We stopped in the small town of Whitehall, New York. This was the birthplace of the U.S. Navy. In 1776, Congress ordered the construction of a fleet of ships here to counter an anticipated British invasion. It came. And on Oct. 11, 1776, 12 American ships sailed foward to take on a formidable British Armada. The Americans, according to accounts, fought valiantly — under the direction of, none other than, Commander Benedict Arnold. And even though the Americans “lost,” with most of their ships being crippled or destroyed altogether, the battle forced a delay in the rest of the British invasion, which, ultimately, gave the Colonial forces more time to prepare. And the rest, as they say, is history… What history doesn’t say, at least much, I told editor Pat Ripley of the Whitehall newspaper here is that that the fleet of First Navy boats that would be launched for “freedom’s sake,” were built in part, ironically enough, by slaves. I learned this, and many other things, at a museum here dedicated to those early Navy days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We stopped in the small town of Whitehall, New York. This was the birthplace of the U.S. Navy. In 1776, Congress ordered the construction of a fleet of ships here to counter an anticipated British invasion. It came. And on …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}