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by Peter T Young Leave a Comment
by Peter T Young Leave a Comment
The colonies are abuzz following the adjournment of the First Continental Congress. As colonists deliberated and implemented Congress’s mandates, they also pondered the future of their relationship with Great Britain.
The first document ratified by Congress – the Suffolk Resolve – was carried to Great Britain in October 1774. In response, King George III opened Parliament on November 30, 1774 with a speech condemning Massachusetts and declaring the colony to be in a state of rebellion.
As news of the speech spread throughout Massachusetts and the American colonies, residents shared their hopes, fears, and opinions with one another.
On February 3, 1775 Abigail Adams wrote to Mercy Otis Warren, reporting among other things, “The die is cast … but it seems to me the Sword is now our only, yet dreadful alternative”.
Many delegates were skeptical about changing the king’s attitude towards the colonies, but believed that every opportunity should be exhausted to de-escalate the conflict before taking more radical act.
War Breaks Out Before The Second Continental Congress Convenes
Instead, war broke out in Massachusetts (Lexington and Concord) on April 19, 1775. Many delegates are already enroute to Philadelphia, where Congress was scheduled to convene on May 10, 1775.
For the first few months of this conflict, the Patriots had carried on their struggle in an ad-hoc and uncoordinated manner. At this point, the Second Continental Congress intervened and assumed leadership of the war effort. They resolved to prepare for war but continued to seek reconciliation.
Notable additions of attendees include Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and Lyman Hall, the lone delegate representing a single parish in Georgia.
In Massachusetts, the Provincial Congress formed when military governor Thomas Gage dissolved the legislature in 1774. Arguing that “General Gage hath actually levied war” against them, Massachusetts patriots hope Congress will suggest a mechanism for creating a civil government to manage the colony.
As British authority crumbled in the colonies, the Continental Congress effectively took over as the de facto national government, thereby exceeding the initial authority granted to it by the individual colonial governments. However, the local groups that had formed to enforce the colonial boycott continued to support the Congress.
On June 14, the Second Continental Congress created a continental army and appointed George Washington commander-in-chief.
Meanwhile, the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775 forced many delegates to rethink their position on reconciliation. As accounts of the battle reach Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson are drafting the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking up Arms. John Adams calls the document a spirited Manifesto.
Before sending Washington to Boston to meet the troops in July, Congress adopted a comprehensive set of military regulations designed to marshal the troops.
In addition, on June 22, 1775, it approved the first release of $1 million in bills of credit (paper currency), Issued in defense of American liberty, Congress authorized the printing of another $1 million in July. (By the end of 1775, Congress will authorize a total of $6 million bills of credit.)
Olive Branch Petition
Unwilling to completely abandon their hope for peace, the Olive Branch Petition was adopted by Congress on July 5, 1775 to be sent to the King as a last attempt to prevent formal war from being declared. The Petition emphasized their loyalty to the British crown and emphasized their rights as British citizens.
After a flurry of activity in June and July, Congress adjourned for a brief respite on August 2, 1775.
William Penn carried the Olive Branch Petition to London, but the king refused to see him.
Second Continental Congress Reconvenes
When the body reconvened on September 13, 1775 three new delegates representing the entire colony of Georgia are present.
As Massachusetts had done in 1775, individual colonies seek the advice of Congress. John Adams explains his own opinions on the “divine science of politicks” and the most advantageous structure of government in the pamphlet Thoughts on Government.
In February 1776, Congress received news of the Prohibitory Act, which subjects all American vessels to confiscation by the Royal Navy. In March 1776, Congress sends a message of its own to British shipping interests: enemy vessels beware!
Opposition to independence is steadily waning in Congress, thanks in part to the popular support. Common Sense is published in Philadelphia in January 1776. Offering “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” the pamphlet is a publishing success that stirs debate on the subject of independence.
On April 6, 1776, Congress responded to Parliament’s actions by opening American ports to all foreign ships except British vessels. Reports from American agent Arthur Lee in London also served to support the revolutionary cause.
Lee’s reports suggested that France was interested in assisting the colonies in their fight against Great Britain. With a peaceful resolution increasingly unlikely in 1775, Congress began to explore other diplomatic channels and dispatched congressional delegate Silas Deane to France in April of 1776.
As Congress continued to mobilize for war, delegates also debate the possibilities of foreign assistance and the “intricate and complicated subject” of American trade.
