History Thread...

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Adams’ essay is an indirect response to Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” which in addition to calling for independence, outlined a democratic future. The people would elect a one-house legislature; this body would appoint and hold supremacy over the executive, lest that leader rule as a tyrant. 

Adams has praised Paine for his “ready pen” in the service of liberty, but finds his political solutions a “crapulous mass.". He writes his own proposals at the urging of the delegation from North Carolina—the first colony to urge independence, and one seeking guidance in writing a constitution. 

"The happiness of society is the end of government,” Adams writes. Popular consent must be the base of the government, but how are the people to be represented? Direct representation in the form of "a single assembly is liable to all the vices, follies and frailties of an individual." 

The legislature should be made bicameral in the tradition of Britain's Parliament, with an upper house providing a check on the lower house's "hasty results and absurd judgments." Furthermore the executive and judiciary should be independent of the legislature as counterweights to its power. 

Separating the powers of making the laws, from the judicial power to interpret them, and the executive power to enforce them, is a crucial aspect of the British system that Adams defends. The assembly itself cannot exercise these functions, "for want of secrecy and despatch." 

"A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people," Adams writes, "and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen." Each colony should be free to write its own constitution, and together they would "be unconquerable by all the monarchies of Europe."

 

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April 23

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/april-23?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2026-0423-04232026&om_rid=

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1014 

Brian Boru, the high king of Ireland, is assassinated by a group of retreating Norsemen shortly after his Irish forces defeated them.

Brian, a clan prince, seized the throne of the southern Irish state of Dal Cais from its Eoghanacht rulers in 963. He subjugated all of Munster, extended his power over all of southern Ireland, and in 1002 became the high king of Ireland. Unlike previous high kings of Ireland, Brian resisted the rule of Ireland’s Norse invaders, and after further conquests his rule was acknowledged across most of Ireland. As his power increased, relations with the Norsemen on the Irish coast grew increasingly strained. In 1013, Sitric, king of the Dublin Norse, formed an alliance against Brian, featuring Viking warriors from Ireland, the Hebrides, the Orkneys, and Iceland, as well as soldiers of Brian’s native Irish enemies.

On April 23, 1014, Good Friday, forces under Brian’s son Murchad met and annihilated the Viking coalition at the Battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. After the battle, a small group of Norsemen, flying from their defeat, stumbled on Brian’s tent, overcame his bodyguards, and murdered the elderly king. Victory at Clontarf broke Norse power in Ireland forever, but Ireland largely fell into anarchy after the death of Brian.

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At 3 a.m. on April 23, 1778, Commander John Paul Jones leads a small detachment of two boats from his ship, the USS Ranger, to raid the shallow port at Whitehaven, England, where, by his own account, 400 British merchant ships are anchored. Jones was hoping to reach the port at midnight when ebb tide would leave the ships at their most vulnerable.

Jones and his 30 volunteers had greater difficulty than anticipated rowing to the port, which was protected by two forts. They did not arrive until dawn. Jones’ boat successfully took the southern fort, disabling its cannon, but the other boat returned without attempting an attack on the northern fort after the sailors claimed to have been frightened away by a noise. To compensate, Jones set fire to the southern fort, which subsequently engulfed the entire town.

Commander Jones, one of the most daring and successful naval commanders of the American Revolution, was born in Scotland on July 6, 1747. He was apprenticed to a merchant at the age of 13 and soon went to sea from Whitehaven, the very port he returned to attack on this day in 1778. In Virginia at the onset of the revolution, Jones sided with the Patriots and received a commission as a first lieutenant in the Continental Navy on December 7, 1775.

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1865. Confederate President Jefferson Davis writes to his wife, Varina, of the desperate situation facing the Confederates.

“Panic has seized the country,” he wrote to his wife in Georgia. Davis was in Charlotte, North Carolina, on his flight away from Yankee troops. It was three weeks since Davis had fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, as Union troops were overrunning the trenches nearby. Davis and his government headed west to Danville, Virginia, in hopes of reestablishing offices there.

When Confederate General Robert E. Lee was forced to surrender his army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, Davis and his officials traveled south in hopes of connecting with the last major Confederate army, the force of General Joseph Johnston. Johnston, then in North Carolina, was himself in dire straits, as General William T. Sherman’s massive force was bearing down.

Davis continued to his wife, “The issue is one which it is very painful for me to meet. On one hand is the long night of oppression which will follow the return of our people to the ‘Union'; on the other, the suffering of the women and children, and carnage among the few brave patriots who would still oppose the invader.” The Davises were reunited a few days later as the president continued to flee and continue the fight. Two weeks later, Union troops finally captured the Confederate president in Georgia. Davis was charged with treason, but never tried. In 1889, he died at age 81.

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1975 At a speech at Tulane University, President Gerald Ford says the Vietnam War is finished as far as America is concerned. “Today, Americans can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by re-fighting a war.” This was devastating news to the South Vietnamese, who were desperately pleading for U.S. support as the North Vietnamese surrounded Saigon for the final assault on the capital city.