He had a time machine too?
[quote=“Susanann, post:36, topic:551842”]
Of interest is the fact that Hessians were not mentioned as such in the DOI. This is because at the time it was uncertain where Britain was getting its hired troops. The Hessians might as easily have been Russians but the Empress wanted to get her relatives with smaller German armies some work. (Ahhalt-Zerbst, I think). 18,000 of the ‘Hessians’ were from Hesse-Kassal, the 2nd biggest suppliers being Brunswick (most of whom were in the northern campaigns.)
Hessians in British service were nothing new, there were more than a few Hessians in waving distance from Culloden, with lots more taking up garrison duties to free up British troops.
Oh please. Give me a break.
This is the first time anywhere that I have seen that the revolution was about gun rights.
Of course not. It was about health care.
Gun rights were about the revolution, however.
Well, not everyone could be a gutless, evil traitor turning their backs on the homeland and Monarchy that protected them through God’s will. 
OK, I would have been one of the traitors.
especially when they played “Born to Wild” and “Magic Carpet Ride” live.
Guerilla with a blue coat under my ghillie suit sounds suitable!
To hell with the blood backs!
Well, I woulda gunned up, packed my shit and headed west to the Only Great Lake: Tahoe. Woulda summered on the shore, brewing beer and claiming land, maybe spend the summer in the valley mining the gold that Sutter wouldn’t find for decades later. Today, they place would be lousy with features named after me!
Ah, what a dream!
Like the cairn where the locals buried you after you died of malaria.
I’ve traced my mother’s family back to the 1750’s and they, apparently, were loyalists who high-tailed it to Nova Scotia when they saw the writing on the wall (my great-grandmother moved back in the late 1800s).
In general, I tend to defer to authority so I would probably have encouraged peaceful negotiation with the King – but once war broke out, I’d be doing my part to fight.
I don’t think I actually know enough about it to know who I’d side with, but ‘no taxation without representation’ sounds pretty logical to me, so I’d probably side with the revolutionaries.
Totally depends on am I rich, where do I live, what are the sympathies of my neighbors and how much tar do they have on hand, and many other factors. I like to think I’d have been royalty, in which case family loyalty would come first, unless of course the Americans offered to better deal me (By God’s Grace King of the United States of North America, Marquis of the Mississippi, and Lord Protector of the Florida Keys and various Picturesque New England Lighthouses might have a ring to it).
See, this is the thing. I’m not a traitor at heart, so I really couldn’t have been a patriot. I imagine I would have fled north to Acadia as fast as I could. Maybe been a privateer out of Halifax or something, but more likely just a refugee.
Anyway, I’ve never really had time for the whiny Patriot We-Don’t-Want-To-Pay-For-Our-Own-Protection schtick. So yah, not a Patriot.
PS. Susannan, I think the main objection to what you said was that none of the redcoats were German because the German soldiers didn’t wear red, not because there weren’t lots of German soldiers fighting for the king.
“Goddamn them all! I was told
we’d cruise the seas for American gold!”
If singing was involved I’d be with the patriots so I could join in the harmonies up in “foul fetid fuming foggy filthy Philadelphia”.
Yah, hopefully I would get to keep my legs. 
A much harder question for me as a southerner would be “1861: Which Side Do You Choose?”
Granted if I were alive in 1861 my views on slavery and society would probably be worlds different, but since the voting majority in my homestate (Alabama) is currently and most of my relatives have always been politically and religiously conservative (particularly in the rural areas and I’m from the rural areas) and I’ve never subscribed to that and since then as now there was a not at all insubstantial community that disagreed with the majority I can definitely envision being opposed to slavery as an institution and opposed to the lunacy of
- Belief that a peaceful secession is a possibility
- Belief that a peaceful secession would be a good idea even if it were possible
- Belief that there’s a butterfly’s chance in Antarctica that a war could be won against the better armed/better supplied/industrialized/superior numbers of the United States (counting the Confederate States as a new entity)
On the other hand, could I quite literally take up arms against my friends, neighbors, and family? Or stand idly by while an army invades the southern interior, which in addition to ethical issues has practical ones (to borrow a line from Miss Saigon “There’s a mad dog on the rampage/if you think he’ll change save your breath…”).
