History: Boston Tea Party, G.Mason, Savannah, Beethoven, Stalin, Wright Flyer, Bulge, Rainey, Washington Dies, Trent, Verdun &More
December is a month full of historic occurrences, especially for Americans, from the Boston Tea Party to the Battles of the Bulge and Fredericksburg to the surrender of Savannah to the winter camp at Valley Forge to George Washington’s death to the publication of the “American Crisis,” Paine’s pamphlet that revitalized the flagging Revolutionary cause. “These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph,” Paine wrote. We should take his words to heart and vow to learn from both the victories and the failures of the past as we work to rebuild America this new year.
December 11
1282 - Estimated date on which Llywelyn Ap Gruffudd, native Prince of Wales, is killed by the English while trying to assert Welsh independence.
1620 - The Mayflower’s passengers make landing at Plymouth Rock in New England.
1725 - Founding Father George Mason is born. A friend to multiple future presidents, including George Washington, he is sometimes called the “Forgotten Founder” because of how his legacy is overlooked. He was key to the founding of America, however, and is called the “Father of the Bill of Rights.”
1918 - Nobel-winning, anti-Communist Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is born. His works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the Gulag Archipelago, based on his own experiences, exposed the harsh abuses of Soviet imprisonment and concentration camps.
1941 - Axis powers Italy and Nazi Germany declare war on the U.S.
1998 - The House Judiciary Committee approves articles of impeachment against rapist perjurer President Bill Clinton.
December 12
627 - Estimated date of the Battle of Nineveh during the Byzantine-Sassanid (Persian) war; a Byzantine victory.
1745 - Future Founding Father and first SCOTUS Chief Justice John Jay is born in New York. He co-wrote the famous Federalist Papers.
1870 - Joseph H. Rainey, a Republican from South Carolina, is sworn in as the first black congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives. Born into slavery and forced to work for the Confederates during the Civil War, he openly opposed the KKK and worked for civil rights after the war. His great-granddaughter said of his rise “from nothing to greatness” that “It’s what we all think the best of America encompasses.”
1963 - Kenya declares independence from Britain.
December 13
304 - Martyrdom of St. Lucy of Syracuse, a young Christian who refused marriage to a pagan and was tortured and killed. Her feast is now an important holiday in Scandinavia and Italy. Read more here.
1545 - The Catholic Church’s Council of Trent convenes in Italy. A hugely impactful and inspiring council, it enacted reforms and addressed the problems of the Protestant Revolt.
1636 - Considered the birthday of the U.S. National Guard, as the “first militia regiments in North America were organized in Massachusetts.”
1642 - Dutch explorer Abel Tasman discovers New Zealand.
1862 - History.com: “The Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, involved nearly 200,000 combatants, the largest concentration of troops in any Civil War battle… The results of the battle sent Union morale plummeting and [unfortunately] lent …new energy to the [traitorous] Confederate cause.” The Union 116th Pennsylvania Regiment of the Irish Brigade was slaughtered, and Lt. Col. St. Clair A. Mulholland recalled, “They were not there to fight, only to die.”
Related: Untold Stories: ‘Do You Want to Be Free?’ America’s Promise for a Former Slave
1949 - Israel’s Knesset votes to move the capital of the newly reborn country from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the capital of ancient Israel. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, with a reference to Psalm 136/137, stated, “A nation that, for two thousand and five hundred years, has faithfully adhered to the vow made by the first exiles by the waters of Babylon not to forget Jerusalem, will never agree to be separated from Jerusalem.”
December 14
1546 - Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is born.
1774 - New Hampshire militia attack the British Fort William and Mary to confiscate the arsenal before the British do in the American Revolution’s first engagement. Read my full article.
1799 - George Washington, the first U.S. President and Father of Our Country, dies at his Mount Vernon home. The healthy 67-year-old had been out riding in bad weather, and stayed in wet clothes for dinner; that night, George told his wife Martha he was so ill he could scarcely breathe. Washington’s overseer bled him and then doctors “bled him four more times over the next eight hours, with a total blood loss of 40 percent.” On Dec. 14, Washington passed away, his final words being, “Do you understand me? . . . Tis well!” There is still hot debate over what illness actually killed Washington, with numerous theories being posited. Washington ensured in his will that all of his slaves would be freed and either educated or cared for (depending on their age). There is a debated story, based on the testimony of Washington’s own slaves and Jesuit annals, that Washington became a Catholic on his deathbed. He was certainly always very pro-Catholic (unusual among many Protestants of the time), for instance ending the Revolutionaries’ celebration of Guy Fawkes Day for its anti-Catholicism, and he owned a beautiful image of the Blessed Virgin which still remains on display at his Mount Vernon home today (see below).
