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February 17 - March 21, 2021
As such, it continues to speak to us now, issuing a challenge across more than two centuries.
It was his fate to become “the most thoroughly classicized figure of his generation,” according to one specialist in American classicism.1 Indeed, there eventually would be not one but two biographies of Washington published in America that were written in Latin.2 Washington would not have been able to read those accounts, because he never learned Latin.
Cato—upright, honest, patriotic, self-sacrificing, and a bit remote.
the commander who relinquished power and returned to his farm, an American Cincinnatus.
losing a battle can sometimes be an advantage, because a tactical setback can sometimes result in a strategic gain,
Teachers w/ tough classes
Astute chroniclers of military operations therefore focus not just on battles but on what actually wins wars.
He failed to see the big strategic picture; instead, his thinking was down in the weeds of tactics.
“In confidence I tell you that I never was in such an unhappy, divided state since I was born,”
People like to talk about how change is good, but they often forget how awkward, even exhausting and painful, it can be.
“I am wearied almost to death with the retrograde Motions of things.”29
What Washington’s critics did not see then, and sometimes not even now, was that being indecisive was decidedly preferable to being decisively wrong.
Lori is Washington
but eternal defeat and miscarriage must attend the man of the best parts if curs’d with indecision.”
no matter how well founded, interfere with the task at hand. This was Washington the stoic.
welcomed his views, which entitled me, I thought, to your advice upon any point in which I appeard to be wanting—to meet with any thing then, that carried with it a complexion of witholding that advice from me, and censuring my Conduct to another was such an argument of disengenuity that I was not a little mortified at it.
The basement of Nassau Hall, the college’s building, was made a jail for locals suspected of rebel leanings.
What resources are available, and how might they be employed to address the task at hand? What can I ask my troops to do, and what should I recognize as exceeding their capabilities?
I know the comments that some people will make on our Fabian conduct. It will be imputed either to cowardice or to weakness: But the more discerning, I trust, will not find it difficult to conceive that it proceeds from the truest policy, and is an argument neither of the one nor the other.
the clarity and energy of its prose.
“There is a conviction, at once hard and utopian, that both one’s learning and one’s experience may be used instrumentally, to lay hold of the future and shape it.”63
“the less Shewy but regulated Conduct of Fabius.”
Washington began to sense that relying too heavily on the public-mindedness of Americans was becoming a dangerous course. “A small knowledge of human nature will convince us,” Washington wrote in a report to a visiting committee of Congress, that with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle; and that, almost, every man is more or less, under its influence. Motives of public virtue may for a time, or in particular instances, actuate men to the observance of a conduct purely disinterested; but they are not of themselves sufficient to produce a persevering conformity
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Burkean
contest. But I will venture to assert, that a great and lasting War can never be supported on this principle alone—It must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward.
“in republican government, virtue must always be tied to interest.”4
“Unless we can return a little more to first principles, & act a little more upon patriotic ground, I do not know when it will [end]—or—what may be the issue of the contest,” he fretted in March 1779.
“too many melancholy proofs of the decay of public virtue.”
he would be “exposed to the Rage of his bitter enemies, deprived of a Fortune of about £70,000, and now left to wander like Cain upon the Earth.”
Jefferson escaped astride his horse Caractacus—named for the British chieftain who led resistance to the Roman invasion in the first century ad—riding southwest up the steep green slope of Carter Mountain, avoiding the main roads.
The nearby College of William & Mary was a casualty of this last major fight. The college buildings had been occupied by French troops, who converted them into a hospital for their ill and injured. 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
“this sink of nastiness perfumed the whole house very sensibly and, without doubt, vitiated all the air within the wards.”22
Fun anecdote...for novel
Hamilton’s impudent notion was that “the claims of the army” could be made “useful” to Congress. But, he added, perhaps too clever by half, “the difficulty will be to keep a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation” [Hamilton’s italics]. So, he suggested, perhaps Washington should not interfere if the Army’s officers made public protests about their pay and pensions. And maybe Washington should even quietly encourage such protests. If so, he counseled, conspiratorially, Washington should keep his role quiet: “This however must not appear: it is of moment to the public
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“I often feel a mortification, which it would be impolitic to express, that sets my passions at variance with my reason.”
“The idea of redress by force is too chimerical to have had a place in the imagination of any serious mind in this Army.”
the foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy Age of ignorance and superstition, but at an Epocha when the rights of Mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period—The researches of the human Mind after social happiness have been carried to a great extent, the treasures of knowledge acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislators, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the establishment of our forms of Government.
Burkean respect for ibtellectual institutions or disciplines
“Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action,” he stated.40 He bowed to Congress, then walked to his carriage with his wife and headed home to Mount Vernon, arriving in time to celebrate Christmas there.
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.”47 This pithy sentence may be the single most illuminating thing ever written about John Adams.
Montesquieu’s warning that the great first hurdle of nationhood was surviving the shift from war to peace.
To ask for men in a free state who are bold in war and timid in peace is to wish the impossible.”
Montesquieu made a striking observation: “At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.”
“Rome . . . was originally a band of ruffians. Plunder and rapine made her rich, and her oppression of millions made her great. But America needs never be ashamed to tell her birth.”
Welllllllllllll not quite
Neither the manners nor the genius of Rome are suited to the republic or age we live in. All her maxims and habits were military, her government was constituted for war. Ours is unfit for it, and our situation still less than our constitution, invites us to emulate the conduct of Rome, or to attempt a display of unprofitable heroism.8
could American government be structured in a different way that would make it more sustainable? Here he could begin by revisiting his college readings of Thucydides and Xenophon,
Aristotle in his Politics had already engaged in comparisons between different sorts of constitutional arrangements, and Montesquieu had tried to offer a general theory of the relationship between the “spirits” of different polities and the way they were organized. But as a systematic effort to identify the core working elements of all the confederacies known to have existed, Madison’s document was unprecedented.
New Yorker comparative polities
Polybius attributes the power of the city in part to its culture of loyalty and virtue, but also to the mixture of powers within the Republic. 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.” This view deeply influenced Adams and many other Americans of the Revolutionary generation.21 Adams
the Shays uprising and how many people in other states were inclined to follow suit. “The flames of internal insurrection were ready to burst out in every quarter, . . . and from one end to the other of the continent, we walked on ashes, concealing fire beneath our feet.”
the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4,
“domestic Violence.”
Early in 1787, Jay reported to Jefferson in Paris that “our Governments want Energy, and there is Reason to fear that too much has been expected from the Virtue and good Sense of the People.”
As the historian Daniel Howe puts it, the founding generation was “fed up with the Articles of Confederation and their reliance on uncoerced public virtue.”
Gordon Wood calls “the now widely accepted view that Madison was the most astute, profound, and original political theorist among the founding fathers.”47
Montesquieu, who accounted for some 60 percent of references made to Enlightenment writers by American political commentators of the 1780s.
