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George Washington
WHAT IS THERE TO CELEBRATE?
As we approach the bicentennial of the American Revolution we find ourselves in a paradoxical and embarrassing situation. A celebration of some kind certainly seems to be in order, but the urge to celebrate is not exactly overwhelming.
The brothers were expected to perform an almost impossible task, subduing a people of the same flesh and blood and heritage.
Wars are more often lost than won, but in 1775 a man who predicted British defeat in the Revolution would have been taken for a fool.
On any list of events that have altered the course of history the opening of Japan to foreign trade in 1854 must surely rank high.
Rakehells, men of good will, adventurers, and bunglers were all in the glittering pageant when the Old World came to help out the New
Two great historic figures, men who have merged into myth, are almost the sole remains of the alliance between France and the revolutionary forces of America—Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin. And like most myths time has changed them, clothing the reality in a web of romance.
“1795.—The state of my health rendering a voyage to Europe necessary, I determined to proceed by way of America. Accordingly, towards the end of November, I left Santipore, taking with me a small Bengal cow, in addition to my doombah and other curiosities brought from Delhi.
Courageous and resourceful, the Marquis was bred for better things than defeat at the hands of rebellious provincials.
In war the final defeat is the one that counts. Yet there are wars and wars, and only rarely do historians conclude that a particular surrender was not only a cessation of fighting but a watershed marking the end of one epoch and the start of another.
Second in a series of paintings for
AMERICAN HERITAGE
Mid-October of 1776 found a badly beaten American army in full retreat from Manhattan Island into the forests and farmlands of Westchester County.
When British dragoons captured this brilliant and ambitious general, it put an end to his ambition to replace Washington as commander-in-chief.
One acquaintance nicknamed him Naso, for the long beak that dominated his dark, pinched face. Mohawk warriors, with whom he lived during the French and Indian War, called him Ounewaterika, or “Boiling Water”—a name that only partially suggested his disposition.
James Fenimore Cooper told him; Charles Sumner and Ralph Waldo Emerson told him; even Charles Bulfinch, one of the architects of the Capitol, told him; but Horatio Greenough knew his own mind.
The British commander felt the rebels didn't a real army. But letters he addressed to "George Washington, Esq." were returned to sender.
Defeated at Saratoga, Burgoyne’s troops faced nearly five years of enforced exile in a hostile countryside
On October 17, 1777, Elijah Fisher confided the following information to his diary: … Gen. Burgoin and his howl army surrendered themselves Prisoners of Ware and Come to Captelate with our army and Gen. Gates.
A domino theory, distant wilderness warfare, the notion of “defensive enclaves,” hawks, doves, hired mercenaries, possible intervention by hostile powers, a Little trouble telling friendly natives from unfriendly—George III went through the whole routine
To begin with, the Presidential libraries do not look like what they are. Each one is, in fact, a miniature Office of Public Records.
In reprisal for a Tory atrocity, Washington ordered the hanging of a captive British officer chosen by lot. He was nineteen.
President Washington appointed John Jay to be Chief Justice because the eloquent partisan of the Constitution shared a desire to strengthen the machinery of the central government and to bring about conformity to treaty obligations among the states.
After the Revolution, Washington returned to farming at Mount Vernon but eventually called for that he wished a “Convention of the People” to establish a “Federal Constitution”
Mortally ill as his century dwindled to its close, Washington was helped to his grave by physicians who clung to typical eighteenth-century remedies. But he died as nobly as he had lived
“Whom can we trust now?” cried out General Washington when he discovered his friend’s “villainous perfidy.”
The most famous, or infamous, traitor in American history was Major General Benedict Arnold—a brilliant officer, a whirlwind hero, a trusted military comrade of George Washington’s.
Had a tempest not thwarted his plans, George Washington might have lost the Revolution in the first major operation he commanded
That George Washington drove the British out of Boston in early March 1776 is known to almost every schoolboy who has studied the American Revolution, but a disturbing aspect of this crucial event is not recognized even by most of the experts.
Neglected for over half a century, Emanuel Leutze’s huge historical canvas hovered near oblivion. Then this magazine helped to rediscover
Last fall, when the December issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE was being prepared for the printer, the Editors looked into the career of Emanuel Leutze, painter of the famous "Washington Crossing the Delaware," which was
The Polish poet stayed twelve days and saw it all—the great gardens, pretty Nellie Custis, the distillery, the toy Bastille, the wretched slave huts, the great man himself denouncing the irritating French
The American system of choosing a President has not worked out badly, far as it may be from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a natural aristocracy
Or, a dogged attempt to assemble a most remarkable company—the famous survivors of the battle lost by a British general on the Monongahela. Everybody who was anybody was there, from George Washington to Daniel Boone. Everybody, that is, but B. Gratz Brown
To Falstaff’s question, early America gave an unequivocal answer. Its roadside taverns were the traveler’s refuge and the townsman’s club
In a day of rampant money-making, gentle Peter Cooper was not only a reformer but successful, widely loved, and rich.
Without doubt they were Washington, who walked carefully within the Constitution, and Lincoln, who stretched it as far as he dared
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