First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

by Thomas E. Ricks

They erected a huge three-story latrine on one side of the building, with a pit underneath it, thus enabling the patients to defecate without having to go up or down the stairs. The resulting stench was astonishing, reported James Tilton, a Delaware regiment surgeon assigned to tend to the American wounded sent there. He remembered that “this sink of nastiness perfumed the whole house very sensibly and, without doubt, vitiated all the air within the wards.”

The officers would assemble at the camp’s “Newbuilding,” a structure also known by the troops as “the Temple of Virtue.”29 What better place for Washington to speak at a crucial moment, having dedicated his life to the pursuit of eighteenth-century public virtue?

“The idea of redress by force is too chimerical to have had a place in the imagination of any serious mind in this Army.”