Singer, Soldier, Photographer, Prophet, Poet, Priest, and Occasional Developer
New Bern, NC
Joined June 2007
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Cutter retweeted
Here is a man who won one of the first great American victories of the Revolution without fighting a battle. He was not a soldier. He was a fat, cheerful Boston bookseller with no military training, and what he pulled off in the winter of 1775 into 1776 is one of the most staggering feats of sheer willpower and logistics in American history. His name was Henry Knox.
Knox learned war the way he learned everything: from books. He ran a fashionable bookshop in Boston, and he devoured the military engineering and artillery treatises on his own shelves. When the Revolution broke out, that self-taught knowledge suddenly mattered, because the American army besieging British-held Boston had a fatal problem. They had the enemy penned in the city, but they had almost no heavy cannon to force them out. It was a stalemate, and stalemates favored the British.
Knox had an audacious idea. Nearly 300 miles away, at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, sat a treasure of captured British artillery, dozens of heavy cannon and mortars taken earlier in the war. What if someone went and got them? Brought the guns to Boston? Everyone could see the problem: it was winter, the route ran through frozen lakes, rivers, forests, and the snowbound Berkshire mountains, and the guns weighed a combined 60 tons. Sixty tons. It sounded impossible. Washington gave the 25-year-old bookseller the job anyway.
And Knox did it. He got to Ticonderoga and set to work dismantling and hauling out around 59 pieces of artillery, some of them massive. He had 40 heavy sledges specially built. He rounded up teams of oxen, dozens and dozens of them, and boats to move the guns across the water before the freeze. And then, through the brutal heart of a New England winter, he dragged 120,000 pounds of iron and brass across a frozen wilderness.
Picture it. Cannon lashed to sleds, oxen straining in the snow, men breaking through ice, hauling the guns up and then carefully down the icy slopes of the Berkshires, where a runaway sled could be a disaster. Guns broke through frozen rivers and had to be fished out. It was backbreaking, dangerous, freezing work, mile after mile, week after week. And this untested bookseller held it all together by force of personality and organization. In under two months, he brought the entire "noble train of artillery" 300 miles through the dead of winter, and in late January 1776 he reported to Washington that the guns had arrived.
Then came the payoff. On a single night in early March, Washington's men quietly hauled Knox's cannon up onto Dorchester Heights, the high ground overlooking Boston and its harbor. When the British woke up, they found the American army suddenly looking down their throats with heavy artillery that could smash their ships and their positions. Their commander realized the city was untenable. And so, rather than fight, the British evacuated Boston entirely on March 17, 1776, and sailed away. The Americans had liberated a major city without a battle, because a bookseller had done the impossible with oxen and sleds and nerve.
Knox never looked back. He became Washington's chief of artillery for the rest of the war, the man whose guns crossed the Delaware to Trenton and pounded the British into surrender at Yorktown, and after the war he became the young nation's first Secretary of War. Fort Knox is named for him. But his greatest monument is that winter journey. Remember Henry Knox, the bookseller who read about artillery in his shop, then went out and dragged 60 tons of it across a frozen wilderness to hand George Washington the guns that freed Boston.
New @MaterialUI Temporal Localization adapter for use with Date and Time components. Globally polyfills Temporal if unavailable. github.com/cutterbl/mui-temp… #TemporalAPI #Date #Time
Cutter retweeted
In March 1776, months before the Declaration, Adam Smith looked across the Atlantic and wrote what reads like a prophecy now:
“From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”
No war had been won. No nation had even been declared yet.
But a Scottish economist saw it coming.
Cutter retweeted
"When they tried to cast Atticus Finch for ""To Kill a Mockingbird,"" James Stewart said no—the role was too controversial—but one actor called back immediately and gave a performance that would change American culture forever.
Hollywood.
Producer Alan J. Pakula had a problem. He'd secured the rights to Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a story that was shattering hearts and opening eyes across America. But finding someone to play Atticus Finch—the small-town lawyer who defends a Black man falsely accused of rape in 1930s Alabama—felt impossible.
The role demanded something rare: quiet moral authority. Not theatrics. Not bravado. Just the kind of decency that makes you believe goodness can exist even in a broken world.
James Stewart passed. Too risky, he thought. Too controversial for the times.
Rock Hudson was floated. Pakula wasn't convinced. The role needed more than star power—it needed gravity, wisdom, a man who could make integrity look effortless.
Then they called Gregory Peck.
""He called back immediately,"" Pakula later said. ""No maybes.""
