Great Americans Project

Born today in 1732, Brigadier General John Glover was a self-made entrepreneur whose Marblehead Mariner” regiment made critical contributions during the Revolutionary War. Perhaps most notably, his men enabled General Washington’s surprise attack on Christmas Day 1776. 🇺🇸

Patriots decided they loved liberty more than their own lives because a government was arbitrarily raising the price of sugar, tea, paper/stamps, and glass, etc, Like I agree, it's a Revolution of ideas, but economic factors play a motivating role This is not controversial

In the first paragraphs of his ~500 page book, de Tocqueville writes -- that democracy –IS- succeeding in America and -- that America had greater socioeconomic EQUALITY than he had observed elsewhere (no true aristocrats etc.) -- that America's equality of opportunity seemed to be -THE- fundamental fact, from which all others flowed -- that the desire to try it (democracy) is spreading to other nations

On November 2, 1734, deep in the dark forests of Kentucky, a wind kicked up and shook the branches of the trees. Hundreds of miles to the east, in Berks County, Pennsylvania, a baby boy had been born. His name was Daniel Boone.

In 1768, John Hancock was the richest merchant in Boston, and the Crown was convinced he was a smuggler. On May 9, his sloop Liberty docked in Boston Harbor carrying Madeira wine. Hancock paid duties on 25 casks, far less than the ship could hold. Customs officials later claimed the rest had been unloaded overnight, and a customs inspector said he'd been locked in a cabin below deck while it happened. On June 10, customs seized the Liberty and towed it out under the guns of the warship HMS Romney. Boston erupted. A mob attacked customs officials, smashed windows at their homes, and dragged one official's boat through the streets and burned it. The customs men fled to Castle William in the harbor for their safety. Hancock was charged with smuggling and tried in a vice-admiralty court with no jury, facing ruinous penalties. His defense attorney was a young lawyer named John Adams. After months of proceedings, the Crown quietly dropped the case in 1769. Whether Hancock actually smuggled that wine is still debated by historians. But the ship's story got stranger. The British converted the Liberty into a customs patrol vessel, the very job of enforcing the trade laws Hancock was accused of breaking. In July 1769, angry colonists in Newport, Rhode Island boarded it, cut it loose, and burned it. Seven years later, Hancock wrote the biggest signature on the Declaration of Independence.

At the decisive moment of one of the most important battles of the Revolution, John Eager Howard's line got a confused order and accidentally began turning its back on the charging enemy. It should have been a catastrophe. Instead it won the battle. And that strange, lucky, brilliantly exploited mistake is why Cowpens is studied in war colleges to this day. Howard was a young Maryland officer, quiet, steady, and brave, the kind of man who did not seek glory but was always where the fighting was hottest. At the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, Daniel Morgan gave him command of the main line of Continental regulars, the hard core of the army, the line that had to hold when the British came on. And come on they did. Banastre Tarleton's troops, confident and aggressive, pressed the American line hard, and at the crisis of the battle the British tried to work around Howard's flank. Howard moved to meet the threat. He gave an order for a company on his right to wheel and face the flanking British. But in the noise and smoke and chaos, the order was misunderstood. Instead of pivoting to face the enemy, the men began to fall back, to withdraw. And then, like a chain reaction, the rest of the line saw their comrades pulling back and began to withdraw too. The entire American main line was suddenly walking away from the enemy. To anyone watching, it looked exactly like a retreat, like the American line was breaking. The British thought they had won. Seeing the Americans falling back, Tarleton's soldiers broke their own ranks and surged forward in a wild, eager pursuit, certain they were about to ride down a beaten enemy. In their excitement, they turned a disciplined advance into a disorganized rush. That was the moment Morgan and Howard pounced. They were cool enough to see that the accidental withdrawal had drawn the British into a trap. Morgan rode along the retreating line and had the men halt on a rise, and then Howard gave the order that turned the whole battle: face about. In an instant the entire American line stopped, spun around, and fired a single, massive, point-blank volley straight into the faces of the onrushing, disordered British, who were now bunched up and totally exposed. The volley tore the British line apart. And before they could recover, Howard ordered the bayonet charge, and his Continentals went straight at them with cold steel. The British broke completely. What had looked moments before like an American retreat became the hammer blow that shattered Tarleton's army. Combined with the American cavalry hitting from the flanks, it turned Cowpens into one of the most lopsided and complete victories of the war, a battle that gutted the British forces in the South and set the chain of events running toward Yorktown. It was Morgan's plan, but it was Howard's steadiness that made it work, his coolness in turning a confused, accidental withdrawal into a perfectly timed volley and charge under enormous pressure. Nathanael Greene and the army knew it, and Congress awarded Howard one of the rare silver medals given to the war's genuine heroes. Remember John Eager Howard. He proved that in battle, the difference between disaster and triumph can be a single order misunderstood, and a commander calm enough to turn the accident into a weapon. His line turned its back on the enemy by mistake, and he made that mistake the winning move of the Battle of Cowpens.