John Ferling Quotes

• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “Were people to mingle only with those of like mind, every man would be an insulate being." Thomas Jefferson”

  John Ferling

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• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “Mr. Adams, by your Name I conclude you are descended from the first Man and Woman. . . . [Perhaps] you could resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first couple found the Art of lying together?” Adams must have been mortified. He blushed but stammered cleverly, or so he remembered, that the first couple surely “flew together . . . like two Objects in electric Experiments.” “Well,” the lady responded, “I know not how it was, but this I know, it is a very happy Shock.”21”

  John Ferling

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• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “The feelings of politicians are rarely transparent.”

  John Ferling

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• “Jefferson subsequently came to believe that Henry’s speech attacking the Stamp Act had been “the dawn of the Revolution.”36”

  John Ferling

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• “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

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• “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

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• “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

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• “Jefferson was the rare student who came to college already knowing that there could be joy in studying.”

  John Ferling

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• “To deal with what a High Federalist claimed was the “army of spies and incendiaries scattered through the continent,” two acts authorized the deportation of aliens who were already in the country.44”

  John Ferling

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• “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

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• “Empires exist for the benefit of the parent state. That, and the fact that the colonists eventually came to appreciate this truth, goes a long way toward explaining the origins of the American Revolution. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authorities in London, the seat of Great Britain’s empire,”

  John Ferling

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• “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

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• “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

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• “Washington had learned the secrets of inducing others to follow his lead. Washington probably knew more about leadership before he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday than John Adams discovered in his lifetime.”

  John Ferling

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• “He was convinced that public service and private misery were inextricably linked.”

  John Ferling

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• “Jefferson attributes to a college professor and mentor his lifelong habit of questioning conventional wisdom.”

  John Ferling

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