r/revolutionarywar

Cilp is from war of rights game , and an musket is charleville 1766

In order:

Jone Paul Jones (1747-1791)

John Barry (1745-1803)

John Adams (1797-1801)

"At the urging of General George Washington, the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Navy. In Philadelphia, the Congress commissioned the first Navy officers, including John Barry, regarded as the Father of the U.S. Navy, and John Paul Jones, who went on to fame by raiding the coasts of Britain itself.

On the Philadelphia bank of the Delaware River, the new Navy commissioned its first ship, the USS Alfred. On the Alfred, John Paul Jones was the first to hoist the original American national flag, the Grand Union Flag. Later, Francis Hopkinson, a New Jersey signer of the Declaration, designed the first Navy flag, which became the pattern for the Stars and Stripes.

In Philadelphia's historic tavern called The Tun, John Adams wrote the Navy’s organizing document, the Articles of War. From the Delaware the navy’s first flotilla sailed, and escorted the Marines on their first amphibious operation to seize guns and gunpowder from the British in the Bahamas. The Navy’s efforts were organized in Philadelphia through most of the American Revolution, until the war ended and the Continental Navy was dissolved.

The U.S. Navy was reborn in Philadelphia after the Constitution was adopted there. A few years after Philadelphia became the Nation’s Capital, Congress met in Congress Hall and passed the Navy Act of 1794, creating the Department of the Navy. There President Washington nominated the first Secretary of the Navy, and Congress authorized construction of the famed six frigates, which were designed in Philadelphia. The first – USS United States – was launched on the Delaware and was the first U.S. Navy ship."

https://www.homecoming250.org/birthplace-of-the-navy-marine-corps/the-birth-of-the-navy/

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Sources and more information.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

https://history-maps.com/story/Benjamin-Franklin/event/Declaration-of-Independence

The American Rebellion (1776) by Rudyard Kipling (linked here in song form)

What is interesting about Kipling’s “The American Rebellion” is that it is really two poems jammed together by sheer brute force. The first half is Kipling the imperial lawyer making the strongest possible British case against the American Revolution: you let us fight France, you let us spend the money, you let us secure the continent, and then, once the danger was gone and the bill arrived, you suddenly discovered liberty. And that argument has _some_ merit because it is not completely Kipling just being a jingo-ist. Britain really had protected the colonies. Britain really had bad debts largely (but not wholey) caused by protecting the American collonies. The Revolution really did come after the French threat had been removed. But Kipling takes that real point and stretches it until it breaks IMO.

He treats the American argument as if it were just pure hypocrisy and that is just not how they thought. He barely admits the constitutional issue: that the colonists thought Parliament was claiming a new kind of power over them, and that they were defending old English liberties, not inventing freedom out of nowhere because "taxes are soooooooooooo annoying!" That is the big problem in the first half which is sharp, memorable, and historically crooked. Even the title, “The American Rebellion,” is Kipling being . . . well Kipling.

To Rudyard America is misbehaving naughty son. But then the poem changes. Once he gets to Valley Forge, the Delaware, the snow, the British dead, and the American dead lying in the same ground, the sneer drains out of him! The second half is a much better poem because it stops trying to win the argument he is having with people long since dead. It's Kipling the human poet writer who could really get into the emotional weight of history

Tomorrow's the 250th anniversary of John Dunlap printing the first copies of the Declaration overnight in his Philadelphia shop. Within days copies were spreading the news of Independence around the Colonies, including being read to General Washington's troops preparing to defend NYC. I spent the last five months recreating that printing — built my own papermaking equipment, hand-made the paper (period flax/hemp fiber), remade and hand-set the type to match the Library of Congress's copy, then printed it on a letterpress. About 1,300 hours total.

Happy to talk process — beating fiber, mould/deckle setup, ink mixing, whatever you want to dig into.

As we get closer to Independence Day and America's 250th anniversary, I thought this was a fitting way to revisit one of the country's most important documents.

The full Declaration of Independence has been turned into an immersive audio experience, with the text recited by the five members of the Committee of Five: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston.

The words are the original Declaration itself, so you're hearing the document exactly as it was written, just spoken aloud by the men who drafted and refined it. It's a different experience than reading it on a page, especially when you reach the final pledge of "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

I'll leave here the link for anyone who wants to give it a listen. I'd be interested to know what part of the Declaration still resonates with you 250 years later. Also you can talk with the signers at virtualwayback.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8EKUo3kMzw

Almost nothing in Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware is accurate, and once you start counting the errors, it becomes almost funny. The Stars and Stripes flying in the background wouldn't be designed for another nine months. The boat is far too small to hold the twelve men crammed into it. The real crossing happened in the pitch black of a sleeting Christmas night, not this golden cinematic dawn. The Delaware was fairly narrow where Washington's army actually crossed, but Leutze painted the heaving ice floes of the Rhine — the river he knew from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he'd never once seen the Delaware. And Washington is standing upright in a short-walled rowboat, a posture so precarious it would have been absurd in any real river crossing.

None of this was carelessness. Leutze wasn't trying to document an event. He was building a myth, and accuracy came second to drama.

What actually happened that night

By late December 1776, the American Revolution was close to collapse. Washington's Continental Army had been routed from New York and chased across New Jersey. Enlistments were expiring. Morale was at rock bottom. Thomas Paine was writing The Crisis — "These are the times that try men's souls" — because souls were genuinely being tried.

