When young speechwriters (I was once one) start at the White House, they receive some version of the same talking-to: Remember the speech is the president’s, not yours. He doesn’t have all day to spend hunched over a computer. Write what he would if he had the time.

Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, it was members of the Continental Congress who were in need of words and short of time to write them. Had it occurred to anyone that the Declaration of Independence would one day become America’s most revered document, the assignment would surely not have fallen to one of Virginia’s junior delegates, Thomas Jefferson.

On June 11, 1776, as discussed in last week’s newsletter, Congress appointed a committee to draft a declaration in the expectation that Richard Henry Lee’s motion for independence would pass in a few weeks’ time. Who on the committee would wield the pen was left to the discretion of its five members: John Adams of Massachusetts; Roger Sherman of Connecticut; Robert Livingston of New York; Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania; and the lanky 33-year-old Jefferson, who made a habit of keeping his lips closed and his arms crossed.

There was never any serious thought of Sherman or Livingston writing the declaration. Ditto for the famous Franklin. A bout of gout had confined him to bed. As it happened, the old newspaper editor wouldn’t have agreed to take on the job anyway. “I have made it a rule. . . whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body,” he later told Jefferson.

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With all the buildup to the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it’s easy to forget that the real suspense in Philadelphia 250 years ago was not over whether the Continental Congress would approve the document drafted by Thomas Jefferson but over whether the delegates would approve a resolution written by another Virginian, Richard Henry Lee.

Though Massachusetts delegate John Adams believed Congress had essentially declared independence in mid-May when it narrowly approved the statement that he had written calling for the authority of King George III to “be totally suppressed” in all 13 colonies (see our newsletter from two weeks ago), there was still considerable resistance to making independence official. It was Lee who forced the issue on June 7, 1776, when he introduced the following resolution: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Born just weeks before George Washington in the same Virginia county (Westmoreland), Lee belonged to one of colonial America’s most powerful families. John Adams would remember the Lees as “that band of brothers—intrepid and unchangeable—who like the Greeks at Thermopylae, stood in the gap, in defense of their country, from the first glimmering in the Revolution, in the horizon—through all its rising light, to its perfect day.”

Five of Lee’s brothers reached adulthood, and four found their way into leadership roles in the American Revolution. Younger brother Francis Lightfoot Lee served with Richard Henry in the Continental Congress (they’d both eventually sign the Declaration of Independence). Baby brothers William Lee and Arthur Lee carried out diplomacy in Europe. Meanwhile, older brother Thomas Ludwell Lee led the way in Williamsburg at the Virginia Convention, when it voted on May 15, 1776, to instruct its delegates to the Continental Congress to propose a resolution of independence. It was in obedience to those instructions that Richard Henry Lee introduced his resolution.

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Not many visitors to Arlington National Cemetery make it out back behind the mansion house, where the graves run up against the old cavalry post formerly known as Fort Myer. In the grass past a Japanese cedar is a tombstone bearing four stars and two names carved into military lore: Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright and Adele Holley Wainwright. The engraved text identifies him as “General, United States Army,” and her merely as “his beloved wife.”

As is always the case at Arlington, there is more to be said. The ease with which the Wainwrights lie together belies a story of separation and suffering symbolic of the sacrifices that generations of service members and their families have made for our freedom. With Memorial Day this week, we owe it to remember the general who became the highest-ranking American prisoner of World War II and his long-suffering wife, who became a prisoner of an enemy of a different kind.

“Home is where the husband is.” That was the saying in the military family where Wainwright had grown up, and Adele Holley embraced it in 1911 upon marrying the skinny West Point graduate who had followed his father into the cavalry and loved riding horses, singing, and reading military history. There was no other way to be married to a cavalryman but to be ready to pick up at a moment’s notice and set off wherever duty led. In 1940, that meant going to the Philippines, then a U.S. colony, for what the Wainwrights assumed would be the final assignment in a career that had taken him to Europe during World War I and more recently made him a general officer. Adele would have stuck it out in the Philippines till the bitter end had the military not ordered army wives and children to leave in May 1941, amid fears that the islands would be difficult to defend in the event of war with Japan.

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Even a man of George Washington’s stature couldn’t escape one of the more annoying features of modern life: meetings. Worried as he was to leave his army in New York City amid reports of thousands of British reinforcements, including German troops, on the move (see our earlier newsletter), the general couldn’t turn down an “invitation” 250 years ago this week from the Continental Congress to confer in Philadelphia.

It didn’t take many visits to the brick state house where Congress convened in the City of Brotherly Love for Washington to complain about delegates “still feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation” and moving too slowly toward a declaration of independence from Great Britain. As it turned out, events were moving faster than Washington perceived, thanks in large measure to a series of maneuvers orchestrated by Massachusetts delegate John Adams.

