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January 1 - January 24, 2021
Plutarch’s Lives,
Winning battles does not necessarily win wars. Indeed, losing a battle can sometimes be an advantage, because a tactical setback can sometimes result in a strategic gain, if by engaging the enemy one slows his movement, distracts him from other targets, or just wears him down.
Effective tactics are helpful to have, but without a strategy, they can be useless, like a powerful car without a steering wheel.
He was better at this sort of observation and contemplation than were most of his contemporaries, and indeed than most generals are, both then and now.
sign of his understanding that, given the stakes in the war, he could not let personal feelings, no matter how well founded, interfere with the task at hand. This was Washington the stoic.
The foremost task of a general is to understand the nature of the war he or she faces—which often turns out to be a third way, neither the one preferred nor the one expected.
these men could be militarily effective when used in a manner that played to their strengths. Let them fight near their own towns, amid familiar fields, forests, and hills, and they would prove more resilient. Encourage them to take on isolated British patrols. And when the situation was quiet, let them slip home to tend to their farms. It was not a recipe for conventional military glory, but it did point the way toward a strategy for possibly defeating the British.
When the British ejected the American army from New York City in August and September of 1776, they had fielded 31,600 soldiers. By February of 1777 they had just 14,000, with the rest simply gone—killed, badly wounded, seriously ill, captured, or deserted.
Hamilton concluded with a marvelously succinct summary of American strategy: “Our business then is to avoid a General engagement and waste the enemy away by constantly goading their sides, in a desultory teazing way.”60
But as 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.
both cases, the defender was facing an invader from overseas who had to cross land and sea barriers in order to bring in additional supplies and troops.68 Those hurdles made attacking the invader’s supply lines and exhausting his troops an especially productive approach.
“deliberate maturely, but. . . . execute promptly & vigorously.”
“in republican government, virtue must always be tied to interest.”4
notorious British cavalry commander, Colonel Banastre Tarleton,
By some accounts, he finished by putting on his glasses to read aloud a letter, apologizing in an aside that he had gone nearly blind in the service of his country. With that quiet explanation, he quelled the officers’ insurrection.
He had put down “a most insiduous attempt to disturb the repose of the Army, & sow the seeds of discord between the Civil & military
powers of the continent.”34 Washington’s quashing of military dissent would resonate down through the decades, underscoring that the American armed forces are subordinate to civilian authority, most especially when the officer corps disagrees with Congress.
“The Militia of this Country must be considerd as the Palladium of our security and the first effectual resort,”
the American Revolution did not turn on itself, with the victors shattering into warring factions and a government that maintains power only by the exercise of violence against citizens,
as has happened so often after other successful rebellions, as in France in the eighteenth century and Russia in the twentieth.
the gap between American reality and American aspirations
Shays’ Rebellion would provide the backdrop for the great event of the next two years—the
“Political foes who underrated James Madison did so at their peril,” observes the biographer Ron Chernow.
In these letters he laid out the basic elements of what would become known as the Virginia plan, which in turn would be the core of the eventual Constitution.
But no one got everything they wanted from the Constitution. When considering the document, it is useful to see it as a kind of peace treaty between the states.
That said, there was one very powerful part of the Constitution that would resonate through the ages. Its three most essential words stand at the very beginning of the document: “We the people.” It is the people, not the states or the federal government, that hold ultimate power. As James Madison would later write, “If we advert to the nature of republican government, we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.”
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”41
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Washington, Madison, and the other people leading the young nation were always conscious that there was nothing certain about the United States of America. Every crisis threatened to be an existential test of a new way of living, of how a society had been arranged.
This is a striking equation, insisting that terror and virtue go hand in hand. The thought builds an intellectual bridge between the ancient world and modern totalitarianism. It is itself a terrifying assertion to make.
wise heads, when considering parties, should “recognize their necessity” and “give them the credit they deserve.”
Slavery was doomed to end sooner than any of them thought possible. But its underlying ideology of white supremacy lives on, and in fact in recent years has seen a resurgence, its proponents no longer afraid to appear in public.
Over the last 150 years there has been progress in expanding the franchise, so that women and nonwhites now exercise far more political power than the founders envisioned. I think they would be pleased to see that the machine they designed has proven both durable and flexible.
America works best when it gives people the freedom to tap their own energies and exploit their talents.
2. Curtail campaign finance
3. Re-focus on the public good
4. Promote, cultivate, and reward virtue in public life—but don’t count on it
5. Respect our core institutions—and push them
6. Wake up Congress
7. Enrich the political vocabulary
8. Reclaim the definition of “un-American”
9. Rehabilitate “happiness”
We need to appreciate the Enlightenment’s broader, richer notion of happiness and make it again about finding one’s place in the world, enjoying what we have and what we see in it, and appreciating the beauty of the Earth during our short time on it.
10. Know your history
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That
