More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 14 - November 1, 2020
the gun decks painted bright red to lessen the psychological shock of blood spilled in battle.
“young active fellows” who loaded firelocks while lying on their backs, then flipped over to fire from their bellies.
They were now swept up in events grander than themselves, in “the meeting of strong men, at the beginning of great things.”
“truly a good man,” but one “who does not seem to have strength equal to his wishes.”
Many had “liberty or death” printed in large white script over their hearts, although one young rifleman admitted to preferring “liberty or wounded.”
“but I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”
A census in late April counted 268 liquor vendors in Mannahatta.
New York was considered the least disloyal of the thirteen colonies,
Loyalists typically abhorred both civil disobedience—once begun, where would it end?—
“Which is better,” the Boston clergyman Mather Byles asked, “to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?”
Incarceration in a cellblock known as the Dark Hole showed Ketchum the folly of shoving the queer.
The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.…
to call Lee homely was to insult homely men.
“We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs,”
A British officer recorded in his journal that Hale had been caught on Long Island by Lieutenant Colonel Robert Rogers,
Franklin concurred with Samuel Johnson that ship travel was like being in jail without the comforts of jail.
Similar estrangements, heartbreaking and brutal, were tearing apart American families from Maine to Georgia.
“Let old England see how they like to have an active enemy at their own door,”
It was also rumored, Horace Walpole wrote, that he “has invented a machine the size of a toothpick case … that would reduce St. Paul’s to a handful of ashes.”
Poor Richard had advised. “Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
“I cannot desert a man—& it would certainly be a desertion in a court of honor—who has deserted everything to defend his country.”
Paine again condemned both loyalists (“servile, slavish, self-interested”) and the king (“a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man).”
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
“Perseverance accomplished what at first seemed impossible.”
the hardest of war’s hard truths—that for a new nation to live, young men must die, often alone, usually in pain, and sometimes to no obvious purpose.
