Quotes from Robert Middlekauff

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.

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.

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.

No political system ever perfectly expresses the needs of its society. No society in the English colonies constructed political arrangements completely faithful to itself.

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.

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.

Franklin was a practical man. Practical men usually do not make revolutions; dreamers do.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.