Fort Ticonderoga Quotes

Fort Ticonderoga

Enter Henry Knox. The twenty-five-year-old bookworm approached Washington and volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the equipment. Washington approved the cockamamie mission. And so, that November Knox and his brother set off for New York. Who knew they would return in January with forty-three cannons, fourteen mortars, and two howitzers dragged across frozen rivers and over the snowy Berkshire Mountains on custom sleds. The is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter.

In early July 1777, Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York fell to the British, prompting King George III to clap his hands and exclaim, “I have beat them! Beat all the Americans.” It was a potential calamity for the patriots, since it opened a corridor for General John Burgoyne and his invading army from Canada to push south to New York City, slicing the rebel army in half and isolating New England—an overarching objective of British war policy.

If Old England is not by this lesson taught humility, then she is an obstinate old slut, bent upon her ruin.

Burgoyne exuded the high-spirited complacency obligatory at the beginning of every military calamity.

The English keep their clothing very clean,” a Bayreuth private observed in his diary, “and have only the vices of cussing, swearing, drinking, whoring, and stealing.

Perhaps Clinton’s shrewdest insight was that this war required figuring

Perhaps Clinton’s shrewdest insight was that this war required figuring out how “to gain the hearts & subdue the minds of America.

It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.

French officer would later tell Washington, “Your Excellency in that instance really conquered General Howe, but his troops conquered yours.

The American rebellion, now entering its third year, provided a perfect vehicle for sapping British strength, giving France time to brace for war and to enlist Spain’s military assistance under the Family Compact, which bound the Bourbon dynastic regimes in Versailles and Madrid and required them to provide mutual support.

The “fat old fellow”—also his description—still had the burly shoulders and strong back of a printer who had once manhandled eighty-pound forms of lead type for a living. After taking the

waters, a half smile on his pursed lips and a knowing glint in his hazel eyes, he might ramble down the rue Saint-Honoré with his crab-tree walking stick to the Café de la Régence or into the Académie Royale des Sciences, to which he had been elected in 1772 as the celebrated author of Experiments and Observations on Electricity. “Such a person was made to excite the curiosity of Paris,” an acquaintance wrote. “The people clustered around as he passed and asked, ‘Who is this old peasant who has such a noble air?’ 

We are sure that we are right, and we leave to you the despairing reflection of being the tool of a miserable tyrant.

The valley was filled with smoke,” a New Jersey diarist wrote. “The sun was set when I left the hill, from whence I saw the fate of the day.

I extracted four balls by cutting in the opposite side from where they went in,” Jonathan Todd, a surgeon’s mate in the 7th Connecticut, wrote his family on October 6. “My clothes are all bloody. Have none clean to put on…. None of you know the hardships of a soldier’s life.

As his own spymaster, Washington sent $500 to one Nathaniel Sacket “for secret services,” adding, “It runs in my head that I was to correspond with you by a fictitious name. If so, I have forgot the name and must be reminded of it again.

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.

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.

What a beautiful, what a happy land this is! Without kings, without high priests, without idle barons. Here everyone is happy.

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.

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.

Washington’s abrupt conversion encouraged inoculation in states that had sharply restricted the practice, particularly in the North. In a letter to his

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.

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.

I prayed the Lord to have mercy on his soul, and then took care of his body.

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.

Civil wars are unhappily distinguished from all others by a degree of rancor in their prosecution.

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.

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.

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,

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….

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.