You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [21]
Though Washington grew into the character and role of the victorious general of an ill-trained and poorly equipped army of colonials during the American Revolution, Dinwiddie had failed to see the untested, untempered boy inside young George Washington. While Washington would later emerge as a military strategist, tactician, and warrior like few others, he had been unable to properly divine a way through his troubled odyssey through the Ohio Valley. Washington had also failed to realize that France’s American fortifications were actually modest defensive structures far removed from Virginian lines, that the human intelligence he had gathered had largely come from questionable sources and suppositions, that the native populace of the Ohio Valley actually cared little for either side, and that France realistically had little time or money to take the prized remote and undeveloped region.
In actuality, young George Washington’s inexperience and untrained eye actually upset the entire Western Hemisphere’s geopolitical landscape. He single-handedly brought about the French and British war for America. This led to the need to permanently station British regiments in the American colonies and, as a result, the tea and stamp taxes to support them. The housing of these regular army units imposed on ordinary citizens and the taxation were the proximate causes for the first colonial movements, which were established only to try to gain for colonials “the rights of all British Citizens and eventually blossomed into the War for Independence, the American Revolution.
In a way things did work out in the long run. The explosive report of an inexperienced youth and the disastrous military expedition it inspired did much to precipitate the events of both the American War for Independence and the French Revolution. But you have to feel how the ambitious and proud young George Washington felt as his disaster became the talk of Virginia. Later he was the hero of a Revolution. Strangely it was a revolution that might never have happened except for the consequences of his own youthful mistakes.
You Lost Your Head
It was the worst of times, yep, the worst of times, and not the best of times at all. That certainly turned out to be the case for the man who made the decisions at the height of the French Revolution. His decisions definitely ensured the worst of endings for him.
ROBESPIERRE’S ELOQUENCE AND FATALLY BAD TIMING
IN BEING WOUNDED
PARIS, 1794
Brian M. Thomsen
The French Revolution was actually a series of revolutions that redefined the governing powers of the French empires in a gradual and violent shift that eventually replaced an absolutely powerful sovereign (as best exemplified by Louis XIV, who was, after a long reign of total monarchical control, long dead before the power shifts began to occur) with a series of temporary governmental bodies, which shifted further and further to the left politically and often based their powers on the blunt force of mob rule.
What actually caused the Revolution(s) is still subject to debate. The common populist myth of French peasants starving after years of famine and oppression, with a tyrannical military force unjustly imprisoning thousands, is at best an exaggeration. The iconographic image of the peasants storming the Bastille, though inspiring, is actually of little consequence pragmatically since the prison itself, at the time, was really incarcerating only a few madmen and a handful of common criminals who were