Revolutionary War I Am so

Revolutionary War

I am so tired of the feuding between the rebel Colonists and the King's soldiers! Must we all be forced to choose a side? There stands the soldier of my King, head of my country and the one to whom I have owed allegiance since the day of my birth. But at the other side stand the people I have known since that birth. There stands the butcher Mr. Cooper, a good man with a good wife. I am apprenticed with his son; he is teaching me a good trade and I will have a happy life thanks to his guidance. And yet this man, whom I know to be good and honest, is ready to train his gun on the King's soldiers! How can this be?

A understand why colonists are so angry. My family was in Boston visiting my mother's family in March of 1770 when British soldiers fired on townspeople. Then there was that incident in 1865 when the governor's coach was burned until it was nothing but a pile of ashes and cinder (Kreamer, PAGE). No wonder the British think the colonists are populated with nothing but a bunch of rabble!

The Loyalist press says that the colonists who have formed militias are men of no account, men from the very lowest classes and little more than hooligans (Stanley, PAGE). and, I used to believe that. The incident in 1770 was absolutely awful, but it was pretty clear that some of the colonists, at least, were just spoiling for a reason to take out after the British soldiers (Author not given, PAGE). But these militiamen include men like Mr. Cooper. There's old Calvin Pike, too. He must be fifty. He's a farmer. He owns land, and he works hard. These people are not riff-raff. We would have no town without them, and they're reasonable people.

People whisper about the "Sons of Liberty," a secret organization working to free the colonies from Great Britain. Clearly this is treason, but these are good men also. Samuel Adams is known for shooting off his mouth at all things related to Great Britain (Kreamer, PAGE), and many expect that he is just as willing to shoot something more deadly at the King's soldiers, but he is also known to be a thoughtful and intelligent man, and his arguments make sense. Still, it is said that he was behind that incident in 1773 where people everyone knows to be discontented colonists dumped a shipload of tea into the Boston harbor rather than pay a hated tax on it (Kreamer, PAGE). Well, we all hate taxes, don't we? They raise the cost of everything, but how is England to protect us if we don't provide them with money to help pay for their army?

I don't know what to think of this. One thing I am certain of, is that what we really have here are two armies facing each other. They've been involved for skirmishes for years, and it seems as if all of them want a fight if the Boston Massacre is any example. I have always been loyal to the King, but is this how a king treats his subjects, by drawing weapons on them on a hillside? The colonists did not start this fight; they are here in response to the threat.

Every real man wants to defend his homeland from threat, in my opinion. Until today I thought of my homeland as Great Britain, and I saw my allegiance to King George. But there are King George's representatives ready to aim their muskets at Mr. Cooper, and old Mr. Pike, and our only doctor, and a lot of other good people. Look there, I see Matthew Cooper, my fellow apprentice and best friend. It seems he has made up his mind.

I am of two minds about the Stamp Acts. On the one hand, the British did send soldiers to protect us and fight for us when the French threatened (Kreamer, PAGE). There is no doubt about that. But that war is long over, and yet here we sit, paying high taxes on products that are already expensive due to their being shipped from England. We are barred from buying them anywhere else, even though we might get some things much cheaper. They don't want us to make goods for ourselves more cheaply, and we have to buy these highly taxed items instead.