Saratoga Quotes

“Our people are not calculated to be confined in garrisons or kept in any particular service; they soon grow troublesome and uneasy by reflecting on their folly in bringing themselves into a state of subjection when they might have continued free and independent'. This was a society unlike any in the world, in which people placed great value on their status as independent individuals, beholden to no man. They were suspicious of standing armies and impatient of discipline, and while they realized the need to resist the enemy, they preferred to do so on their own terms at a time and place of their own choosing. It did not make for the kind of army on which generals could pin great hopes.”
― Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War

“A year earlier, representatives of thirteen states had assembled in Philadelphia and declared their intention to form a more perfect union, but what had come of their declaration was a long way from being a union, let alone a perfect one, and Schuyler, along with all his other problems, was caught up in one of the regional rivalries that would surface as long as the republic endured. Describing the colonies, Benjamin Franklin once noted that each had “peculiar expressions, familiar to its own people, but strange and unintelligible to others.” An early traveler observed, “Fire and Water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies,” and it was said before the Revolution that the disjointed collection of settlements would come to no good, that they would soon engage in civil war. So”
― Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America's Revolutionary War