John Adams emerges as an indispensable American who nominated George Washington, signed the Declaration of Independence, and helped draft the Treaty of Paris to secure U.S. independence. The narrative details the British Empire's fiscal ruin, the pivotal Franco-American alliance, and the decisive Battle of the Virginia Capes that trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown. Honoring Major Scott Smiley and reflecting on Continental Army hardships, the discussion asserts that rights are God-given responsibilities rather than political constructs, laying a moral foundation for American liberty despite the later necessity of civil war to end slavery. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The Indispensable American00:04:39
In tonight's episode of America's Mayor Live, we're going to continue playing the White House series celebrating the 250th anniversary.
Shout out to President Trump and his White House for making this series.
I've been, folks I've worked with over the years, some of them I consider friends Pat Adams, Kaylin Dorr, Sonny Nelson, Kush Desai, Anna Kelly Allison.
In order to form a more American community.
Be an indispensable American, too.
Though never a soldier, Adams fought for America's freedom in our nation's most important chapter.
Few Americans in history have a political and diplomatic resume like Adams.
Here's a list of some of the positions he held in public life Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress, including real accomplishments and crucial battles fought and won for his country.
Though Adams was impatient and viewed as too tactless for legislative life, He was a ferocious behind the scenes operator and ended up playing a big part in the most momentous decisions in our nation's fight for independence and beyond.
His decision to nominate George Washington as Commander in Chief of the Colonial Armies was as consequential an act as any he would perform.
Adams first met Washington while the two served as delegates to the First Continental Congress.
He was impressed with Washington's military experience and Washington's demeanor.
And he knew that to unify the colonies, he would need to choose someone to lead the Continental Army that was not a Yankee.
Virginia was not just the richest colony, but the largest.
And as David McCullough noted in his biography of Adams, the very proud Virginians felt they had a right to lead.
In the Second Continental Congress, no delegate fought harder than Adams behind closed doors and on the House floor for the colonies to not merely sever ties with Great Britain.
But declare independence outright.
In May of 1770, and 55 others put their name to paper and pledged to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, Adams penned these words to his bride Abigail about how that day should be remembered.
It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.
It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shoes, games, sports, guns, bells.
Bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other, from in America and independence thereafter.
Adams wrote of his efforts later in his life If this had been the only action of my life, it would have been well spent.
And there were his efforts, along with John Jay and Benjamin Franklin, on the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War.
The Treaty of Paris established the United States as an independent nation and doubled the size of America.
Lest we forget, Adams served as the second president of the United States and managed to whom?
Adams was not born to wealth.
His father made his living as a farmer and shoemaker in the quiet village of 2,000 people called Braintree, Massachusetts.
Baptized in the church where his father served as a deacon, Adams learned from him the necessity and importance of hard work, good habits, and trustworthiness.
Adams wrote these words about his father.
After he died, a man of strict piety and great integrity, much esteemed and beloved wherever he was known, which was not far, his sphere of life being not extensive.
The starring lawyers did back then.
He worked by Deus Giles, who were on full display, as he described how the mob pelted the British soul voting Algernon Sidney, the English political theorist who wrote, But as time passed, his defense of the reign was ambition to be useful.
At great personal risk to his family, health, and wealth, Adam served his country like few others have before or after.
What more could Adams have done to earn the honorific Indispensable American?
Navy Defies Empire00:13:01
It's a question worth asking and answering as we approach our nation's 250th birthday celebration.
They slammed shut.
This is no accident.
This symbolic the king had arrived in his grand gold state coach drawn by eight horses and festooned with gilded carvings, lions to signify national strength, cherubs to signify divine right, and four gleaming figures of Triton, the Greek sea god to proclaim Britain's naval supremacy.
The monarchy's power was often memorialized in symbols, and yet, beneath the pomp and circumstance, The edifice of imperial majesty crumbled.
The late British Empire, overextended and over centralized, suffered under the pressures of factionalism and fiscal ruin.
The national debt had nearly doubled by 1763, and interest payments alone devoured over half of the annual budget.