For Peck, the decision was instant. Something about the story felt achingly familiar. He'd grown up in La Jolla, California—a small town not unlike Harper Lee's fictional Maycomb, Alabama. The characters in her novel felt like people he'd known as a boy. The moral landscape felt like home.
""I put everything I had into it,"" Peck reflected years later. ""All my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity.""
He didn't approach Atticus Finch as a character to perform.
He approached him as a person to become.
When Harper Lee learned that Gregory Peck would bring her beloved character to life on screen, she was thrilled. But it wasn't until years later—after watching his performance again and again, after seeing how audiences responded—that she understood why it resonated so powerfully.
""The years told me his secret,"" she wrote. ""When he played Atticus Finch, he had played himself, and time has told all of us something more: when he played himself, he touched the world.""
The film premiered in 1962. Critics praised it. Audiences wept. In 1963, Gregory Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
But the Oscar wasn't what stayed with him.
""Hardly a day passes that I don't think how lucky I was to be cast in that film,"" he said decades later. ""I recently sat at a dinner next to a woman who saw it when she was 14 years old, and she said it changed her life. I hear things like that all the time.""
Letters poured in for years. Teachers wrote to say they showed the film to their students every year. Parents wrote to say they named their sons after Atticus. Lawyers wrote to say the film inspired them to pursue justice. Civil rights activists wrote to say it helped people understand.
A single performance, reverberating across generations.
In 2003, the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 greatest movie heroes of all time.
Atticus Finch ranked number one.
Not the strongest hero. Not the one who won the most battles or saved the most lives. But the one who stood up for what was right—quietly, calmly, courageously—even when standing completely alone.
Because that's what real heroism looks like. Not dramatic speeches or violent confrontation, but steady moral clarity in the face of overwhelming pressure.
Gregory Peck gave us that. He showed us what quiet courage looks like. What fatherhood can be. What decency means when the world around you has lost its way.
Some performances entertain us for two hours and fade.
Others become part of who we are—shaping how we see justice, how we raise our children, how we measure our own character.
Gregory Peck didn't just play Atticus Finch.
He became the father millions of us wish we'd had—and the person many of us are still trying to be.
"
Cutter retweeted
He taught Thomas Jefferson. He taught the future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He taught a future president. And then he was murdered, poisoned with arsenic by his own greedy grandnephew, and the killer walked free because of a monstrous law. Meet George Wythe, the teacher of the founders.
If the American Revolution had a professor, it was this man.
Wythe was born in Virginia around 1726 and became one of the most respected legal minds in the colonies. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the first of Virginia's signers to do so. But his real, staggering legacy is who he shaped, because he became the first professor of law in the entire United States.
Look at the students who sat under George Wythe. Thomas Jefferson, who called Wythe his mentor and second father. John Marshall, who would become the most important Chief Justice in Supreme Court history. James Monroe, a future President of the United States. Henry Clay, one of the greatest senators the country ever produced. Edmund Randolph, a future Attorney General. One teacher, quietly training the men who would run the country for the next half century. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration, he was channeling ideas Wythe had poured into him.
Wythe was also ahead of his time in a way that took real courage. He was a quiet abolitionist. He freed the people he had enslaved and even made provisions to support them until they could stand on their own, and he included a freed young Black man in his household in his will.
And that generosity is exactly what got him killed.
Wythe's grandnephew and heir, a reckless young man named George Wythe Sweeney, was in debt and impatient for his inheritance. When he learned that Wythe had willed part of the estate away to others, including that freed young man, Sweeney decided to fix the math himself. He slipped arsenic into the household's food and coffee.
The poison killed the freed young man. And it slowly killed George Wythe too. But Wythe didn't go quickly. As he lay dying, the old lawyer realized what had happened, and with his last strength he changed his will to cut his murderer out of it entirely. Justice, on his own deathbed.
But here's the part that still stings. Sweeney was put on trial for the murder, and he was acquitted. Why? Because the key witness who saw everything was a free Black woman in Wythe's household, and Virginia law at the time forbade Black witnesses from testifying against a white person. The one person who could have hanged him was silenced by law. The killer of a Founding Father walked away free.
George Wythe died in 1806, at around 80 years old.
A brilliant teacher who trained a generation of American giants, freed the people he had enslaved, and was murdered for his decency by a system that then let his killer go.
George Wythe. The professor of the revolution, betrayed at his own table.
Cutter retweeted
New Hampshire learns of the independence of the United States as 22-year-old John Taylor Gilman reads aloud a copy of the Declaration of Independence in Exeter.
The document was printed by Loyalist Robert Luist Fowle, editor of the New Hampshire Gazette. Though the Declaration sharply contrasts with his ideology, Fowle printed it because he felt a journalistic duty to do so.
