Badass of the Week:

Born in 1695, just 75 years after the first Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, the stone-cold hardass who would be made a state hero of Massachusetts was first unleashed on colonial America in the 1740s while serving as a Captain in His Majesty’s Dragoons – a badass unit of elite British cavalrymen much-feared across the globe for their ability to impale people on lance-points and then pump their already-dead bodies full of gigantic pistol ammunition that more closely resembled baseballs than the sort of rounds you see packed into Beretta magazines these days. Fighting the French in Canada during the War of Austrian Succession (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as King George’s War because seriously WTF did colonial Americans care about Austrian succession), Whittemore was part of the British contingent that assaulted the frozen shores of Nova Scotia and beat the shit out of the French at their stronghold of Louisbourg in 1745. The 50 year-old cavalry officer went into battle galloping at the head of a company of rifle-toting horsemen, and emerged from the shouldering flames of a thoroughly ass-humped Louisbourg holding a bitchin’ ornate longsword he had wrenched from the lifeless hands of a French officer who had, in Whittemore’s words, “died suddenly”. The French would eventually manage to snake Louisbourg back from the Brits, so thirteen years later, during the Seven Years’ War (a conflict that was known here in the colonies as the French and Indian War because WTF we were fighting the French and the Indians, and also because it lasted nine years instead of seven), Whittemore had to return to his old stomping grounds of Louisburg and ruthlessly beat it into submission once again. Serving under the able command fellow badass British commander James Wolfe, a man who earned his reputation by commanding a line of riflemen who held their lines against a frothing-at-the-mouth horde of psychotic, sword-swinging William Wallace motherfuckers in Scotland (this is a story I intend to tell at a later date), Whittemore once again pummeled the French retarded and stole all of their shit he could get his hands on. He served valiantly during the Second Siege of Louisbourg, pounding the poor city into rubble a second time in an epic bloodbath would mark the beginning of the end for France’s Atlantic colonies – Quebec would fall shortly thereafter, and the French would be chased out of Canada forever. So you can thank Whittemore for that, if you are inclined to do so.

Beating Frenchmen down with a cavalry saber at the age of 64 is pretty cool and all, but Whittemore still wasn’t done doing awesome shit in the name of King George the Third and His Loyal Colonies. Four years after busting up the French for the second time in two decades he led troops against Chief Pontiac in the bloody Indian Wars that raged across the Great Lakes region. Never one to back down from an up-close-and-personal fistfight, it was during a particularly nasty bout of hand-to-hand combat he came into possession of another totally sweet war trophy – an awesome pair of matched dueling pistols he had taken from the body of a warrior he’d just finished bayoneting or sabering or whatever.

After serving in three American wars before America was even a country, Whittemore decided the colonies were pretty damn radical, so he settled down in Massachusetts, married two different women (though not at the same time), had eight kids, and built a house out of the carcasses of bears he’d killed and mutilated with his own two hands. Or something like that.

Now, all of this shit is pretty god damned impressive, but interestingly none of it is actually what Samuel Whittemore is best known for. No, his distinction as a national hero instead comes from a fateful day in mid-April 1775, when the British colonies in the New World decided they weren’t going to take any more of King George’s bullshit and decided to get their American Revolution on. And you can be pretty damn sure that if there were asses to be kicked, Whittemore was going to be one of the men doing the kicking.

So one day a bunch of colonial malcontents got together, formed a battle line, and opened fire on a bunch of redcoats that were pissing them off with their silly Stamp Acts and whatnot. The Brits managed to beat back this militia force at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, but when they heard that a larger force of angry, rifle-toting colonials was headed their way, the English officers decided to march back to their headquarters and regroup. Along the way, they were hassled relentlessly by American militiamen with rifles and angry insults, though no group harassed them more ferociously than Captain Sam Whittemore. When the Redcoats went marching back through his hometown of Menotomy, this guy decided that he wasn’t going to let his advanced age stop him from doing some crazy shit and taking on an entire British army himself. The 80 year old Whittemore grabbed his rifle and ran outside:

Whittemore, by himself, with no backup, positioned himself behind a stone wall, waited in ambush, and then single-handedly engaged the entire British 47th Regiment of Foot with nothing more than his musket and the pure liquid anger coursing through his veins. His ambush had been successful – by this time this guy popped up like a decrepitly old rifle-toting jack-in-the-box, the British troops were pretty much on top of him. He fired off his musket at point-blank range, busting the nearest guy so hard it nearly blew his red coat into the next dimension.