Britain's incoherent colonial policies, the sugar interest battling the tea interest, parliament in the hands of the squirearchy, Had degenerated in constitutional history, found their earliest expressions in 1215 with the adoption of Magna Carta.
This lineage of liberties had been reinforced in the Petition of Rights in 1628 and the English Bill of Rights of 1689.
The colonists, as proud Englishmen, were humbly requesting the same protections that they and their forebears had once enjoyed.
Instead, for more than a decade, They endured a litany of humiliations and betrayals, taxes imposed without representation, trade restricted by decree, soldiers quartered in civilian homes, and representative assemblies dissolved by royal order.
What began as a dispute over a three pence per pound tax on tea had matured into a fundamental contest over the nature of political authority.
Whereas the British monarchy asserted the alienable rights, it declared that liberty is not dispensed at the mercy of the state, rather, it is given by God.
The English Civil War of the 1640s had already tested the limits of royal power, culminating in parliamentary independence.
Now, over a century hence, the symbolic scenes at Westminster the knocking of Black Rod, the slamming of the Commons' doors, the King's florid address were the mere remnants.
Of a once mighty empire.
The very ritual of barring Black Rod, once an assertion of defiance, echoed hollowly.
Across the Atlantic, a much deeper form of defiance had taken root.
The Declaration is a promise.
More than that, it is a compass, pointing always toward the dignity of the human soul and the solemn duty of free citizens to guard against the rise of tyranny no matter.
Attempts to forcibly suppress this, this yearning, would only deepen the conflict.
Upon learning of the Declaration of Independence, Burke was sick at heart, convinced that the moment for reconciliation had passed and that the empire's map and its future would be irrevocably altered.
In the American insurrectionists, King George faced an existential challenge to the very institution of his kingship.
And the empire over which he reigned.
Upon his ascension to the throne in 1760 at the young age of 22, the king famously proclaimed, Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Britain.
The colonies were part of that glory, extensions of himself as king, but by 1776, that identity was being reshaped by forces greater than him.
One year prior to the signing of the Declaration, it was already becoming clear that the old world.
Was giving way to the new.
And so, standing before the House of Lords in October 1775, the King had declared The rebellious war now levied is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire, and the object is too important, the spirit of the British nation too high, the resources with which God hath blessed her too numerous to give up so many colonies.
In carefully measured but resolute words, King George warned Parliament of the dangers this rebellion posed, not only to the loyal colonies, but to the entire European colonial system.
He called for unanimity at home, promising to uphold British honor and restore order.
British rule had, under the petition, arrived.
King George issued a proclamation branding the colonists as traitors, engaged in open rebellion, commanding all officers to exert their utmost endeavors to suppress.
Such rebellion.
The king's decision was final.
No compromise, no negotiation, only the suppression of American unrest.
And so we return to Westminster in the fall of 1776, where King George issues a call to arms.
If their treason be suffered to take root, much mischief must grow from it to the safety of my.
Loyal colonies, to the commerce of my kingdoms, and indeed to the present system of all Europe.
The king's implausible claim to British happiness rang hollow against the colonists' cry for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The American colony stood at the brink of revolution.
On land, our founding teeth, 1775, was authorized the outfitting of two armed vessels to intercept British supply ships for much needed gunpowder, weapons, and other critical materials.
From that authorization, the United States Navy was born.
Not from vast resources or naval supremacy, but from the bold determination of a young nation fighting for freedom.
They knew that the new republic.
Could not defend its shores by the strength of an army alone.
On November 5th, Essex Hopkins was selected as Commander in Chief and the first commissioned officer in the United States Navy.
On November 25th, Congress authorized Continental Navy vessels to attack any British warship or transport.
On November 28th, the Second Continental Congress released rules and regulations for the Navy of the United Colonies, drafted by John Adams.
On December 3rd, the colonies converted a purchased merchant ship to a 24 gun.
With a certain percentage of the revenue going back to the privateers.
It would prove very lucrative to the privateers and it would prove very helpful to the colonies.
By the end of the war, privateers commandeered about 600 British merchant ships with much of the spoils directed to the war effort.
