American Leviathan

The Road Nobody Watched

AVA Insights — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:00:42 GMT

There were four ways through the Heights of Guan on Long Island.

The ridge ran across the island east to west — wooded, one hundred to a hundred and fifty feet tall, steep enough to be a real obstacle and cut by exactly four passes. From west to east: the Gowanus Road along the shore, Flatbush Pass, Bedford Pass, and, far out on the American left, Jamaica Pass.

Washington’s army guarded three of them.

The fourth, Jamaica Pass, was half-heartedly covered by five young militia officers on horseback.

Five men. For one of the most vulnerable parts in the American defensive lines.

Some context for how the Americans ended up in this position.

Howe had begun landing on Long Island on August 22 at Gravesend Bay, putting some twenty thousand men ashore in a few hours with the Royal Navy running the operation. It was a textbook amphibious landing, unopposed.

Washington had made a decision that military historians have criticized ever since: he divided his army between Manhattan and Long Island, because he could not determine where the main blow would fall and could not afford to be wrong either way. The result was that he was weaker than the enemy in both places.

Command on Long Island was muddled. Nathanael Greene, who knew the ground better than anyone, had fallen seriously ill. Israel Putnam took over days before the battle. John Sullivan held the center. William Alexander, who styled himself Lord Stirling, held the right along the Gowanus Road.

Roughly nine thousand raw American troops faced roughly twenty thousand professionals.

On the night of August 26, Howe did the thing that good generals do and mediocre ones talk about afterward. After he and the other British generals received word from Loyalist spies that the Jamaica Pass was lightly guarded, he and General Henry Clinton came up with a plan.

Howe left a force in front of the American center to make noise and hold attention. Then he personally led ten thousand men — with Clinton, Lords Cornwallis and Percy — on a night march east, around the American left flank, through the dark, dragging artillery, to Jamaica Pass.

In the early morning hours they took the five militia officers without a shot being fired.

By dawn the British army was through the pass and behind the American line. Two cannon shots signaled the trap closed.

The Americans in the center were still facing forward, fighting the diversion in front of them, when the muskets started behind them.

What followed was not a battle so much as a collapse. Sullivan’s line disintegrated. Men ran for the fortified lines at Brooklyn Heights through woods full of British and Hessian troops. Sullivan was captured. Stirling was captured. Casualty estimates run to about three hundred Americans killed and a thousand taken prisoner, against light British losses.

It was the largest battle of the entire war by the number of men engaged. It was also the most complete defeat the Continental Army would ever suffer.

Except for one thing, and it is the only thing worth remembering from that morning.

Stirling, on the right, understood before almost anyone else that the army was cut off and that the road to the Brooklyn lines — across the Gowanus Creek and its marsh — would be closed within the hour if somebody did not hold Cornwallis in place.

He had with him the 1st Maryland Regiment under Mordecai Gist. Roughly four hundred men, many of them from Baltimore’s better families, uniformed and drilled and new to combat.

Stirling ordered the rest of his command to save itself across the creek. Then he took the Marylanders and attacked.

Uphill. Into a fortified stone house held by Cornwallis’s grenadiers and artillery. Not once. By most accounts they came on five or six separate times into a force that outnumbered them five to one, re-forming after each repulse and going in again.

They could not take the position. They would never take the position. That was not what they were doing.

They were buying minutes, and they paid for them at the going rate. Somewhere around two hundred and fifty of them were killed or wounded in that field. The survivors were mostly captured. Stirling, refusing to surrender to Cornwallis, walked over and surrendered to a Hessian officer instead.

Washington watched it from a redoubt on the heights. The words attributed to him have echoed for two hundred and fifty years:

“Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose.”

The men who got across the creek because of them went on to hold the Brooklyn lines that afternoon — and to be part of the army that survived the next three days, and the next seven years.

Two lessons, and they cut in different directions.

The first is about attention. An army with three passes covered and one unwatched is not an army with seventy-five percent security. It has none. A defense is only as strong as the gap nobody is looking at, and the enemy’s entire profession consists of finding that gap.

The second is about what a small number of committed men can purchase with their lives when the situation is hopeless and they act anyway.

Howe had the American army trapped on the night of August 27 — pinned against the East River with the Royal Navy positioned to seal the escape. He declined to storm the Brooklyn works, remembering Bunker Hill, and settled in for a siege.

It was the best decision available to a careful professional soldier.

It was also the mistake that lost Britain the war, because two nights later something happened on that river that the Americans would spend the rest of their lives calling providential.

The Plot Against Washington

AVA Insights — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:10:19 GMT

Six days before the Declaration of Independence was approved, the Continental Army executed one of its own.

Thomas Hickey was a private in the Commander-in-Chief’s Guard — Washington’s personal bodyguard, a unit selected for reliability and appearance, the men closest to him. Irish-born, a deserter from the British army, he had been in American service for some time.

On June 28, 1776, he was hanged in a field near Bowery Lane in New York before a crowd that contemporaries estimated at twenty thousand people.

It was the first execution of a soldier in the history of the United States Army. The story around it has been growing ever since, and it is worth separating what is documented from what is legend, because the documented version is more interesting.

Start with how it came apart, which was not through counterintelligence brilliance.

Hickey and another soldier were arrested for passing counterfeit money. This was ordinary criminal work — a bar of the era, a shopkeeper, bad bills.

In jail, Hickey talked.

He told a fellow prisoner that he and others were involved in something considerably larger than currency fraud: a Loyalist conspiracy in New York City, funded and directed from outside the army, which had recruited soldiers from the garrison and from Washington’s own Guard.

The prisoner passed it along. The provincial authorities, led by John Jay, began pulling threads.

What emerged was a network centered on William Tryon, the royal governor of New York, who had abandoned the city and was running his administration from a British warship in the harbor — a detail worth sitting with, because it captures the strange half-state of that spring, when the Crown’s governor was still governing, technically, from a boat a mile offshore.

Money moved ashore through intermediaries. Among those arrested was David Mathews, the Loyalist mayor of New York City, accused of distributing Tryon’s funds.

Perhaps a dozen or more people were taken up in the sweep, soldiers and civilians both.

Now the part that requires discipline.

The accounts that circulated at the time — and that have been repeated in popular histories ever since — described a plot to seize or assassinate Washington, spike the artillery, blow up the powder magazine, and cut the King’s Bridge at the very north end of the island to trap the army on Manhattan when the British fleet arrived.

