The British Are Coming Quotes

“The tasks were too many, the seas too vast, the sails too few.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“London—the king’s men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, “panting for an explosion.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Here, then, was the crux. The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“A French writer once observed that, "in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves.… The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.… Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Thomas Paine had failed at everything he ever attempted in Britain: shopkeeping, teaching, tax collecting (twice), and marriage (also twice). For years he made whalebone corset stays in dreary provincial towns, then worked as an exciseman, chasing Dutch gin and tobacco smugglers along the English coast before being sacked for cause. Forced into bankruptcy—“Trade I do not understand,” he admitted—in desperation he sailed for Philadelphia and immediately found work editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, printing articles on Voltaire, beavers, suicide, and revolutionary politics. A gifted writer, infused with egalitarian and utopian ideals, he attacked slavery, dueling, animal cruelty, and the oppression of women. On January 10, 1776, a thousand copies of his new pamphlet on the American rebellion had been published anonymously under a simple title suggested by Dr. Benjamin Rush.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army, a more integrated national force than would exist for nearly two centuries.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Congress had denounced Catholics for “impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world.” Now it found “the Protestant and Catholic colonies to be strongly linked” by their common antipathy to British oppression. In a gesture of tolerance and perhaps to forestall charges of hypocrisy, Congress also acknowledged that Catholics deserved “liberty of conscience.” If nothing else, the Canadian gambit caused Americans to contemplate the practical merits of inclusion, moderation, and religious freedom. The Northern Army, as the invasion host was named, was to be a liberating force, not a vengeful one.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Edmund S. Morgan would write (in respect to the Declaration of Independence), "The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Erect and somber, Washington rode into the middle of a hollow square formed by New York and Connecticut regiments while a chirpy throng of civilians ringed the greensward. A uniformed aide spurred his horse forward; the crowd hushed as he unfolded his script and began to read: “In Congress, July 4, 1776.” Even the most unlettered private recognized that something majestic was in the air. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Reasonably democratic, reasonably egalitarian, wary of privilege and outsiders, they were accustomed to tending their own affairs, choosing their own ministers, militia officers, and political leaders. Convinced that their elected assemblies were equal in stature and authority to Parliament, they believed that governance by consent was paramount. They had not consented to being taxed, to being occupied, to seeing their councils dismissed and their port sealed like a graveyard crypt. They were godly, of course, placed here by the Almighty to do His will. Sometimes political strife was also a moral contest between right and wrong, good and evil. This struggle, as the historian Gordon S. Wood later wrote, would prove their blessedness. Warren circled round to that very point: Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful, but we have many friends, determining to be free.… On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots—if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace—who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Two hours later, Revere trotted into Lexington, his mount thoroughly lathered after outgalloping a pair of Gage’s equestrian sentinels near Charlestown. Veering north toward the Mystic River to avoid further trouble, Revere had alerted almost every farmstead and minute captain within shouting distance. Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry—“The British are coming!”—but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, “The regulars are coming out.” Now he carried the alarm to the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s parsonage, just up the road from Lexington Common. Here Clarke had written three thousand sermons in twenty years; here he called up the stairs each morning to rouse his ten children—“Polly, Betsey, Lucy, Liddy, Patty, Sally, Thomas, Jonas, William, Peter, get up!” And here he had given sanctuary, in a bedroom to the left of the front door, to the renegades Hancock and Samuel Adams. A squad of militiamen stood guard at the house as Revere dismounted, spurs clanking. Two warnings had already come from the east: as many as nine mounted British officers had been seen patrolling the Middlesex roads, perhaps “upon some evil design.” At the door, a suspicious orderly sergeant challenged Revere, and Clarke blocked his path until Hancock reportedly called out, “Come in, Revere, we’re not afraid of you.” The herald delivered his message: British regulars by the hundreds were coming out, first by boat, then on foot. There was not a moment to lose.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“The Americans, the Scottish economist Adam Smith warned, “feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel.… [They] are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves will become, and which indeed seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Thomas Paine, who had a shrewd eye for military matters, was closer to the mark in a public letter to Admiral Howe published in early 1777. “In all the wars which you have formerly been concerned in, you had only armies to contend with,” Paine observed. “In this case, you have both an army and a country to combat.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“the hardest of war’s hard truths—that for a new nation to live, young men must die, often alone, usually in pain, and sometimes to no obvious purpose. He, more than anyone, would be responsible for ordering those men to their deaths.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Newspapers printed stories of variable accuracy, beginning with a twenty-six-line account in the loyalist Boston News-Letter on April 20, deploring “this shocking introduction to all the miseries of a civil war.” The New-Hampshire Gazette’s headline read, “Bloody News.” In barely three weeks, the first reports of the day’s action would reach Charleston and Savannah. Lurid rumors spread quickly: of grandfathers shot in their beds, of families burned alive, of pregnant women bayoneted. Americans in thirteen colonies were alarmed, aroused, angry. “The times are very affecting,” Reverend Ezra Stiles told his diary in Rhode Island on April 23.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“By the early summer of 1776, the town had grown to twelve thousand residents—half white and free, half neither. Every farthing of Charleston’s affluence derived from slavery, as plain as the blue-stained palms of the indigo pickers sold on the Custom House auction block, or the ships packed with shackled Gambians and Angolans at Fitzsimmons’ Wharf, or the pillory near So Be It Lane for “negroes, mulattoes, and mestizos, who are apt to be riotous and disorderly,” according to a town ordinance.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“British colonial policy, quite simply, sought revenue for the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Described by his biographer as an “overweight, rheumatic, vain, pompous, gluttonous inebriate,” he had run through several fortunes totaling almost £100,000 with his spendthrift ways and aristocratic pretensions, including expenditures for a heavily mortgaged, thousand-acre New Jersey estate with piazzas, a deer park, painted drawing rooms, a wardrobe holding thirty-one coats and fifty-eight vests, and carriages embossed with the coat of arms he claimed as his patrimony.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“none surpassed this document in elegance, clarity, or breathtaking vision. That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners—Jefferson alone had two hundred—was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Tis worth the experiment. Audaces fortuna juvat”—fortune favors the bold—though he tempted fortune by adding, “Should we fail I don’t see any fatal consequences which are likely to attend it.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Discipline,” Washington had written in 1757, “is the soul of an army.” Certainly”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“It was the indispensable institution, led by the indispensable man, and the coupling of a national army with its commander marked the transformation of a rebellion into a revolution. “Confusion and discord reigned in every department,” Washington wrote in late July. “However we mend every day, and I flatter myself that in a little time we shall work up these raw materials into good stuff.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year’s pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year’s pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were “deemed slain in battle.” No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777