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History See other History Articles Title: The Yankee Problem in America Since the 2000 presidential election, much attention has been paid to a map showing the sharp geographical division between the two candidates’ support. Gore prevailed in the power- and plunder-seeking Deep North (Northeast, Upper Midwest, Pacific Coast) and Bush in the regions inhabited by productive and decent Americans. There is nothing new about this. Historically speaking, it is just one more manifestation of the Yankee problem. As indicated by these books (listed at the end), scholars are at last starting to pay some attention to one of the most important and most neglected subjects in United States history – the Yankee problem. By Yankee I do not mean everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. Lots of them have always been good folks. The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees. I am using the term historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image. Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee – self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing. Northern Methodism and Chicago were both, in their formative periods, hotbeds of abolitionist, high tariff Black Republicanism. The Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants. The ethnic division between Yankees and other Americans goes back to earliest colonial times. Up until the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were considered to be the American mainstream and Yankees were considered to be the "peculiar" people. Because of a long campaign of cultural imperialism and the successful military imperialism engineered by the Yankees, the South, since the war, has been considered the problem, the deviation from the true American norm. Historians have made an industry of explaining why the South is different (and evil, for that which defies the "American" as now established, is by definition evil). Is the South different because of slavery? white supremacy? the climate? pellagra? illiteracy? poverty? guilt? defeat? Celtic wildness rather than Anglo-Saxon sobriety? Unnoticed in all this literature was a hidden assumption: the North is normal, the standard of all things American and good. Anything that does not conform is a problem to be explained and a condition to be annihilated. What about that hidden assumption? Should not historians be interested in understanding how the North got to be the way it is? Indeed, is there any question in American history more important? According to standard accounts of American history (i.e., Northern mythology), New Englanders fought the Revolution and founded glorious American freedom as had been planned by the "Puritan Fathers." Southerners, who had always been of questionable character, because of their fanatic devotion to slavery, wickedly rebelled against government of, by, and for the people, were put down by the armies of the Lord, and should be ever grateful for not having been exterminated. (This is clearly the view of the anonymous Union Leaguer from Portland, Maine, who recently sent me a chamber pot labeled "Robert E. Lee’s soup tureen.") And out of their benevolence and devotion to the ideal of freedom, the North struck the chains from the suffering black people. (They should be forever grateful, also. Take a look at the Boston statue with happy blacks adoring the feet of Col. Robert Gould Shaw.) Aside from the fact that every generalization in this standard history is false, an obvious defect in it is that, for anyone familiar with American history before the War, it is clear that "Southern" was American and Yankees were the problem. America was Washington and Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of New Orleans, John Randolph and Henry Clay, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone, and Francis Marion. Southerners had made the Constitution, saved it under Jefferson from the Yankees, fought the wars, acquired the territory, and settled the West, including the Northwest. To most Americans, in Pennsylvania and Indiana as well as Virginia and Georgia, this was a basic view up until about 1850. New England had been a threat, a nuisance, and a negative force in the progress of America. Northerners, including some patriotic New Englanders, believed this as much as Southerners. When Washington Irving, whose family were among the early Anglo-Dutch settlers of New York, wrote the story about the "Headless Horseman," he was ridiculing Yankees. The prig Ichabod Crane had come over from Connecticut and made himself a nuisance. So a young man (New York young men were then normal young men rather than Yankees) played a trick on him and sent him fleeing back to Yankeeland where he belonged. James Fenimore Cooper, of another early New York family, felt the same way about New Englanders who appear unfavorably in his writings. Yet another New York writer, James Kirke Paulding (among many others) wrote a book defending the South and attacking abolitionists. It is not unreasonable to conclude that in Moby Dick, the New York Democrat Herman Melville modeled the fanatical Captain Ahab on the Yankee abolitionist. In fact, the term "Yankee" appears to originate in some mingling of Dutch and Indian words, to designate New Englanders. Obviously, both the Dutch New Yorkers and the Native Americans recognized them as "different." Young Abe Lincoln amused his neighbors in southern Indiana and Illinois, nearly all of whom, like his own family, had come from the South, with "Yankee jokes," stories making fun of dishonest peddlers from New England. They were the most popular stories in his repertoire, except for the dirty ones. Right into the war, Northerners opposed to the conquest of the South blamed the conflict on fanatical New Englanders out for power and plunder, not on the good Americans in the South who had been provoked beyond bearing. Many people, and not only in the South, thought that Southerners, according to their nature, had been loyal to the Union, had served it, fought and sacrificed for it as long as they could. New Englanders, according to their nature, had always been grasping for themselves while proclaiming their righteousness and superiority. The Yankees succeeded so well, by the long cultural war described in these volumes, and by the North’s military victory, that there was no longer a Yankee problem. Now the Yankee was America and the South was the problem. America, the Yankee version, was all that was normal and right and good. Southerners understood who had won the war (not Northerners, though they had shed a lot of blood, but the accursed Yankees.) With some justification they began to regard all Northerners as Yankees, even the hordes of foreigners who had been hired to wear the blue. Here is something closer to a real history of the United States: American freedom was not a legacy of the "Puritan Fathers," but of Virginians who proclaimed and spread constitutional rights. New England gets some credit for beginning the War of Independence. After the first few years, however, Yankees played little part. The war was fought and won in the South. Besides, New Englanders had good reasons for independence – they did not fit into the British Empire economically, since one of their main industries was smuggling, and the influential Puritan clergy hated the Church of England. Southerners, in fighting for independence, were actually going against their economic interests for the sake of principle. Once Southerners had gone into the Union (which a number of wise statesmen like Patrick Henry and George Mason warned them against), the Yankees began to show how they regarded the new federal government: as an instrument to be used for their own purposes. Southerners long continued to view the Union as a vehicle for mutual cooperation, as they often naively still do. In the first Congress, Yankees demanded that the federal government continue the British subsidies to their fishing fleets. While Virginia and the other Southern states gave up their vast western lands for future new states, New Englanders demanded a special preserve for themselves (the "Western Reserve" in Ohio). Under John Adams, the New England quest for power grew into a frenzy. They passed the Sedition Law to punish anti-government words (as long as they controlled the government) in clear violation of the Constitution. During the election of 1800 the preachers in New England told their congregations that Thomas Jefferson was a French Jacobin who would set up the guillotine in their town squares and declare women common property. (What else could be expected from a dissolute slaveholder?) In fact, Jefferson’s well-known distaste for mixing of church and state rested largely on his dislike of the power of the New England self-appointed saints. When Jeffersonians took power, the New Englanders fought them with all their diminishing strength. Their poet William Cullen Bryant regarded the Louisiana Purchase as nothing but a large swamp for Jefferson to pursue his atheistic penchant for science. The War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, was decisive for the seemingly permanent discrediting of New England. The Yankee ruling class opposed the war even though it was begun by Southerners on behalf of oppressed American seamen, most of whom were New Englanders. Yankees did not care about their oppressed poorer citizens because they were making big bucks smuggling into wartime Europe. One New England congressman attacked young patriot John C. Calhoun as a backwoodsman who had never seen a sail and who was unqualified to deal with foreign policy. During the war Yankees traded with the enemy and talked openly of secession. (Southerners never spoke of secession in time of war.) Massachusetts refused to have its militia called into constitutional federal service even after invasion, and then, notoriously for years after, demanded that the federal government pay its militia expenses. Historians have endlessly repeated that the "Era of Good Feelings" under President Monroe refers to the absence of party strife. Actually, the term was first used to describe the state of affairs in which New England traitorousness had declined to the point that a Virginia president could visit Boston without being mobbed. Yankee political arrogance was soulmate to Yankee cultural arrogance. Throughout the antebellum period, New England literature was characterized and promoted as the American literature, and non-Yankee writers, in most cases much more talented and original, were ignored or slandered. Edgar Allan Poe had