One especially durable story holds that Hickey attempted to poison Washington with a dish of peas, and that a housekeeper named Phoebe Fraunces threw them out the window to a flock of chickens, which promptly died.

That story appears to be a nineteenth-century invention. It is a good story. It is not evidence.

Here is what the record actually shows: Hickey was tried by court-martial on June 26, 1776, and the charges he was convicted on were mutiny and sedition, and holding a treacherous correspondence with the enemy.

He was not convicted of a plot to assassinate the commander-in-chief.

The court had testimony that he had enlisted in the conspiracy and had taken Tryon’s money. It evidently did not have proof sufficient to convict on the murder plot, and a court-martial that was fully prepared to hang him did not charge it.

Hickey’s own defense, offered at trial, was that he had joined the scheme only to cheat the Tories out of their money and had never intended to act on it.

The court did not believe him, and it was probably right not to. But the honest summary is: a real Loyalist conspiracy, funded by the royal governor, that had penetrated Washington’s own bodyguard — with the most sensational specific allegation unproven.

That is still an appalling security failure that does not need embellishment.

Washington’s general orders after the execution are the strangest document in the affair, and the most human.

He did not use the occasion to warn the army about British gold, or about Loyalist recruiters, or about operational security.

He used it to warn them about women and drink.

The orders express his hope that every soldier will take warning from Hickey’s fate, and attribute the man’s ruin to lewd women and to a life of profligacy — and they end by recommending that the soldiers avoid both, and instead attend to their duty.

Washington had commanded troops for a year at that point and had a clear-eyed view of what actually destroyed men in an army. Not ideology. Habits.

Which is, in its way, the most Founding-era conclusion available: a republic’s security ultimately rests on the private character of the men who serve it, and character is built or destroyed in small daily choices long before it is tested by an enemy agent with a purse.

Two things to carry out of this.

The first is a caution about how history gets told. The poisoned peas are more fun than the court-martial record. That is precisely why they spread, and it is why serious people should check.

A movement that cannot tell the difference between what it can prove and what it enjoys believing will eventually be unable to persuade anyone who is not already persuaded. The founding does not need to be improved. It needs to be read.

The second is about the season.

June of 1776 is remembered as a month of committees and drafting — Jefferson at his desk on Market Street, Congress edging toward a vote. It was also a month in which the royal governor of New York was buying soldiers out of the American commanding general’s own guard, and the army responded by hanging one of them in front of twenty thousand witnesses five days before independence was declared.

The founding was not a seminar. It was a fight, conducted by men who understood that they were surrounded by enemies without and within — and that some of the enemies surrounding them were actually wearing the same uniform.

The Oracle

AVA Insights — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:31:08 GMT

If you had asked an American in 1787 to name the greatest political thinker alive or dead, you would have heard Locke but you probably would have heard Montesquieu named more often.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, was a French nobleman and former magistrate who spent roughly twenty years writing a single enormous book. The Spirit of Laws appeared in 1748. The Catholic Church put it on the Index of Forbidden Books three years later, which was, then as now, excellent publicity.

Scholars who have counted citations in American political writing from the founding era find Montesquieu at the top of the list of secular authorities. Not Locke. Not Hume. Not Blackstone. Montesquieu.

Madison, in Federalist 47, called him the oracle who is always consulted and cited on the subject of separated powers.

So what was in the book?

Montesquieu’s first move was to stop asking what the best government is and start asking what makes any government work.

Laws, he argued, are not free-floating propositions that a philosopher can deduce and a legislator can impose. They grow out of a people — their history, their religion, their commerce, their habits, even their geography. The spirit of the law is the relationship between a legal code and everything else about the society that produced it.

This is why he is sometimes called the first sociologist. It is also why he is deeply unfashionable in an age that assumes best practice can be exported anywhere by a sufficiently confident consultant.

His second move is the one that made him immortal.

Every government, he observed, performs three functions. It makes law. It executes law. It judges under law. And political liberty exists only when those three functions are held by different hands.

His reasoning was not procedural. It was psychological, and it should sound familiar after Rutherford and the Scots:

Every man invested with power is apt to abuse it. He will push until he meets a limit. And since he will not stop himself, only power can check power.

Not a better class of rulers. Not stronger oaths. Structure.

Montesquieu believed he had found the working model in the English constitution — King, Lords, and Commons, with an independent judiciary. Historians have argued ever since about whether he described England accurately or invented an idealized England that never quite existed.

It hardly matters. The Americans read the description and built the thing.

Here is what deserves more attention: the Founders did not simply copy him. They argued with him and beat him on his own ground.

Montesquieu held a view inherited from antiquity and shared by nearly everyone: republics must be small. A free state depends on citizens who share a common way of life, know one another, and can be virtuous together. Stretch a republic across a large territory with diverse interests and it collapses into faction, then into despotism.

The Anti-Federalists believed this and they used it like a hammer. Brutus in The Anti-Fedralist Papers, and others, quoted Montesquieu against the proposed Constitution: you cannot run a republic across thirteen states and a continent. The oracle himself says so.

It was the single strongest argument against ratification, made with the era’s most respected authority.

Madison’s reply, in Federalist 10, is one of the genuine intellectual achievements in the history of political thought. He accepted Montesquieu’s diagnosis and rejected his prescription.

Yes, faction destroys republics. Yes, human nature guarantees faction. But a small republic is precisely where faction is most dangerous, because a single interest can capture a majority and there is nowhere to hide from it.

Enlarge the republic and you multiply the interests. No faction can assemble a durable majority. The very size that Montesquieu feared becomes in Madison’s thinking part of the safeguard.

The Constitution is Montesquieu’s mechanism installed at Madison’s scale.

And then there is the sentence Madison wrote about what happens when the mechanism fails: when the legislative and executive powers are united in the same body, he wrote in Federalist 47, there can be no liberty. When judicial power is joined to them, everything is lost. The accumulation of all three in the same hands, whether one, few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective — that is the very definition of tyranny.

Read that clause again. Whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective.

Madison was not only worried about kings. He was worried about any entity that accumulates all three functions, regardless of how it got there and regardless of how well-intentioned it is.

Consider a modern federal agency. It promulgates rules and statutes that carry the force of law. It investigates and enforces those rules. And when you contest an enforcement action, your case was heard for decades, at least initially, by an administrative law judge employed by the same agency.

