Excerpt from Two American Retrospects Within our forces, there were the usual bickerings and dissensions. Poor humanity cannot work, it would seem, in any other way. I often thought during the war that if the animosities engendered in patriotic committees of good men and women could only be concentrated on the front, the Boche would not long have held out. Nor was the Conti nental Army altogether a unit. General Washington was embarrassed with petty criticisms, omniscient suggestions, and the jealousies of officers ...
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Excerpt from Two American Retrospects Within our forces, there were the usual bickerings and dissensions. Poor humanity cannot work, it would seem, in any other way. I often thought during the war that if the animosities engendered in patriotic committees of good men and women could only be concentrated on the front, the Boche would not long have held out. Nor was the Conti nental Army altogether a unit. General Washington was embarrassed with petty criticisms, omniscient suggestions, and the jealousies of officers associated with him in com mand. There were pacifists in those days, too. Congress, says our author, were apprehensive that the royal army would pay a visit to Philadelphia, and taking into considera tion the religious tenets of a great many of the inhabitants denominated Quakers, which would not allow of their taking up arms, and which had been a great clog to the military operations of the Pennsylvanians - they judged it proper to lay before the people the hazard that would attend the suc cess of the enemy, and getting into their capital; for this purpose Congress ordered handbills to be struck off - like our posters - and circulated through the State, to rouse them to a sense of their danger, and the defense of their property, and to convince the Continent that one spirit actuated the whole. The address, he adds, had a good effect in the Southern States; they were excited to more vigorous exertions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at ... This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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