great fun ridiculing the literary pretensions of New Englanders, but they largely succeeded in dominating the idea of American literature into the 20th century. Generations of Americans have been cured of reading forever by being forced to digest dreary third-string New England poets as "American literature." In 1789, a Connecticut Puritan preacher named Jedidiah Morse published the first book of American Geography. The trouble was, it was not an American geography but a Yankee geography. Most of the book was taken up with describing the virtues of New England. Once you got west of the Hudson River, as Morse saw it and conveyed to the world’s reading public, the U.S. was a benighted land inhabited by lazy, dirty Scotch-Irish and Germans in the Middle States and lazy, morally depraved Southerners, corrupted and enervated by slavery. New Englanders were pure Anglo-Saxons with all virtues. The rest of the Americans were questionable people of lower or mongrel ancestry. The theme of New Englanders as pure Anglo-Saxons continued right down through the 20th century. The alleged saints of American equality operated on a theory of their racial superiority. While Catholics and Jews were, in the South, accepted and loyal Southerners, Yankees burned down convents and banished Jews from the Union Army lines. A few years after Morse, Noah Webster, also from Connecticut, published his American Dictionary and American spelling book. The trouble was, it was not an American dictionary but a New England dictionary. As Webster declared in his preface, New Englanders spoke and spelled the purest and best form of English of any people in the world. Southerners and others ignored Webster and spelled and pronounced real English until after the War of Southern Independence. As the books show, Yankees after the War of 1812 were acutely aware of their minority status. And here is the important point: they launched a deliberate campaign to take over control of the idea of "America." The campaign was multi-faceted. Politically, they gained profits from the protective tariff and federal expenditures, both of which drained money from the South for the benefit of the North, and New England especially. Seeking economic advantage from legislation is nothing new in human history. But the New England greed was marked by its peculiar assumptions of moral superiority. New Englanders, who were selling their products in a market from which competition had been excluded by the tariff, proclaimed that the low price of cotton was due to the fact that Southerners lacked the drive and enterprise of virtuous Yankees! (When the South was actually the productive part of the U.S. economy.) This transfer of wealth built the strength of the North. It was even more profitable than the slave trade (which New England shippers carried on from Africa to Brazil and Cuba right up to the War Between the States) and the Chinese opium trade (which they were also to break into). Another phase of the Yankee campaign for what they considered their rightful dominance was the capture of the history of the American Revolution. At a time when decent Americans celebrated the Revolution as the common glory of all, New Englanders were publishing a literature claiming the whole credit for themselves. A scribbler from Maine named Lorenzo Sabine, for one example among many, published a book in which he claimed that the Revolution in the South had been won by New England soldiers because Southerners were traitorous and enervated by slavery. As William Gilmore Simms pointed out, it was all lies. When Daniel Webster was received hospitably in Charleston, he made a speech in which he commemorated the graves of the many heroic Revolutionary soldiers from New England which were to be found in the South. The trouble was, those graves did not exist. Many Southern volunteers had fought in the North, but no soldier from north of Pennsylvania (except a few generals) had ever fought in the South! George Washington was a bit of a problem here, so the honor-driven, foxhunting Virginia gentleman was transformed by phony folklore into a prim New Englander in character, a false image that has misled and repulsed countless Americans since. It should be clear, this was not merely misplaced pride. It was a deliberate, systematic effort by the Massachusetts elite to take control of American symbols and disparage all competing claims. Do not be put off by Professor Sheidley’s use of "Conservative Leaders" in his title. He means merely the Yankee ruling elite who were never conservatives then or now. Conservatives do not work for "the transformation of America." Another successful effort was a New England claim on the West. When New Englanders referred to "the West" in antebellum times, they meant the parts of Ohio and adjacent states settled by New Englanders. The rest of the great American West did not count. In fact, the great drama of danger and adventure and achievement that was the American West, from the Appalachians to the Pacific, was predominantly the work of Southerners and not of New Englanders at all. In the Midwest, the New Englanders came after Southerners had tamed the wilderness, and they looked down upon the early settlers. But in Western movies we still have the inevitable family from Boston moving west by covered wagon. Such