Legislative. Executive. Judicial. One roof.

Montesquieu did not need to imagine a tyrant to explain why this is dangerous. He only needed to observe that men with power push until something pushes back.

The question for our own moment is not whether the people staffing those agencies are wicked. Most of them are not, but they are imperfect human beings just like the rest of us, prone to do what they can, not what they should. The question is the one the oracle asked in 1748.

What, or who, exactly, is pushing back?

The Scotsman Who Taught the Father of the Constitution

AVA Insights — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:57:26 GMT

Scotland in the eighteenth century had roughly a million and a half people, terrible weather, and no political power to speak of.

But it also had Edinburgh and Glasgow and inside those two cities a generation of thinkers — Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson — who between them reinvented moral philosophy, economics, sociology, and the theory of how human beings actually behave.

Not how they ought to behave. How they do.

That distinction is the whole Scottish contribution, the Scottish Enlightenment, and it is in many ways the reason the American Constitution reads the way it does.

The French Enlightenment tended to begin with a theory of man and then design institutions to fit it. Perfect the man, perfect the state. The Scots ran the opposite direction. They started with man as he is — self-interested, tribal, easily flattered, prone to faction, occasionally capable of remarkable virtue but usually not — and asked what kind of institutions could produce decent outcomes anyway.

Adam Smith did it with markets. The butcher does not feed you out of love.

Thomas Reid did it with epistemology, answering Hume’s skepticism with what became known as Common Sense Realism: ordinary people can actually know things, and a philosophy that concludes otherwise has refuted itself, not the world.

A Presbyterian minister named John Witherspoon carried the entire apparatus of thought across the Atlantic and installed it in a small college in New Jersey.

Witherspoon arrived in 1768 to become president of the College of New Jersey — the school we now call Princeton. He had been recruited out of Paisley, Scotland, and he had to be asked twice because his wife did not want to cross the ocean.

Witherspoon should be more famous than he is: he was the only active clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence. He served in the Continental Congress through most of the war. But the signature is the least of it.

Look instead at the roll of students who passed through his classrooms: a President of the United States, a Vice President, dozens of Congressmen and Senators, a dozen governors, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and a substantial bloc of the men who would sit in Philadelphia in 1787: James Madison, Gunning Bedford Jr., William Richardson Davie, Jonathan Dayton, Oliver Ellsworth, William Paterson, and Luther Martin.

Witherspoon did not simply preside over these men. He taught them personally. Moral philosophy was the capstone course at the college and the president taught it himself, lecturing on natural law, on the origins of civil society, on the rights of conscience, on the necessity of dividing power because power concentrated will be power abused.

The lectures were Scottish philosophy in American clothes.

His most consequential student stayed an extra year.

James Madison finished the standard course early — he compressed three years into two, wrecked his health doing it, and then remained at the College of New Jersey for further study with Witherspoon, working through Hebrew and ethics and, one assumes, a great deal of conversation.

Madison was small, quiet, and physically unimpressive. He was also the most systematic political mind of his generation, and when the moment came he did what a Witherspoon student would do: he read.

In the months before the Constitutional Convention, Madison worked through crate after crate of books Jefferson had shipped him from Paris, and he produced a memorandum on the ancient and modern confederacies — a catalog of every republic he could find and precisely how each one had died.

The diagnosis was always the same. Faction. One interest gathering enough strength to crush the rest.

The Scottish answer was not to abolish faction, because you cannot abolish human nature. The Scottish answer was to arrange things so that faction checks faction.

Madison wrote it up in Federalist 10. The remedy for the dangers of faction is not a smaller, purer republic where everyone agrees, which is what political theory had assumed since Aristotle. It is a larger one — extend the sphere, multiply the interests, and no single faction can assemble a majority to oppress the others.

He wrote the deeper premise in Federalist 51, and it is the single most Scottish sentence in American literature:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Read the rest of that passage. If angels governed men, no controls on government would be necessary either. The difficulty is that you must first enable the government to control the governed, and then oblige it to control itself.

That is Witherspoon’s classroom, restated as constitutional architecture.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable part.

The entire American system was designed by men who assumed that whoever holds power will misuse it, and who therefore built a machine of competing ambitions to make misuse difficult.

The modern administrative state is built on the opposite assumption. It assumes a class of credentialed experts whose judgment is disinterested, whose expertise substitutes for consent, and who therefore do not require the same checks as ordinary politicians — because they are not really exercising political power at all, merely applying neutral technique.

That is not a Scottish idea. It is the French one, arriving late.

Madison had a phrase for what happens when the same hands write the rules, enforce the rules, and judge the disputes under the rules.

He called it the very definition of tyranny. He was quoting a Frenchman when he said it — but that is the next essay.

The Book the Hangman Burned

AVA Insights — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:07:45 GMT

In 1644, a Scottish Presbyterian minister published a book with a title that was itself the whole argument.

Lex, Rex.

The Law is King.

Not Rex, Lex — the King is Law, which is what every crown in Europe had been insisting for a thousand years. Samuel Rutherford simply reversed the two words and detonated the divine right of kings.

The book was an answer. John Maxwell, a bishop in exile, had published a defense of absolute monarchy arguing that the king answered to God alone and to no man on earth. Rutherford, one of the Scottish commissioners to the Westminster Assembly, wrote a reply of some four hundred pages.

His claim was simple and, at the time, close to insane.

Power originates in the people. The people covenant with a ruler. The covenant has terms. A king who breaks the terms is not a king exercising authority but a man committing a crime, and resisting him is not rebellion — it is moral law enforcement.

Rutherford went further. All men are born equal in the sense that none is born with a natural right to rule another. There is no royal blood. There is only a trust, granted conditionally, revocable when abused.

He was not writing political theory in the abstract. He was writing in the middle of a civil war, for a movement of Scottish Covenanters who had signed their names to a document binding themselves to God and to each other — sometimes, according to tradition, in their own blood.

That is worth pausing on. The idea of a written covenant, publicly subscribed, that limits the powers of rulers and binds a people together did not arrive in America with the Constitutional Convention. It arrived on ships, in the heads of Scots and Ulster Scots and Puritans who were already practicing it.

The Crown understood exactly what it was reading with Lex, Rex.

The account passed down holds that when King Charles saw Lex, Rex, he remarked that it would scarcely ever get an answer.

It never did — not the kind he meant.