Cutter retweeted
“Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
“They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
“They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.
“How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!
“Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.
“Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interest — a nation’s jubilee.”
- Frederick Douglass
Cutter retweeted
America turns 250 today.
Let me read back the resume.
We started by telling a king to pound sand, in writing.
By 1803 we bought half a continent from France for about four cents an acre.
We fought a war with ourselves and somehow stayed one country.
We strung a railroad across the entire thing.
We handed the world the lightbulb, the telephone, and the airplane in about thirty years flat.
Then a man named Willis Carrier invented air conditioning and made half the planet actually livable.
You are welcome, Texas. You are welcome, Dubai.
Twice the whole world caught fire, and twice we showed up and helped put it out.
We split the atom.
We put men on the moon in 1969.
Then we went back and hit golf balls up there, because why not.
We invented jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop, and the whole planet is still dancing to it.
We put a burger and fries on every corner of the earth.
We built rockets that fly themselves home and land standing straight up.
We flew a helicopter on Mars.
We launched a car into actual space and it is still out there cruising.
We also invented ranch dressing and somehow talked the entire world into putting it on pizza.
Priorities.
We even invented three of our own sports so we could win them.
Baseball, basketball, and football.
Real football, the kind with hands, because we named it and we are not taking corrections.
The rest of the planet can keep soccer, which is fine, we are hosting it in our backyard this summer anyway.
And yes, Canadian football exists, wider field, extra man, one fewer down, and we try very hard not to think about it.
Frankly it was generous of us to invent our own games.
If we put all that energy into soccer, nobody else would ever lift that trophy again.
We would win it so often they would just rename it the America’s Cup and hand us the keys.
You are welcome for the suspense.
And in 2026 we threw a birthday so big a German tourist live-tweeted our gas stations to 750,000 people.
Not every chapter was clean.
We argued, we stumbled, we fixed what we broke, and we kept building.
That is the whole trick.
Two hundred and fifty years in, and we are still the loudest, brightest, most improbable experiment on the map.
Not bad for a country that started as a strongly worded letter to a king.
Happy birthday, America.
🦋
Cutter retweeted
In 1982, Robin Williams did a routine as the American Flag for the Norman Lear produced tv special "I Love Liberty" created to bridge political divides - and it's one of the greatest pieces you'll see 🇺🇸
Cutter retweeted
The vote that would create the United States was deadlocked, and the man who could break the tie was eighty miles away, dying of cancer, on the wrong side of a thunderstorm.
His name was Caesar Rodney. On the first of July 1776, while Congress argued itself toward independence in Philadelphia, he was stuck back in Delaware. He was tamping down Loyalist trouble, in constant pain from the cancer eating at his face and fighting for breath due to his asthma.
Then the letter came. Delaware's two delegates in Congress were split. One for independence, one against. Without a tiebreaker, the colonies would not stand united. And a divided front was exactly what the Crown was counting on.
He did not hesitate. He climbed onto his horse near midnight and rode straight into the storm. Lightning split the sky. The roads turned to sludge. A journey that normally took two days but he made it in eighteen hours. He stopped only to change horses, soaked with every mile.
He reached Independence Hall on the morning of July 2 just as the vote was called, still in his boots and spurs. Caked in mud. Thomas McKean never forgot the sight of him standing in the doorway.
Rodney walked in and cast his vote for independence. It broke Delaware's tie, and with that, not a single colony stood against the break from Britain.
On this day, 250 years ago, a dying man rode all night through a storm so America could be born.
America 250 🇺🇸
Cutter retweeted
How old were some of America’s Founding Fathers in 1776?
🇺🇸 Thomas Jefferson — 33
🇺🇸 Alexander Hamilton — 21
🇺🇸 James Madison — 25
🇺🇸 John Adams — 40
🇺🇸 George Washington — 44
🇺🇸 John Hancock — 39
🇺🇸 Benjamin Franklin — 70
🇺🇸 Patrick Henry — 40
🇺🇸 Samuel Adams — 53
🇺🇸 Thomas Paine — 39
The United States was founded by a remarkable mix of young revolutionaries and experienced statesmen.
Cutter retweeted
Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old when his draft of the Declaration of Independence reached Congress on June 28, 1776. A week later, the delegates went through it line by line and cut almost a quarter of what he had written.
He had not worked alone. A committee of five delegates, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, was asked to write a statement of independence, and they handed the job to Jefferson. He did it in about 17 days, in a rented room on the second floor of a house in Philadelphia. He wrote on a portable lap desk he had designed himself: mahogany, about the size of a modern laptop, with a fold-down board and a drawer for ink and paper. It sits in the Smithsonian now.
