The Glorious Cause Quotes

“Why did his young troops repeatedly fail to stand and fight? Washington’s explanation—one which made him feel both despair and pride—was that they were free men. Their freedom brought them to revolution and, paradoxically, made them incapable of fighting it well. The freedom Washington saw left its mark on character: yes, the Americans were free—a condition which made them impatient of restraint and discipline. And discipline was the heart of an army. It could be achieved only through long training, and a long period of training entailed long enlistments. As the war continued, Washington came to understand that the freedom which filled American life inhibited not only the fighting qualities of his troops but also the large-scale organization of men in a regular army and, behind the army, the political organization on all levels necessary to its support.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“In the end, however, the intangible played as great a part as organization or system in keeping the army going. The army’s will to survive and to fight on short rations, its willingness to suffer, to sacrifice, made the inadequate adequate and rendered the failures of others of little importance. The army overcame the worst in itself and in others. It was indomitable.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“the victims chosen by the mobs at the time of the Stamp Act were struck not simply because they supported or were presumed to support English policy. Such men as Andrew Oliver, Jared Ingersoll, and in particular Thomas Hutchinson represented a dangerous moral order. In attacking them, and others like them, the mobs not only defended political liberty in America but also virtue and morality. The mobs and no doubt popular leaders as well acted in the belief that they faced an unqualified evil. The Devil’s specter had been summoned up in the denunciation of the stamp men. Protestant concerns and mental patterns had fostered an exaggerated clarity of morality and immorality, thereby heightening the emotional receptivity to fear of unseen, utterly evil forces.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“Every newspaper report of Virginia’s action made events in Virginia sound more extravagant than they were. The Burgesses had passed four resolves; Maryland printed six and Rhode Island seven; undoubtedly stories relayed in private letters, by word of mouth, the gossip of taverns, parishes, towns, and court meetings introduced further distortions. Henry’s bravado was reported in these stories; his backing down was not.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“Most American ideas were a part of the great tradition of the eighteenth-century common-wealthmen, the radical Whig ideology that arose from a series of upheavals in seventeenth-century England—the Civil War, the exclusion crisis of 1679–81, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Broadly speaking, this Whig theory described two sorts of threats to political freedom: a general moral decay of the people which would invite the intrusion of evil and despotic rulers, and the encroachment of executive authority upon the legislature, the attempt that power always made to subdue the liberty protected by mixed government.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“If the older churches often found themselves unable to cope with growth and mobility, the newer sects—especially the Separates and the Baptists—did not. Nor did churches swept by the revival and its message that the experience of the Spirit, the New Birth, constituted true religion. For the Awakening recalled a generation to the standards of reformed Protestantism, which had prevailed at the time of the founding of America. It revived values summed up best by its greater emphasis on individual experience and its lessened concern for traditional church organization. At the same time it produced a concentration on morality and right behavior, a social ethic supple enough to insist on the rights of the community while it supported the claims of individualism.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“No political system ever perfectly expresses the needs of its society. No society in the English colonies constructed political arrangements completely faithful to itself.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“the crisis that came upon the English colonies in the American Revolution was constitutional. It raised the question of how men should be governed, or as the Americans came to say, whether they as free men could govern themselves.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“The sense of superiority and the snobbery that underlay all the theory were far more important than any of the formal statements of mercantile or political thought. For this sense permeated, or seemed to, all ranks of Englishmen conscious of American existence. And it may be that the colonials in America, in the peculiar way of colonials, accepted both the truth of the explicit propositions and the unconscious assumption that they somehow were unequal to the English across the sea. Certain it is that the most sophisticated among them yearned to be cosmopolites, followed London’s fashions, and aped the English style. If this imitation did nothing else, it confirmed the prevailing feeling in Britain that the lines of colonial subordination were right and should remain unchanged.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“the extent of Parliament’s authority to legislate for the colonies had not been closely examined by anyone. When it was, it became a center of controversy. The common presumption in England, wholly unexamined, was that all was clear in the colonial relation. The colonies were colonies, after all, and as such they were “dependencies,” plants set out by superiors, the “children” of the “mother country,” and “our subjects.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“For all the power of the English, to cultivated Europe they appeared to be only a cut above the barbarians. Granted they had won victories in war, their merchants pushed their ships all over the world, they dominated commerce almost everywhere, but despite all these successes, Europeans could not bring themselves to extravagant praise or unqualified admiration. The English were after all a people without a culture. No European collected the pictures of English artists or sent his sons to England for education, and the Grand Tour did not include stopovers at English salons.2”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“Pitt was one of the marvels of the century, a leader who dazzled sober politicians and the crowd alike. He drew his peculiar appeal from some inner quality of temperament as well as mind, a quality which allowed, indeed drove, him to disregard both conventional wisdom and opposition and to push through to what he wanted. He was an “original” in an age suspicious of the original. He got away with being what he was, scorning the commonplace and the expected and explaining himself in a magnificent oratorical flow that inspired as much as it informed. Pitt’s powers of concentration shone from his fierce eyes, as did his belief in himself; in the crisis of war he said, “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.” He was obsessed even more by a vision of English greatness, a vision that fed on hatred of France and contempt for Spain. Pitt had despised the fumbling efforts of his predecessors to cope with the French on the Continent, and he was impatient with the incompetence of English generals in America.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“And yet the crisis that came upon the English colonies in the American Revolution was constitutional. It raised the question of how men should be governed, or as the Americans came to say, whether they as free men could govern themselves. There had been conflict between individual colonies and the home government before; in fact there had been rebellions within several colonies against constituted authority; and there may have been a long-standing though submerged resentment within the colonies against external control. All the earlier”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“Such men wrote the Constitution. They did so in a mood marked by disenchantment. For the delegates shared the widespread suspicion that virtue might be in flight from a deteriorating America”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“The Americans did not withdraw from the battlefield in a manner recommended by military manuals. Rather they left in a crowd with no regiment retaining its integrity as a unit. Gates made no attempt to discipline or reorganize this herd, choosing rather to outdistance it astride a fast horse.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“The prospect of many new states formed out of the West should make New Jersey pause; these states would undoubtedly enter the Union “when they contained but few inhabitants. If they should be entitled to vote according to their proportions of inhabitants, all would be right and safe.” But let them “have an equal vote, and a more objectionable minority than ever might give law to the whole.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“Roger Sherman of Connecticut almost made this meaning explicit in his opposition to popular election in the following sentence: “If it were in view to abolish the State Governments the elections ought to be by the people.” In other words if the state governments were to be preserved they must elect the officers of the national government. Early in the Convention, Sherman also professed a strong animus against the people saying that they “should have as little to do as may be about the Government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled.” Later when the protection of state rights was not at stake, Sherman proved more sympathetic to popular control than these first statements suggest.16”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“Franklin was a practical man. Practical men usually do not make revolutions; dreamers do.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“The use of travelling,” Doctor Johnson wrote Mrs. Thrale, “is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“It was difficult not to be intimidated by a crowd, especially at a time when it had attained such skill in the gentle art of tarring and feathering.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789

“The cause of liberty, he wrote, had always attracted “knaves” and “Qua[c]ks in Politics,” “Impostors in Patriotism” who imposed upon the “credulity of the well-meaning deluded Multitude.”
― Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789