What it got instead came in 1661, when the Restoration Parliament in Scotland ordered the book burned at the cross of Edinburgh by the hands of the hangman. Rutherford was stripped of his offices, confined to his own house, and summoned to appear before Parliament at Edinburgh on a charge of treason.

Struck with a sudden illness, Rutherford lay dying when he heard word that some of his closest Covenanter friends had been executed by the Crown. He said to those gathered about his bed: “My blessed Master, He is a Kingly King. And soon I shall shine--I shall see Him as He is--I shall see Him reign and all His fair company with Him.”

Several days later, the summons came for him to stand before Parliament on charges of high treason. The reply attributed to him is one of the greatest lines in the history of civil courage: “Tell them I have summons before a Superior Judge. I behoove to answer my first summons; and ere your day arrive, I will be where few kings and great folk come.”

He died in March of 1661. Parliament could burn the book. It had no jurisdiction over the argument.

Here is why this matters for Americans, and why it belongs at the beginning of the story rather than as a footnote.

Ideas do not travel by citation. They travel by formation.

Very few of the men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 sat down with a copy of Lex, Rex open on the desk. That is not how influence works. What they had instead was an entire inherited grammar of politics — covenant, consent, limited authority, lawful resistance — carried across the Atlantic by the Presbyterian and Puritan churches, taught from pulpits, argued in kirk sessions, and eventually installed in the curriculum of American colleges by Scottish schoolmasters.

One of those schoolmasters was John Witherspoon, who arrived at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1768 and taught some of the Founding generation, including a shy Virginian named James Madison.

Witherspoon, heavily influenced by Rutherford and Lex, Rex, and his own Calvinist beliefs, helped shape much of Madison’s thinking regarding human nature and its flaws, religious freedom, the rule of law and the need to diffuse power.

From the tradition and philosophy of Rutherford to Witherspoon to the Father of the Constitution, Madison, came this belief: No man is above the law. Not a bishop, not a parliament, not a king. Not, eventually, an unelected administrator.

We’re so far removed from the realities of the 17th and 18th centuries that the sentence sounds like a platitude now. It is worth remembering though that in that moment it got a book burned in the public square by an executioner and the man who wrote it died under indictment for saying it out loud.

The law is king.

Everything else in the American experiment is commentary on that line.

They Signed It Anyway

AVA Insights — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:47:57 GMT

Everyone knows July 4.

Almost nobody knows August 2, which is the date that actually required courage.

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress formally adopted and approved the text of the Declaration of Independence and sent it to a printer. What came off John Dunlap’s press that night were broadsides — announcements, bearing only two names: those of the president of Congress, John Hancock and its secretary, Charles Thomson.

The document with the signatures on it, the engrossed parchment that resides in the National Archives in Washington DC today, was not ready until the end of the month. Most of the delegates put their names to it on Thursday, August 2, 1776.

Four weeks had passed. In those four weeks, their situation had changed completely.

Beginning in late June and continuing all summer, the sails had been appearing off Sandy Hook in the New York City area.

First a few. Then dozens. Then more ships than anyone in America had ever seen in one place; hundreds upon hundreds.

The Empire had returned in force.

By August, General William Howe and his brother, Admiral Richard Howe, had assembled somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred vessels and more than thirty thousand troops in and around New York Harbor — British regulars and sailors along with Hessian mercenaries, professional mercenaries hired by the Crown to put down the rebellion.

It was the largest expeditionary force in the history of Great Britain.

The Americans could count. Ships were visible from the shore. Washington’s army in New York numbered perhaps twenty thousand men on paper, many of them militia, poorly trained, badly equipped, and already sick.

There was no ambiguity left. In July, independence was a proposition. In August, it was a wager against a massive invasion force you could see from the beach.

That is the context for the signing. The men who walked up to the desk in Philadelphia and picked up the pen knew what was anchored off Staten Island.

Benjamin Rush was there, and years later he wrote down what the room was like.

He remembered silence. He remembered gloom. He remembered men going up one at a time, in what he described as the pensive and awful manner of subscribing to their own death warrants.

And he remembered the one moment of levity, which is one of the blackest jokes in American history.

Benjamin Harrison of Virginia was a large man — genuinely large, a heavy Tidewater planter. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts was small and slight.

Harrison turned to Gerry and observed that he would have a considerable advantage when they all hanged for what they were doing that day. His own weight would finish him in a moment. Gerry, being so light, would dance in the air for an hour or two before he was dead.

Rush recorded that Harrison’s words produced a transient smile from Gerry.

Think about the mechanics of that joke. It is not gallows humor in the loose modern sense. It is a technically accurate observation about drop weight and asphyxiation, delivered between two men who had a realistic expectation of experiencing it.

They were not being dramatic. Treason against the Crown carried a defined and gruesome penalty, and the man authorized to impose it had just parked over thirty thousand sailors and soldiers in their largest harbor.

A few things worth knowing about that parchment.

Not everyone signed on August 2. Some delegates were absent and signed later in the fall. Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire was not even elected to Congress until September and added his name in November. A few signers had not been present for the July vote at all.

And Congress kept the list secret for months. The full roster of names was not published until January of 1777 — after Trenton, after there was something resembling good news.

That detail is easy to read cynically. Read it correctly instead. It means these men understood precisely what a signed list of names would be worth to a British provost marshal, and they signed anyway.

Roughly a third of them paid for it. When they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, they meant it in the truest sense: Homes were burned, estates seized, sons killed, fortunes gone. Several were captured. One, Richard Stockton of New Jersey — a College of New Jersey man, a John Witherspoon colleague — was dragged from his bed, imprisoned, and never recovered his health.

Here is the thing to hold onto: we tend to treat the founding as inevitable because we know the ending. We read the Declaration as a birth announcement.

It was not. On August 2, 1776, it was closer to a death warrant that our Founders willingly chose to sign because they believed in something worth dying for.

The men who signed it had no assurance of Saratoga, no assurance of the French alliance, no assurance of Yorktown. What they had was an argument about the nature of legitimate authority, an army they suspected was up against enormous odds, and a vast fleet visible on the horizon.

And they still signed. And then twenty-five days later the British landed on Long Island and very nearly ended the war.

The Republic’s First Classroom

AVA Insights — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:03:30 GMT

Ask most Americans where representative democracy began. They’ll probably answer: Washington and Congress, the White House.

The Founders would have course answered differently. They would have said the township, the county, the church, the jury, the schoolhouse.

