Unwilling to face a jury, he also tried to slash his own wrists. Imprisoned later in Italy, he died of cyanide poisoning in what was believed to be a suicide. Harsh conditions persisted at the detention center, especially during the tough-on-crime policies of Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.
In , according to the New York Times, lawyers complained to a judge about the conditions faced by their defendants. Earlier that year, terrorists had attempted to blow up the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. In November , two of those detainees sought escape via death. Administrations changed in both City Hall and the White House.
Criminal justice reforms came and went. But the MCC appeared immune to them all. Efforts to have MCC administrators take her accusations seriously came to naught, her lawsuit alleged. In , Roberto Grant was accused of attempting to steal Cartier watches from a Manhattan store. He was sent to the MCC, where he died the following year. Although officials told his mother that he overdosed, there were actually indications that Grant had been severely beaten.
She recalls, for example, him saying that inmates would stuff balled-up clothing under the doors to keep out rodents and insects. He is now suing over his treatment there and has been transferred to another facility. Dana Gottesfeld believes that for all its invocations of security, the MCC suffers from a lack of oversight.
Perhaps the most unusual sign of dysfunction at the MCC took place in , when sentencing for Mansour Arbabsiar, an Iranian would-be assassin of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, had to be postponed because two elevators at the facility simply stopped functioning , and there was no way to transport Arbabsiar from the 10th-floor cell where he was being held.
The elevators were presumably fixed. But the far deeper problems would remain. Much remains unknown about how and why Epstein killed himself. But whatever the ultimate reason, it was a troublingly common fate for federal detainees in lower Manhattan. He was right. Download the Yahoo News app to customize your experience. FBI document warns conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat.
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The French and Indian War changed all this, as you know. This was the first Great War for Empire—rivaled only by the struggle against Napoleon over a half century later—and Britain drained its every financial resource to defeat its enemy. In the end, Britain won—and found it a pyrrhic victory. Its treasury was empty; it owed money to creditors; and its budget for the military was growing rather than declining for it had to protect its position against a new French challenge.
On the streets of London, citizens rioted to see wartime taxes reduced. The new young king had a crisis on his hands. We all know what followed: salutary neglect was replaced by concerted, though clumsy efforts to tighten control over American trade, new taxes—and the first direct tax—were imposed by Parliament, smugglers were arrested and tried. But was there tyranny? Consider this: the Sugar Act did not increase the duty on foreign molasses, it lowered it, slashed it in half in fact; the real shock to the New England smugglers was that the government declared its intention to enforce the import tax and to prosecute smugglers.
What happened to those smugglers? The British government allowed local juries of their peers to try them—and those peers promptly declare them all innocent. John Hancock, caught red-handed, was not only found innocent but celebrated as a hero after the trial.
Did the British government retaliate? Only mildly. Frustrated after multiple trials of this sort, it created Vice Admiralty courts, perfectly legal, to try the offenders in a less friendly environment.
But the biggest hue and cry of tyranny arose because of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts. The Stamp Act was an innovation; not an infringement of rights, but an assertion of authority that had long lay dormant—and thus lost its potency.
When Americans protested—when they harassed stamp officials, physically attacked customs men, destroyed stamps—the British "tyrants" responded by repealing the hated act. They chose the same path with the Townshend Acts, which were also an innovation—and a dicier one—because they laid import taxes on British goods.
How did the British handle the protests, the violence, the organized resistance led by colonial legislators? Did they arrest the ringleaders of resistance?
Did they close down the newspapers that carried diatribes and learned discourses against British policies? Did they restructure the colonial governments? Did they arrest the men who met in illegal political bodies such as the Stamp Act Congress and the Continental Congress, or declare them ineligible to serve in local offices?
For the British, as it would be for the Founding Fathers of the United States, the sanctity of private property was worth protecting. It is amazing to me how patient and tolerant British officials remained over the turbulent s and s. It was not until , when British troops marched toward Lexington and Concord, that orders were given to arrest the two men considered to be prime ringleaders of rebellion, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
Patrick Henry was not arrested for declaring "give me liberty or give me death"; Common Sense was not confiscated nor was the press that printed it shut down. Arrogant, foolish, self-interested the members of Parliament and the king might have been—but they were victims of their own commitment to the British constitution and its guarantee of rights.
In the end, the tyranny revolutionaries decried was the imperial system itself; that is, the notion that colonies existed for the welfare of the Mother Country. The second element of the myth is the unanimity of support for the Revolution. Did all Americans—north and south; white, red, and black; female and male; rich and poor—greet the Declaration of Independence with uniform enthusiasm?