a thing never existed! The people moving west in covered wagons were from the upper South and were despised by Boston. So our West is reduced, in literature, to The Oregon Trail, a silly book written by a Boston tourist, and the phony cavortings of the Eastern sissy Teddy Roosevelt in the cattle country opened by Southerners. And the great American outdoors is now symbolized by Henry David Thoreau and a little frog pond at Walden, in sight of the Boston smokestacks. The Pennsylvanian Owen Wister knew better when he entitled his Wyoming novel, The Virginian. To fully understand what the Yankee is today – builder of the all-powerful "multicultural" therapeutic state (with himself giving the orders and collecting the rewards) which is the perfection of history and which is to be exported to all peoples, by guided missiles on women and children if necessary – we need a bit more real history. That history is philosophical, or rather theological, and demographic. New Englanders lived in a barren land. Some of their surplus sons went to sea. Many others moved west when it was safe to do so. By 1830, half the people in the state of New York were New England-born. By 1850, New Englanders had tipped the political balance in the Midwest, with the help of German revolutionaries and authoritarians who had flooded in after the 1848 revolutions. The leading editors in New York City, Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, and the big money men, were New England-born. Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania steel tycoon and Radical Republican, was from Vermont. (Thanks to the tariff, he made $6,000 extra profit on every mile of railroad rails he sold.) The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural institutions, and by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot of the South to spread slavery to the North, which was as imaginary as Jefferson’s guillotine. The people that Cooper and Irving had despised as interlopers now controlled New York! The Yankees could now carry a majority in the North and in 1860 elect the first sectional president in U.S. history – a threat to the South to knuckle under or else. In time, even the despised Irish Catholics began to think like Yankees. We must also take note of the intellectual revolution amongst the Yankees which created the modern version of self-righteous authoritarian "Liberalism" so well exemplified by Mrs. Clinton. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Germany to study. There he learned from philosophers that the world was advancing by dialectical process to an ever-higher state. He returned to Boston, and after marrying the dying daughter of a banker, resigned from the clergy, declared the sacraments to be a remnant of barbarism, and proclaimed The American as the "New Man" who was leaving behind the garbage of the past and blazing the way into the future state of perfection for humanity. Emerson has ever since in many quarters been regarded as the American philosopher, the true interpreter of the meaning of America. From the point of view of Christianity, this "American" doctrine is heresy. From the point of view of history it is nonsense. But it is powerful enough for Ronald Reagan, who should have known better, to proclaim America as the shining City upon a Hill that was to redeem mankind. And powerful enough that the United States has long pursued a bipartisan foreign policy, one of the guiding assumptions of which is that America is the model of perfection to which all the world should want to conform. There is no reason for readers of Southern Partisan to rush out and buy these books, which are expensive and dense academic treatises. If you are really interested, get your library to acquire them. They are well-documented studies, responsibly restrained in their drawing of larger conclusions. But they indicate what is hopefully a trend of exploration of the neglected field of Yankee history. The highflying Yankee rhetoric of Emerson and Hillary Rodham Clinton has a nether side, which has its historical origins in the "Burnt Over District." The "Burnt Over District" was well known to antebellum Americans. Emersonian notions bore strange fruit in the central regions of New York State settled by the overflow of poorer Yankees from New England. It was "Burnt Over" because it (along with a similar area in northern Ohio) was swept over time and again by post-millennial revivalism. Here preachers like Charles G. Finney began to confuse Emerson’s future state of perfection with Christianity, and God’s plan for humanity with American chosenness. If this were true, then anything that stood in the way of American perfection must be eradicated. The threatening evil at various times was liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the Masonic order, meat-eating, marriage. Within the small area of the Burnt Over District and within the space of a few decades was generated what historians have misnamed the "Jacksonian reform movement:" Joseph Smith received the Book of Mormon from the Angel Moroni; William Miller began the Seventh Day Adventists by predicting, inaccurately, the end of the world; the free love colony of John Humphrey Noyes flourished at Oneida; the first feminist convention was held at Seneca Falls; and John Brown, who was born in Connecticut, collected accomplices and financial backers for his mass murder expeditions. It was in this milieu that abolitionism, as opposed to the antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners, had its origins. Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth. It was not the Union that our Southern forefathers seceded from, but the deadly combination of Yankee greed and righteousness. Most abolitionists had little knowledge of or interest in black people or knowledge of life in the South. Slavery promoted sin and thus must end. No thought was given to what would happen to the African-Americans. In fact, many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and blacks would disappear and the land be repopulated by virtuous Yankees. The darker side of the Yankee mind has had its expression in American history as well as the side of high ideals. Timothy McVeigh from New York and the Unabomber from Harvard are, like John Brown, examples of this side of the Yankee problem. (Even though distinguished Yankee intellectuals have declared that their violence was a product of the evil "Southern gun culture.") General Richard Taylor, in one of the best Confederate memoirs, Destruction and Reconstruction, related what happened as he surrendered the last Confederate troops east of the Mississippi in 1865. A German, wearing the uniform of a Yankee general and speaking in heavily accented English, lectured him that now that the war was over, Southerners would be taught "the true American principles." Taylor replied, sardonically, that he regretted that his grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, and his father, President of the United States, had not passed on to him true American principles. Yankeeism was triumphant. Since the Confederate surrender, the Yankee has always been a strong and often dominant force in American society, though occasionally tempered by Southerners and other representatives of Western civilization in America. In the 1960s the Yankee had one of his periodic eruptions of mania such as he had in the 1850s. Since then, he has managed to destroy a good part of the liberty and morals of the American peoples. It remains to be seen whether his conquest is permanent or whether in the future we may be, at least to some degree, emancipated from it.
Poster Comment: Now let's see if we have hundreds of comments about the Yankee problem in the U.S. and the world, just like we had about the Zionist Jew problem. I expect lots and lots of comments from leveller and Burkeman1 about 'anti-Yankeeism" and all the horrors associated with it. Scrapper2 can obsess over every little change I made in the article (can you find them? Look hard!).
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#1. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
Be A Chooser makes changes to articles too. Did you learn to do this from him'her?
I learned to do it when I was a newspaper editor and reporter, as I wrote someplace else. I have the right to do so, as does anyone. By the way, I like the way you completely ignored the article and obsessed on something trivial. That's a mind that can see a twig and miss the entire forest.
"Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war." -- Thucydides
Are you such a singular bore that you actually searched out this old column, slapped today's date on it- and reposted it all so that you could add your moron comment at the end? Were you trying to hide the fact that you actually spent time searching out this column to somehow "bag" me and leveller and scrapper? Do you think it worked? I'm not sure what your point is- I doubt you do. And what is more? I don't really care. Weird.
YT may be a bore, but this is a great column re: our previous exchange on MA vs. the South. Kind of puts it all in a broader historical perspective, don't it? Damn Yankees, indeed.
Check out my blog, America, the Bushieful.
NASCAR, grits, and slavery bother me, but Mason, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe are some of my favorites. The South had every right to secede, as did the North in 1814. The antebellum North was, unfortunately, the source of the revival of Mercantilism in the US: protectionism, central banking, and federal internal improvements. Bernard Bailyn once did a study of the emigration patterns of Brits to America. If I recall correctly, the people of the South and the North in America came predominantly from regions in Britain that were, respectively, supportive of the Crown and the Roundheads, and that division in English society apparently reflected earlier divisions between suporters of the houses of York and Lancaster. Perhaps the zeiigeists of Northerners and Southerners are the result of longstanding cultural differences. With a broad brush, I would paint the division between Red America and Blue America (you know some socialist in the Media had to be responsible for labeling the farmers as Red) as follows: the rural Bush supporters are in favor of huge military budgets, kickass intervention abroad, no welfare, agricultural price supports, Jesus in the schools, and abortion in the alleys. The urbane, sophisticated Northerners, on the other hand, are in favor of government ponzi schemes, the mercantilist agenda, abortion on demand, and no Jesus anywhere. Perhaps I exaggerate.