Neutrality was an impossibility if you lived in the south: if you were between 18 and 45 you were required to serve in the armed forces or show just cause why you shouldn’t and even then you were required to contribute to the war effort. You could of course leave the south, but then as now relocating to an entirely different part of the country when you don’t have enough money to support you for any length of time is very difficult physically, fiscally, and emotionally and in time of war enough so that it’s hardly even an option. Or, you can cross enemy lines and fight with the Union knowing that every bullet you fire might land in the chest of your friend or relative (odds are your particular bullet won’t of course, but figuratively speaking).
I can totally understand why many southerners who were not gung ho on slavery and thought secession was a stupid idea joined the southern cause. (Robert E. Lee was perhaps the best known of these but there were many others of lesser name; my ancestors served under a colonel [Milton Kirkpatrick] who had been one of the most adamant and vocal of anti secession politicians in 1861 while Jefferson Davis’s brother and wife [who couldn’t stand each other] wrote separately in 1861 that if the North decided to fight then the south was committing suicide.) Anything approaching national or political identity was far more tied in to first your innermost group and then your state and then your region and to a country far down the road.
During the Revolution there seems to have been, ironically, more of a notion of belonging to a whole- albeit a very new notion- than there was 80 years later. Not to say that everybody felt all Americany- it was far more of a “brother against brother” war than the Civil War; during the Civil War most southerners ultimately took the side of the south regardless of their pre-war political leanings and there was relatively little split-up of immediate family members outside of border states and Tennessee (which was more divided than most border states), but in the Revolution there were many close family members and neighbors divided by the war.
There are actually houses in and plantations around Savannah whose ownership changed names on paper several times during the Revolution rebel family members tossed them to the Tory family members tossed them back and forth depending on which side was winning; they might not agree on anything else but they agreed on wanting the family to stay wealthy. George Washington’s best friends and neighbors George and Sally Fairfax, famously moved to England because of their Tory leanings even though both had roots in Virginia for several generations as did some of Thomas Jefferson’s in-laws. There were also oddities like Lachlan McGillivray, a Scot whose clan participated with vigor in every uprising against the English crown yet when he came here as a youth and got stinking rich he became a staunch Tory, though most of his relatives were not. There were also people who started out on one side and ended up on the other than in the Civil War- some of my ancestors lived in a Swiss-German community near Orange County SC that switched its loyalties about two or three times during the wars. It’s a pity the Revolution is so little visited by Hollywood or even in quality historical fiction because in many ways it’s a far more interesting and complex war and its outcome was completely unpredictable to those who lived at the time.
I’d open my home to soldiers and probably be a nurse in some capacity to the wounded. Ply them with whiskey and hold them down for the amputation. Change bandages and help them get well. I’d hide the slaves and pass them on to safe houses. I actually stayed in a house on The Cape that had false walls and rooms to hide the slaves for the underground railroad.
I know slavery happened and it was wrong but us pulling out of Liberia is a bigger sin! Monrovia is a slum and if you are interested in what we did watch “The Travel Guide to Liberia” on Utube. Be prepared to see what we did to the Liberian people for our own gain. We owe them, in some way shape or form for the hell we created. Sorry, off topic but there is a lot of slave history that I was unaware of.
My cousin rented a place in New Hampshire that had a small room under the barn that was entered by about a 6 foot long and 2 foot high tunnel. The owners and previous tenants called it King Tut’s tomb but I wondered if it was an Underground Railroad station.
A pity about the UR conductors is that the ones in the south (and there were quite a few) were almost totally forgotten because even after the war it wasn’t a good idea to announce you’d helped slaves escape. It’s known from historical record that a lot of the conductors down here were slaves themselves who would hollow out tunnels under a barn or make a hidden crawlspace in the top of a chicken coop (where one poor woman actually remained for a couple of years). I know of one case of a white conductor in Georgia who was a slaveowner herself and owned a farm where she kept one of the outbuildings supplied with food and water but was otherwise absentee landlord, which gave her plausible deniability (she could say “I haven’t been to that property in two weeks” if fugitives were found there) and I suspect much of southern conducting was like this: turn a blind eye when your slaves seem to be taking an awful lot of scraps to the chicken coop or ignore that rustling in the bushes past the barn because to actively assist without any kind of buffer is to invite a hanging or worse. A surprising number of slaveowners were abolitionists (Mary Todd Lincoln’s family being among them).
I’d have been a patriot. I’m a little too decrepit to make a good soldier, but I understand that Washington had a lot of spies, and considering the fact that Nathan Hale is the only one we hear about getting caught, it seems like a good way to go.