What he handed over on June 28 was very different from the version we honor today. Franklin and Adams had already marked it up before it reached the floor. In all, the text went through 86 changes.
The biggest single cut was a long passage that blamed King George III for the slave trade. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted it gone, and Congress removed it to keep them on side.
Jefferson sat through the edits and hated them. Franklin, sitting next to him, tried to cheer him up with a story about a shopkeeper named John Thompson, whose sign once read "John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money," with a picture of a hat. One friend after another cut a word they thought was pointless, until the sign simply said "John Thompson" next to a drawing of a hat. That, Franklin told him, is what happens when a committee gets hold of your words.
For the rest of his life, Jefferson kept copying out his first draft by hand and sending it to friends, so they could read what he had written before Congress changed it.
The parchment behind glass at the National Archives, the one more than a million people line up to see every year, is the edited text adopted on July 4, not the draft from June 28. Centuries of sunlight and travel have faded it so badly that much of it now reads as blank parchment. The heading and John Hancock's signature are about all you can still read.
Jefferson called it "an expression of the American mind." It was never just one man's work. Many people argued over it, cut it down, and signed it, and the country it founded is still standing 250 years later.
Cutter retweeted
This guy wore a black silk glove on one hand for almost thirty years, and the reason why is wild. Meet Richard Henry Lee, the man who actually proposed American independence.
Quick correction to what most people think. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration. But he didn't propose breaking from Britain. Richard Henry Lee did.
On June 7, 1776, Lee stood up in the Continental Congress and laid down the words that started everything: "Resolved, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states." That motion, the Lee Resolution, is the thing that forced the vote. Jefferson was then assigned to write up the document explaining why. So the order people skip is this. Lee proposes the divorce. Jefferson writes the letter. Without Lee's resolution, there's no Declaration to sign.
Now the glove. Back in 1768, years before any of this, Lee was out hunting on his own land and his rifle exploded in his hands. The blast tore four fingers off his left hand. For the rest of his life he covered the damage with a black silk glove. And here's the part I love. He turned it into a weapon. When he gave speeches, he'd gesture with that gloved, ruined hand, and people couldn't look away from it.
Because make no mistake, this man could talk. People who heard him speak compared him to Cicero, the legendary Roman orator. He was the voice in the room. His own brother Francis Lightfoot Lee, who also signed the Declaration, was the quiet one. Richard was thunder.
He grew up at Stratford Hall in Virginia, the same house where Robert E. Lee would later be born into the same famous family. He helped lead the colony toward revolution, served in Congress, later became president of Congress under the Articles of Confederation, and finished his career as one of Virginia's first United States senators.
A man with half a hand, who stood up and said out loud the dangerous thing nobody else would put in a motion, and changed the course of history with one sentence.
Richard Henry Lee. The man who moved that America should be free.
Cutter retweeted
250 years ago today, on June 29, 1776, New Yorkers looked out at the water and saw a nightmare on the horizon. The British fleet had arrived, and so many ships filled the bay that witnesses said the masts looked like "a forest of pine trees" growing out of the sea. The timing could not have been more brutal.
This was the empire's answer to the rebellion, and it was overwhelming. The first wave of around 45 warships and transports dropped anchor off Sandy Hook and Staten Island carrying General William Howe and roughly 10,000 troops. Within days it kept growing. Then his brother Admiral Richard Howe arrived with more. It would eventually swell into one of the largest seaborne invasion forces of the entire 18th century, hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of professional soldiers and German mercenaries, aimed at one city.
Now sit with the timing. While that forest of masts was filling the harbor, delegates down in Philadelphia were in the final days of debating whether to declare independence. They voted for it on July 2 and signed off on the wording on July 4. So at the exact moment America was being born on paper, the most powerful military on earth was already anchored off its coast, getting ready to strangle it in the cradle.
The people of New York understood exactly what they were seeing. Alarm bells rang, panic spread through the streets, and soldiers sprinted to their posts to stare at a force they had almost no hope of matching. Washington's army was outnumbered, outgunned, and about to get badly beaten in the battles for New York that followed.
That's the part that gets lost in the fireworks every Fourth of July. Independence wasn't declared from a position of strength. It was declared with an enemy armada already sitting on the doorstep, knowing full well what was coming. They signed their names anyway.
Being Commander of my local VFW takes up all of my "free" time, so OSS contributions are spotty nowadays. That said, I've finally released new versions of #soundtouchjs. Complete rewrite in TS and updates to internal buffers for smoother rendering. github.com/cutterbl/SoundTou…
