“They are remarkably stout and hardy men,” thought army surgeon James Thacher, “Dressed in white frocks, or rifle shirts, and round hats.” The robust constitutions and rugged appearance of the reinforcements that arrived at Boston in the summer of 1775 occasioned no small stir in the army camps ringing Boston. Dressed in a curious amalgam […]
“The cunning man steals a horse, the wise man lets him alone.”[1] It had been less than three months since Congress had adopted a Declaration of Independence, but George Washington was already warning that the Articles of War governing the behavior of troops was in desperate need of an update, “otherwise the Army, but for […]
In the weeks before it declared independence, the Continental Congress was already hard at work building the institutions it would need to maintain the new republic. In June 1776, a committee was appointed to explore articles that would link the thirteen provincial legislatures in a loose confederation. A second was tasked to consider how the […]