1896 - James Doolittle is born in California. He went on to lead the famous first aerial attack on the Japanese mainland, known as the “Doolittle Raid,” received the Medal of Honor, and became “the first person in Air Force Reserve history to wear four stars.”
1861 - Prince Albert, beloved royal consort of Britain’s Queen Victoria, dies.
1911 - “Norwegian Roald Amundsen becomes the first explorer to reach the South Pole.”
December 15
37 AD - Future Roman emperor Nero is born. Famed for massacring Christians and being a bloody, licentious, irrational tyrant.
533 - Estimated date of the Battle of Tricamarum, a victory for the Byzantine general Belisarius against the Vandals.
1832 - Gustave Eiffel is born in France.
1961 - Former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “final solution,” is sentenced to death in Israel.
1966 - Brilliant American artist and innovator Walt Disney dies. Read my full articles on him and on Mickey Mouse.
December 16
755 - An Lushan begins his Rebellion against China’s Tang dynasty.
1485 - Catalina or Catherine of Aragon, future first wife of murderous Henry VIII of England, is born.
1598 - Reported date of the naval Battle of Noryang Point: Koreans stop Japanese invasion.
1653 - Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell is sworn in as Lord Protector of Great Britain. He caused bloodshed in England, Scotland, and Ireland; in the latter alone, as much as 41% of the Irish population perished during anti-Catholic Cromwell’s reign.
1773 - The famous Boston Tea Party occurs, a major event leading up to the American Revolution. A group of over 100 men, some disguised as Mohawks and many from the “Sons of Liberty” group, board three tea ships and dump over 300 crates of tea into Boston Harbor in protest of the Tea Act, which was part of the British government’s ongoing dictatorial overreach in ruling the American colonies. “No taxation without representation” was the cry. The whole proceeding was actually quite orderly and well-planned, with the colonists themselves ensuring no tea was stolen, no people were injured, and no property was destroyed but the tea. Below is Walt Disney’s musical tribute to the Boston Tea Party, from Johnny Tremain:
1775 - Brilliant English authoress Jane Austen is born. Read more here.
1944 - WWII: The Battle of the Bulge begins. Read more here.
December 17
1398 - The Battle of Delhi occurs between two Muslim rulers; Mongol-Turkish Timur (also known as Tamerlane) accused Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud of Delhi in India of being too lenient to his Hindu subjects. Timur conquered and sacked Delhi.
1770 - Composer, musician, and genius Ludwig van Beethoven is baptized in Cologne.
1903 - Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a new era dawns. “Orville Wright completed the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft known as the Wright Flyer. The flight lasted just 12 seconds, traveled 120 feet, and reached a top speed of 6.8 miles per hour…highest altitude reached in any of the flights was about 10 feet [NASA.gov].” Orville and his brother Wilber completed four flights in all that day. The Flyer is now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
December 18
218 BC - Estimated date of the Battle of the Trebia during the Second Punic War. Carthaginian general Hannibal completely defeated the Romans.
1878 - Russian mass murderer and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is born. Stalin was responsible for the deaths of between 20 and 60 million victims.
1892 - Premier of Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker.”
1916 - The Battle of Verdun, the longest military engagement of WWI, finally ends.
December 19
1776 - American Revolution: Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis” is published. “These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph,” Paine began. Gen. George Washington had Paine’s message read to his dispirited and fast-shrinking Army
1777 - The “ill-supplied Continental Army led by General George Washington arrived at Valley Forge after a tough season of campaigning against the British. [National Park Service].”
1843 - Charles Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol is published in London. It earned Dickens the nickname “The Man Who Invented Christmas.”
1946 - Murderous Communist Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh launches an attack against the French in Hanoi, the start of the First Indochina War.
December 20
1046 - Pope Gregory VI resigns, ending a feud with two anti-popes.
