The Fate of the Day Quotes

“New York remained a garrison town, under the heels of British military boots and without civilian courts, civil government, or elected officials. Clinton’s ration summary for mid-December listed 34,299 men, 3,875 women, and 3,444 children; in addition to several thousand horses wintering on Long Island, the army also claimed 930 cattle and 1,019 sheep. The king’s bureaucracy regulated every aspect of New York life, from grain and firewood prices to cartage fees by the mile: six shillings for a hogshead of rum or eight shillings for a load of hay. Brooklyn ferries could charge no more than two shillings for a horse, a penny for a rabbit, or sixpence for a man, a hog, a large looking glass, or a dead calf. Every house was required to keep two fire buckets, and “no corpse is to be buried in the yard of the meeting house.” Auctioneers, boatmen, and various vendors needed licenses, and no stranger could set foot in New York without notifying the authorities. Commandant Pattison, warning that “many evils daily arise from the unlimited number of taverns and public houses,” capped the number of grogshop licenses at two hundred, each subject to official approval. Hospital patients bought so much liquor that they would now be forced to wear an H on both sleeves, and barkeeps were forbidden to serve them.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“was such a fool to stay so long in England,” he told a friend”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Now forty-nine”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Follies and blunders without end.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“I am here in the usual style—writing”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Everywhere distrust”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Almost a third of the country’s thirty-five hundred physicians served with the Continental Army”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Expert at gauging the temper of the chamber”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“None of them evinced the least sign of hate or malicious joy as we passed by.” Lieutenant Lord Napier later told his journal, “They behaved with the greatest decency and propriety, not even a smile appearing in any of their countenances, which circumstance I really believe would not have happened had the case been reversed.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Money is this man’s God, and to get enough of it he would sacrifice his country.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“American Crisis, Number IV, dated “Philadelphia, September 12, 1777,” he wrote, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Good luck and an opponent’s blunders perhaps counted for more than Kalb reckoned; they had long contributed to Washington’s success as a commander.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Major General Baron de Kalb, Lafayette’s companion in the voyage from Bordeaux, had come to his own conclusions about Washington in a month of observing the Continental Army. “He is the most amiable, kind-hearted, and upright of men,” Kalb wrote his wife. “But as a general he is too slow, too indolent, and far too weak…. Whatever success he may have will be owing to good luck and to the blunders of his adversaries.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“I prayed the Lord to have mercy on his soul, and then took care of his body.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Washington urged him to get moving. The delay “has filled me with inexpressible concern,” he wrote Sullivan in early July. Surely no more than fifteen hundred foemen, Indian and white, would oppose the expedition; the Continental force would outnumber them three to one. “Hasten your operations with all possible dispatch,” Washington commanded in another tart dispatch. “Disencumber yourself of every article of baggage and stores which is not necessary.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“he advocated “a law to compel the masters of families to inoculate every child born within a certain limited time, under severe penalties.” At the same time, in defiance of Virginia law, he ordered the inoculation of his family and all slaves at Mount Vernon.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Washington’s abrupt conversion encouraged inoculation in states that had sharply restricted the practice, particularly in the North. In a letter to his”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“To Britain’s discredit, Howe would be succeeded as the North American naval commander by an unpopular incompetent, Vice Admiral James Gambier, described as an “old reptile” given to convulsions, bad nerves, and dispatches that began with maundering nonsense such as “Crippled and dying as I am.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“I grow every day more and more disgusted with the folly & iniquity of the cause in which I am condemned to serve,” Captain Richard Fitzpatrick, a Guards officer and member of Parliament, wrote his brother, the Earl of Upper Ossory. Brigadier General James Pattison, who had recently arrived from England to command the Royal Artillery detachments, also wrote his brother in December. “All the efforts that Great Britain can make will never effectively conquer this great continent,” he warned, adding: We have not only armies to combat, but a whole country, where every man, woman, and even child is your enemy…. Ministers have been deceived and have never known the true state of this country. If they had, they never would have entered into a war with it.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Gates took a moment at the end of the day to scratch a note to his wife: Burgoyne and his whole army have laid down their arms, and surrendered themselves to me and my Yankees. Thanks to the Giver of all victory for this triumphant success…. If Old England is not by this lesson taught humility, then she is an obstinate old slut, bent upon her ruin.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Henry Laurens urged states to send “no frolickers, no jolly fellows, or you will be despised,” adding, “We want genius, insight, foresight, fortitude, and all the virtuous powers of the human mind.” He would be largely disappointed.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“We are entered deeply in a contest on which our all depends,” Hamilton wrote Greene as the apple trees blossomed in Morristown. “We must endeavor to rub through it.” Rubbing through it had become the American way of war, an improvised skitter from one crisis to the next.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“With remarkable nonchalance, both the government and Burgoyne shrugged off this inconvenient wrinkle. No attempt was made to ensure that the “junction with Sir William Howe” was more than notional, or to assess how the Canada Army, if forced to spend the next winter in Albany, would supply itself across more than 200 wilderness miles from Montreal or 150 miles upriver from New York City. While conceding that “extraordinary physical difficulties” lay ahead, Burgoyne exuded the high-spirited complacency obligatory at the beginning of every military calamity. To General Edward Harvey, the army’s adjutant general in London, he wrote, “I have reason to be exceedingly satisfied with all that has been done.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“Civil wars are unhappily distinguished from all others by a degree of rancor in their prosecution.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of mankind,” the marquis wrote in another letter to Adrienne. “She is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, of equality, and of peaceful liberty….”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“No one was more agitated at what he called “the characteristic imbecility of a council of war” than Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, who had served as notetaker during the dim-lit conference. The generals collectively resembled a “society of midwives,”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“If Old England is not by this lesson taught humility, then she is an obstinate old slut, bent upon her ruin.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“French officer would later tell Washington, “Your Excellency in that instance really conquered General Howe, but his troops conquered yours.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“The whole of this affair appears a mystery to me.” Brigadier General Weedon wrote a friend in Virginia, “So sportive is fortune, and the chances of war so uncertain, that when victory was in our hands we had not grace to keep it.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

“virtues. In The American Crisis, Number IV, dated “Philadelphia, September 12, 1777,” he wrote, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780