Yorktown: Climax of the Revolution

“A total of about 200,000 Americans had served in the war, but that did not mean the rest of the country of about 3 million would show them any gratitude or respect. Americans in 1783 were desperate to put the trauma of the Revolution behind them, and these broken and penniless soldiers were a daily reminder of what they preferred to forget. “What scornful looks and hard words have I experienced,” Martin wrote forty-seven years later. “I hope I shall one day find land enough to lay my bones.””

— Unknown

“and the University of Pennsylvania, he penned a memoir of his time in America. Shortly after marrying the twenty-eight-year-old Marie Brigitte Plunkett,””

— Unknown

“[F]rom the observations I have made in the course of this war,” he wrote to his friend Benjamin Harrison, who was now governor of Virginia, “I am decided in my opinion that if the powers of Congress are not enlarged and made competent to all general purposes, that the blood which has been spilt, the expense that has been incurred and the distresses which have been felt will avail us nothing; and that the bond, already too weak, which holds us together, will soon be broken; when anarchy and confusion must prevail.””

— Unknown

“As Thomas Jefferson wrote the following year, “the moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.””

— Unknown

“THAT SPRING WASHINGTON received a letter from Lafayette, who had long since returned to France. Now that peace was looking like a certainty, he had a “wild scheme” to propose: the two of them should buy a small plantation together and “try the experiment to free the Negroes and use them only as tenants. Such an example as yours might render it a general practice.” Lafayette’s time in Virginia had given him a firsthand knowledge of the horrifying realities of southern slavery. He still loved Washington like a father, but something needed to be done to ensure that the promise of the Declaration of Independence”

— Unknown

“When he had learned in the fall of 1778 that she was critically ill, he rushed from New York back to their home in Culford, a small town about a hundred miles to the northeast of London, arriving shortly before her death at the age of thirty-two. Never happy about her husband’s decision to leave her and their two children in England while he fought the war in America, Jemima had requested that a thorn tree be planted over her grave to signify “the sorrow which [had] destroyed her life.””

— Unknown