By 1776, our Navy was proving consequential.
On March 3rd, a six ship American naval force, along with 200 Marines from the recently established Continental Marine Corps, raided New Providence and the Bahamas.
Famously known as the Raid on Nassau, it was our Navy Marine Corps team's first successful amphibious assault, capturing Fort Montague and much needed military supplies 85 cannons, 15 mortars, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.
On April 7th, the converted 16 gun brigantine Lexington, under Captain John Barry, the first captain placed in command of an American warship, one of the most formidable naval powers in the world.
The Franco American alliance was ratified by Congress on June 6th.
1778.
With the French entry into the war, General Washington quickly recognized that the French Navy would be critical to victory.
Britain's ability to move large forces by sea had resulted in the capture of New York City in 1776 and Philadelphia in 1777.
As Washington would later say in 1780, in any operation and under all circumstances, a decisive naval superiority is to be considered as a fundamental principle and the basis upon which every hope of success. must ultimately depend.
His words were prophetic.
On September 5th, 1781, 24 French ships under the command of Comte de Grasse faced off against 19 British ships under the command of Sir Thomas Graves near the mouth of what is known as the Battle of the Virginia Capes.
French naval forces defeated the British fleet in an hours-long naval battle, leaving the French in control of the Chesapeake and trapping 8,500 troops under British General Cornwallis at Yorktown.
It was one that sealed the outcome of the war.
Because of the effective French blockade, General Cornwallis was unable to be resupplied or extracted by sea by the British Navy.
The British would soon be surrounded by land as well as with a combined American and French army traveling from New York.
It was a coordinated land Navy action that Washington had been trying to execute since 1778.
Was one that convinced Cornwallis to surrender at Yorktown and convinced much of the British population and Parliament that the war could not be won.
On September 3rd, 1783, the British signed the Treaty of Paris and officially surrendered, formally, it needed to be taken.
After years of paying costly tribute, President Washington and Congress passed the Naval Act of 1794. authorizing the construction of the Navy's six frigates, the USS United States, USS Constellation, USS Constitution, USS Chesapeake, USS Congress, and USS President.
This act marked the rebirth of the United States Navy, and these ships would play a significant role in securing victory in the quasi-war with France, the First Barbary War, War of 1812, and the Second Barbary War.
The Navy's earliest years were far from easy, but far more successful than they may have appeared.
The Continental Navy, those who came before us, let us reflect on the enduring spirit that began in 1775, because that spirit, one forged in honor, courage, and commitment, remains in all of us today.
Thank you for joining me today to celebrate our shared heritage.
May God bless you, the Navy Marine Corps team, and the United States of America.
Scott's Blind Sacrifice00:06:02
U.S. Army Major Scott Smiley paid a high price serving our nation.
Scott was leading his platoon in Iraq when a blast sent shrapnel through his eyes, leaving him blind and temporarily paralyzed.
Scott would become the first blind active duty military officer before medically retiring.
Just over 231,000 men served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and only 48,000 ever served at the same time.
How many can you name?
George Washington probably comes to mind.
Maybe Hamilton, Lafayette.
If you're a real history buff, you might remember Nathaniel Greene or John Stark.
How about all the others?
Who remembers the ordinary soldiers who won our independence?
I'm Michael Knowles, and I remember one of those soldiers.
Not because he led a famous regiment or went on to hold any high office.
There's no monument to his service.
Other than a small headstone in a far flung cemetery with a simple four word epitaph Soldier of the Revolution.
And I remember that soldier because he's my great, grandpa, Simon Farmer.
He didn't own much.
His estate comprised a heifer, a sword from his father, and a walking cane.
Personal effects all of the value of one dollar.
This relative poverty, common among the men who won the revolution, Was a hardship for him, but a blessing to us.
Because it prompted these patriots to detail their service in official government documents in exchange for a modest stipend in their old age.
But money was never a top priority for these men.
The teenagers and 20-somethings who enlisted and re-enlisted in the Continental Army might have done so with the promise of pay, but that pay rarely came on time.
