BOOK REVIEW = FIVE STARS
Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War by Les Standiford
Les Standiford’s book has done it again, another gem of history delivered in his fast moving account of events in America's determined fight for “Independence, Liberty and Justice for all.”
Looking back over the years that struggle has not stood the test of time. We, the people, have been trying to fix something that was not broken.
EXCERPTS:
There was a long history of friction between the colonies and the mother country prior to 1765, of course, and although much was made of philosophy and concepts such as liberty and the right to self-governance, a great deal of unrest in the decade prior to the outbreak of war also came down to money.
The colonists had no say because such matters were being debated thousands of miles away. In fact, when stated in this fashion, the reasons for the discontent of the American colonists sound much like the complaints of the contemporary citizens of Main Street when the possibility of any new tax is mentioned in Congress or during presidential debates. Nearly 250 years ago, a group of American citizens decided that the conditions under which they were governed were intolerable; eventually they realized that no change would be forthcoming as a result of mere complaint and petition. Action would have to be taken. And because such actions were illegal, often directed at individuals and property, and because they could be punished by imprisonment and even death, their undertakings and the identities of those who carried them out would by necessity be covert. In short, there was an almost simultaneous eruption within the American colonies of cells of a secret radical society committed to imposing forcible change upon the established government.
The men who came to call themselves Sons of Liberty were patriots in their own eyes and are likely to seem so in the eyes of most Americans of this day. In the eyes of the British (and not a few fellow colonists) of the 1760s, however, they were terrorists who deserved to pay dearly for the things they had done. Certainly, when they undertook to plan and carry out such actions as the Albany “Riots,” the burning of the HMS Gaspée, and the Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty were not playing at symbolic gestures that would become the stuff of cant and schoolboy legend—they were laying their lives on the line in missions at a time when many of their fellow citizens were straddling the fence between obeisance to their lawful leaders and a commitment to an untested form of republican government.
Adams would reason, “If our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves—It strikes our British Privileges, which as we have never forfeited them, we hold in common with our Fellow Subjects who are Natives of Britain: If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?”
Brought to South Carolina prior to nonimportation, the number increased to 5,000 in 1772 and 8,000 in 1773. The slave population, which had stood at 80,000 in 1769, grew by 1773 to 110,000, nearly half again as large. Modern sensitivities to the practice aside, the burgeoning population of slaves meant a corresponding drag on opportunity for craftsmen and laborers of the time. How could a free man earn a decent living, they lamented, when there were so many around him who were forced to work for nothing?
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