It may be accurate to say that Vermont seceded from New York in 1777, waged a successful revolution, established itself as a self-governing independent republic, and was admitted to the union as an independent state with self-constituted boundaries. U.S. Supreme Court VERMONT v. NEW HAMPSHIRE, 289 U.S. 593 (1933) * * * Our conclusion as to the meaning and effect of the Order-in-Council of 1764 would be decisive of the boundary of Vermont upon her admission to the Union were it not for the history of Vermont as a revolutionary government and the consequent uncertainty whether she was admitted under the second clause of article 4, 3, of the Constitution as a new state formed out of the territory of New York, with her boundary accordingly determined by that of New York, or whether she was admitted under the first clause of article 4, 3, as an independent revolutionary state with self-constituted boundaries. The special master found that attempts by the New York authorities after 1764 to interfere with the possession of the holders of the New Hampshire grants made prior to the Order-in-Council led to protest and forcible resistance which assumed the proportions of a revolutionary movement. This movement culminated in 1777 in the Declaration of Independence by the towns comprising the New Hampshire grants on both sides of the Green Mountains, which proclaimed that the jurisdiction granted by the crown 'to New York government over the people of the New Hampshire Grants is totally dissolved,' and that a free and independent government is set up within the territory now Vermont, bounded 'east on Connecticut River ... as far as the New Hampshire Grants extends.' From that time until the admission of Vermont into the Union in 1791 an independent government was maintained with defined geographical limits extending on the east to the Connecticut River. In view of these facts the special master concluded that the Order-in-Council was nullified by successful revolution and Vermont was admitted as an independent state with self-constituted boundaries. In 1777, Vermont's leaders finally declared independence of the New Hampshire Grants not only from Britain, but also from New York. Despite the unresolved conflict with New York and secret negotiations of some political leaders with the British in Canada (Williamson 1949), Vermont actively supported the Revolution. Yet, until its admission to the Union as the fourteenth state in 1791, the Republic of Vermont was effectively a sovereign state. Vermont set a significant precedent, first, because the state was established through secession from another member state of the Union, and second, because the same right to sovereign authority claimed by the Revolutionaries vis-à-vis the British Empire was invoked by Vermont's leaders to justify that secession.
The Underground Railroad went to Canada, not New England. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ll/llcg/061/0600/06460084.gif Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd session, vol. IV, appendix, p.84, col. 3. A VERMONT STORY From a speech on emancipation, by Sen. J.R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, March 19, 1862. "And now, judge," said he, "when you get to Washington, I want to have you take hold of this negro business, and dispose of it in some way or other; have slavery abolished, and be done with it." "Well," said the judge, "as the people who own these slaves, or claim to own them, have paid their money for them, and hold them as property under their State laws, would it not be just, if we abolish slavery, that some provision should be made to make them compensation?" He hesitated, thought earnestly for a while, and, in a serious tone, replied: "Yes, I think that would be just, and I will stand my share of the taxes." Although a very close and economical man, he was willing to bear his portion of the taxes. "But," said the judge, "there is one other question; when the negroes are emancipated, what shall be done with them? They are a poor people; they will have nothing; there must be some place for them to live. Do you think it would be any more than fair that we should take our share of them?" "Well, what would be our share in the town of Woodstock?" he inquired. The judge replied: "There are about two thousand five hundred people in Woodstock; and if you take the census and make the computation, you will find that there would be about one for every five white persons; so that here in Woodstock our share would be about five hundred." "What!" said he, "five hundred negroes in Woodstock! Judge, I called to pay my respects; I bid you good evening;" and he started for the door, and mounted his horse. As he was about to leave, he turned round and said: "Judge, I guess you need not do anything more about that negro business on my account." [Laughter.] Mr. President, perhaps I am not going too far when I say that honorable gentleman sits before me now. Mr. [Jacob] COLLAMER [R-Vt.]. As the gentleman has called me out, I may be allowed to say that the inhabitants of the town were about three thousand, and the proportion was about one to six.