Now, when you’re using a firearm that takes 20 seconds to reload, it’s kind of hard to go all Leonard Funk on a platoon of enemy infantry, but damn it if Whittemore wasn’t going to try. With a company of Brits bearing down in him, he quick-drew his twin flintlock pistols and popped a couple of locks on them (caps hadn’t been invented yet, though I think the analogy still works pretty fucking well), busting another two Limeys a matching set of new assholes. Then he unsheathed the ornate French sword, and this 80-year-old madman stood his ground in hand-to-hand against a couple dozen trained soldiers, each of which was probably a quarter of his age.

…[I]t didn’t work out so well. Whittemore was shot through the face by a 69-caliber bullet, knocked down, and bayonetted 13 times by motherfuckers. I’d like to imagine he wounded a couple more Englishmen who slipped or choked on his blood, though history only seems to credit him with three kills on three shots fired. The Brits, convinced that this man was sufficiently beat to shit, left him for dead kept on their death march back to base, harassed the entire way by Whittemore’s fellow militiamen.

Amazingly, however, Samuel Whittemore didn’t die. When his friends rushed out from their homes to check on his body, they found the half-dead, ultra-bloody octogenarian still trying to reload his weapon and seek vengeance. The dude actually survived the entire war, finally dying in 1793 at the age of 98 from extreme old age and awesomeness. A 2005 act of the Massachusetts legislature declared him an official state hero, and today he has one of the most badass historical markers of all time.

“Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
—Captain John Parker.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Stand your ground; don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” — Captain John Parker.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Washington Post:

Philip Mead was online late one night in May, looking for possible artifacts from the American Revolution, when a painting up for auction caught his eye and got his heart racing.

The chief historian at the American Revolution Museum had spied an unsigned watercolor from 1782. It was a panorama of an army encampment, and to his expert eye seemed to feature the only known wartime depiction of the tent George Washington used as his command center during the Revolutionary War.

The tent is the marquee exhibit at the museum, which opened in April. And, thanks to Mead’s sharp eye, the museum now owns the painting that will anchor an exhibition next year.

Mead said the discovery seemed almost “too good to be true.”

“I’ve had this level of excitement only a handful of times in my 30 years of looking for this stuff,” Mead said.

When Mead saw the painting, he immediately emailed the image to Scott Stephenson, the museum’s vice president of collections, exhibitions and programming.

“My heart leapt into my throat when I realized what this painting was,” Stephenson said.

They had to quickly line up donors to bid on the piece, which was going up for auction just days after they spotted it. They were concerned maybe they weren’t the only people to spot the rare work, and they weren’t 100 percent sure the painting was exactly what they had hoped.

“Our motto is you must kiss every frog in case it is a prince,” Stephenson said.

In this case, it was a prince.

With only one other bidder, they landed the painting easily, for $12,000. Once in hand, the museum’s curatorial team was able to conclude the painting shows the Continental Army’s fall encampment at Verplanck’s Point, New York, and was created by Pierre L’Enfant, the French-born engineer best known for laying out the nation’s capital.

Before he created the blueprint for Washington, D.C., L’Enfant served in the Continental Army. He was wounded at the Siege of Savannah, taken prisoner at the surrender of Charleston and upon his release went back to serve George Washington for the remainder of the war.

The painting depicts hundreds of military tents arrayed across a rolling Hudson Valley landscape. Perched on a hilltop rising about the scene on the painting’s left side is Washington’s field headquarters, including the telltale tent.

RTWT

Asbury Park Press:

It’s a hexagonal piece of lead, maybe the size of a fingertip. Canister shot, it was called, and the Continental Army used it to shred British lines at the Battle of Monmouth in June of 1778.

When his team of volunteer archaeologists found this and other pieces of ordnance in the ground at Monmouth Battlefield State Park last summer, Dan Sivilich suspected they were not your typical artifacts.