1860 - Following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the US presidency, despite Democrat shenanigans such as not having Lincoln on the ballot in some states (sound familiar?), the slave state of South Carolina secedes from the Union, specifically for the purpose of protecting the institution of race-based slavery. This began a movement of seceding states that formed the Confederacy. Lincoln had not yet taken office, and he intended to pursue a gradual process of eliminating slavery, but the pro-slavery Democrats didn’t want slavery restricted or eliminated at all. Here, in their own words, are the South Carolinians’ reasons for seceding:
“[A]n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution…In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed…all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”
By the way, the words “slave” and “slavery” never appear in the Constitution, and, as former slave Frederick Douglass indicated, slavery could have been abolished without changing a word of the Constitution. But it is vital to note that South Carolina openly avowed it was seceding specifically to safeguard the evil of slavery, which helps explain the appalling war crimes, including mass enslavement and racial massacre, of the Confederates later in the war.
December 21
1864 - Civil War: Confederate Savannah surrenders to Union Gen. Sherman, marking the end of Sherman’s famous March to the Sea campaign. Sherman sent President Lincoln a telegram: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.” The March to the Sea drew thousands of slaves seeking freedom with Union aid.
1937 - Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the first ever full-length animated film, premieres and is an instant hit.
1945 - Gen. George Patton dies in a hospital after a suspicious vehicle accident in Germany. There is evidence, including testimony from a man who claimed to have been involved in the plot, that Patton was assassinated by American high command (possibly by poison while he was in the hospital). According to the Museum of the American G.I., Patton “is recognized as the greatest battlefield commander and well-known American general from the modern war era.” During World War II, unlike so many other commanders, the fearless Patton led from the front (including a first-of-its-kind company of black soldiers, the “Black Panthers”). His awards included the Distinguished Service Cross, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, and the Meritorious Service Medal. After the Normandy invasions stalled, Patton and his fast-moving 3rd Army had to go in, liberating some 45,000 square miles of France in only two months. The political correctness of his far less capable commanders and peers, including Eisenhower and Bradley, led to Patton’s being given far less latitude and command during WWII than he should have received; many thousands of men would probably not have died in North Africa, for instance, if Patton instead of the disastrous generals Montgomery and Eisenhower had been in charge. Read more here.
December 22
1858 - Italian composer Giacomo Puccini is born.
December 23
1688 - Catholic King James II flees England after losing the crown to his treacherous daughter, Mary, and her usurping Protestant Dutch husband, William of Orange.
1783 - Gen. George Washington appears before the Continental Congress to resign his position as commander-in-chief voluntarily. His speech was emotional, and there was reportedly much weeping. Everyone there knew that the American Revolution would have been a lost cause without Washington; he led his troops to victory against the world’s most powerful empire. Washington’s surrender of power and refusal to be a king/dictator has always been admired as a rare occurrence in history among successful leaders and a testament to Washington’s own integrity and republicanism.
1948 - “In Tokyo, Japan, Hideki Tojo, former Japanese premier and chief of the Kwantung Army, is executed along with six other top Japanese leaders for their war crimes during World War II. Seven of the defendants were also found guilty of committing crimes against humanity, especially in regard to their systematic genocide of the Chinese people.”
December 24
1745 - U.S. Founder Benjamin Rush, a physician, politician, educator, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, is born.
1809 - Old West frontiersman and soldier Christopher “Kit” Carson is born in Kentucky.
1814 - The Treaty of Peace and Amity between Britain and the U.S. ends the War of 1812.
1818 - Franz Gruber’s “Silent Night” is sung for the first time. Read my full piece.
Did I miss any important events? Let me know in the comments.
Corban, from Mark 7:11, was the Lawfare two tiered justice system of the Pharisees. To allow Clintons, Obamas, Bidens, Bezos, Soros’s et al, to “pledge” their money later, to the Temple now. So that they could get a ‘Not Honoring Father and Mother” get out of God’s Word free card. When their parents came and asked them for help in their old age, they could Lawyer Legalese say, “sorry, Corban, that money is a votive gift to the Temple”. While still having access to all their money. Until they died. Leaving their parents out in the cold. A Lawyer Lawfare practice Jesus condemned in Mark 7:11. A practice still used by Rich today with their Tax Shelter lawfare loop holes. Extrapolate that to lawfare two tiered human justice get out of God’s Commandments Free cards for killing babies, sterilizing and mutilating children for life, etc.