For those who choose to invoke ancient ancestry, General George Washington wrote eloquently about Massachusetts back in 1775. Washington, George, 1732-1799. The writings of George Washington Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library To RICHARD HENRY LEE Dear Sir: Your favor of the first Inst. by Mr. Randolph came safe to hand -- the merits of this young Gentleman added to your recommendation, and my own knowledge of his character induced me to take him into my Family as an aid de camp in the room of Mr. Mifflin, whom I have appointed Quarter Master Genel. from a thorough perswasion of his -- Integrity my own experience of his activity -- and finally, because he stands unconnected with either of these Governments; or with this that, or t'other man; for between you and I there is more in this than you can easily immagine. As we have now nearly compleated our Lines of Defence, we nothing more, in my opinion to fear from the Enemy, provided we can keep our men to their duty and make them watchful and vigilant; but it is among the most difficult tasks I ever undertook in my life to induce these people to believe that there is, or can be, danger till the Bayonet is pushed at their Breasts; not that it proceeds from any uncommon prowess, but rather from an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people which, believe me, prevails but too generally among the officers of the Massachusets part of the Army who are nearly of the same kidney with the Privates, and adds not a little to my difficulties; as there is no such thing as getting of officers of this stamp to exert themselves in carrying orders into execution -- to curry favor with the ---------- men (by whom they were chosen, and on whose smiles possibly they may think they may again rely) seems to be one of the principal objects of their attention. I submit it therefore to your consideration whether there is, or is not, a propriety in that Resolution of the Congress, which leaves the ultimate appointment of all officers below the Rank of Generals to the Governments where the Regiments originated now the Army is become Continental? -- To me it appears improper in two points of view; first, it is giving that power and weight to an Individual Colony, which ought, of right, to belong only to the whole, and next it damps the spirit and ardor of volunteers from all but the four New England Governments as none but their people have the least chance of getting into office. -- Would it not be better therefore to have the warrants which the Commander-in-Chief is authorized to give Pro-tempore, approved or disapproved, by the Continental Congress, or a Committee of their body, which I should suppose in any long recess must always sit? In this case every Gentleman will stand an equal chance of being promoted according to his merits; in the other all officers will be confined to the Inhabitants of the 4 New England Governments which in my opinion is impolitick to a degree. I have made a pretty good slam among such kind of officers as the Massachusets Government abound in since I came to this Camp having Broke one Colo. and two Captains for cowardly behavior in the action on Bunkers Hill, -- two Captains for drawing more provisions and pay than they had men in their Company -- and one for being absent from his Post when the Enemy appeared there and burnt a House just by it. Besides these, I have at this time -- one Colo., one Major, one Captn., and two subalterns under arrest for tryal -- In short I spare none ---------- yet fear it will not all do as these People seem to be too inattentive to every thing but their Interest. I have not been unmindful of that part of your Letter respecting Point Alderton -- before the receipt of it, it had become an object of my particular enquiry, but the Accts. of its situation differ exceedingly in respect to the command it has of the ship channel but my knowledge of this matter would not have been confined to enquiries only if I had ever been in a condition, since my arrival here, to have taken possession of such a Post; but you well know, my good Sir, that it becomes the duty of an Officer to consider some other matters, as well as a situation, -- namely, What number of men are necessary to defend a place -- how it can be supported -- and how furnished with ammunition. -- In respect to the first I conceive our defence of this place (point alderton) must be proportioned to the attack of Genl. Gage's whole force, leaving him just enough to man his Lines on Boston and Charles Town Necks -- and with regard to the second, and most important, as well as alarming object we have only 184 Barls. of Powder in all (including the late supply from Philadelphia) wch is not sufficient to give 25 muskets cartridges to each man, and scarcely to serve the artillery in any brisk action one