One winter’s day at Valley Forge, Colonel John Brooks of Massachusetts, who had fought at Concord, White Plains, and Saratoga, confided to a friend that the Army was in worrisome shape: “In my opinion nothing but virtue has kept our army together through this campaign.”1 That sentence is comprehensible only if “virtue” is read in the eighteenth-century sense of the word, meaning public-spiritedness, or putting the common good above one’s own interest.
