Thursday, August 23, 2007

Today In History: Quick on the uptake.

On August 23rd, 1775, noticing that we'd been shooting up his troops for some three months, King George III declared the American colonies to be in a state of open rebellion.

Boy, nothing slipped past him!
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4 comments:

Cybrludite said...

To be fair, news didn't exactly travel at the speed of light back then. I'm sure that part of the delay was the word from the troops that they were, indeed, being shot up having to cross the Atlantic in a big wooden sieve equiped with sails... :-p

8:28 AM, August 23, 2007
Anonymous said...

Um... Woon't that be more like five months (Concord & Lexington happening on April 19)?

Just sayin' 's all.

M

9:23 AM, August 23, 2007
Anonymous said...

There's a lot to be said for him. He was a fan of Jethro Tull.

The two greatest agricultural experimenters of the age were probably George Washington and George the Third. Had they met, they'd have hit it off.

1:18 PM, August 23, 2007
Anonymous said...

cybrludite is partly right, but I thought that the faster ships of the time could cross the Atlantic in under two months, and this was four months after the Massachusetts colonists shot the heck out of the troops coming back from a gun-confiscating mission in Concord. Perhaps the king had to write back, "Isn't it a bit late for April Fools" and wait for a reply...

Although I think it's more likely that the king's court and the Prime Minister tried to shrug that off as an isolated incident. But then the next news packet concerned the battle of Bunker's Hill, where a considerably larger colonial force didn't just snipe at a detachment returning from a successful mission, but actually tried to hold their ground against an entire regiment. That was one thing that made it serious; the other was that the ultimate British victory came after hard fighting and the sort of casualty list that makes a General realize that he can't keep on winning this way forever.

markm

3:47 PM, August 23, 2007

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