That’s where republics are actually built.

Long before independence, Americans governed themselves locally. They repaired roads and built bridges, raised militias, resolved disputes, collected taxes and established schools.

Nobody waited for London and nobody asked permission.

Self-government became habit long before it became ideology.

This astonished Tocqueville when he visited the young American Republic in the 1830s.

Europeans looked upward whenever problems appeared. Americans looked sideways to neighbors first and government later.

The order mattered.

Because citizens who solve small problems eventually become capable of solving larger ones. Local government wasn’t simply administrative convenience. It was civic education.

The township taught compromise and responsibility, participation and accountability.

The Constitution assumed citizens already possessed those habits. It could not create them.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for modern America: if citizens no longer practice governing themselves locally ... can they continue governing themselves nationally?

The Founders believed the answer depended upon those smaller institutions and the daily practice of republican citizenship. They were right.

For this American experiment in self-government to continue long-term, we need to relearn local civic engagement. The future of the Republic depends on it.

Why the Founders Read History

AVA Insights — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:01:09 GMT

Modern politics suffers from remarkable confidence; “chronological snobbery” as C.S. Lewis describes it.

Every generation believes its problems are unprecedented and its technology unique, its politics entirely new.

The Founders disagreed because they believed that though times may change, there is always one constant throughout history: human nature.

Which explains why their libraries were filled with historical works: Plutarch, Livy, Polybius, Cicero (who John Adams, somewhat obsessed with Cicero’s writings and speeches, affectionately referred to as “Tully”), Tacitus, Aristotle.

Not necessarily because they loved antiquity but because they loved patterns.

History became their laboratory. Athens taught what pure democracy becomes without restraint. Rome demonstrated how republics slowly consolidate power. England illustrated both liberty and corruption simultaneously.

The Founders were not collecting quotations from the ancients. They were conducting political science.

Madison spent months before Philadelphia reading books about nearly every republic from history. Not searching for inspiration per se but searching for failure: Why did republics in the past fail? What broke? When? Why?

That research of human nature and failed republics shaped the Constitution more than many Americans realize. Madison’s conclusions from his studies were that factionalism, and eventually one faction gaining enough power to crush the others, was why many republics in the past had failed. So his recipe for success was to set faction against faction and through the machinery of the republic (the separation of pwoers) never allow one faction to gain too much power.

The Founders expected future citizens to continue that habit of studying and applying history.

History wasn’t nostalgia for our Founders. It was their roadmap to the future.

A republic without historical memory eventually repeats historical mistakes.

Modern societies should study history more carefully. There is a circular nature to it as we progress through time: we make technological advances and scientific breakthroughs, yet many times repeat the same mistakes of previous generations because of our flawed human nature.

The Founders were trying to avoid past generations’ mistakes when it came to republics failing. We’d do well to follow their example and become better students of history.

Roger Williams Was Right

AVA Insights — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:03:12 GMT

John Winthrop gets remembered. But Roger Williams should too.

Both men were Puritans. Both crossed the Atlantic searching for religious liberty. Both believed deeply in covenant.

Yet they reached opposite conclusions.

Winthrop believed the covenant required unity. Williams believed the covenant required freedom. That disagreement changed America.

Williams argued civil government possesses no legitimate authority over conscience.

The magistrate may punish theft, fraud, and violence. But belief? Never.

For expressing those views, Massachusetts banished him. Williams fled into the New England winter. Many assumed he would die.

Instead he founded Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge for religious freedom. His settlement would eventually join with three others and become Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the official name of the state until 2020 when Providence Plantations was removed by state referendum).

It was a colony unlike any other: no established church but a colony committed to religious liberty and freedom of conscience with a complete separation between civil authority and religious belief.

Ironically, America’s religious freedom did not emerge despite Puritanism. It emerged because one Puritan followed the covenant further than everyone else.

Williams understood something extraordinary: if rights come from God... then government cannot own conscience.

Jefferson would eventually write similar ideas. Madison would defend them. The First Amendment would protect them. But Roger Williams lived them first.

Sometimes exile becomes foundation. Sometimes losing an argument changes civilization.

The Way of the Ancestors

AVA Insights — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:08:23 GMT

Rome had no Bill of Rights or written constitution or Supreme Court.

Yet the Roman Republic endured nearly five centuries.

How?

The Romans had something they called the mos maiorum, which means, “The ways and traditions of the ancestors.”

It wasn’t law. It wasn’t legislation. It wasn’t enforced by courts. It was more like the British Common Law: unwritten, understood and with expectations.

Citizens behaved a certain way because that was what honorable Romans did.

One took a ten year interlude before running for consul again. Consuls served one year and then surrendered power. Generals returned home. Senators placed the republic above themselves.

Until they didn’t.

That is the important part.

The republic did not collapse because someone ignored one law.

It collapsed because enough Romans stopped believing the unwritten rules still mattered. The forms survived but the spirit disappeared. The Senate still met, elections still occurred, titles remained.

But the civic trust had evaporated. It became clear that Rome’s gods and religion were not strong enough to enforce the mos maiorum and it became apparent that the ways and traditions of the ancestors was really just a gentlemen’s agreement and the gentlemen stopped agreeing.

Marius and Sulla eviscerated the norms and then Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

By then, the Roman Republic was already dying. The Founders studied Rome obsessively because they feared precisely this sequence.

Not invasion, but Internal decay. Not foreign enemies, but citizens forgetting what citizenship requires.

Franklin understood it. Washington embodied it. Lincoln rescued it.

Tocqueville later recognized it.

Every republic depends upon habits that no constitution can manufacture.

The Constitution restrains government. But no amount of laws or traditions can restrain a people who have shrugged off virtue and individual self-governing.

In the end, if there is to be a virtuous republic the citizens must restrain themselves. There must be a virtue based on transcendent values with an understood enforcement mechanism of eternal rewards and punishments. The question still in the balance today is whether enough citizens of the American Republic will renew and restore the virtue necessary for the long-term survival of the republic.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

AVA Insights — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:06:13 GMT

On July 4, America turned 250.

Two and a half centuries.

That is a long time for any nation to endure. It is an extraordinary length of time for a free one.

And it is worth stopping, on this, of all birthdays, to ask a question we too rarely ask.

Where did all of this come from?

Most Americans grow up believing the founding was a revolt. A clean break. A handful of colonists who threw off a king and invented something the world had never seen.

