Fascinating account of an unsung American hero.

Jack Jouett deserves a poem. Or at least to be taught, remembered, and honored.

Agreed.

Most Americans have no idea where Memorial Day actually came from. It was not invented by Congress. It was not handed down by a president. It was built from the ground up by ordinary citizens standing over the graves of men who gave everything for this country. The Civil War ended in April 1865. It cost roughly 750,000 American lives, more than every other war this nation has fought combined. Every town had empty chairs at the dinner table. Every county had fresh graves. The wounds were everywhere. And out of that grief, something uniquely American happened. Without any federal order, communities across the country, North and South, began visiting cemeteries in the spring of 1866 to lay flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers. Waterloo, New York. Columbus, Mississippi. Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. Carbondale, Illinois. Charleston, South Carolina. Dozens of towns later claimed to be the birthplace of the tradition, because the tradition rose up in dozens of places at once. That is the point. Nobody told Americans to honor their dead. They just did it. On May 5, 1868, a Union general named John A. Logan, then commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, recognized what the country was already doing and made it official. He issued General Order No. 11, designating May 30th as a day "for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion." He chose May 30th for a simple reason. It was not the anniversary of any battle. He wanted a day that belonged to all the fallen, not to any single victory or defeat. They called it Decoration Day. The first national observance was held at Arlington National Cemetery, on land that had been seized from Robert E. Lee's family and turned into the resting place of Union dead. 5,000 people showed up. James Garfield, a future president, gave the speech. Children from a nearby orphanage for the children of dead soldiers walked through the rows of graves placing flowers on every single headstone, Union and Confederate alike. That last detail matters. From the very beginning, Americans understood that the dead belonged to the country, not to a side. After World War I, the holiday expanded to honor the fallen of every American war. In 1971, it officially became Memorial Day and was moved to the last Monday in May. But the core never changed. It is one of the only holidays in the world founded not by decree but by grief. A nation of citizens who chose, on their own, to remember. This Memorial Day, remember what it actually is. Not a long weekend. Not a sale at the mall. A promise. That the men and women who died for this country will never be forgotten by the country they died for. Pass it on.

I wish I could like this twice. Once for each new thing I learned.

Now I want a parrot.

George Washington never went to college. His father Augustine died when George was 11, and the money for English boarding school died with him. His two older half-brothers had already been polished at Appleby Grammar School across the Atlantic. George got Virginia, a demanding mother named Mary, and whatever books he could find at home. At 14 he tried to escape it all by joining the British Royal Navy. His mother shut it down. So he did the next best thing: he taught himself surveying from his late father's instruments, and at 16 he rode west into the Shenandoah wilderness on a commission from Lord Fairfax, who owned over five million acres of Virginia and needed them mapped. His teenage journal survives. It is brutal, funny, and absolutely not the voice of a marble statue. On his first night at a frontier inn, he stripped down and climbed into what passed for a bed, only to find "nothing but a Little Straw Matted together without Sheets or any thing else but only one Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas etc." After that he preferred sleeping outside by the fire, even when it rained, even when his clothes froze stiff on him by morning. One journal entry, almost in passing: thirty Native warriors walked into camp carrying a fresh scalp from battle. The teenage surveying party shared their liquor with them and watched them perform a war dance by firelight. George wrote it down the way a modern teenager logs a weird night out. He swam horses across swollen rivers. He ate roasted meat off forked sticks because "our Spits was Forked Sticks our Plates was a Large Chip as for Dishes we had none." He met German settlers and noted in frustration that they "would never speak English but when spoken to they speak all Dutch." He measured timber in country where almost no English speaker had ever walked. By 17 he was the commissioned surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest official surveyor in the colony of Virginia. By 18 he had parlayed the earnings into nearly 1,500 acres of Shenandoah Valley land in his own name, bought outright, while boys his age back east were still reciting Latin in heated parlors. The man who would one day command the Continental Army, defeat the largest empire on earth, and then voluntarily refuse a crown, did not learn leadership in a lecture hall. He learned it at 16, in a tent, in the dark, hundreds of miles from anyone who could save him.

This is an excellent summary of John Hancock's commitment to American Independence.

THIS is why we have an internet.

Funny. And also, kind of useful.

I now know where I want my birthday dinner!

I love all the laughter. What a treasured memory this made for everyone.

Bravo.

Very interesting.

Very impressive.

Perfection.

Big fan of free speech myself.

Very interesting, and worth a follow.

This makes sense.

Roger Scruton, the ancestor duty