Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes
Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Interview.
This is one of the earliest uses of the “Father of the Country” phrase in describing George Washington. Washington did attend and was elected the Presiding Officer. He only spoke twice. Knox was a close friend and confidant of Washington’s and knew how to stroke Washington’s ego.
Welliver was the first of the American presidential speechwriters. President Harding was the one who used the term in public.
Today, most Americans know little of Samuel Adams but see John Adams as a much larger and more important figure. But for the American Patriots fighting the Revolution, it was Sam Adams who made the most outstanding contributions to the political strategy and leadership.
The treaty ending the Revolutionary war guaranteed that the English bankers and merchants who had debts going back to before the American Revo
lution would have “no impediment” in collecting their debts in America. However, Rhode Island and Virginia in particular placed many impediments and made it virtually impossible for debts to be collected in their states. The John Jay led Supreme Court, in particular, overturned state actions on the grounds that they had implemented Patrick Henry’s sentiment and hence violated the treaty.
Adams liked hardly anyone. Washington, his fellow Federalist was President when Adams was Vice President. He had little use for fellow Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton. See {621582} . Washington was by no means illiterate. He was an excellent writer, and was a trained surveyor who also had strong mathematical skills. The founding fathers were an amazingly well educated group of men, and Washington was about average in that rarefied atmosphere. Jefferson and Hamilton who arguably were far more learned than Adams, and who worked with Washington in his cabinet, never complained about Washington's intellectual or education capability. The problem was Adams who was critical of almost all.
Americans were by no means united in wanting to take up arms against Britain. Relatively few of the loyalist quotations have come down to us, but here is one. It also illustrates why some Americans wanted complete independence: So that they could escape their debts to English merchants. Most however had more noble and unselfish motives. As a matter of fact, the American Revolution is unusual in the sense that there were so many men of substance who sacrificed much of their material wealth for the American ideal. There were also the rogues and opportunists as Galloway describes.
His Fundamentals of New York Law was used for teaching law for years.
This was written more than a year before the “blows” began. It took time to ship the men and supplies to America and the British did not handle that task with much efficiency.
This was written more than a year before the American Revolution Battles began. It took time to ship the men and supplies to America and the British did not handle that task with much efficiency. See {636926} for another of the King’s statements.
Fox was one of the opposition leaders who were opposed to the heavy handed policies that the British King and Government had used.
Mechanics was a general term for people who made things, or fixed things. Ramsay was the first major historian of the American Revolution.
Nathaniel Philbrick is an American author of history, winner of the National Book Award, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His maritime history, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which tells the true story that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick, won the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was adapted as a film in 2015.
