JASON: And now I am here in New England. This afternoon I am meeting with Sandra Simon in her apartment in Boston. Sandra is of Irish/English descent with family going back to the early colonial settlements in and around Boston. We are in the second bedroom of her apartment which is set up as an office den with book cases lining three walls. The remaining wall has two windows looking out onto a green space that is part of the Boston College campus. She is a youthful looking thirty years old, with short cropped auburn hair and remarkable green eyes. I image this is the Irish blood that I am seeing display itself. Let's start there. I want her to tell me a bit about her ancestors through the decades.
SANDRA: ""Well, as you know the folks in this part of New England are very proud of our origins as some of the original European settlers of this country. My family, and others like us, have spent time researching and recording the lives of our ancestors – most of it is accurate and, I suppose, some of it might be a bit exaggerated or fanciful.
All the history books have accounted for the hardships of the original settlements and the forming of the Thirteen Colonies under the British. So where to start? . . . . It gets interesting in 1776 when we colonials decide we have had enough of sending tax monies to Britain and having to purchase expensive goods only from Britain or its colonies. There was great resistance to this, especially when they increased these taxes in 1775. So much so that they had to send their redcoats to enforce their position. The British felt that the Colonies should repay them a debt for defending us during the French and Indian wars. It wasn't that they wanted too much, it was more that they could do as they pleased with us, and we had no control.
Some armed skirmishes in the colonies escalated to the point of a declared revolution with our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. We were not all that impulsive in thinking we could gain independence on our own. We expected support from the French who were traditional enemies of the British and were still smarting over their defeat by the British in Canada some seventeen years earlier. The declaration was the easy part. The battles waged on for some seven years. In the end, the French Navy helped force the British to surrender in the port of Yorktown, Virginia and that essentially led to the end of the War with the signing of Treaty of Paris in 1783.
So, I suppose you could say that our national birthday of July 4, 1776 was a bit premature since the war did not end, and the British did not admit defeat and grant independence until some seven years later. But history is always written by the victors, as they say"".
JASON: "" Yes the first of the modern democracies, with a new constitution. Taking some the democratic parliamentary processes of England, as well as some of the policies of the new revolutionaries in France. In addition, Benjamin Franklin is also reported to have studied and incorporated some of the Indigenous governing practices, most notably of the Iroquois nation"".
I know that few New Englanders have read the Declaration, but virtually all are familiar with the opening sentences in the Preamble which contains the words "we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, with certain unalienable rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness . . . " A noble cause when it states all men are created equal (and presumably are to be treated that way). However, we know that 41 of the 56 signatories to the Declaration were slave owners at the time, and after. And that over the next 100 years that nine of the Presidents before Lincoln were also slave owners.
But, the Preamble was mainly designed to justify the reasons for independence by listing some twenty-eight injuries the colony had suffered at the hands of the British King George III. Only two of which the scholars have found to be valid. But it was a spectacular piece of salesmanship since it did not depict the enemy as some faceless nation or some nameless group of parliamentarians; no, it personalized all claimed offences against one man – George III. Even though at the time the English monarchy had been reduced to a symbolic figurehead for over a hundred years since the government was being run by Parliament – as it is today.
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New America: How America Could Have Happened. An Alternate History
Ficțiune istoricăWhat if North America today was divided up the way the original colonial powers had settled it. With the English all along the Atlantic coast. The French down the middle along the Mississippi watershed. The Spanish in the west all along the Pacifi...