Even when it did, it was worth less than the paper it was printed on.
A wagonload of Continental dollars would hardly buy a wagon load of provisions.
The men were paid as though they were volunteers, but they were expected to fight like a professional army.
Often, when I have picked the last grain from the bones of my scanty morsel, have I eat the very bones, as much of them as possibly could be eaten, and then have had to perform some hard and fatiguing duty.
One in six soldiers died that winter.
Those who survived the bullets and bayonets of the British.
As well as the constant malnutrition, disease, dysentery, typhus, smallpox, and exposure.
General Washington reported that by late December of that year, not less than 2,898 men were unfit for duty by reason of their being barefoot and otherwise naked.
Many couldn't walk on their frostbitten feet.
And Valley Forge wasn't even the coldest winter.
Two years later, during the winter of 1779 to 1780, One sentry froze to death at his post in Morristown, New Jersey.
When the Continental soldiers were no kind of nourishment but roots and black birch bark, Private William Beggs recalled his party of soldiers ate a stray horse, and they were lucky to have found it.
On the Sullivan campaign in 1779, soldiers had to settle for horse feed as overstretched supply lines reduced them to half rations without flour.
And still, they managed to rout Tory Rangers and their Iroquois allies at the Battle of Newtown, a major military victory, albeit one that cost them their clothes.
One private, Nathan Davis, recalled that his uniform had been cut to rags by marching through woods and thickets.
Many men walked bare chested.
The lucky ones wore Indian leggings.
Some wore little more than loincloths.
But they had broken the Indian strength and advanced the Army's campaign.
Occasionally, troops mutinied.
Who could blame them?
But most did not.
In Simon's New Hampshire line, I said to my children, Your father was a coward.
These soldiers took leave of their families, some of whom disagreed even with the cause of independence.
They endured and overcame their hardships for, in the words of Massachusetts soldier James Davenport, liberty, peace, and independence forever.
If the soldiers had one fear, it was the indifference of their countrymen, that their sacrifices would be in vain and their cause soon forgotten.
At Valley Forge, Dr. Albigens Waldo.
Described the dread in his diary.
There comes a soldier.
He comes and cries, I fail fast, I shall soon be no more, and all the reward I shall get will be, Poor Will is dead.
In 1780, the Continental Congress voted to give a reward, at least to officers who had served in the Revolution half pay for life, a courtesy, the great man's levy, and the proud man's grin.
Sold are those arms which once on Britain's blazed, when, flushed with conquest, to the charge they came.
A Reputation Forged In War00:02:56
that power repelled, and freedom's fabric raised.
She leaves her soldier, famine, and a name.
On November 10th, 1775, the Second Continental Congress passed a resolution to raise two battalions of Continental Marines.
These first Marines fought for our independence on land and at sea, taking on the mightiest naval force in the history of the world, from the coast of Maine to the islands of the Bahamas to England itself.
Since then, the Marines have fought hand to hand at Bella Wood, stormed the beaches of Tarawa, and prevailed over.
Foes in Fallujah and across Afghanistan.
The Marine Corps has always been the tip of the spear of America's military dominance, the first to fight.
Now, that reputation helped inform my own decision to enlist in 2003.
And as former Commandant General Chuck Krulak said, the Marine Corps does two great things for our country it wins battles and it makes Marines.
Now, as with countless other young men and women who served my time, in order to
form a more perfect union, we're all about taxes on this world.
How should you buy it?
I'm sure you need to get most of these things.
We love each other.
Our lives, our fortunes, and our secret honor.
Private.
sphere.
It is a matter of personal practice and not of public affairs.
Founders' Moral Conscience00:08:28
Some might even argue that to debase matters of religion to those of politics is to muddy the waters of public discourse with pious sentiments.
One of the most prominent voices of the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson.
A deist and one of the founders most influenced by the Enlightenment thinkers, Jefferson nevertheless wrote just five years after drafting the Declaration Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their?
Only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God.
And to that question, Jefferson and his fellow founders would have said no.