On the night of December 25–26, Washington gambled everything. He ferried roughly 2,400 men, horses, and artillery across the Delaware River in darkness and sleet, marched nine miles through a nor'easter, and launched a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton — German mercenaries hired by the British crown. The engagement was brief and devastating: about 22 Hessians killed, 98 wounded, over 900 captured. Continental losses were fewer than ten. It was as much a moral victory as a military one. After months of humiliation, proof that the cause could still win.

This is the event Leutze chose to paint — but he painted it 75 years later, and his reasons had as much to do with Europe in 1848 as with America in 1776.

A German-American painting for a European crisis

Emanuel Leutze was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, emigrated to the United States as a child, and then returned to Europe as a young painter, settling in the Düsseldorf art scene. He conceived the picture during the Revolutions of 1848, when liberal reformers across Europe — France, Austria, the German states, Hungary — rose up against kings and emperors, and then watched those revolutions fail, one after another.

Leutze's canvas was a message to those defeated revolutionaries. Here, it insisted, is what is possible. A ragged, divided, improbable coalition of people had once overthrown an empire. If they could do it, so could you.

He used American tourists and art students in Düsseldorf as models — among them the painters Worthington Whittredge and Andreas Achenbach. The picture he finished in 1850 was damaged in a studio fire, restored, and sold to what is now the Kunsthalle Bremen. That first version was destroyed on September 5, 1942, in an Allied bombing raid during the Second World War. The painting in the Met today is the full-size replica Leutze began immediately after: the second version, sent to New York in 1851.

The crew as argument

Look past Washington and study the boat carefully, because Leutze packed it with a deliberate cross-section of the Revolutionary cause — and the casting is the real argument of the picture.

At the bow, three men shove ice aside with their oars. One is an African American. Another wears the checkered bonnet of a Scotsman. A third wears a coonskin cap, the mark of the western frontier. Amidships, farmers in broad-brimmed hats hunch against the cold. At the stern sits a man in moccasins, leggings, and the fur-trimmed dress of a Northeast Woodlands Native American — rendered with enough specificity that you can make out the quillwork on the pouch he carries. Behind this lead boat, a whole flotilla struggles across, their bayonets raised against the breaking dawn.

The young man gripping the flag behind Washington is traditionally identified as Lieutenant James Monroe, the future fifth president of the United States.

This wasn't a historical record; there's no evidence the boats held anything like so tidy a sampler of the young nation. Leutze was making a philosophical claim: a revolution is not the work of one great man. It belongs to all of these people — immigrant and native-born, Black and white, soldier and farmer — bound together by a single purpose.

The reception: fifty thousand people lined up

When the painting arrived in New York in October 1851, it was a sensation. More than fifty thousand people came to see it in its first months on view. The New York Daily Times reported that over twenty thousand had already filed past and declared that "the sight of such a splendid work of art will do more for the union of this country than a thousand union speeches."

Consider the timing. This was 1851 — a decade in which the United States was tearing itself apart over slavery and sectional rivalry. The Compromise of 1850 had just temporarily papered over a crisis that would, ten years later, produce the Civil War. Into this atmosphere came a twelve-by-twenty-one-foot image of Americans of every kind rowing together toward a common goal, in the dark, through the ice. It struck a nerve.

The painter Marshall O. Roberts bought it for the then-enormous sum of $10,000. In 1897 it was given to the Metropolitan Museum, where it hangs today in a reproduction of its original trophy-style frame.

The other story in the boat

A painting this beloved inevitably carries contestation alongside it.

Scott Manning Stevens, a cultural historian and citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, has written about seeing the painting as a boy and feeling, briefly, glad to find a Native man included. Then, growing older, he learned what the image leaves out. He credits Leutze with painting "our better angels" — with insisting that the cause belonged to everyone. But he also notes that just three years after the crossing, Washington ordered General Sullivan's campaign to destroy British-allied Indigenous communities across what is now central New York, a campaign so devastating to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that the Mohawk name for Washington became Hanadahguyus — "destroyer of villages" — a title later extended to the U.S. presidency itself.

The painting's unity is real, and the exclusions it smooths over are also real. The Met now frames both truths simultaneously.

Generations of artists have borrowed Leutze's composition to argue back. Robert Colescott, Jacob Lawrence, and others have recast the boat's crew to tell pointedly different stories of who American history actually belongs to. The surest sign that an image has become truly iconic is how many people feel compelled to argue with it.

Why it endures

By 1950, the Met's curators had grown uneasy with the picture's crowd-pleasing scale and sent it away — first to Dallas, then to a church near the actual crossing site in Pennsylvania — before it finally returned to New York in 1970. In January 2002, a former museum guard glued a photograph of the September 11 attacks to its surface. The painting was not seriously damaged. In 2022, the White House's smaller third version sold at auction for $45 million.

The details in the picture are wrong. The flag, the light, the physics of the boat — none of it holds up. But Leutze was painting something that doesn't submit to fact-checking: the posture of a person who keeps standing up in the dark, who keeps moving forward when every reasonable calculation says to stop.

That's not history. That's mythology. And it turns out mythology is what a nation reaches for when it needs to remember what it thinks it is.

The painting hangs in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Admission to the Met is pay-what-you-wish for New York State residents.