That is a stirring story.

But it is not quite the true one.

The truth is deeper and, in my view, far more remarkable.

The American founding was not the invention of new ideas, per se. It was the culmination of old ones—the distillation of millennia of Western political and philosophical thought, argued over and paid for in blood across centuries, and finally codified into law by serious men who held a clear-eyed and unsentimental view of human nature. All of which led our founders, for the first time in the history of the world, to establish a rights-based republic in which the people are sovereign.

That is the story I set out to tell.

This Fourth of July, I released a new feature documentary, The Thread of Liberty, to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

The film follows a single thread—the idea of ordered liberty under law—as it runs across the centuries, passed from generation to generation.

To trace it, we borrowed a guide: Alexis de Tocqueville, the young Frenchman who came to America in the 1830s to see with his own eyes whether a free people could actually govern themselves.

We follow his journey and insights from the intellectual origins of American liberty, through the crucible of the founding, to the America Tocqueville witnessed in the 1830s, to the slow erosion of constitutional limits over the last century and the rise of the Administrative State, and finally to the fight to restore the Constitutional Republic in our own time.

I did not want to make a partisan film.

I wanted to make an honest one.

Honest about the nation’s flaws.

And confident, still, in the enduring power of the framework the founders left us.

I was not alone in this.

The Thread of Liberty is built on conversations with eleven of the finest historians and constitutional scholars in the country—among them Victor Davis Hanson, Larry Arnn, Wilfred McClay, Paul Rahe, and Roger Kimball.

What they have to say about who we are, and how we got here, is worth far more than the price of admission.

Because there is a price of admission, and it is not money.

Benjamin Franklin named it at the close of the Constitutional Convention.

Asked what kind of government the delegates had produced, he is said to have answered:

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

If you can keep it.

It was an understood question—and Franklin’s challenge to those who would follow the founding generation:

Can you keep it?

Every generation of Americans has stood where we now stand, handed a republic it did not build and asked the same silent question:

Will we keep it, or will we let it slip?

Do we still feel an obligation to the experiment?

The men who signed their names in 1776 answered that question with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

The question now belongs to us.

I made The Thread of Liberty because I believe this generation can still answer it well—but only if we remember what we were given and why it is worth keeping.

The film premiered on the Fourth.

It’s available now.

You can watch it, learn more about it, and share it at threadofliberty.com.

Watch it this week.

Watch it with your children.

It’s time for a rebirth of instinctive patriotism—that inborn love of country—and I sincerely hope this documentary becomes part of that rebirth.

The Declaration Heard Around the World

AVA Insights — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:01:55 GMT

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence.

The document announced to the world that the American colonies no longer recognized British authority.

But the Declaration did something even more important than that.

It explained why.

That is what made it revolutionary.

Empires had risen and fallen throughout history. Rebellions were not new. What made the American Revolution different was the argument underneath it.

The Declaration asserted that rights do not come from governments. They come from God.

That governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That government and legitimate authority depend on securing and protecting natural rights rather than consolidating power.

And when government becomes destructive to those ends, citizens possess the right to alter or abolish it.

Those ideas detonated across the globe.

Not because America was militarily dominant. It wasn’t.

But because the Declaration articulated a radically different understanding of political legitimacy.

The old world organized society around hierarchy, monarchy, inherited authority, and centralized control. The Declaration organized political legitimacy around natural rights and self-government and set the stage for the Constitution in which the people would be sovereign.

That distinction changed history.

Thomas Jefferson’s language gave moral clarity to the Revolution. But the document reflected something much deeper already developing throughout colonial America: A civilization accustomed to local governance, civic participation, religious pluralism, and decentralized authority.

The Declaration did not create those habits. It codified them.

And that matters.

The American experiment succeeded not merely because of military victories, but because a culture of self-government already existed before independence was declared.

That is what Tocqueville later recognized. America’s strength came less from abstract theories than from the habits of free citizens governing themselves locally.

The Declaration transformed those habits into a universal political statement.

And nearly 250 years later, its central question still confronts every generation:

Are created human beings able to govern themselves? Or are they meant to be managed permanently by ruling experts?

The founders answered clearly.

They chose liberty.

The Vote That Made Independence Real

AVA Insights — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:12:41 GMT

Americans celebrate July 4.

John Adams believed they should celebrate July 2.

Because July 2 was the day American independence actually became official.

After weeks of debate following Richard Henry Lee’s resolution, and then the drafting of the Declaration, the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence on July 2, 1776.

The colonies were no longer politically connected to Britain.

The decision was final.

Adams immediately understood the magnitude of the moment. He wrote to his wife Abigail that July 2 would become one of the great celebrated dates in human history:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. -- I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. -- Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Adams was off by two days. But not by significance.

The vote itself represented something remarkable. Delegates were not merely signing a symbolic protest. It wasn’t just about leaving behind their claims to inherited rights and charter rights as Englishmen and embracing natural inherent rights as the basis for them declaring independence.

No, in the eyes of the Crown and Parliament they were committing treason against the most powerful empire on earth.

If the Revolution failed, many of them would likely be executed.

That reality tends to get sanitized in modern retellings. But the Founders were not influencers managing optics. They were men risking everything.

And importantly, the vote for independence did not emerge from elite decree alone. It reflected years of growing colonial self-government, local resistance, militia organization, pamphlet campaigns, church debates, and civic mobilization. In some ways, declaring independence was simply an acknowledgement of what already existed in reality.

The Declaration would explain and justify independence. The July 2 vote enacted it.

That distinction matters.

America became independent not because of rhetoric alone, but because political leaders formally accepted responsibility for self-government.

That is the core American idea: Free people governing themselves rather than being permanently managed from above.

The British Crown viewed authority as its by inheritance and the divine right of kings. The American Revolution increasingly treated authority as something delegated conditionally by citizens to secure and protect their rights.

That remains one of the great unresolved tensions in modern politics.

Who governs? Permanent managerial systems from above? Or the people themselves?

July 2 represented the moment America answered that question publicly.

The colonies chose self-government.

And once they did, history changed.

The Martyr of Liberty

AVA Insights — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 14:53:41 GMT

Long before Jefferson wrote a declaration, Algernon Sidney lost his head. Literally.

A Parlimentarian who fought with Cromwell in the English Civil War, Sidney was executed in 1683 for opposing royal absolutism.

