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January 5 - January 15, 2022
more often than not it took the form of “partisan war”—that is, an irregular or guerrilla war waged in the shadows, often by part-time fighters operating in small, fluid units and then melting back into the civilian population.
His military thinking early on was conventional, painfully so. He failed to see the big strategic picture; instead, his thinking was down in the weeds of tactics.
Effective tactics are helpful to have, but without a strategy, they can be useless, like a powerful car without a steering wheel.
the effect the militias could have if used well.
John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress.
December 1776, when he crossed the Delaware River, surprised the isolated Hessian garrison at Trenton, and took some 948 prisoners.
he could use the militia and detached regulars to inflict damage while protecting the main army.”
Encourage them to take on isolated British patrols. And when the situation was quiet, let them slip home to tend to their farms.
“We have had a pretty amusement known by the name of foraging or fighting for our daily bread,” a Scottish redcoat named James Murray reported in a letter. “As the rascals are skulking about the whole country, it is impossible to move with any degree of safety without a pretty large escort.”
One militia tactic was to leave cattle out in the open and then ambush the British as they tried to capture the herd.
indeavoring to Skirmish with the Enemy at all times, and avoid a general engagement.”
Adams, who for unknown reasons seemed to believe he was an expert on military affairs,
“Our business then is to avoid a General engagement and waste the enemy away by constantly goading their sides, in a desultory teazing way.”
Washington now would attack at times of opportunity, but not seek to decide the war through big battles.
long as Washington held the Continental Army together, the British could not win the war, which in turn meant that they would eventually lose it.
The more seriously Adams was in error, the more emphatically he raged against the Fabian approach,
Adams also was 180 degrees off in judging the benefits of foreign military assistance.
“Had Fabius attended to the Advice given him by the Roman youth[,] Hannibal would have found Little Difficulty in possessing himself of Italy.”
Stringing the British along was, in fact, precisely the right strategy.
the British could not figure out an effective way to counter the Fabian approach.
“In all important matters,” he advised, “deliberate maturely, but. . . . execute promptly & vigorously.”
Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good.
need to account for the role of self-interest in public life:
great and lasting War can never be supported on this principle alone—It must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward.
Washington would emerge from the war, Phelps adds, persuaded that “in republican government, virtue must always be tied to interest.”
Washington’s insight would be articulated and then refined into political theory by James Madison ten years later.
Loyalists were left in a bind. The only thing worse than not being protected at all was to first be protected and thus encouraged to shed one’s neutral or ambiguous stance,
the British withdrawal from Philadelphia was a major defeat, if a nearly silent one.
The enemy had developed a grim appreciation of the ability of militiamen to attack, fall back, hide, and attack again.
As the war faded away, Washington rejected yet another Roman model: He would not become a Julius Caesar, the general who takes over the nation. He probably could easily have done so, had he wanted to.
Oliver Cromwell, who a century earlier had led the way in establishing an English republic, only to become a dictator who passed power to his inept son.
Franklin summarized Adams memorably: “He means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”
Polybius wrote that he intended to analyze how “it came about that nearly the whole world fell under the power of Rome in somewhat less than fifty-three years.”
He saw the consuls bringing an element of monarchy and the Senate an aspect of aristocracy, but the people also holding power in the form of tribunes who could veto acts of the consuls and Senate. “The best constitution,” he wrote, is “that which partakes of all these three elements.”
he applauded having more than one legislative body, in order to hamper the passage of laws in the heat of the moment.
“Pythagoras, as well as Socrates, Plato, and Xenophon, were persuaded that the happiness of nations depended chiefly on the form of their government.”
When he came home from the war, he remained unpaid for his service and so was unable to pay his debts.
Shays, marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts, which held more than a thousand barrels of gunpowder, as well as thousands of muskets with bayonets.
Shays and his comrades ultimately would be given a silent memorial in the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, which among other things guarantees the states protection against both foreign invasion and “domestic Violence.”
We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”
“Political foes who underrated James Madison did so at their peril,” observes the biographer Ron Chernow.
faction would have to be accepted and interest would have to be seen not as sinful but as natural. What would a government designed to accommodate them look like?
the Virginia plan, which in turn would be the core of the eventual Constitution.
Madison was the most astute, profound, and original political theorist among the founding fathers.”
Through his studies he arrived in Philadelphia as what one biographer calls “the best-informed man in America on the principles of government.”
he was portraying faction not as a problem but as a solution—or
Roman tribunes, who “lost their influence and power, in proportion as their number was augmented.”
One reason that in the United States of the twenty-first century the 580,000 people of Wyoming are represented by two senators, the same number as the 40 million citizens of California, is because of the example of this league, which was a series of confederations of cities formed early in Greek history.
“The great division of interests in the U. States,” he said, according to his notes, “did not lie between the large & small states; It lay between the Northern & Southern.”23 In the long term he was right, unfortunately. But the solutions the conventioneers devised to placate the South and keep it part of the country, especially giving constitutional protections to the institution of slavery, would seven decades later lead the nation to civil war.
Madison would lose on a point he considered key, that of giving Congress the power to veto state laws.