Deane succeeded in securing informal French support by May. By then, Congress was increasingly conducting international diplomacy and had drafted the Model Treaty with which it hoped to seek alliances with Spain and France.
Action for the Establishment of Alternative Structures of Authority
In late 1775 and early 1776, the provincial congresses of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Virginia asked the Second Continental Congress for advice on what to do about the unsettled condition of government caused by the outbreak of war with Britain.
Congress agreed that there was a crisis of authority, but recommended only the convening of popularly elected assemblies to set up interim measures for exercising governmental authority to last until the establishment of a reconciliation with Great Britain.
In the congressional debates on these requests, John Adams of Massachusetts and like-minded colleagues urged Congress to act more decisively by recommending the establishment of alternative structures of authority as early as possible before any final break with Britain.
Conservative delegates such as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and James Duane and John Jay of New York argued in opposition that adopting new forms of government would be tantamount to declaring independence and would prevent reconciliation with the mother country.
It was not until May 10, 1776, that the Second Continental Congress finally adopted the following resolution drafted by John Adams. Five days later Congress accepted a preamble to the act also written by Adams.
Declaration of Independence
Many delegates fear their actions – such as the creation of new civil governments and the search for potential foreign allies – are tantamount to declaring independence. By June, delegates consider a resolution on the matter of independence itself
On July 4, 1776 the Congress took the important step of formally declaring the colonies’ independence from Great Britain.
In September, Congress adopted the Model Treaty, and then sent commissioners to France to negotiate a formal alliance. They entered into a formal alliance with France in 1778. Congress eventually sent diplomats to other European powers to encourage support for the American cause and to secure loans for the money-strapped war effort.
Congress and the British government made further attempts to reconcile, but negotiations failed when Congress refused to revoke the Declaration of Independence, both in a meeting on September 11, 1776, with British Admiral Richard Howe, and when a peace delegation from Parliament arrived in Philadelphia in 1778.
Instead, Congress spelled out terms for peace on August 14, 1779, which demanded British withdrawal, American independence, and navigation rights on the Mississippi River. The next month Congress appointed John Adams to negotiate such terms with England, but British officials were evasive.
The war raged on throughout this time.
The Second Congress continued to meet until March 1, 1781, when the Articles of Confederation that established a new national government for the United States took effect.
Click the following link to a general summary about the Second Continental Congress:
by Peter T Young Leave a Comment
For a time, he was known as “Duck Bill” because of his sweeping nose and protruding upper lip (covered with a mustache later in life). He was also nicknamed “Wild Bill” for his daring fighting in the Union army during the Civil War, which included service as a spy, a scout, and a sharpshooter.
James Butler Hickok was born May 27, 1837 at Homer (now Troy Grove), Illinois. His family emigrated from England in 1635 to Massachusetts, where his great-grandfather responded to the British march on Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the American Revolution.
Hickok’s father moved his family from Vermont to Maine to Illinois. There the family’s small farm served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. (Britannica)
William A Hickok, father of “Wild Bill,” constructed a hidden trap door in the floor of his house that led to a secret room between the first floor and the cellar. Runaway slaves would hide in this secret room before continuing on to Canada and freedom.
William Hickok and other residents of Troy Grove would hide the runaway slaves during the day, but then at night, cover the slaves with hay in the bottom of William Hickok’s wagon and travel under the cover of darkness to the next Underground Railroad station. (LaSalle County Historical Society Museum)
Hickok left home at age 17 and worked as a canal boat pilot in Utica, Illinois, before heading west in 1856 to Bleeding Kansas, which was embroiled in a violent conflict over whether slavery should be permitted there.
During this period Hickok prevented a man from beating an 11-year-old boy, who grew up to become Buffalo Bill Cody, Hickok’s longtime friend. (Britannica)
Buffalo Bill later wrote in his memoirs that he first met Wild Bill when Hickok saved him from a serious beating by an irate teamster while they were all working for a freighting company.
Cody had recently been hired as an “extra”, the term generally used at that time for a young boy too small to drive the teams or load freight, but who was able to perform various camp duties for the crew as an extra hand. When the teamster chose to pick on Cody, Hickok intervened. (Center of the West)
Hickok later joined the antislavery Free State Army of Jayhawkers and, having already become skilled with a gun as a youth, served as a bodyguard for Union General James H Lanes.