For years he’d argued that legitimate government rests on consent, not inherited authority. In the age of the divine rights of kings, Sidney rejected the idea.

He argued for a government limited in size and scope and based on the consent of the people.

If the government becomes corrupt, the people should abolish it.

For those ideas, considered seditious at the time, Sidney was convicted of treason and beheaded in December of 1683.

But his writings lived on and crossed the Atlantic. Colonists read them obsessively.

Jefferson later acknowledged Sidney alongside Locke as one of the major influences behind the Declaration.

Sidney’s life revealed something the founders never forgot: The argument for liberty often carries a cost. Ideas matter because power fears them.

And few ideas frightened monarchies more than the belief that governments exist for the people, not the other way around.

The Philosopher Behind the Revolution

AVA Insights — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:01:16 GMT

Before Jefferson wrote the Declaration, he’d read English author John Locke. So did Adams. So did Madison. So did almost everyone else.

Locke’s arguments were revolutionary for his time: governments exist to secure natural rights. Not create them or distribute them or redefine them.

Secure them.

And when governments consistently violate those rights? The people retain the authority to alter or abolish them. Jefferson did not invent that principle. He inherited it.

Then translated it into language ordinary people could understand.

So while the Declaration was uniquely American, we must understand that Jefferson and the Committee of Five drew heavily from different sources like Locke. Consider some of the central themes in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, initially published anonymously in 1689:

All individuals possess inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property.
In a state of nature, those rights are vulnerable, so individuals form a “social contract” to create a government. Thus, in Locke’s thinking, the primary and sole purpose of government is to protect these rights because. . . that’s why governments are formed.
Which leads to this point: when a government fails to protect its citizens’ natural rights and breaks the social contract, citizens then have a right, even a moral obligation, to overthrow that government and establish a new one.

Now with Locke’s ideas in mind, think about the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .

Locke wrote “Life, liberty and property.” Jefferson wrote, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (there is some evidence that Jefferson didn’t want to include property for fear it might enshrine the idea that there was a right to slaves).

Jefferson is channeling Locke when he writes, “That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” What Locke and later Jefferson were arguing for was a rights-based government: governments existed to secure natural inherent rights; not give them, not take them away–secure them. That was their only legitimate purpose.

And finally, just as Locke had written nearly a century before, Jefferson would write that, if and when, governments do not protect rights, and in fact become destructive to them, the people have a right to alter or abolish those governments.

Jefferson and the other Founders stood in the flow of ideas and philosophies from previous generations. But what made the American Founders unique was that they turned those ideas and philosophies into reality when they established, for the first time in the history of the world, a rights-based government in which the people were sovereign.

The Books That Started a Revolution

AVA Insights — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:02:40 GMT

June 28, 1776

The American Revolution wasn’t born on a battlefield.

It was born in libraries. It was born in pamphlets. John Adams believed that the political pamphlets, like John Dickinson’s Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense of the 1760s and 1770s were significant catalysts for the American Revolution. He observed that the revolution occurred “in the Minds and Hearts of the People,” via that era’s relentless and numerous pamphlets, and essays.

One of the most influential books in colonial pre-revolutionary America, however, wasn’t written by a founder. It wasn’t even written by an American.

It was written by two Englishmen: John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.

Their work became known as Cato’s Letters, named for Cato the Younger who fought to preserve the Roman Republic during its late stages.

Colonists devoured the book.

The central message was simple: Power expands and corrupts therefore power must be watched constantly. In their 144 essays, Trenchard and Gordon wrote that liberty is the unalienable right of all mankind and that the government’s primary purpose is to protect these rights. They viewed consolidated power with great suspicion, arguing that there should be checks and balances to diffuse power, and that citizens had a right to freedom of speech and conscience.

The founders quoted Cato’s Letters endlessly because they reinforced a lesson history repeatedly teaches: Liberty rarely disappears all at once.

It erodes gradually, through bureaucracy, through dependency, through centralized authority.

The Revolution was fueled as much by this suspicion of power as by taxation itself.

And that suspicion was one of America’s defining characteristics and one we would do well to resurrect.

The Founder America Forgot

AVA Insights — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:04:15 GMT

Most Americans have never heard of James Wilson.

That is remarkable.

Because few founders shaped America more deeply.

Wilson believed something revolutionary:

The people are sovereign.

Not Parliament.

Not governors.

Not states.

The people.

This seems obvious now.

It wasn’t in 1776.

Wilson helped transform the Revolution from a dispute about English rights into something far more ambitious:

Government deriving legitimacy directly from citizens.

He later helped design:

the presidency,
the judiciary,
popular sovereignty itself.

In many ways, Wilson supplied the constitutional architecture behind Jefferson’s rhetoric.

The Declaration explains why government exists.

Wilson helped explain where it gets authority.

And his answer changed the world.

The Midnight Rider Few Remember

AVA Insights — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:02:27 GMT

June 24, 1776

Most Americans know Paul Revere. Fewer know Caesar Rodney.

That is unfortunate because Rodney may have cast one of the most important votes in American history.

In late June 1776, Delaware’s delegation was deadlocked on the issue of independence.

One delegate supported independence. One opposed it and the colony’s vote hung in the balance.

Because of that independence itself remained uncertain.

Rodney was 80 miles away.

Sick. Exhausted. Battling severe facial cancer.

Yet when he learned Delaware’s vote might decide the issue, he mounted his horse and rode through a thunderstorm across the Delmarva Peninsula. Through the night. Through rain and mud, arriving in Philadelphia on July 1.

Just as John Hancock called the morning’s session to order to once again take up the resolution on independence, Rodney strode into the room. It was said he walked into Independence Hall still muddy and wet, a green scarf hiding his disfigured face, his spurs clanking on the floor as he took his seat with the Delaware delegation.

That morning, he broke the tie and Delaware voted for independence. His vote had a domino effect. South Carolina, which had been a no, saw Delaware and Pennsylvania change their votes to yes, and followed suit. The resolution advanced and Rodney would sign the Declaration with the other delegates on August 2.

History often turns on ideas.

Sometimes it turns on a man willing to take a grueling, lonely ride through a thunderous night.

The Founder Who Built the Treasury

AVA Insights — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:02:22 GMT

Most revolutions fail because they run out of money and resources before they run out of courage.

The American Revolution almost did both.