Rights, as understood by the drafters of the Declaration and the Constitution, are not conjured into existence by political consensus, nor are they granted by parliaments or princes.
Our rights exist not on parchment alone, never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
In our day, I fear that we are at risk of losing this metaphysical grounding of a person's rights.
There seems to be no limit to the number or kinds of rights individuals can claim.
Rights have become assertions of will, often severed from truth or justice.
Sadly, deeply immoral acts are often defended under the banner of individual rights.
But I would posit to you that this conception of rights is really a misconception.
Rights do not exist just because we say they do.
And here I call to mind one of my intellectual heroes, St. Thomas Aquinas.
Aquinas rarely spoke of rights in the plural.
Instead, he referred to the Latin word jus, which means the right, understood not as a claim but as that which is due to another.
In Thomistic terms, a right is what justice demands, as measured certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Importantly, The Declaration's appeal to the British is not a democratic one.
The colonists did not declare political independence from their ancestral homeland simply because the majority agreed.
No, the appeal of the Declaration was fundamentally moral and philosophical.
It was a practical application of moral reason to political grievance.
In the estimation of the signers of the Declaration, British governance had devolved from stewardship into tyranny.
They all agreed in the Declaration that the Crown involved itself in circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.
This claim is not for mere rhetorical flourish, rather, it signals a moral judgment.
The abuses of the Crown were more than an inconvenience, they were a grave injustice.
The signers of the Declaration committed a revolutionary act.
One that led to a devastating war.
Yet they acted to restore the moral law that had been lost, the rights that we are given by God.
And while it's impossible for us to know the thoughts within the hearts and minds of men, I believe it was the conscience, the inner witness of the divine law, that stirred many of the founders to affix their names to the Declaration.
Conscience is the key to understanding how the founders accessed the truth of the eternal law.
And applied them to their circumstances.
The Second Vatican Council in Gaudium at Spez describes conscience as the most secret core and sanctuary of a man.
There he's alone with God, whose voice echoes in its depths.
The founder's defense of the colonists was not only an act of courage, but one of justice.
Prior to America's founding, many nations only recognized the rights of a privileged few.
But the Declaration laid the foundation for recognizing the rights of all Americans.
Now, this promise of liberty was not fulfilled instantaneously, it took a bloody civil war and many courageous abolitionists to end the sin of slavery.
And respect the dignity of all persons.
But from the very beginning, our founders understood that rights do not exist within a vacuum.
With every right comes responsibilities to our families, our fellow citizens, and our Creator.
In other words, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness does not render the political order neutral on questions of good and evil.
It does not leave us in a naked public square, to use Father Richard John Newhouse's famous phrase.
Rather, it Presumes that citizens are moral actors capable of discerning the good and obligated to pursue it.
The Founding Fathers anticipated that the American people would not passively receive dictates from the state as distant subjects, but that they would actively participate in moral and political deliberations as citizens.
This is why George Washington famously said in his farewell address.
Political prosperity, religion, and morality are indispensable supports.
In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.
Today, nearly 250 years after the birth of our republic, we find ourselves the recipients of this great moral inheritance.
For if our rights are real, then so too are our responsibilities.
To be an American citizen is to be entrusted with the freedom to.
Pursue the good, the duty to care for our neighbors and uphold justice, and the burden and the privilege of conscience.
May we prove worthy of it.
It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking that brought to us the discovery of our freedoms, of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776.
One of the first American bestsellers in which Thomas Paine explained, by rational principles, the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the Kingdom of Great Britain and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, for freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the ability to select the people who govern them.
And he explained it in ways that were understandable to all the people.
not just the elite.
Because the desire for freedom is universal.
The desire for freedom adheres in the human mind and it is part of the human soul.
This is exactly the time we should consult our history.
Look at what we've done in the past and see if we can't use it to help us now.
We understand that our founders created the greatest country in the history of the world.
The greatest democracy, the freest country.
A country that has taken more people out of poverty than any country ever.
All of us are so fortunate to be Americans.
But a great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we're able to reason, we're able to talk, we're able to analyze.