single day -- Under these circumstances I dare say you will agree with me, that it would not be very eligible to take a post 30 miles distant (by Land) from this place, when we have already a line of circumvallation round Boston of at least 10 miles in extant to defend any part of which may be attacked without our having (if the Enemy will keep their own Council) an hours previous notice of it; and that, it would not be prudent in me, to attempt a measure which would necessarily bring on a consumption of all the ammunition we have, thereby leaving the Army at the mercy of the Enemy, or to ---------- disperse; and the Country to be ravaged and laid waste at discretion -- to you, Sir, I may Account for my conduct, but I cannot declare the motives of it to every one, notwithstanding I know by not doing it, that I shall stand in a very unfavorable light in the opinion of those who expect much, and will find little done, without understanding or perhaps giving them selves the trouble of enquiring into the cause. -- Such however is the fate of all those who are obliged to act the part I do, I must therefore submit to it, under a consciousness of having done my duty to the best of my abilities. On Saturday night last we took possession of a Hill advanced of our Lines, and within point blank shot of the Enemy on Charles Town neck. -- We worked incessantly the whole night with 1200 men, and before morning got an Intrenchment in such forwardness as to bid defiance to their Cannon; about nine o'clock on Sunday they began a heavy cannonade which continued through the day without any injury to our work, and with the loss of four men only two of which were killed through their own folly -- The Insult of the cannonade however we were obliged to submit to with impunity, not daring to make use of artillery on acct. of the consumption of powder, except with one nine pounder placed on a point, with which we silenced, and indeed sunk, one of their Floating Batteries. -- This move of ours was made to prevent the Enemy from gaining this Hill, and we thought was giving them a fair challenge to dispute it as we had been told by various people who had just left Boston, that they were preparing to come out, but instead of accepting of it, we learn that it has thrown them into great consternation which might be improved if we had the means of doing it -- Yesterday afternoon they began a Bombardment without any effect, as yet. -- ---------- There has been so many great, and capital errors, and abuses to rectify -- so many examples to make -- and so little Inclination in the officers of inferior Rank to contribute their aid to accomplish this work, that my life has been nothing else (since I came here) but one continued round of annoyance and fatigue ; in short no pecuniary recompense could induce me to undergo what I have especially as I expect, by shewing so little countenance to irregularities and publick abuses to render myself very obnoxious to a greater part of these People. -- But as I have already greatly exceeded the bounds of a Letter I will not trouble you with matters relative to my own feelings. ==================== Washington, George, 1732-1799. The writings of George Washington Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library To THE MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATURE Gentn.: The Quarter Master General of the Army has represented to me that notwithstanding he has offered 2/ pr Foot for Fire Wood, 2 1/2 pr Bushel for Oats, 3/4 pr Ct for Hay, he cannot procure those Articles for the use of the Army. From the information I have received, I have great Reason to believe, that this is an Artificial Scarcity, partly created by some persons who are monopolizing those Articles, in order to advance the Price and partly by the Possessors of them in the Neighbourhood of the Camp, who keep them in Order to profit by our Distress. As such a Combination must be attended with fatal Consequences both to the Country and Army, I cannot doubt the Interposition of your Honors to provide some Speedy and effectual Remedy; That which is usual and Customary in such Cases, is to fix the Prices to the Several Articles; bearing a Proportion to what is the Ordinary Rate, and if Persons will not ---------- Comply with a reasonable Tariff, but still refuse to furnish such Necessary Articles, the great Law of Self Preservation must authorize us to compel them. This or any other Regulations, which your knowledge of the People and Zeal for the Service shall induce you to make, will I doubt not remove the Mischief at present, and prevent it in future. If you should at the same Time extend your Views to other Articles besides those I have enumerated, I flatter myself it would have a very beneficial Effect. I am &c. =================
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