You know how, some days, you get a lot of work done? Yesterday wasn’t one of those days. You know how, though, on some days, you get some stuff done and you figure it’ll pay off later on? Maybe yesterday was one of those days. You know how, some days, you just wind up cleaning things instead of doing work. Yesterday was one of those days.

You know how, sometimes, you think “I am going to do this chore tomorrow,” and you go to bed feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting yourself on the back for the work you’re going to do tomorrow, but then you don’t really feel the same way about that the next day?

Just me? OK then.

Yesterday I cleaned my desk, which was threatening to encircle and collapse upon me. A few small things got thrown away. Momentum builders, I thought, with a handful of short runs to toss things into a garbage can. Also, I had some cords and cables which have been vexxing me. Vexxing me, I say. I am vexxed. Two Xs. Or, I have been. Now some of them are out of site, and I am merely vexed.

Also, I cleaned my phone off, which desperately needed some attention, moving some videos to an external drive gave me almost 40 GB of space back. Now my phone feels lighter, somehow?

While those files were transferring, and while I was moving cables, I cleaned beneath part of my desk, too. Beneath my desk is a tennis ball, which I bat around with the cats occasionally, and a stool I made in a 7th grade shop class. I wonder if any of my old classmates still have theirs.

We also had some weather, which turned into threats of threatening weather, which turned into another realization that we’ve done terrible damage to our weather forecasting abilities in the last 20 months. Meanwhile, we had our first generator test yesterday. It fired up and ran for five minutes and then turned itself off, exactly as intended. You can hear it in the house. It isn’t overbearing, but you know it is running. Given the number of lawn mowers and leaf blowers we have around us, it’ll blend in soon enough.

By the time all of that was done, and I was ready to work, it was time to knock off for the day. So I did. Tomorrow, then, I thought to myself, feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting myself on the back for work I’ll be doing tomorrow. Tomorrow was today. Those pats were unearned.

I had a meeting scheduled this morning, my first official work thing of the new school year, but it was canceled and will be rescheduled for September. I like how this is starting off.

Anyway, let’s return to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the regular check in with the kitties.

Despite the cleaning, I can never get ride of this box. It has been claimed by the management of this domicile. (Though we do need to hang the cool thing that is inside the box. Let me add that back to the list …)

There’s a ledge on our stairs, and I love it when the cats remember it is there. This week it has been a spot for Phoebe.

Last night my lovely bride moved an empty laundry basket, just so it wouldn’t be underfoot. This simple effort stirred Poseidon and brought him across the room to inspect the procedure. The baskets are his, I guess. Especially when they have laundry in them.

Those towels were fresh out of the dryer, so you can understand. (As I write this he is sitting in my closet, on a pile of clothes. They, too, were clean before he found them. I found this out because I was doing laundry at the time.) So he likes clothes.

But he also enjoys his private time, in his cabinet above the refrigerator.

And, yes, I leave a cabinet empty for the cat. I also put a blanket in there so he could be cozy. He sits there, happy as can be, of his own choice or if we are trying to keep him away from dinner.

So the cats are doing just fine, as you can tell. Except Phoebe needs a belly rub right now. I’ll do that, and pat myself on the back, feeling enthusiastic about the effort.

We return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It is such a terrific book and I can’t encourage you enough to get this if you haven’t already. I am into 1778 now and am trying to decide if I want to read more and faster, because it is such a nice read, or if I want to slow down because I’m through the halfway point and I’d like to delay the inevitable end. It’s the kind of book.

Anyway, the Carlisle Peace Commission has landed, and the British are packing up to leave Philadelphia and this one little tidbit gets back to that idea of public sentiment, which, somewhere in 1777, shifted rather demonstrably. And go figure. War at home, difficulties on the domestic economic front, the occasional story or propaganda about a slaughter here or a massacre there. By the time these guys showed up, the only real peace overtures that Lord North and King George offered in the revolution) everyone had picked a side. You were almost certainly a patriot ready for independence or you were strictly a loyalist and, at this point, you might be considering Canada, the islands, or the jolly ol’ isle as a better alternative. Opinions and jaws were set.

