John Ferling > Quotes

“As Washington, Adams, and Jefferson reached the cusp of adulthood, each exhibited a passion for independence. Each hungered for emancipation from the entanglements of childhood and sought to carve out an autonomous existence. The handmaiden to each young man's zeal for self-mastery was a propulsive ambition that drove him to yearn for more than his father had attained, for more even than his father had ever hoped to achieve.”
― John Ferling, Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution

“Gates should have exceeded Washington as a military leader. He had long experience in a professional army and was more loved by his men. But Washington's character was superior to that of his rival, and it made him a great man, whereas Gates was merely a good soldier.”
― John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence

“Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, every man would be an insulate being." Thomas Jefferson”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“Some 2,500 of Washington’s Continentals perished that winter, roughly one in five of those who had entered Valley Forge just before Christmas. (In contrast, one in thirty American soldiers died in combat in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the nation’s costliest engagements in World War II.)”
― John Ferling, Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It

“The feelings of politicians are rarely transparent.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“At first glance, young John Adams’s obsession with recognition seems odd. In contrast to the great mass of his contemporaries, his yearning was exceptional. Yet when Adams is compared to other high achievers of his generation, his behavior appears more normal. Young Washington sought recognition just as fervently, and he impatiently pursued a commission in the British army during the French and Indian War as the most rapid means of procuring attention. The youthful Thomas Jefferson dreamed of someday sitting on the King’s Council in Virginia, while Alexander Hamilton, born too late to soldier in the war in the 1750s, announced: “I contemn the grovling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune, &c., contemns me.” He wished for war, through which he could be catapulted into notoriety; his hero was James Wolfe, the British general who died in the assault on Quebec in 1759. Benjamin Franklin, who grew up earlier in Boston, exhibited the same industriousness and ambition that Adams would evince. He mapped out an extensive regimen of self-improvement, as did Adams, and found his role models in Jesus and Socrates. Adams, and many others who would subsequently play an important role in the affairs of early America, were the sort of men that historian Douglass Adair aptly describes as “passionately selfish and self-interested,” men who shared a common attribute, a love of fame.23”
― John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

“Adams drew back. He wanted Hannah, but he did not live for her. Making a name for himself was more important. He told her that he could not marry for years, until his practice was established. He knew that his honesty would doom the relationship, and Hannah in fact began to see others. Adams's ambition had triumphed over love.”
― John Ferling, Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution

“But England’s degeneration had also allegedly occurred because its modern financial system had produced unimaginable riches for the few and deepening poverty for the many, widening the gap between rich and poor, and cursing the land with a malignant tyranny that ate away at the liberties once enjoyed by Englishmen.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“Fame had been democratized. During most of history only members of the privileged classes had possessed a realistic opportunity to achieve majestic fame, but in the eighteenth century it has been demonstrated repeatedly, by men such as Franklin, for instance, that fame might be achieved by men born into a lesser social rank.”
― John Ferling, Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution

“It was anything but reassuring to have to tell one’s wife, in “Case of real Danger . . . fly to the Woods with our Children.”
― John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

“For leaders, wars are filled with guesses.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“There are always those who wish to sanitize war by portraying its grand and noble deeds-which sometimes occur-while drawing a veil over its shameless side. By its nature, war is harsh, brutal, and pitiless, and while it can call out the best in humankind, it can also awaken the darkest side of human nature, arousing in many participants a coldhearted callousness. For most, danger begets fear. For some, fear sires ferocity, and ferocity spawns a ruthlessness that subsumes compassion. For still other men, more than is gratifying to acknowledge, soldiering is a license to unleash iniquitous qualities that they struggled to suppress in peacetime.”
― John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence

“He also embraced a cyclical theory of history. History, he believed, flowed in cycles. Infant nations were virtuous and uncorrupted, but with age they grew tainted, eventually falling into decline and succumbing to their encumbering maladies and vices.”
― John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

