Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.
Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.
Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.
One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.
The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear their own “hunting shirts” to build on the reputation of frontier marksmen.
If you knew how the journey was going to end, you could afford to be patient along the path.
If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.
His (Washington’s) apparent paralysis was the result of balancing two imperatives: his reputation against the survival of the Continental Army.
Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved.
It took him (Washington) more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts.
For Madison, on the other hand, “a Public Debt is a Public curse,” and “in a Representative Government greater than in any other.”26
in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked
I am not a Federalist,” he declared in 1789, “because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Contemporaries of Alexander Hamilton noticed “his conspicuous sense of self-possession, his unique combination of serenity and energy.
Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary. Washington had gone to war.
The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.
He was responsible for administering an army that lacked time-tested procedures and routinized policies, so every decision became an improvisational act.
And the only thing to do with a sin is to confess, do penance and then, after some kind of decent interval, ask for forgiveness.