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September 1 - November 26, 2023
And: that unlike the Irish and other subjugated peoples, the Americans were heavily armed. Not only were they nimble with firelocks, which were as common as kettles; they also deployed in robust militias experienced in combat against Europeans, Indians, and insurrectionist slaves.
George once asserted that seven hours of sleep sufficed for a man, eight for a woman, and nine for a fool.
Beyond the battlefield, then and forever, stood a shining city on a hill.
“the profession of arms hold their lives by a more precarious tenure than any other body of people.”
“It really was the greatest honor of my life to command gentlemen who made me happy in their company and easy by their conduct.”
“There’s nothing reconciles being shot at … so much as being paid for it.”
We are now without any money in our treasury, powder in our magazines, arms in our stores.… I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulder & entered the ranks, or … retired to the back country, & lived in a wigwam.
“When will the time come that we shall all sit down in our little room and eat a Sunday’s dinner together?” Lieutenant Samuel Shaw wrote his family from Prospect Hill.
Lois Peters told her husband, Captain Nathan Peters, that she had harvested eighty bushels of corn and sold the oxen for £10 to keep their saddlery solvent. “Pray come home as soon as possible.… A visit from you at any time would be agreeable.” If he sent some cloth, she would sew him a shirt and “take great pleasure in doing it.” She signed her letter, “Your loving wife until dead.”
So much thievery plagued the army in New York that Washington on Tuesday, June 18, ordered the quartermaster general to stamp every tool with “C XIII,” denoting the thirteen colonies. That proprietary brand would soon be amended to “United States,” and subsequently shortened to “U.S.”
In a Bible found in the farmhouse that served as a jail for American officers, Lieutenant Fitch took comfort from an epistle to the Ephesians often attributed to St. Paul: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.”
“We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs,” he would write in “The Morals of Chess,” “the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search [for] resources.”
Washington, for his part, believed the fire was serendipitous. “Had I been left to the dictates of my own judgment, New York should have been laid in ashes before I quitted it. To this end I applied to Congress, but was absolutely forbid,” he told his overseer at Mount Vernon. “Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.”
“America should exert herself as if she had no aid to expect but from God and her own valor.”
For years these remains lay scattered and bleaching along the Brooklyn shoreline, the human spoor of inhumanity, speaking bone to bone about how easy it had become to hate thine enemy.
As he stood to leave, the doctor picked up a scrap of paper that had fallen to the floor. On it Washington had scribbled the evening’s watchwords for his sentries: “Victory or Death.”
Instead of the two or three field guns per thousand infantrymen typical in eighteenth-century armies, Washington would take nearly nine per thousand—massed artillery emboldened foot soldiers.
“I live as I please, spend my time according to my fancy, keep a plentiful table for myself and my friends, amuse myself with reading and society,”
