Revolutionary Summer Quotes

“If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“Washington not only fit the bill physically, he was also almost perfect psychologically, so comfortable with his superiority that he felt no need to explain himself. (As a young man during the French and Indian war he had been more outspoken, but he learned from experience to allow his sheer presence to speak for itself.) While less confident men blathered on, he remained silent, thereby making himself a vessel into which admirers for their fondest convictions, becoming a kind of receptacle for diverse aspirations that magically came together in one man.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“Unquestionably, New York enjoyed enormous strategic significance. As Adams had already apprised Washington, it was “the nexus of the Northern and Southern colonies … the key to the whole Continent, as it is a Passage to Canada, to the Great Lakes, and to all the Indian Nations.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“the land of opportunity, where credentials mattered less than demonstrated ability.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“But the question made no sense to the bulk of the troops, who regarded instinctive obedience to orders and ready acceptance of subordination within a military hierarchy as infringements on the very liberty they were fighting for. They saw themselves as invincible, not because they were disciplined soldiers like the redcoats but because they were patriotic, liberty-loving men willing to risk their lives for their convictions.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“Namely, the very values that the American patriots claimed to be fighting for were incompatible with the disciplined culture required in a professional army. Republics were committed to a core principle of consent, while armies were the institutional embodiments of unthinking obedience and routinized coercion. The very idea of a “standing army” struck most members of the Continental Congress and the state legislatures as a highly dangerous threat to republican principles.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting a command under such Circumstances, I should have taken my musket upon my Shoulder & entered the Ranks or … had retir’d to the back country & lived in a Wig-wam. —GEORGE WASHINGTON”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“eager to oppose Thomas Paine’s prescription in Common Sense for a huge single-house legislature that purportedly embodied the will of “the people” in its purest form. For Adams, “the people” was a more complicated, multivoiced, hydra-headed thing that had to be enclosed within different chambers.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“Physically as well as psychologically, Dickinson was the opposite of Adams: tall and gaunt, with a somewhat ashen complexion and a deliberate demeanor that conveyed the confidence of his social standing in the Quaker elite and his legal training at the Inns of Court in London.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“Pitt and Burke were two of the most eloquent and respected members of Parliament, and taken together, by early 1775, they were warning the British ministry that it was headed toward a war that was unwise, unnecessary, and probably unwinnable.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the acknowledged architect of the British victory in the French and Indian War, rose to condemn the decision to militarize the conflict. He recommended the withdrawal from Boston of all British troops, who could only serve as incendiaries for a provocative incident that triggered a war.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“no shared sense of American nationhood existed in 1776, even though the Continental Congress and the Continental Army can be regarded as embryonic versions of such. All alliances among the colonies, and then the states, were presumed to be provisional and temporary arrangements. Allegiances within the far-flung American population remained local,”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“For example, the Continental Congress made a deliberate decision to avoid any consideration of the slavery question, even though most delegates were fully aware that it violated the principles they claimed to be fighting for. Adams is most revealing on this score because, more than anyone else, he articulated the need to defer the full promise of the American Revolution in order to assure a robust consensus on the independence question.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“The second is the military narrative of the battles on Long Island and Manhattan, where the British army and navy delivered a series of devastating defeats to an American army of amateurs, but missed whatever chance existed to end it all. The focal point of this story is the Continental Army, and the major actors are George Washington, Nathanael Greene, and the British brothers Richard and William Howe.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“The first is the political tale of how thirteen colonies came together and agreed on the decision to secede from the British Empire. Here the center point is the Continental Congress, and the leading players, at least in my version, are John Adams, John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“His (Washington's) apparent paralysis was the result of balancing two imperatives: his reputation against the survival of the Continental Army.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“In the summer of 1776, the average British soldier was 28 years old with seven years experience in the Army. The average American soldier was 20 and had known military life for only six months.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“(John) Adams acknowledged that he had made himself obnoxious to many of his colleagues, who regarded him as a one-man bonfire of the vanities. This never troubled Adams, who in his more contrarian moods claimed that his unpopularity provided clinching evidence that his position was principled, because it was obvious that he was not courting popular opinion. His alienation, therefore, was a measure of his integrity.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those factions and furies from spending out of control.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“Ordinary British soldiers harbored several strange preconceptions of their own. Some were surprised that the colonists wore clothes, thinking they would dress like Indians. Other had expected to encounter roving bands of wild animals in the manner of African jungles. And when a loyalist came aboard one ship to help it into port, the British crew and troops were dumbfounded. "All the People had been of the Opinion," they exclaimed, "that the inhabitants of America were black.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

“the second paragraph of the Declaration that is very much an expression of Jefferson’s imagination. It envisions a perfect world, at last bereft of kings, priests, and even government itself. In this never-never land, free individuals interact harmoniously, all forms of political coercion are unnecessary because they have been voluntarily internalized, people pursue their own different versions of happiness without colliding, and some semblance of social equality reigns supreme. As Lincoln recognized, it is an ideal world that can never be reached on this earth, only approached. And each generation had an obligation to move America an increment closer to the full promise, as Lincoln most famously did. The American Dream, then, is the Jeffersonian Dream writ large, embedded in language composed during one of the most crowded and congested moments in American history by an idealistic young man who desperately wished to be somewhere else.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence