole thing, though, and the reason why I don't think they were too worried about it was we're talking about 1783. France was plunged into a massive war debt after this. I know. This ends up directly leading to, didn't make the connection and it's so funny how now we can make the connection between this

what happens in France and the Louisiana purchase and seeing how one as dominoes they spent so much money over here that the people were so pissed because they were trying to have to raise funds elsewhere and probably taxing their people to try to get this money back that it ended up leading to the French Revolution the six years later six years later the beheading of the king and then just a few years later after that, the rise of fucking Napoleon. So this stuff, one just causes the other and it's so crazy to think that like, man, they paid a pretty fucking steep price over there for this. Like the actions that took place as a result of this plunged Europe into war for a long period of time

because of Napoleon having that opportunity to seize power. Yeah, so maybe you kind of felt like you owed it to us a little bit. To sell us Louisiana purchase? We're even because we've bailed them out. They're not speaking German. True. Fucking tabs paid. Treaty of Paris, like you're saying, is officially signed September 3rd, 1783.

Now, they acknowledged U.S. independence, Britain did back in November of 1782, but these things fucking take time to get everything finalized. The wording has to be just right and approved for everybody. So, Treaty of Paris, there's like a whole bunch of them if you try to Google it. There's four or five treaty of paris. This one being the most important. November 25th, 1783, not long after the last British occupation of New York City. Last one to leave, General Guy Carlton, who was the guy that came in and replaced Clinton.

So the last place they left from was New York. It's wild that they still replaced Clinton after that. They had to have someone in there. that was probably more administrative and not a wartime guy. An exit strategy guy? Someone that came in is just like, I'm just good with troop movements

and supply lines and getting people out. I'm a diplomat. It's basically what I am. I know I'm going to have to be talking to these people. Yeah, that guy's a wartime commander. I'm peacetime or we just got our ass to spend time. Good at logistics. Exactly.

But at this point, the United States of America is officially a thing. It is born. Just a few years later, we'll double in size with the Louisiana purchase. Just an insanely gray type of event. Well, at the same time,

it took us what articles in Federation were signed in 1781. So we worked under the Articles of Confederation for six years before the Constitution happened. Yeah. So it was good enough to get us to where we needed to be for the Constitution happening. Um, Constitution, I think we talked to maybe a little bit about it the declaration. Maybe we didn't do an episode on it yet. Nine of the 13th colonies signed it. Um, it was completely ratified and done June 21st, 1788.

So it took just another year to get through everything. But the birth of the nation, we had to be flexible in the beginning. We, we had to, once we had achieved freedom or sovereignty, whatever you want to call it. we had to figure out a way to get to the point of having the Constitution be something that we achieved. We were flying by the seat of our pants for a while they're trying to just figure it out as we went. Well, when we had talked about it a little bit prior just to doing research, had the Brits dropped out really at any time earlier? Like if they decided that the Revolutionary War wasn't worth the fight and they just said, fine you guys do your own thing but we're good we're out of here.

They would have pulled in Australia. Yeah. And just been like, no, keep doing your own thing. Just, you know, you're still part of us, but you're kind of your own thing. It gradually still would have happened. We still wouldn't be an asset. Have you met any America? Yeah, it would have fucking happened.

But have you met an East coaster? Yeah. I just, I feel like it was sort of one of those things where it was bound to happen eventually. I think that the timing that it did happen. where we had leaders step forward. It stopped a lot of infighting that may have happened if we had been granted sovereignty prior without having a revolutionary war. I think there would have been a lot of push and pull back and forth. We wouldn't have had Washington step to the forefront. And we didn't get it right. We we didn't even get it right at the first time because the only reason

that George Washington wasn't proclaimed king of the United States or king of the Americas was because he said no. Yeah. After his second term, they were like, Like you just want to stand. He's like, I'm good. Yeah. So the only reason that we, I don't know if this is when the term limit was set, but Washington served two terms. He wasn't about to go back for a third.

