Nick’s Reviews > The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 > Status Update

And yet the test of battle was endurable, as we have seen. in part because the Continental army shared so much with the people who sustained it. In the long struggle of the war, what made the cause "glorious,'' besides its great principles, was the fact that so many believed in it. As it took hold of Americans' imagination, the glorious cause became, in the popular phrase, the "common cause."

The army's will to survive and to fight on short rations, its willingness to suffer, to sacrifice, made the inadequate adequate and rendered the failures of others of little importance. The army overcame the worst in itself and in others. It was indomitable.

Covet! My Countrymen, and fellow soldiers! Covet! A share of the glory due to heroic deeds! Let it never be said, that in a day of action, you turned your backs on the foe; let the enemy no longer triumph. - Washington, battle of Germantown

The British presented a threat because they were corrupt as well as powerful. They had to be resisted with everything America had; if they were not, virtue, piety, and liberty would be lost. These convictions governed Adams's conduct throughout the Revolution.

Self-government, in this view, rested on virtue, on righteousness, and in the conflict the Americans confronted a government, as John Hancock pointed out, that was not "righteous."

In all the outrage and the proposals for getting things changed there was a sense that the Americans faced evil and corruption which would spread to their own shores if they failed to defend themselves. The sources of this conviction lay deeply within Protestant culture, especially the belief that most conflict involved questions of good and evil, and right and wrong.

Having to stomach a standing army in their midst, observe the redcoats daily, pass by troops stationed on Boston Neck who occupied a guardhouse on land illegally taken it was said from the town, and having to receive challenges by sentries on the streets, their own streets, affronted a people accustomed to personal liberty, fired their tempers, and gnawed away at their honor.

These petitions and similar ones elsewhere came out of small informal meetings, organized by men with no social standing and no offices but with their own interests and the public's in mind. For the next three years more and more such men took part in politics, or in those political activities directed against British policy.

The right of Parliament to regulate trade seemed just as clear—it was a matter of "necessity,"' Stephen Hopkins wrote. The empire had a center, England, and it had constituent parts, the colonies. To pull it together, superintend its commerce, and make decisions relating to matters of common concern were necessary, and Parliament seemed the only agency capable of so doing.

For Pitt praised American resistance: "I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty, as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest."