This Blogger posits that 1776 is more important than 1619 to the American Origin Story, because there was a manifested Divine Intervention in 1776, and it was not the Declaration of Independence; it was the ‘DIVINE FOG.”
The real debate should be cosmological, why was God on the side of the Americans during the Revolutionary War? Why was God on the side of slave holding, bloody white males, reeking of toxic patriarchy?
The answer to that question is speculation above this Blogger's pay grade.
How do we know that God was on the side of toxic American patriarchs?
The DIVINE FOG.
George Washington was a mediocre General at best, not the worst American General ever, that dubious honor is shared by Mark Clark, our General in Italy during World War II, and Ambrose Burnside, the Butcher of Fredericksburg, during the Civil War. For you Southern boys, this Blogger includes John Bell Hood.
Washington is a notch above them. He is brave, understands the rudiments, but he is not top tier like Alexander, Caesar, Wellington or Cromwell. He is mediocre. He has two great qualities; he endures, and he has a fantastic ability to surround himself with brilliant fighting men, Benedict Arnold, Nathanael Greene, Daniel Morgan of the Cowpens, Henry Knox, Mad Anthony Wayne, and Alexander Hamilton. He is a bad general who surrounds himself with brilliant minds.
Washington won a symbolic victory over fat German mercenaries at Trenton, picked up a win at Yorktown,as a scrap from Greene's table. Think of his Yorktown victory like this-Washington is a Euro field goal kicker coming in at the last second to win a Super Bowl after Greene had quarterbacked the team to the one-yard line.
This Blog will make short shift of Washington's August, 1776 Long Island campaign . It stunk. The British Commander, Lord Viscount William Howe exposed him.
The Battle of Brooklyn was fought in what is now Prospect Park, the same park in which this Blogger played touch football with his brother.
Howe forced Washington to retreat to the East River." Washington soon realized that he had placed his forces in a trap by splitting his troops between Manhattan and Long Island, as the waterways were controlled by British warships. The British Navy could cut off Washington's forces by moving their ships from the New Jersey Shore to the East River. "
So if you are an American Rebel,Continental Soldier; you're a soldier in a beaten, defeated army. You are in retreat; your morale is low because your Commander sucks as a General.
As you march in retreat, you are cursing yourself for making the wrong choice, fighting with the Patriots. You are thinking to yourself, maybe that Loyalist your wife flirts with, will sign a statement that the Rebels impressed you into service rather than you joining the Revolution voluntarily.
The British Army is closing in on you, and if they catch you, your side will lose again for they are better in discipline, arms and leadership. It is raining. You have confirmed the rumors that Hessian mercenaries in the service of the British gave no quarter to American soldiers who surrendered after the battle. They shot surrendering Americans on the spot, summarily. Your future consists of this; the British will either kill you in battle, or kill you after you surrender, or hang you as a rebel, or ship you to Jamaica to work on the sugar cane plantation til you die of fever. Now your Loser Generals want you to cross the East River under the guns of the Royal Navy; the greatest Navy in the world, with the greatest gunners in the world, known for their accuracy. You can't swim, and you did not sign up to be killed like a drowning rat, you want to die on land.
It is raining, and you are only thinking about two things, how to keep your powder dry and if King George III will grant an amnesty to the privates of the rebellion. You will turncoat when the time comes and point out your traitorous officers in exchange for amnesty.
"At this juncture, unusual weather conditions intervened. Unfavorable northeast winds prevented the British from moving their ships up New York Bay to encircle the American position. This mile wide channel was Washington's only possible path of retreat."
Fluke?
John Glover was a Massachusetts fisherman by trade. He had formed a Massachusetts regiment, the MARBLEHEAD REGIMENT, comprised of fishermen, mainly from Marblehead. His men were expert boaters, and twice Washington would call on them for their expertise, once when he crossed the Delaware in December, 1776 and now.
The first thing Glover did was commandeer everything which floated in Manhattan; they set out from Lower Manhattan, a Dunkirk fleet, yachts, barges, canoes,yawls. They were off to Brooklyn, to save the Army of the Revolution, to save 9,000 men. If Glover failed.... well, within sixty days of the Declaration of Independence, Howe would have destroyed the Revolution,a sixty day revolution.
Right then, if Howe had attacked it was over, over. In fact, Howe had won the war until Divine Intervention, "... the exodus began at 9 PM. ... After an hour of calmness a gentle southwesterly breeze erupted,which allowed the Marblehead men to hoist sails, increasing the rate of transport by four-fold. By this time the sky had cleared and the moon was shinning brightly."
"All night long the army retreated across the East River, boatload by boatload, aided by darkness and the deception which Washington ordered: leave campfires burning to give the appearance of our troops remaining in place. But with daylight, the deception would be exposed! And the river was open to British ships."
"When first light appeared, the evacuation of 9,000 American troops was far from complete, the oarsmen needed at least three more hours. The soldiers occupying the front line trenches and huddled along the beach, worried that they would be spotted or left behind."
Thousands of soldiers, including Washington, his artillery and supplies were still trapped on the Brooklyn side of the river. And the sun was rising, and with it the End of the Revolution.
Then it happened; that FOG which was beyond fluke, beyond luck and beyond nature. That Fog who made everyone who saw it a Believer; that FOG which leeched atheism out of the American Revolution.
" Then, rising out of the wet ground and off the East River came a dense fog, which covered the entire river. When the sun rose the miraculous fog did not lift!"
THE FOG
" As darkness gave way to early morning light, many of Washington’s men were still on Long Island. They were running out of time! "But again, ‘the elements’ interceded, this time in the form of pea-soup fog. It was called
‘a peculiar providential occurrence,’
‘manifestly providential,’
‘very favorable to the design,’
‘an unusual fog,’
‘a friendly fog,’
‘an American fog."
On the New York side of the river there was no fog; more surprising than that, from Manhattan, right across the river, they could not even SEE the fog.
They could not see the FOG, a fog so dense in Brooklyn that the American soldiers had to put their hands on the men in front of them to guide their way.
The sun was bright and shining over everywhere except that one place, the one place where the American Army was evacuating."The retreat took thirteen hours,... a thick fog ... concealed from the British the operations of the Americans, while at New York the atmosphere was perfectly clear. The fog disappeared about half an hour after the American rear-guard had left the Island."
" The entire Army was extracted, except for the heaviest caliber canon. Just as the last boat pulled into the channel with General Washington aboard, the fog began to lift and dissipate. 9000 men had been saved from certain capture or destruction, and the American cause preserved."
THE AMERICANS DID NOT LOSE A MAN.
The British could not explain to themselves, nor to the world why they did not see or hear the Americans,". ... At daybreak, indeed, the Americans had been remarkably favored by the sudden rise of a fog which covered the East River, but during the night the moon had shone brightly, and one can only wonder that the multitudinous plash of oars and the unavoidable murmur of nine thousand men embarking, with their heavy guns and stores, would not have attracted the attention of some wakeful sentinel, either on shore or on the fleet. A storming party of British, at the right moment, would at least have disturbed the proceedings. So rare a chance of ending the war at a blow was never again to be offered to the British commanders."
Makes you wonder, how could not one sentry not hear NINE THOUSAND MEN MOVING?
The British swore in official reports and private diaries that they DID NOT hear the movement of an Army 100 yards away.
Odd circumstance?
".....The entire maneuver was completed by 7:00 a.m. the next morning, having taken 13 hours to ferry 9,000 men, their horses and their equipment across the East River.
"And in less than an hour after, the fog having dispersed, the enemy was visible on the shore we had left" (McCullough, p. 191)
" The "heavens" assisted the American cause. The entire army escaped without a single loss of life. When the British attacked that morning, the first redcoats to reach the river saw only the fog and heard only the oars of boats taking the last soldiers across. By 7 a.m. Washington and his army were safe in New York with their horses, field artillery, baggage and equipment. It was a miracle on the order of the Hebrews, pursued by Pharoah's army, crossing the Red Sea."
So if the reader ever wonders why the soldiers and officers of the American Army are so religious, understand; it is THE FOG. The American Army owes everything to the DIVINE FOG. It should not have happened, could not have happened...yet it happened. Every secularist in the American Army was converted by THE FOG.
Used up, Glover retired from the army in 1782 in poor health. He failed to secure a job with the U.S. federal government. Another American hero tossed away.
But he had seen THE FOG.
SIDEBAR
Interview with Historian David McCullough
"WALLACE: There's a fog bank that covers him during his retreat.
As you look back over the sweep of history -- I guess this is a personal question -- do you feel divine intervention was on the side of the revolution?
MCCULLOUGH: Well, you can call it divine intervention, you can call it Providence, you can call it chance, you can call it circumstance. You call it the roll of the dice? In any event, whatever it's called,it was out of anyone's control, and absolutely it was the decisive element again and again.Now, it wasn't always the decisive element all alone. They couldn't have made that escape across the East River, when a providential fog bank came in, or the river suddenly got calm -- the wind dropped, it was like the, you know, parting of the waters of the Red Sea. They got calm, and that enabled them to escape.
But they couldn't have escaped without the skill of John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners, who negotiated that exodus of 9,000 men, all their equipment, cannons, horses, everything, across the East River, in the dark, at night, no running lights, and didn't lose a single man. It was brilliant. Incredibly, yet again, circumstance-fate, luck, Providence, the hand of God, as would be said so often-intervened."
SIDEBAR II
"Major Benjamin Tallmadge of the Rebel Army was an eyewitness, "As the eastern sky began to lighten from black to purple, streaks of red and orange--just as the light began to rise, every American eye was anxiously on the eastern horizon . . . Just as the light rose, a dense fog rose out of the earth. I recall this peculiar intervention of divine providence perfectly well, and so dense was the atmosphere that I could scarcely discern a man six yards distant. The fog hung like a blanket upon the area of the British lines, the American lines, the Brooklyn shore, and a corridor of fog across the eastern river to the tip of Manhattan. We tarried until late morning . . ." Under the cover of the fog, the remaining soldiers were rowed to safety. And as Major Tallmadge recalls, "The fog rose at precisely the moment the last boatload of American soldiers left the Brooklyn shore."
SIDEBAR III
" American soldiers involved in this incident viewed these most unlikely of events as providential. Indeed, so did the British, some of whom even wrote in their diaries, "The hand of God is against us."
Washington leaving Brooklyn in a DIVINE FOG
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