In part that’s why the British were leaving Philadelphia. There are a lot of tactical considerations, but everyone that knew what they were looking at and could see it clearly seems to have realized there were difficult days ahead for the redcoats. So it was back to New York. Several thousand loyalists and deserters would take the trek, too. The women and children by see, the rest overland. It was a huge logistical move.

Let’s look at some of the people involved here. Joseph Reed was born into a family of means. He studied law. He becomes a founding father, a soldier, an aide-de-camp to Washington. At one point he was accused of treason in the press. He was also big into Pennsylvania politics, of course. (Those two things are not related.) He was due to be returned to the congress, but his health betrayed him. He died at just 43 years old.

William Henry Drayton gives us that amazing quote. He was a founding father from South Carolina, not to be confused with the later Congressman William Drayton (no Henry as a middle name) who would have been a toddler toddler at the time of the Peace Commission. (The Draytons were cousins.) William Henry Drayton, an ambitious rice plantation owner of South Carolina was a big voice in the lowcountry politics of his time. He gets overlooked a lot, but he was one of the people who thought Independence Day should be marked with fireworks. He also commanded a frigate, served as a judge, wrote part of Carolina’s 1778 constitution and was in the Continental Congress from 1778 until his death the next year at just 37 years old. He was a polemicist, a bomb thrower, and a big, loud, quarrelsome part of that body, which might help explain the attitude that came with that message to Carlisle.

Carlisle is Frederick Howard, the 5th Earl of Carlisle. He ran that particular effort, which found itself ill-informed, ill-timed, and ultimately critical of how the British government was handling this whole thing. And here we can get into the dangerous waters of trying to understand the many attitudes of people who’ve come long before us. But let us just stay general enough and say that King George and his prime minister, Lord North, had their critics at home. While the king was more or less insulated from that, it did exist in some considerable sort of which. For our purposes, it was loud enough to be remembered 250 years later. The British opposition saw France gearing up and worried about the French allies, Spain. The problem with a big empire and a big government is a lot of voices and a lot of needs and a lot of people pulling in different directions and what is a king to do? Well, we’ll send these three guys to try to patch things up.

Dear reader, I hope this does not come as a surprise to you, but they were unsuccessful in those efforts. This reconciliation offering was somewhat comparable to where the colonies started the process, but on this side of the ocean that was now off the table.

Howard was a British statesman, diplomat and author. When this little job failed, he wasn’t blamed, though he thought. In fact, he was made the viceroyalty of Ireland, but that might not have been the most plum assignment given larger global events. William Eden was there, too, a high ranking cabinet member, a member of parliament, a spymaster. Joining them was Commodore George Johnstone, a naval officer who had also served during the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. He was a politician, a member of parliament, a director of the East India Company, and he’d previously been the governor of West Florida from 1763 until 1767. It was Johnstone who was rumored to be offering bribes. Despite these three men, and the British Royal Navy behind them, and the rumors of bribes and whatever else, they could not succeed. They appealed to Congress, but were rebuffed. They appealed to the people, with no more luck.

Some historians point out the value in what the Carlisle Commission was bringing to the peace table, while others have focused on the idea that turning the Congress turning them away was the last obstacle to realizing the American project, even if, as others have argued, Howard, Eden and Johnstone had very little chance of success, as they seemed to think themselves. Perhaps, as some have argued, they were sent, and arrived, too late, to have any real material impact. Soon after, the British efforts in North America ground to a halt for months and the revolutionaries had to interpret that as best they can, perhaps they were leaving, distracted, or done.

Or perhaps, as Andrey Kuchkovskiy wrote in studying the commissioners themselves:

The Carlisle Peace Commission suffered from poor timing and a lack of political and military support. While the public supported their efforts, the officials initially did not, and by the end of their time in the colonies, even the commissioners expressed doubt about achieving peace. Additionally, the expansion of the war after France allied with
the Americans dramatically undercut the commissioners’ efforts. Had the commissioners remained in the colonies to pursue peace, or potentially renewed their conciliatory efforts with a new commission, they could have arguably achieved a possible agreement …

They arrived in the early summer, they departed in early fall. The French were sailing for Boston. The war would continue.

And so does this book. It’s terrific!