The plan had come together the previous week when Adams and his allies in Congress introduced a resolution advising all 13 colonies to put in place governments “sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs.” Seemingly harmless, the measure passed the chamber easily on May 10, 1776. Only then did Adams come forward with a proposal for adding a preamble that revealed what he really intended the resolution to accomplish. The text included this line: “It is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed, and all the powers of government exerted under the authority of the people of the colonies.” When affixed to the resolution, it was a call for all the colonies to eradicate every last vestige of loyalty to George III and set up governments deriving their power from the people alone.

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The despotic and desperate regime clung to power by terrorizing ships on one of the world’s most vital arteries of trade. It seized foreign vessels, enslaved and held hostage their crews in the name of Islam, played European powers off one another, and demanded the United States pay extravagant sums for peace as part of deals that would inevitably be broken.

Two hundred twenty-five years ago this week, the American president had enough. At a cabinet meeting on May 15, 1801—just a couple months after delivering his first inaugural address (discussed here)—Thomas Jefferson made the decision to dispatch a naval squadron to the Mediterranean Sea after the ruler of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, threatened to renege on a treaty and declare open season on American ships. It was the beginning of the Barbary Wars. Though very different from the struggle against Iran today, America’s first fight in the Islamic world is worth remembering.

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From the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., take the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River, and you’ll come to a traffic circle where roads leading north and south (including one to George Washington’s Mount Vernon) meet. Inside the circle is a grassy field, which lies conspicuously free of granite, limestone, or marble. Naturally, the undeveloped spot has caught the eye of the country’s most powerful real-estate developer: President Donald Trump. If he gets his way, a 250-foot triumphal arch will soon rise there in honor of America’s 250th birthday.

Per a recent Washington Post survey, only 21 percent of Americans share Trump’s vision for what would be the world’s largest triumphal arch. In fairness, there hasn’t been much of a discernible public relations campaign to build support. Like so many of the president’s proposals for sprucing up the nation’s capital, the gargantuan arch seems to have come out of left field (technically, right field, given the river’s southeasterly flow). As it turns out, however, plans for erecting a monument on the site have a long history—one that leaves space for the president and his critics to do something that would really be a tribute to America’s past: compromise.

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The French have a term for the feeling that naturally follows from reading recent newspaper headlines about Germany “reinventing” its economy around manufacturing weapons for Europe. The term is déjà vu, and it’s not just about the two world wars. Long before unifying into a nation, the German states of the Holy Roman Empire made a business of supplying their European neighbors with not just arms but also entire armies.

As April 1776 gave way to May, American patriots were discovering the specifics behind reports that King George III of Great Britain had outsourced some of his fight against them to foreign troops. Though hailing from several different German states, these soldiers would go into the history books under the shared name of “Hessians,” for the principality that furnished most of their numbers: Hesse-Kassel. The first of the approximately 30,000 who served in America during the Revolutionary War set off across the Atlantic around this time 250 years ago.

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On April 19, 1776—250 years ago this week—patriot leaders marked one year since the Revolutionary War had begun with the Battles of Lexington and Concord or, as the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson would later put it, “the shot heard round the world.” Across the Atlantic Ocean, no one had awaited the sound longer and more eagerly than the French.

In the usual telling of the Revolutionary War, the story of Franco-American relations revolves around Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission to France and the Marquis de Lafayette’s quest to fight for liberty in America. But long before those two men crossed the Atlantic in opposite directions, a more secret history was being written by a French playwright named Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. By the first anniversary of the war, he and his allies neared approval for one of the war’s greatest pieces of theater: a covert plan to aid the American rebels.

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For anyone who has ever experienced the embarrassment of sharing a news story and finding out only afterward that it was too good to be true, here’s some solace: John Adams could relate. In June 1819, he forwarded to fellow ex-president Thomas Jefferson a newspaper article claiming that Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, had declared independence from Great Britain on May 20, 1775, in terms strikingly similar to the ones Jefferson would use the next year when drafting the Declaration of Independence. Bitter that Jefferson had gotten “all the glory” for a document that Adams denigrated as a “theatrical show,” the New Englander relished evidence that the Virginian had stolen some of his most vaunted phrases, including “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” from the Carolina backwoods.

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In 1859, Mary Custis Lee, the owner of the famed Arlington House in Virginia, published some letters by her late step-great-grandfather, George Washington. Not everyone approved of her editorial choices. Her husband, Colonel Robert E. Lee, believed she had erred by including correspondence showing that Washington had taken an ownership stake in a privateer vessel during the Revolutionary War. “I would prefer it had been omitted,” Lee wrote to Mary. “It may suit the mercantile taste of the East more than it does mine.”

