With All Due Respect: Being the Whole and Actual Truth of How American Colonies Were Lost

Reginald Portnoy was His Majesty's Deputy Assistant Sub-Clerk of Colonial Correspondence for the Port of Boston - the third assistant to the man who holds the door. Nobody watched him. That was the mistake that cost the Crown an empire.Portnoy never forged a document. He simply moved dates. Eight weeks to London, eight weeks back, and a clerk's small adjustments compounding until two reasonable governments were reading each other's letters five months out of phase and concluding, independently and correctly, that the other side had lost its mind. Sixteen weeks is not a delay. Sixteen weeks is a country. Told at eighty-eight on the jubilee morning both old presidents died, Portnoy's account covers thirteen years of chimneys, flutes, unwanted assistants, fifty minutes standing in the rain, a widow printer setting both newspapers from the same type, a seventeen-year-old running four thousand messages on the ribbons of ladies' hats, and the brilliant British officer who deduced from thirty-one misspellings of one name that he was hunting thirty-one men.And then, in June of 1776, Philadelphia asked for a file, and Portnoy handed over the wrong bundle.