Hickok’s growing reputation for fairness and courage earned him, in 1858, a position as a constable in Monticello, Kansas. Later that year he became a teamster with the great freighting enterprise Russell, Majors and Waddell, creators of the Pony Express, for which he was too tall and heavy to be a rider.
It was at this time that Hickok came across a bear blocking a road, an encounter that would become part of the lore surrounding him: Hickok shot the bear, which only angered it, and a struggle ensued, during which Hickok used a knife to slit the bear’s throat, but not before he was nearly crushed to death.
Hickok was bedridden for months before he went to southern Nebraska in the summer of 1861 to work at the Pony Express station at Rock Creek. (Britannica)
There are many versions of the shootout that occurred at Rock Creek on July 12, 1861, shortly after the start of the Civil War, and all, in one way or another, contributed to Hickok’s legend.
David McCanles acted as the Pony Express’s Rock Creek station manager and had reputedly ridiculed Hickok during his convalescence from his injuries.
The first major description of the incident appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in February 1867. In quick succession, Hickok was said to have then killed five members of McCanles’s gang and knocked out another before three more gang members threw him down on a bed, only to be bested in hand-to-hand combat by the knife-wielding Hickok.
Later historians, however, have presented a radically different portrayal of the events at Rock Creek. Hickok was charged with murder but found not guilty.
After the fact, there was much speculation as to whether romantic rivalry had had a role in the incident: Hickok was apparently involved with a woman who had also been involved with the married McCanles. (Britannica)
On July 21, 1865, in a shootout in Springfield, Missouri, he killed David Tutt, a skillful gunfighter who had been flaunting the watch he won from Hickok in a poker game.
Hickok was arrested for murder, tried, and acquitted. This incident added to his fame as a gunslinger, which skyrocketed when journalist and later explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley reported as fact in the New York Herald in 1867 Hickok’s exaggerated claim that he had killed 100 men. (Britannia)
Hickok was a favorite of George Armstrong Custer and his wife, Libbie, who described him “as a delight to look upon.” Hickok’s physical appearance was by many accounts arresting.
One account of him, written in the late 1860s, described Hickok as “six feet tall, lithe, active, sinewy, [a] daring rider, [a] dead shot with pistol and rifle, [with] long locks, fine features and mustache, buckskin leggings, red shirt, broad-brim hat, twin pistols in belt, rifle in hand.”
Despite his rough-and-ready ways, Hickok was also said to have been genteel and courteous and to have enjoyed dressing with panache in the latest styles of the day.
In 1869 Hickok became sheriff of Hays City, Kansas, where he killed several men in shootouts. In 1871 he took over as the marshal of the tough cow town of Abilene, Kansas. There, again, he killed several men, including his deputy marshal, whose death – the result of an accidental shooting – led to Hickok’s dismissal.
Hickok tried acting in Wild West shows, which were growing in popularity. His own show, The Daring Buffalo Chase of the Plains, did not fare well, but in 1873 he joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s The Scouts of the Prairie, which was based in Rochester, New York.
Although the show brought Hickok some much-needed income, he was unhappy, began drinking heavily, and returned to the West in March 1874.
In 1876 in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, Hickok married Agnes Lake Thatcher, a former circus performer. A month or so later, he left their honeymoon in Cincinnati for the goldfields of the Black Hills in the Dakota Territory, where he hoped to make enough money to send for her.
He traveled west to Deadwood, South Dakota, in a wagon train that included Martha Jane Cannary (“Calamity Jane”), who later claimed she had secretly married him.
Deadwood was overrun with miners, gunmen, and gamblers when Hickok became a peace officer there in July 1876, relying as much on his reputation as on his diminishing gun skills, which were compromised by failing eyesight.
Throughout his lifetime, Hickok would work as a wagon-master for the Union Army during the Civil War, serve as a sheriff and city marshal, and kill at least six men in gunfights.
Hickok is widely regarded as the greatest gunfighter who ever lived, is the winner of the first recorded quick-draw duel, and was posthumously inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in 1979. (Denver Library)
On August 2, 1876, during a poker game in a saloon that found him with his back uncharacteristically to the door, Hickok was shot in the back of his head by Jack McCall, who may have been hired to kill him. (Initially acquitted, McCall was retried in Laramie, Wyoming Territory, found guilty, and hanged on March 1, 1877.) (Britannica)
The cards Hickok had been holding when he was shot and killed – a pair of black aces and a pair of black eights plus an unknown fifth card – became known as the “Dead Man’s Hand.”
by Peter T Young Leave a Comment
Historically the world was thought of having 4 oceans the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Arctic. Today we have five oceans (adding the Southern (around Antarctica)) covering over 71 percent of the earth’s surface and over 97 percent of the earth’s water. (National Geographic)
The term ‘Seven Seas’ has referred to bodies of water along trade routes, regional bodies of water, or exotic and far-away bodies of water.
