Home > Work > In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
1 " 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. "
― Nathaniel Philbrick , In the Hurricane's Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown
2 " 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, "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " 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—“liberty and justice for all”—applied to all Americans, no matter what their skin color. "
