(Author’s note: The second book collection of my columns, Bruce’s History Lessons - the Second Five Years (2006 – 20011) is now available in book form and in e-book form on Amazon (download to either Kindle or Kindle IPad), or at Barnes and Noble .  Click on the above links to go to either version on Amazon.  My first five-year collection of columns, Bruce’s History Lessons – The First Five Years (2001 – 2006) is also available at Amazon.  Both books can also be purchased via the book links on the homepage of my website, historylessons.net.)

This week (Dec. 19) in 1777, George Washington led his beleaguered Continental Army into winter’s quarters in Valley Forge, Pa., where they would endure the harshest winter in memory with little food, clothing or shelter.  The stories about “Blood on the snow” and cries of “No meat!” were actually quite true.  By contrast, just 18 miles away in Philadelphia, British General William Howe and his warm, well-fed troops were settling into quarters, happy to wait out a winter they were sure would be the last for the rebellious Americans.

But the question arises?  Why Valley Forge, a hard-to-supply camp so close to Philadelphia and Howe’s more powerful army?  Why not larger, more comfortable winter headquarters farther away — in Reading or Lancaster, Pa., as some had suggested?   Why suffer such deprivation and be so near a dangerous enemy?

The answer is mostly politics.  Recall that the decision to break with Great Britain, then the world’s most powerful military force, was not universally supported in America.  In many areas, Loyalists — those who preferred to remain part of the British Empire — outnumbered rebels, and fence-sitters — those waiting to see how things turned out — were also in abundance.   And in December of 1777 things were not going well for America, meaning the people were growing increasingly tired of the war.  That was especially true in Pennsylvania with its large population of Quaker pacifists.

Thus was Washington reluctant to “leave the field” for the hinterlands.  He worried that giving up any presence near Philadelphia, back then the most important city in America, would leave native Philadelphians who supported the revolution defenseless against British reprisals and Loyalist retribution.  Part of Washington’s genius as a commander was his understanding that the American Revolution was as much a battle for the “hearts and minds” of the populace as it was a battle of soldiers and equipment.   The decision to winter at Valley Forge, which at least was a militarily defensible position, was made partly to buck up the morale of the rebels in and around Philadelphia, thus ensuring that they remained loyal to the revolution.

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Our second president, John Adams, who was born this week (Oct. 30) in 1735, would serve his country with a dedication that only one other Founding Father surpassed — the one who preceded him to the presidency, George Washington. When Adams wasn’t being asked to leave his home and family in Braintree, Massachusetts, to serve his country in Congress, he was asked to leave home, family and country to represent the latter in Europe — and he always went despite the toll it took on his family, his finances and his health.

In his day his importance to the nation was considered second only to Washington, and it was Adams himself, as leader of the Continental Congress, who convinced Congress to make Washington commander of the Revolutionary Army — thus making possible Washington’s heroic destiny.

Adams also later convinced that Congress to assign another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, the task of writing a document declaring America’s independence from England.  As historian David McCullough has noted, if Adams had done nothing other than those two deeds, his imprint on American history would be indelible.

But Adams did much more.  His Thoughts on Government, written in 1775, was an early blueprint on how to arrange government institutions to ensure liberty among the people, and during the American Revolution it was Adams who secured a vital loan from the Netherlands that helped the Americans keep on fighting. Once that war was won, Adams also helped negotiate the peace treaty with England.

As America’s first vice president (a job the loquacious Adams loathed as much because it rendered him mute as it did powerless), he was the model of loyalty to Washington, while his own presidency, although controversial thanks to the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, was a qualified success marked by terrible timing.  Among other things, Adams sensibly kept an unprepared America out of a potentially disastrous war with France, even though the rest of the nation clamored for it. But news of the peace treaty eliminating all causes for that war arrived just after the election of 1800, which he lost to Jefferson.

He also lost to Jefferson — or so he believed — his rightful place among the pantheon of American heroes.  Adams was both jealous and astonished that Jefferson, whose only major contribution to the revolution was a document that Adams had assigned him to write, became the symbol of the revolutionary spirit.  And even though the two men ended their lives as friends — forever linked by dying on the same historic day, July 4, 1826 — Adams was convinced he would never get his proper due.

He was almost right. It would take 175 years and David McCullough’s wonderful book, John Adams, to give him that due at last.

In the war of words over whether or not to ratify the U.S. Constitution, the two opposing sides — the Federalists, who supported ratification, and the Anti-Federalists, who did not — always used pen names when publishing articles arguing for or against ratification. They did this both because it was a common practice and to hide their true identities.  We know today that “Publius,” the author of the pro-ratification Federalist Papers, was really Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison.  We think “Brutus,” the most prolific Anti-Federalist author, was New York’s Robert Yates, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, but one who refused to sign the finished document.

For Mercy Otis Warren, born this week (Sept. 25) in 1728, hiding her identity with the pen name “A Columbian Patriot” was even more important because in the 1780s women simply did not join the public policy debate.  But Warren was a passionate patriot who had long spoken her mind through the printed word.  In the run up to the American Revolution she had published several polemics and had written several plays criticizing Royal authority in America and warning the colonists about the growing assault on their rights and liberties that the British were undertaking.

Warren was also an Anti-Federalist.  She disliked the Constitution almost as much as she disliked the British, and while many Anti-Federalists differed over whether to revise the proposed Constitution — and if so, how much — other Anti-Federalists, Warren among them, wanted to scrap the entire document and start over.  Outraged that her home state of Massachusetts had voted to ratify the Constitution without demanding wholesale changes beforehand, Warren wrote her most famous pamphlet, Observations on the Constitution, in which she listed 15 objections to the Constitution.   She hoped that Observations would at least convince the states still in the undecided camp, especially New York, to reject the Constitution outright, and more than 15,000 copies of her pamphlet were distributed throughout the state of New York.

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