The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Worse yet, the Americans had formed their own cockleshell fleet to bedevil British mariners in New England waters.

Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army, a more integrated national force than would exist for nearly two centuries.

The American penchant for subjugating those deemed in need of deliverance was hardly extinguished by the calamity in Canada. As the historian Eliot A. Cohen has observed, that impulse would recur often in the centuries to come, “with mixed motives and uncertain outcomes.” Canada proved a foreshadow.

a radical assertion that power derived not from God or through bloodlines but from the people,

Described by his biographer as an “overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate,” he had run through several fortunes totaling almost £100,000 with his spendthrift ways and aristocratic pretensions, including expenditures for a heavily mortgaged, thousand-acre New Jersey estate with piazzas, a deer park, painted drawing rooms, a wardrobe holding thirty-one coats and fifty-eight vests, and carriages embossed with the coat of arms he claimed as his patrimony.

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