Although it was too late for Mary to remove the offending letters, many chroniclers of the American Revolution have taken her husband’s advice and obscured the contributions of privateers. Perhaps the hesitancy to mention them is due to their being lumped in (usually unfairly) with pirates or perhaps to a discomfort with how these privately owned ships mixed patriotism with profits. With this week marking the 250th anniversary of the Continental Congress setting rules for privateering, it’s long past time to see these ships for what they were: the embodiment of the entrepreneurial spirit that would shape the new country.

In early 1776, the colonists learned that Parliament had passed a law forbidding trade with them and unleashing the world’s most powerful navy against their ships. Although the law would go into the history books as the Prohibitory Act, Continental Congress delegate John Adams favored calling it “an Act of Independency” because it broke any last ties that remained to the Mother Country. “It throws 13 colonies out of the royal protection . . . and makes us independent in spite of all our supplications and entreaties,” he wrote. “It may be fortunate that the Act of Independency should come from the British Parliament, rather than the American Congress.”

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They traveled by gunboat and foot instead of helicopter; gained entry by forging letters instead of breaching computer systems; donned disguises instead of night-vision goggles; and communicated with smoke signals and flags instead of livestream. Long before the operation to extract Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, a band of U.S. soldiers and their Filipino allies pulled off one of the most daring ruses in military history and captured the Philippine insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo. The 125th anniversary of the raid this week is a reminder that such missions require cunning and courage—and rarely come without controversy.

It was hardly obvious in 1898, when the Spanish-American War first brought U.S. forces to the Philippines (then a Spanish colony), that Aguinaldo would become America’s most-wanted man in the archipelago. Not yet 30 years old but already the head of the Philippine nationalist movement, Aguinaldo had hoped that the country famous for the Declaration of Independence would support a declaration of independence for the Philippines. When President William McKinley dashed those hopes by claiming the islands for the United States at the end of the war (there was reason to think the Germans or Japanese might have seized the islands otherwise), Aguinaldo shifted from fighting the Spanish to fighting the Americans.

With U.S. forces putting the squeeze on the nationalist army in late 1899, Aguinaldo turned to guerrilla tactics and dispersed his men. The bloody Philippine-American War would drag on as Aguinaldo disappeared into the mountainous northeast of the Philippines’ largest island, Luzon.

The breakthrough in the search for Aguinaldo came in January 1901 via the same means that would later lead Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden: a courier. When a messenger carrying dispatches from Aguinaldo surrendered to American forces, Brigadier General Frederick Funston took personal charge of the questioning. A diminutive Kansan known for making big headlines (he had received the Medal of Honor for his actions during a battle in 1899), Funston would deny ever employing an interrogation technique known as the “water cure.” Whatever the truth, Funston gained two key pieces of information: that Aguinaldo resided in a village called Palanan by Luzon’s northeast coast, and that he was hoping to receive reinforcements there shortly.

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The loyalists in Boston had hoped the day would never come, but come it did on March 17, 1776, when the British evacuated the city after a nearly yearlong siege by patriot forces. There would be chaos and confusion, but no refugees left to swim after ships that had already sailed, no scenes as tragic as the ones that the country born out of the American Revolution would one day leave behind in Saigon and Kabul.

As we commemorate the birth of the United States, there’s no shame in admitting there are still lessons worth learning from the example the Mother Country set. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, the British showed how a great power can abandon a city without forsaking its friends.

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Judging by the recent Supreme Court decision on tariffs, James Madison, whose 275th birthday is March 16, remains as relevant as ever. His name appears in the decision almost two dozen times—in the opinions of both the justices who struck down President Donald Trump’s preferred method of imposing tariffs and those who would have upheld it.

During the winter of 1832–33, Americans had the good fortune of not having to guess which side the “Father of the Constitution” would take amid the so-called nullification crisis when South Carolina raised a very different challenge to the constitutionality of protective tariffs. Of all the Constitution’s signers, Madison was the only one still alive to give his opinion.

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The Fortress Washington Built Overnight

There was little sleep this night 250 years ago around Boston. The British troops occupying the city had heard rumors of a rebel movement but could not hear the procession of wagons, oxen, and soldiers over the roar of the artillery duel that the Continental Army had begun. Not until the sun rose over Boston Harbor the next morning did the British discover what the cannon fire and darkness had disguised: George Washington’s men had transformed the previously unoccupied Dorchester Heights across the water into a formidable bastion with the fortifications and firepower needed to force the British out of the city.

The operation on Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4, 1776, led to Washington’s first significant triumph of the Revolutionary War and previewed a secret weapon that regimes underestimating the United States have failed to reckon with time and time again: the ingenuity and enterprise of the American people.

By March, the siege that had begun with the British falling back into Boston from Concord and Lexington was nearing the one-year mark. As discussed here a few weeks ago, Washington felt his countrymen losing patience with the stalemate. The officers he convened in a war council in mid-February had rejected his plan to throw troops across the frozen water separating his army from the British but gave their support to an alternative plan: fortifying Dorchester Heights.

