Can you hear it yet? The Long Roll of William Diamond's Drum

The Long Roll: (Mil.) A prolonged roll of the drums, as the signal of an attack by the enemy, and for the troops to arrange themselves in line.

"And having met at the place of our company's parade., [we] were dismissed by our captain, John Parker, for the present, with orders to be ready to attend at the beat of the drum." -- Deposition of Lexington Minuteman Nathaniel Mulliken.

After a restless night of alarms, counsels, musters and dismissals of militia, mysterious couriers, intelligence and counter-intelligence, a forty-five-year-old veteran of Rogers' Rangers in the French and Indian wars, Captain John Parker, commanding the Lexington minutemen, directed his drummer boy to go across the road to the Common and beat the call to arms. And when William Diamond, bringing the enthusiasm of his sixteen years to the beating of his gaily emblazoned drum, rolled out the call to the village's minutemen, the War of the American Revolution began. . . As William Diamond continued to beat the call on his drum, the Lexington minutemen perhaps thirty of them assembled on the Common. Captain Parker directed Orderly Sergeant William Munroe to form the men in ranks. . .

The rolling beat of William Diamond's drum began to drown out, in the ears of the approaching British, the soft thud of their own marching feet on the unpaved roadway. Aware that the drum was sounding a military assembly, the British officers halted their troops, the light infantry in front and the grenadiers in the rear. Orders were given to stop, prime and load their guns, double their ranks, and then to proceed again at double-quick time. -- William Diamond's Drum by Arthur Bernon Tourtellot.

William Diamond's drum is sounding the long roll once again, and it doesn't take much imagination to hear it. As the collectivists in the Federal government attempt to roll the Dead Elephant Party into banning the private sale of arms (and it looks like it won't take much effort), states like New York, Colorado and New Mexico are rushing headlong into their own versions of the same Intolerable Acts. We are thus confronted with the end of what Claire Wolfe called "the awkward stage."

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." – 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution (1996)

The enforcement of these various odious, unconstitutional laws -- whether state or federal -- will be resisted, flaunted and then Leviathan, which can't afford to look silly, will come to kill us for our temerity.

This is not paranoia, but merely the natural order of things in our new collectivist state of Amerika. Don't believe me? Ask a Davidian, if you can find one still alive.

For understand, what we seek is not a revolution, but a counter-revolution -- against the collectivists who have been hacking, gnawing and biting at the supports of the Founder's Republic and their vision of the rule of law for over a century. Like the Founders, we -- who only wish to be left alone with our liberty and property intact -- must seek a restoration of their vision and secure our liberty once more for ourselves and our posterity.

(By 19 April 1775), revolution in the minds of the people of Lexington had already been almost fully achieved. The revolt was of a philosophic nature, skillfully and positively phrased in philosophic terms and on the whole neither inflammatory nor overly emotional in either content or language. The public papers of Lexington, tracing the evolution of the town's opinion, are great state papers, written in the neat orderly hand of Jonas Clarke; and they paralleled, when they did not actually anticipate, the great papers of the colonies as a federation. In the opinion of Lexington there was little doubt left that Britain by her acts had shattered her own traditions, dating from the barons at Runnymede, of a free society. In the Coercive Acts of 1774 (which, in addition to closing the port of Boston, revoked the Massachusetts charter, transferred trials to England or to other colonies, and quartered soldiers on the inhabitants without their permission) the people of Lexington saw the revolution as really one launched by the British Parliament against a wholly British heritage. And in their minds the movement in the colonies, all their acts and resolves, was a counterrevolution to restore centuries-old freedoms and safeguards against tyranny. . .

But it was clear to Jonas Clarke and thus to his townsmen, as events progressed, that no debate of the issues was to lead to any final solution. The ministry of Lord North was proceeding as if it had nothing but contempt for colonial opinion and was bankrupt of any expedient but force. The reaction in Lexington was inevitable. Having already concluded, "We shall be ready to sacrifice our estates and everything dear in life, yea and life itself, in support of the common cause," they voted at last, abandoning faith in the power of reason for the comfort of practical measures, to strengthen their arms and militia with "a suitable quantity of flints . . . two pieces of cannon ... (and) a pair of drums."

One of those was young William Diamond's drum, upon which he beat the long roll and ushered in what we now call the American Revolution but which was, in fact, a glorious counter-revolution against a corrupt regime in violation of its own English Constitution.

Today, William Diamond's drum again beats the long roll. We do not seek a civil war, but one is being thrust upon us. If we do not now stand, then when will we? We must defy these intolerable acts, whatever their source, and challenge the collectivist revolutionaries to come work their will upon us if they do not like it -- and they most assuredly won't. We must give a final rattle of the tail before striking. They may pass whatever "laws" they wish, then watch what happens when they try to enforce them. The next moves will be up to them. May God have mercy on their corrupt, heathen murderous souls, for they are unlikely to receive any in the ghastly civil conflict their tyrannical appetites seem to crave.