The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal"Fisher, Sydney George
History
The American Revolution and the Boer War, An Open Letter to Mr. Charles Francis Adams on His Pamphlet "The Confederacy and the Transvaal"
Fisher, Sydney George
Adams, Charles Francis, 1835-1915. Confederacy and the Transvaal; South African War, 1899-1902
But when you see the principles and tactics of Washington and your own
great grandfather repeated in a country far off they seem different, and
when you see them turned against a country which gradually has come to
embody in your mind fashionable society, you think them very dreadful.
From your great grandfather's time to yours is a very short distance in
history but a long distance, it seems, in political morals.
The proposition for which you contend, or for which you profess to
contend, for I decline to believe that anyone of your name really
accepts such stuff, is nothing but the old principle of the bully and
brute. The little man must yield where his case is shown to be hopeless
and save the brute's time and money. After every battle of the
revolution the British and the loyalists thought that your ancestor and
his friends ought to give it up, and this went on for over seven years
in spite of the assistance of France.
I am inclined to think that if you were really put to the test you would
not live up to your own principles. I am inclined to think that if I and
several others, outnumbering you in the proportion of the English to the
Boers, should present revolvers and say that being men of better
business capacity we would now kindly take charge of your private
affairs and manage them for you to your great advantage, you would not
act quite as piously as you preach. The one or two drops of the blood of
old John, which are still hidden in your veins, somewhere down in your
boots, would suddenly rush to your heart and inflame it. You would duck
under those revolver muzzles and come at our stomachs in a way that
would keep us moving. We should undoubtedly very soon have your dead
body with which to conduct some sort of brutal and stupid British
triumph; but we should never be able to say that we had made a political
slave of a living Adams.
I have not space here to take you all through the revolution and remind
you of every scene in which your ancestor figured. But I shall finish
what I was saying about Washington when his army was reduced to 3,300
and he was prepared for a grand trek to the Alleghenies. He did not have
to resort to that because General Howe did not press him any further.
For political reasons, which we cannot go into here, Howe preferred that
Washington should raise another army if he could.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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