While Washington fought battles and Congress debated independence, one man spent most of the war confronting a simpler problem:

How do you finance a revolution? That man was Robert Morris. We remember Washington and Jefferson and other prominent Founders.

But history rarely remembers the man who kept the government solvent because it’s not quite as glamorous.

Morris understood something every founder eventually learned: Patriotism does not pay suppliers. Liberty does not feed armies. Principles do not automatically create credit.

The Continental Congress printed currency. Inflation exploded. Supplies vanished. Confidence deteriorated.

Morris stepped into the vacuum. To be clear, initially with real doubts and great hesitation. Morris leaned toward reconciliation with the Crown and feared the “independency movement” in the Second Continental Congress was pushing too hard, too soon. His hesitation stemmed in many ways from his great wealth: he was considered to be the richest man in the colonies, having made his fortune via Willing, Morris & Company, the company which he and Thomas Willing had founded in 1757.

The firm became one of the most successful import-export and financial businesses in the American colonies in the years preceding the Revolution, with global trade throughout the British Empire. A revolution would destroy that lucrative trade.

But in the end, Morris realized independence was the only route for the colonies. Once his mind was made up, he threw everything into the cause.

He used his own fortune repeatedly. He negotiated loans. Created systems of credit. Organized procurement.

Ultimately, he became the financial backbone of the Revolution.

When Washington critically needed cash in December 1776, Morris leaned on an old Quaker friend to dig up a chest of coin in the man’s backyard. Time and time again he came through for Washington in critical moments. Throughout the war until Yorktown, Washington’s army moved because Morris found the money.

That may sound less romantic than battlefield heroics. It was because most find logistics and numbers boring. Morris didn’t lead gallant charges or lead troops to victory but without him none of those would have been possible.

Because of his financial abilities he was indispensable to the cause and was dubbed “The Financier of the Revolution.” In the end, he gave everything for the Revolution he’d been so hesitant to support at its beginning. When we read the lines, “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” we should see Morris’ face: he was willing to risk his entire fortune for the sake of liberty.

His life is one of the recurring themes of the American founding:

Freedom requires competence. Not merely rhetoric or ideals but competence and systems.

Morris reminds us that republics survive when practical men solve practical problems.

The Revolution needed philosophers but it also needed finance men and accountants.

The Battle That Looked Like a Defeat

AVA Insights — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:17:06 GMT

June 17, 1775

Technically, the British won the Battle of Bunker Hill. But in reality the victory deeply troubled them.

Most battles are sometimes reduced to a simple question: Who held the ground when the shooting stopped?

Bunker Hill was a bit different: what did the battle reveal? Because it revealed a great deal.

Two months earlier, blood had been shed at Lexington and Concord. Militia forces had surrounded Boston, trapping British troops inside the city. Yet many British commanders still viewed the colonial resistance as a temporary disturbance.

The colonists were nothing more than undisciplined farmers, provincial militias playing at war; amateurs with muskets.

On June 17, 1775, those assumptions and disdain died on Breed’s Hill overlooking Boston Harbor.

The Americans had spent the night fortifying positions on the heights above Charlestown, actually building their redoubt in a far more advanced position than originally planned. British General Thomas Gage recognized the danger immediately. If the rebels held that position and placed cannon inside the redoubt on Breed’s Hill, they would threaten British control of Boston itself.

So he sent General William Howe and 2,000 of the best British troops to attack. Howe took in the situation and sent some of his elite light troops down the Mystic River Beach to flank the Americans. John Stark of New Hampshire, along with sixty men, decimated the flanking attempt.

Undeterred, Howe divided his forces and sent his men straight up the slopes. Rows of British regulars advanced uphill into the Americans behind the rail fence and the earthen redoubt, the red-coated infantry marched in disciplined formation exactly as European armies had done for generations.

The Americans waited.

And waited.

According to tradition, William Prescott, commanding the redoubt, ordered his men not to fire until they could see “the whites of their eyes.”

Whether those exact words were spoken matters less than the reality behind them. Ammunition was scarce and every shot mattered. But even more so, Prescott, a veteran of the French and Indian War, knew green and untrained men typically fired too soon and too high. He had to make them wait for as long as possible.

A sheet of fire and flame hit the British at the rail fence and redoubt and the first British assault collapsed.

Then the second.

Stunned and exhausted, Howe and the British made one last push, leaving the rail fence at the top of the hill alone to focus their attacks on the earthen redoubt. Prescott, knowing the Americans were low on gunpowder, watched and waited, advising Dr. Joseph Warren, President of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts and a newly appointed Major General, to retire. Warren refused.

The third assault came. Were it not for the Americans running out of gunpowder, they would have held the redoubt. Instead the redcoats forced their way in but were stunned that the Americans did not flee. In the vicious close combat that followed, Warren was killed covering the colonists’ retreat.

By the end of the day, the British technically held the ground but victory had come at a staggering price.

More than 1,000 British casualties.

Nearly half the attacking force.

Almost a hundred of the officers were killed or wounded.

The British Army had won the hill but lost confidence.

General William Howe reportedly reflected afterward:

That statement captures the true significance of Bunker Hill. Howe, who became the British commander-in-chief after Gage was recalled, was never the same after Bunker Hill. He became more timid, less daring, more unsure of himself.

The battle also shattered the illusion that the colonies could be pacified cheaply.

The Americans had demonstrated they could stand against professional European troops and inflict devastating losses.

Just as importantly, they proved it to themselves.

The militia forces that fought at Bunker Hill were still disorganized. They lacked uniform training. They lacked centralized command. They lacked sufficient supplies.

What they did not lack was determination.

The battle revealed something deeper about the American character. It proved they could actually go toe-to-toe with one of the greatest military powers in the world.

The founders also understood that free societies often possess advantages centralized systems struggle to replicate: initiative, local knowledge, improvisation, and resilience.

Bunker Hill also transformed British thinking.

Before the battle, many British leaders still believed reconciliation remained possible. Afterward, increasing numbers began viewing the colonies as an organized rebellion requiring suppression.

Compromise became harder. Positions hardened. The road toward independence accelerated.

That is why June 17 matters.

Not because America won but because the British learned that defeating the colonies would require far more blood, treasure, and time than anyone in London had anticipated.

Empires are often defeated not by a single catastrophic loss.

They are defeated when the cost of victory becomes unbearable.

At Bunker Hill, Britain received its first glimpse of that future and America saw something equally important: they could in fact make the Empire bleed and feel pain.