Continental Army Quotes

The die is now cast. The colonies must either submit or triumph.

After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.

United Colonies

Then Anthony is mad, stark mad. Mad Anthony Wayne! Mad Anthony Wayne!

George Washington’s brother, Lawrence, was the Uncle of Our Country.

In a few days an officer came to our camp, under a flag of truce, and informed Hamilton, then a captain of artillery, but afterwards the aid of General Washington, that Captain Hale had been arrested within the British lines condemned as a spy, and executed that morning.

There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.

The year 1776, celebrated as the birth year of the nation and for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was for those who carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too they would never forget.

My next book is also set in the eighteenth century. It's about the Revolution, with the focus on the year 1776. It's about Washington and the army and the war. It's the nadir, the low point of the United States of America.

Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of July not only with exploding powder and shimmering flares, but with all of our senses.

Very great Pains have been taken to starve the [American Patriot] Troops … in Boston, for no Article Necessary for the support of Life is suffered to be sent from any of the Provinces from New Hampshire to South Carolina, and in most of the sea-Ports persons are appointed to examine everything that is embarked and where it was going.

When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair.

It is my opinion that General Washington’s influence will do more than all the Assemblies upon the Continent. I always thought him exceeding popular; but in many places he is little less than adored; and universally admired. His influence in this Country might possibly effect something great.

More than two decades later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming out any other way.

There were people who said the Society of Cincinnati in the American revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati.

I received orders from Congress to proceed to Charleston in South Carolina, for the purpose of Co'operating with General Lincoln in the defense of that Capitol.

Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire.

Didn't George Washington say, 'He who controls Afghanistan will carry New Jersey?'

On the coming of that tremendous storm which for eight years desolated our country, Mr. Jefferson hesitated not, halted not.

I am George Rogers Clark. You have just become a prisoner of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis.

It is hard for anyone who discovers George Washington not to write about him, perhaps because he is so hard to discover and such a surprise when you do.

Before the end of the [American Revolutionary] war came South Carolina and Georgia were very nearly demoralized. In the course of the conflict South Carolina lost not less than 25,000 slaves, about one-fifth of all she had. Georgia did not lose so many, but proportionally suffered even more. Some of the Negroes went into the British army, some went away with the loyalists, and some took advantage of the confusion and escaped to the Indians … some slaves entered the Continental Army as free Negroes.

What's been largely forgotten is that Washington was highly passionate and aggressive, and it was only after losing Philadelphia to the British after a string of disastrous battlefield performances that he finally resigned himself to the more conservative approach with which he has since become associated.

General Washington had rather incautiously encamped the bulk of his army on Long Island - a large and plentiful district about two miles from the city of New York.