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

by Rick Atkinson

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. He, more than anyone, would be responsible for ordering those men to their deaths.

“I look up to heaven and most devoutly thank the great Governor of the Universe for producing this turn in our affairs of America,” he added, “& this sentiment, I hope, will so prevail on the hearts of the people as to induce them to be a people chosen of heaven.”

Thomas Paine, who had a shrewd eye for military matters, was closer to the mark in a public letter to Admiral Howe published in early 1777. “In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in, you had only armies to contend with,” Paine observed. “In this case, you have both an army and a country to combat.”

The Americans, the Scottish economist Adam Smith warned, “feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel.… [They] are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves will become, and which indeed seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”