Le complot pour assassiner George Washington

Bien intéressant cet article rédigé autour du contenu du livre "The first conspiracy". Bien sûr on ne peut réécrire l'histoire, mais on peut s'amuser à imaginer ce que seraient les États-Unis si le héros de la guerre d'indépendance avant été éliminé. Un épisode méconnu de l'histoire américaine. Si aujourd'hui on se plaît à rappeler l'élan patriote qui mènera à la naissance du pays, on omet souvent de préciser que l'idée de l'indépendance ne fait pas l'unanimité et que Washington ne manquera pas d'ennemis dans son propre pays.

 “We love in America to tell the story of the American Revolution where we just all held hands together, dreamed of democracy and took on the British,” Meltzer says. “It's a great story. It's not the real story.”

There was no polling data then, but historians estimate that in the summer of 1776, about one in five white colonists were loyal to the king. Most loyalists were in the middle colonies of New York and New Jersey, and included New York’s royal governor, William Tryon.

Tryon had been forced into a strange exile onboard a ship docked in the New York harbor, where he waited for the British invasion and took regular visitors. One of those visitors was David Mathews, the loyalist mayor of New York City. Together, they worked on a way to help the British from behind enemy lines.

  “The plan was that they were going to blow up certain bridges, they were going to steal cannons, and some said they were going to kill George Washington right there in an assassination. And others say they were going to kidnap him and hang him,” Meltzer says.

Obviously, the two would need help to pull off something so huge, and it was Mathews’s job to recruit conspirators. He got at least four of them from Washington’s elite Life Guard, a sort of proto-Secret Service responsible for protecting the commander in chief."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/02/17/plot-assassinate-george-washington-how-it-was-foiled/?utm_term=.bdffe7d6f6a7