After the divisive experiences of the Vietnam war and the current divisions over the war in Iraq, it is appealing to think that there was an overwhelming consensus for independence. But it was not so. John Adams famously said that "one third supported the war, one third opposed it, and one third had no opinion. It is far more likely that, at the beginning of the struggle, many more than one third of the colonists hoped desperately to remain neutral in a battle between Mother Country and rebellious Americans.
Their assumption was that, no matter who was in power, they would have to pay taxes—why risk their lives over who that would be? Many a farmer equipped his home with two flags, the British and the American, and prepared to raise the appropriate one as an army marched by.
As the war progressed many of these neutral colonists did join the American cause, but this, as John Shy and Charles Royster have shown, was not an ideological or political choice: the British army behaved so badly everywhere it went, looting, raping, destroying, that it literally drove colonists into the revolutionary camp.
But let us take a closer look at those who supported, and those who opposed, the movement for independence. To do this, I would like you to imagine the Revolution as a prism with many sides, and I would like to focus on what we would call "self-interested" motives. This is not to say that men and women chose their sides in the war solely for economic reasons or to satisfy ambitions. Ideas also influenced Americans—and ideas shaped how Americans articulated their choice for rebellion or loyalty and how they understood that choice to reflect their values and ethics.
And we also know that leading loyalists, who opposed independence, believed the Revolution was the creation of demagogues and men with thwarted ambitions; to them, the renunciation of the Crown and "the greatest constitutional government the world had ever known" was wholly unjustified.
Who then were more likely to become revolutionaries? Let me suggest four broad groups: smugglers and urban workers; planters; legislators; and African Americans, both slave and free.
As you know, British policies after struck hardest at the New England colonies. The post policies like the Sugar Act of carried the threat of more regulation, more restrictions, and eventual economic disaster. Merchants like Hancock found ready allies in those urban workers, distillers, lumber jacks, and shipbuilders whose livelihoods also depended upon the smuggling made possible by salutary neglect.
Not surprisingly, Boston became the center of protest, of reprisals, and of rebellion. What about planters? Again, legend has it that tidewater planters led the way in calling for independence.
Yet, current historiography suggests that, in Virginia at least, the Virginians we think of as founding fathers were reluctant rather than eager revolutionaries. Three things propelled them into the revolutionary camp: first, the great burden of debt they owed English and Scottish merchants who provided credit for the purchase of land, slaves, and especially luxury goods that men like Jefferson craved.
Second, pressure from ordinary farmers and backcountry settlers who wanted the right to move onto Indian lands—a right denied by the Proclamation Line of As the protest against Great Britain grew during the s, as the tension mounted, wealthy tidewater planters feared that a war was inevitable and, as they put it in letters to one another, they could either lead it or be trampled under the feet of patriots in the western counties. Legislators—those men who ran the assemblies in each colony—had good reason to join the Revolution by There were two routes to power and status in the colonial political world: appointment to office by the king or his representative, the governor, and election to office in the colonial assembly by the white male property owners who enjoyed the right to vote.
Historians know that the same wealthy families dominated these assemblies, with fathers passing down to sons the duty—and privilege—of serving. Many were lawyers or had legal training; most had an education far superior to the ordinary colonist; and, through marriage, many were part of interlocking families. By mid-century the assembly was the de facto supreme power in most colonies; British policy trends after threatened this supremacy.
As Britain realized that the assemblies had evolved into mini-parliaments, assuming extensive rights, efforts were made to reassert the authority and sovereignty of the English Parliament. In the end—and far too late—the king authorized independent salaries for governors and judges, removing the bargaining power that the assembly had used effectively to force the governors to bend to their will. And it drove many of them into rebellion.
Finally, many enslaved and free blacks supported the Revolution. The rhetoric of the Revolution—"liberty and equality"—gave hope to free African Americans that they might receive better treatment within their communities. For the enslaved, rhetoric mattered less than the fact that service in the military, offered late and unenthusiastically by the revolutionaries, provided a route to freedom for many.
Who opposed the war for independence? Loyalists might be considered in five groups: royal office holders, merchants who traded directly with England, slaves, backcountry farmers of the Lower South, and Native Americans.
Winning appointment to a royal office was the second route to political power. These posts included governors, lieutenant governors, attorney generals, and judges of the vice admiralty courts.
Salaries were generous; status was high; and one did not have to stand for office and woo voters. And because in the eighteenth century taking an oath of loyalty, as they did for their offices, meant something almost sacred. Then, while many New England merchants depended upon the Caribbean trade, there were others, in New York and Philadelphia as well as New England, who made their livings from the sale of British manufactured goods.
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