William Adams Quotes
If our countries had war the one with the other, that was no cause that he should put us to death; with which they were out of heart that their cruel pretense failed them. For which God be forever-more praised.
Adams, William. "Letter I." Memorials of the Empire of Japon: In the XVI and XVII Centuries, edited by Thomas Rundall, Hakluyt Society, 1850, p. 24.
Sherman, one of the most gifted generals of the Civil War. He hated the cruelty of war and the Civil War in particular as he had specifically warned his Southern friends ahead of time about what war would bring. See {585882}. Sherman was one of the first American military men to look at war without any of the romantic, patriotic, noble attributes that most others did.
Attila the Hun
They had seen many other abolitionists attacked and butchered by the pro-slavery forces. The civil war of Kansas was over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state of a free state. If a free state, the free states would be able to block further slavery. If Kansas were to become a slave state, the slave states would have a sufficient majority to make all future expansion hospitable to slavery. The slavery forces started sending man and families into Kansas so that they could vote; the abolitionists did the same. Both sides armed and a war began with each faction trying to kill or drive the other faction out of Kansas before the vote. See {617388} and {612516}.
A number of the American soldiers refused to obey Calley's illegal order. Some helped some villagers to escape, and a helicopter pilot landed betreen Callery's men and the villagers they were shooting at, and ordered his helicopter machine gun crew to fire on the soldiers if they did back off. The soldiers stopped firing at the civillians. However, his and other reports of the massacre were covered up by the military for a few years. Mai Lai was not the only major war crime perpetrated by Americans in the Vietnam War; there had been a few others. But given the years of fighting and the many opportunities war crimes violations under orders were quite rare. The Viet Cong had many more war crimes that they perpetrated, and our South Vietnamese allies repeatedly committed war crimes against their own people.
William Adams, known in Japanese as Miura Anjin (三浦按針: "the pilot of Miura") was an English navigator who, in 1600, was the first of his nation to reach Japan during a five-ship expedition for the Dutch East India Company. Of the few survivors of the only ship that reached Japan, Adams and his second mate Jan Joosten were not allowed to leave the country while Jacob Quaeckernaeck and Melchior van Santvoort were to go back to the Dutch Republic to invite them to trade. Adams and Joosten settled in Japan and became two of the first ever (and very few) Western samurai.
