Washington Assumes Command II

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Lead: Though he had a certain magisterial demeanor, George Washington knew he was the servant of civilian rule.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: From the beginning, the American Republic vested ultimate power in the hands of people in the person of their elected representatives. Though the nation admired military leaders and has often elected them to power, republican sentiment has always distrusted the man on horseback and insisted that in peace and in war power rests with civilians. In many ways this attitude, if not originating with George Washington, was certainly re-enforced by his respectful approach to his civilian masters and his willingness to give up power, twice in fact.

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Washington Assumes Command I

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Lead: When he returned home in 1783, he was the most famous man in the world. It all started eight years before.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In June 1775, the Continental Congress, itself willing to start a war but not yet to declare American independence, appointed George Washington of Virginia its military commander and sent him off to Boston to confront 10,000 British troops occupying the port. In the course of nine months he would meet the men with whom he would prosecute America’s longest-declared war, he would experiment with those strategic martial impulses that for good and for ill sustained his Army and the country through to the end, and would begin the process of maturation that would shape him into the nation’s most consequential founder.

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James Caldwell: The Soldier’s Parson

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Lead: When his troops ran out of wadding for their weapons, James Caldwell found a musical substitute.

Intro.: "A Moment in Time" with Dan Roberts

Content: At the time of the Revolution much leadership on the side of independence came from clergymen. In the middle colonies many Presbyterian pastors were in the vanguard of the Patriot cause. One of them was James Caldwell. Virginia born and Princeton educated Pastor Caldwell was chaplain of the 3rd N.J. Regiment. His enthusiasm for the Patriot cause earned him the love of his troops, but much resentment as well. Both his home and church at Elizabethtown, N.J. were burned by Tories raiding parties.

 

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American Revolution: The Incompetence of King George III III

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Lead: In the 1700s the United States broke from England. No colony in history had done that before. This series examines America’s Revolution.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: When he was a child, the parents of King George III doted on George’s brother, Edward. This experience created a shy, insecure prince with a rather inflexible personality who had little respect for the opinions of others when they disagreed with his own. His tutor and guide after the age of 17 was John Stuart, Earl of Bute, advisor to George’s mother. Bute suffered the same personal rigidity and reinforced the future king’s already deficient understanding of how people operate, too often getting personal strength confused with intransigence or stubbornness.

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American Revolution: The Incompetence of King George III II

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Lead: In the 1700s the United States broke from England. No colony in history had done that before. This series examines America’s Revolution.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: In August 1765, at the height of the Stamp Act crisis, the citizens of Boston waked to a revolting, but all-too-familiar spectacle. Hanging in effigy was Andrew Oliver, appointed by the Crown to collect the hated Stamp Tax. Hanging beside his effigial corpse was a boot out of which was crawling a representation of the devil. This boot was a play on the name of and represented John Stuart, Scottish Earl of Bute, seen as an evil enemy of colonial rights and liberties, in large measure because of what the patriots considered his perverse influence over the young King George.

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American Revolution: The Incompetence of King George III I

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Lead: In the 1700s the United States broke from England. No colony in history had done that before. This series examines America’s Revolution.Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: He was the first monarch of his kin to be born in England – Norfolk House, London in 1738 – and the first Hanoverian monarch to speak English. The prince who would become King George III was raised in obscurity by parents who clearly doted on his brother Edward. When he managed to get a word in edge-wise during family conversations he was too often admonished, “Do hold your tongue, George: don’t talk like a fool.” Therefore, the young man who would grow up to command and lose an empire developed into a quiet, shy, modest introvert who loved the British Constitution but only too slowly grew effectively to learn his role as a sovereign in a time of growing crisis.

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Lexington, Massachusetts, 1775 II

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Lead: Having killed Minutemen on the Lexington, Massachusetts green in April, 1775, British regulars moved off to Concord.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: The British soldiers were sent by Governor Gage to capture provincial arms and the leaders of the Massachusetts rebellion, John Hancock and Sam Adams. In the end they got neither, but like a man sticking his hand into a hornets’ nest they stirred up a Revolution.

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Lexington, Massachusetts, 1775 I

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Lead: A brief skirmish between British Regulars and colonial militia in Lexington, Massachusetts in April 1775 set off a revolution.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Thomas Gage, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts in the spring of 1775, liked Americans, but it seemed as though the sentiment was not mutual, at least among a certain number of his colonial charges. Led by Samuel Adams and John Hancock, some of the provincials were in thinly disguised rebellion. They had tossed together a Provincial Congress and had begun to assemble war materiel in the tiny village of Concord westward, 21 miles up the Boston Neck. Gage, under pressure from London, had his eyes on those arms and the colonial leaders, to seize the weapons and arrest Hancock and Adams.

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