So we were even headed down the path of potentially another monarchy under our constitution. He had to be so fucking tired. Can you imagine he just got done fucking fighting that war? And then they were like, hey, do you want to run this shit for like, you know, the next four years? And then after the four years are like, you want to run it for for her? four more and they're like four more and he's like fuck no no i'm out going back to mount vernon i'm taking my wooden teeth and i'm fucking gone thank you good night um basically just getting down to kind of the the nitty gritty of it um overall just to kind of like reiterate france's contribution

to us winning over the course of the war they provided 12,000 soldiers and again that wasn't even they weren't even in it from the get go it was after saratoga and kind of even a little bit later than that that they started providing actual like manpower 32,000 sailors. That's how strong of a naval presence that they were they were providing. When it comes to the losses, the numbers for the American side are pretty staggering, but there's a reason for that. First of all, it's fighting here. Anyone that was sent over from Britain was a soldier. So those are the only kills plus the loyalists that were over here as well. Total losses for the American side

between 178,000 and 223,000 killed. Now, 130,000 of that number died of smallpox. When you think about that, we didn't even really touch on smallpox and when it was like running through the fucking like country. Yeah. But the fact that we were also fighting that at the same time, is pretty fucking incredible and still came out on top.

Yeah, I mean, it's, we got the same treatment. We gave the Native Americans that we got over here because like you said, the 120 years or whatever, all the people over here hadn't been introduced to smallpox. Yeah. Luckily, Washington had taken a trip with like his stepbrother down into somewhere in the Caribbean. Yeah. And contracted smallpox down there.

So when it came time, he had a natural immunity to be able. to fight it off, which happy accident, I guess you would say. Yeah. 17,000 died of other diseases. And then a total of 2,000 plus French were actually killed. On the British side, 8,500, give or take. Has seen Germans, 7,700. So, I mean, they were using a lot of mercenaries.

And then loyalists that were here in the country, about 7,000 dead. Loyalists were pretty concerned. I think they put some actual wording in the peace treaty that loyalists wouldn't be reprisals. Yeah, there was no retribution to be paid against them. And there's the other factors that you don't think about in the losses and death is when you had people that were patriots that were fighting for the colonial cause, if you knew that there were going to be troop movements of the British coming through and they weren't going to be getting resupplied by the end. ocean, you would be burning your crop field so they couldn't resupply on the land. Yeah. And if you burn your crop fields and they come by and they don't have anything to take,

that's great. The unfortunate thing is if you burn your own fields, you're not going to have any food once that happens. And it's not like the Congress that's still so new in its infancy is going to be sending out food to you. You're relying on all that homegrown stuff where all the stuff from, you know, British is probably being brought in. you're so relying on that stuff that that gets destroyed you don't have a backup plan

starvation has to set in on those people a lot of factors working against us a lot of factors working with us just you know as as americans getting to look back on this and just kind of see it from the perspective of just like being in a morally gray area weirdly enough like no one being at fault but then at the same time being at fault like british probably shouldn't have been just having all these fucking colonies, like that, that colonialism, that shit wasn't right. And so on that side, at the same time, on the American side, basically, I don't know, I think kind of stir in the shit pot a little bit with the intention of gaining independence or gaining essentially more favorable rights. So a little bit of column A, little bit of column B, turned out happy

for you and me. Yeah, there's no, I mean, I'm happy with how it turned out. I think that it's turned out for the better and everything's gone well. I will say that there was a point in time when I would argue that maybe we were acting like a child. Yeah. There was a lot of childish actions. What it was, though, it was a children's argument. Yeah.

Both sides were acting like children, and we got into a fight, and we just happened to win that fight. Thanks to the large French exchange student that was fighting with us, Jacques. Jacques strap. Oh, it's been a long one, buddy. Yeah, it has. It's been enjoyable, though. We banged out this recording session all in one night just so we could give you guys a good, continuous kind of solid flow of information. And I hope you stuck around and tuned into the second one after the first one. It's been fun to do this one.

It's nice to learn about our history and kind of understand that nothing's ever wrong. It's all fucking complex, man. All right, guys. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for sticking with us, and we'll catch on the next one. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button.

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