“Two appeared to have fabric impressions on them which suggested they might have hit a uniform,” Sivilich said.

He sent them to PaleoResarch Inc. in Colorado for testing. Nine months later his hunch was proven correct — and then some. One of the pieces tested positive for human blood protein.

“In other words, it hit a soldier,” Sivilich said. “This is the only piece of Revolutionary War canister shot ever found that’s been positively tested for human blood.”

That’s not all. Based on where they were discovered, Sivilich believes the pieces probably were fired by Proctor’s Pennsylvania artillery. One of its cannon is associated with the legendary heroine Molly Pitcher, whose real name likely was Mary Hays.

“It could have been a round that Molly Pitcher handled,” Sivilich said. “We can’t say for sure, but it makes for interesting speculation.”

RTWT

Extremists

Daily Caller reports that the US Defense Department recently identified another unsavory group of dangerous extremists: our founding fathers.

A Department of Defense teaching guide meant to fight extremism advises students that rather than “dressing in sheets” modern-day radicals “will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place,” and describes 18th-century American patriots seeking freedom from the British as belonging to “extremist ideologies.”

The guide comes from documents obtained by Judicial Watch and is authored by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, a DoD-funded diversity training center.

Under a section titled “extremist ideologies,” the document states, “In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

Lemuel Cook (September 10, 1759 – May 20, 1866)

Lemuel Cook was born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, enlisted in Sheldon’s Horse, the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons, fought in Westchester County, at the Battle of Brandywine, in the Virginia Campaign, and was present at Cornwallis’s surrender. He received a discharge, with George Washington’s signature, in 1784. He lived long enough to survive the Civil War and was one of seven Revolutionary War veterans who survived long enough to be photographed.

He was profiled and some of his recollections were published here.

William Ranney, Battle of Cowpens, 1845, oil, South Carolina State House

Colonel William Washington’s servant, “a waiter, too small to wield a sword,” saved his master’s life by wounding a British officer about to cut him down.

On this day in history, my neighbor, Brigadier-General Daniel Morgan with 800 men gave Colonel Banstre Tarleton’s Legion, 1100 men, what Morgan described in a post-battle letter as “a devil of a licking” at Cowpens, South Carolina, January 17, 1781.

They have a statue of Morgan over in Winchester, whose base bears the motto: “Fought everywhere, defeated nowhere.”

The regimental flag of the Continental Army 2nd Light Dragoons, also known as Sheldon’s Horse, captured at the Battle of Pound Ridge, July 2, 1779.

One of the brighter flames in Hell undoubtedly surrounds the spirit of the late Banastre Tarleton (1754-1833), brave but merciless commander of the Loyalist British Legion during the American Revolution.

Tarleton’s spirit is doubtless also feeling a trifle vexed these days, knowing that the depredations of numerous Labour Governments caused his descendant last year to sell his war trophies at Sotheby’s.

The battle flag of Connecticut cavalry regiment Colonel Elisha Sheldon’s Continental Light Dragoons (pictured above), captured by Tarleton at the Battle of Pound Ridge, July 2, 1779, estimated to change hands for $1.5 to $3.5 million dollars, sold for $12.36 million dollars.

The three regimental and divisional flags of the Third Virginia Detachment, commanded by Abraham Buford, captured May 29, 1780 at the Waxhaw Massacre, in which Tarleton’s Legion slaughtered Americans after they had surrendered, estimated at $2.5 to $6.5 million dollars, possibly had their price depressed by the circumstances surrounding their capture, and sold below the high estimate at $5.056 million dollars.

Tarleton’s trophies, recaptured by the American dollars of an anonymous purchaser, will be displayed at Williamsburg, Virginia’s Dewitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, at an exhibition titled Captured Colors: Four Battleflags of the American Revolution starting today through January 9, 2009.

Rare Revolutionary War battle flags returning to U.S.

Flags of our forefathers with 2:21 video

Mencius Moldbug had too much coffee again this morning, and has produced another of his incredibly lengthy, rambling and discursive, yet very clever postings, ranging happily over the intellectual landscape of libertarian theory and the history of the American Revolution this time.

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.