“Washington was unmistakably tenacious and courageous, and an iron-hard ruggedness shined through the patina of genteel cultivation that he had gradually acquired. It set him apart from most other men. He had soldiered for five years, often facing supreme danger. Much was known about his brave exploits. His euphoric remark, uttered during the French and Indian War, about having “heard… Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound,” had gotten into the newspapers and was remembered.”
― John Ferling, Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence

“Jefferson attributes to a college professor and mentor his lifelong habit of questioning conventional wisdom.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“Jefferson reflected, "I think of her (a college infatuation) perhaps too much for my peace of mind. " Nevertheless, he was robbed of his considerable verbal powers when he got the chance to speak to the object of his affections.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“The Virginia assembly quickly approved military action, asserting—as aggressors invariably do—that their soldiers were being sent for defensive purposes, in this instance to safeguard Kentucky.67 While the Continental army”
― John Ferling, Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence

“Today’s America is more Hamilton’s America. Jefferson may never have fully understood Hamilton’s funding and banking systems, but better than most he gleaned the potential dangers that awaited future generations living in the nation state that Hamilton wished to bring into being. Presciently, and with foreboding, Jefferson saw that Hamiltonianism would concentrate power in the hands of the business leaders and financiers that it primarily served, leading inevitably to an American plutocracy every bit as dominant as monarchs and titled aristocrats had once been. Jefferson’s fears were not misplaced. In modern America, concentrated wealth controls politics and government, leading even the extremely conservative Senator John McCain to remark that “both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.”43 The American nation, with its incredibly powerful chief executive, gargantuan military, repeated intervention in the affairs of foreign states, and political system in the thrall of great wealth, is the very world that Jefferson abhorred.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“The author distinguishes George Washington's leadership from that of another aristocratic general whose temperament was somewhat cold. Unlike him, Washington made the effort to at least appear to suffer with his troops.”
― John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic

“If that was not enough, Franklin also kept his exhausted younger cohort awake far into the night with an interminable disquisition on colds.”
― John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

“Adams’s proclivity for truculence and curtness probably emerged early. Uncertain of his abilities and laboring under an exaggerated sense of inadequacy, he probably fashioned such an aggressive manner as a defense mechanism.”
― John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

“Some Continental army officers joined the search, looking for African Americans they had once owned. General Washington was one who spent some time combing the countryside. He found two of his slaves who had escaped in the raid of the HMS Savage. He sent them back to Mount Vernon and a lifetime of servitude.35 In this hour of triumph for a revolution waged for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Washington also found the time to congratulate his army on the victory that had brought “Joy” to “every Breast.”
― John Ferling, Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It

“The author characterizes Hamilton's tone in the Federalist papers by saying that he never spoke of problems but of being at the last stage in the crisis.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“The surface causes of Adams’s anxieties are not difficult to discern. Every activist knew the penalty for treason. Every congressman knew that prison, perhaps death, would be his reward if the American rebellion failed.”
― John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

“Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.”
― John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation

“It was the greatest speech that Adams ever delivered. He was “our Colossus on the floor,” Jefferson said later, adding that Adams had spoken “with a power of thought and expression, that moved us from our seats.” Richard Stockton of New Jersey, one of those who had just entered Congress, was mesmerized by Adams’s speech. The “force of his reasoning” made it clear that there was no choice but independence, he wrote to his son. “The man to whom the country is most indebted for the great measure of independency is Mr. John Adams of Boston. I call him the Atlas of American Independence.”
― John Ferling, John Adams: A Life

“Wanting to change only the British position at the top of the American social structure, John Adams feared that a "rage for innovation" would consume what was worthwhile about American culture.”
― John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic

“Jefferson subsequently came to believe that Henry’s speech attacking the Stamp Act had been “the dawn of the Revolution.”36”
― John Ferling, Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It

“to gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”
― John Ferling, Almost A Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence

“Independence may have been declared in 1776, but it still had to be won. Years of bloody warfare followed. The death toll was staggering, for soldiers and noncombatants. Of all the wars in the history of the United States, only the Civil War witnessed a greater percentage of deaths among those who soldiered. The ratio of”
― John Ferling, Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It