In Greek literature (which is where the phrase entered Western literature), the Seven Seas were the Aegean, Adriatic, Mediterranean, Black, Red and Caspian seas, with the Persian Gulf thrown in as a “sea.”
In Medieval European literature, the phrase referred to the North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Mediterranean, Black, Red and Arabian seas.
As trade picked up across the Atlantic, the concept of the Seven Seas changed again. Mariners then referred to the Seven Seas as the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Not many people use this phrase today, but you could say that the modern Seven Seas include the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans. (NOAA)
Oceans have currents, the continuous, predictable, directional movement of seawater driven by gravity, wind and water density. Ocean water moves in two directions: horizontally and vertically. Horizontal movements are referred to as currents, while vertical changes are called upwellings or downwellings. (National Geographic)
Ocean currents exist both on and below the surface. Some currents are local to specific areas, while others are global. And they move a lot of water. The largest current in the world, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, is estimated to be 100 times larger than all the water flowing in all the world’s rivers.
A characteristic surface speed is about 2 to 20 inches per second. Currents generally diminish in intensity with increasing depth.
Vertical movements exhibit much lower speeds, amounting to only a few meters per month. As seawater is nearly incompressible, vertical movements are associated with regions of convergence and divergence in the horizontal flow patterns. (Britannica)
All of this moving water helps more stationary species get the food and nutrients they need. Instead of going looking for food, these creatures wait for the currents to bring a fresh supply to them.
Currents also play a major role in reproduction. The currents spread larvae and other reproductive cells. Without currents many of the ocean’s ecosystems would collapse. (Ocean Blue Project)
Ocean surface currents tend to form ring-like circulation systems called gyres. A gyre is a circular ocean current formed by a combination of the prevailing winds, the rotation of the Earth, and landmasses.
Continents interfere with the movement of both surface winds and currents. Gyres form in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
Gyres in the Northern Hemisphere travel in clockwise directions while gyres in the Southern Hemisphere travel in counter-clockwise directions. It takes about 54 months for water to travel the circuit of the North Pacific gyre, while only 14 months in the North Atlantic gyre.
In the Northern Hemisphere near the equator, trade winds drive currents westward, forming a North Equatorial Current (NE), which moves at about 1 m/sec. At the western boundary of an ocean basin, the water turns and flows towards the North Pole, forming the western-ocean boundary currents.
Western boundary currents are very strong. Two examples are the Gulf Stream (GS) that runs in the Atlantic ocean basin and the Kuroshio Current in the Pacific ocean basin.
They are narrower, but deeper and swifter, than the other currents in the gyre. For example, speeds of 2 m/sec have been measured in the Gulf Stream. These currents, as deep as 1 km, generally remain in deeper water beyond the continental shelf. Western-ocean boundary currents carry warm water from the equator north.
The broad, gentle pitch of the continental shelf gives way to the relatively steep continental slope. The more gradual transition to the abyssal plain is a sediment-filled region called the continental rise. The continental shelf, slope, and rise are collectively called the continental margin. (Britannica)
Eventually, the western boundary currents fall under the influence of the westerly winds and begin flowing to the east, forming the North Atlantic Current (NA) and North Pacific Current (NP).
When they approach the eastern-ocean boundaries of continents, they turn and flow south, forming the eastern-ocean boundary currents. Eastern-ocean boundary currents are shallower and slower than western-ocean boundary currents.
Current flow over the continental shelves (the edge of a continent that lies under the ocean), close to shore, carrying colder waters from the north to the south. Two examples are the California Current (Cal) in the Pacific Ocean basin and the Canary Current (Can) in the Atlantic Ocean basin.
One major current, the equatorial Countercurrent (EC), appears to be an exception to the circulation pattern set up by the gyres. This countercurrent forms just north of the equator in the region between the north equatorial current and the south equatorial current and flows in the opposite direction. (Hawaii-edu)