This explanation anticipated the argument of Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History (abridged edition, 1954) that leadership appears only in societies undergoing great crises. Although historians of the Civil War might contest the claim, the American Revolution is arguably the greatest political crisis in American history. If it had failed, Washington would have remained an inconsequential Virginia squire, Adams an obscure country lawyer. This crisis explanation also reminds us that Jefferson’s felicitous words in the Declaration, “our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor,” were an accurate
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