To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 Read Free

When there is no army left the rebellion will be over. When the rebellion ends we will all be hung. Therefore we have little to lose.”
    Crossing the ice-choked Delaware at night in three different places, and then marching in the dark to Trenton to surprise a professional Hessian military unit (among the finest in Europe) was an act of absolute desperation.
    Some of the desperation was captured in the password for that night: “Victory or death.” Washington understood this was potentially the last gamble of the Revolution.
    Washington also understood the importance of morale and the power of a small number of determined people. Therefore he had Thomas Paine’s new pamphlet,
The American Crisis
, read to his men as they boarded the boats that night.
    One of the most interesting characteristics of the American Revolutionis the wide range of personalities engaged. From the permanently optimistic Ben Franklin, to the disciplined John Adams, to his fiery cousin Sam Adams, to the intellectual Virginia planter Thomas Jefferson, there was an extraordinary diversity of personalities and backgrounds brought together in response to the perceived threat of British tyranny.
    There may have been no greater contrast than that between General George Washington and the gifted propagandist Thomas Paine. Paine was from the poor neighborhoods of London. He was a natural revolutionary, deeply resentful of the wealthy and secure. Washington was probably the largest landowner in the colonies; a man of impeccable rectitude, considerable formality, and an intense, disciplined work ethic.
    The two could hardly have been more different in their background and temperament, and yet they came together in a moment of need to inspire a movement of determined men with the energy, the conviction, and the courage needed to win despite all the odds.
    No one should underestimate how great the odds were against Washington, the Founding Fathers, and the American Revolution succeeding.
    There was no reason to believe the American Revolution would survive.
    There was no reason to believe it would find a leader so patient, so determined, so disciplined, and so noble that his men would stick with him through defeat after defeat and that a Republic could be built on the shoulders of his moral force.
    George Washington faced an almost impossible task, and the odds were overwhelming that he would lose. The British had grown used to winning. They had crushed the last Irish rebellion in 1693. They had crushed the last Scots rebellion in 1745. They were used to peasant uprisings in rural England and routinely used the army to suppress the rabbles who dared break the law.
    British arrogance and self-confidence had been vastly strengthenedby the triple realities of commercial mercantile wealth, the even greater wealth of the early industrial revolution, and by having the most powerful navy in history.
    The commercial mercantile revolution itself was a byproduct of the dominance of the Royal Navy. From sugar plantations in the West Indies, to the African slave trade, to the spices of Asia, the British merchant fleet was the largest and most profitable in the world. It existed in the protective shadow of the Royal Navy’s dominance over all other navies combined.
    The wealth, which had been coming from trade, was in the eighteenth century rapidly being augmented (and then overshadowed) by the enormous opportunities of the industrial revolution. From the early eighteenth-century invention of the steam engine (applied initially to pump water out of coal mines) to the rise of railroads, which were initially horse drawn, as efficient methods of moving coal, to a huge canal system (which still exists and on which Steve Hanser has navigated on vacation with great enjoyment) there was an explosion of practical invention and production, which was rapidly making Great Britain the wealthiest and most productive country in the world.
    Finally there was military power.
    The British