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Jefferson’s Words for a Fractured Country

By the election of 1800, the political parties that the Founding Fathers had hoped never to see had become impossible to ignore. Republicans (confusingly, the forerunner of the Democratic Party) accused Federalists of a conspiracy to transform the presidency into a monarchy, curtail freedom of speech, and menace immigrants. Federalists accused Republicans of seeking to render America lawless, defenseless, godless, and financially creditless.

Until recently, it was hard for historians trying to relay this history to explain how such apocalyptic-sounding accusations ever went mainstream. Now, anyone scrolling through social media has a decent sense. The timelier question is, how did our forebears move on after the experience? Two hundred twenty-five years ago this week, the winner of the presidential election, Republican Thomas Jefferson, went in search of words that could “restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty, and even life itself, are but dreary things.” That was how he described his goal with his first inaugural address, and it remains among the finest expressions of American values ever composed.

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Washington’s Civil War

A good reason for resisting the fad of referring to Washington’s Birthday as Presidents’ Day went unmentioned in last week’s newsletter but can be summed up here in two words: James Buchanan. On February 22, 1861, a crowd hoping to see soldiers march down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue in honor of the first president’s birthday instead saw the soon-to-be former president Buchanan come down with a case of cold feet. With an antislavery Republican named Abraham Lincoln having won the race to succeed Buchanan, Southern states had begun to secede. Warned that a martial display at this time would wreck chances for negotiations to avert civil war, Buchanan ordered the soldiers to sit out the parade—only to flip-flop later in the day upon hearing his decision had disappointed the people lining the streets.

The controversy over Washington’s birthday on the eve of the Civil War provides perspective on our own so-called “history wars” today. The battle back then was not over whether to save or tear down statues of the Father of Our Country (few could have foreseen such silliness) but over who had the better claim to his legacy: those seeking to save the Union he had forged or those seeking to break away from it.

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Just Call It Washington’s Birthday

In February 1798, President John Adams shocked the then-capital of Philadelphia when one of his terser letters leaked to a newspaper. “I have received your polite invitation,” he wrote, “and embrace the earliest opportunity of informing you that I decline accepting it.” Had the second president tried (and he may have), he couldn’t have found a less tactful way of announcing that he wouldn’t attend a ball in honor of George Washington’s birthday on February 22. Although the usually wise Abigail Adams insisted it would have been improper for her husband as the sitting president to celebrate a former president’s birthday, she got it backward: Among the many reasons to honor Washington was his resolution to retire to private life after two terms in office.

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One man had come to America to bring peace through negotiations. The other had come to impose peace through war. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, Lord Drummond, a Scottish noble acting as an unofficial peace emissary, and Henry Clinton, a high-ranking British general, met on a warship in New York Harbor. The surprise is how much they agreed upon. During their conversation, Clinton summed up his preferred strategy this way: “To gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”

With that turn of phrase, a British general fighting to thwart the American Revolution articulated the doctrine that the nation born out of the struggle would later deploy itself in places such as Vietnam and Iraq: winning hearts and minds. Max Boot, in his book about the history of guerrilla warfare, credits Clinton with “the first recorded use of ‘hearts and minds’ in a counterinsurgency context.” No less of an authority than General David Petraeus has written that the phrase remains the “most succinct explanation for how to win a counterinsurgency.”

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When Connecticut Marched on New York

The message showed up on the streets in late January amid fears that the bonds of society were breaking and that neighborhoods would soon be in flames. “Your city, my friends, has been brought into a state truly degrading to the name of Americans,” the anonymous author wrote. Some called on the commander in chief to send troops. If he delayed, the city might become the gateway for a full-fledged invasion of America. “You have it in your power at present to prevent this dreadful event,” read one letter. “Congress have given you authority to take any step in that place.”

Although the quoted passages may sound timely, both come from 250-year-old documents—one an anonymous broadside and the other a letter to General George Washington—about unrest in New York City. Like the situation in Minneapolis today, the one back then led to a debate over whether forces raised outside a state, or rather a colony, should operate inside its borders. This week in January 1776, a delegation from the Continental Congress arrived in New York on a mission to negotiate the unthinkable: the city’s occupation by troops from Connecticut.

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Opportunity Knox

In our era of credentialism, 25-year-old Henry Knox would never have made it to the interview stage for the position of artillery commander in the Continental Army. A look at his résumé would have shown he had dropped out of school, joined a street gang, gotten wrapped up as a witness in a prominent trial for soldiers accused of firing into a crowd (the Boston Massacre), worked as a bookseller, gone parading in a militia uniform, and wed the daughter of a high-ranking British official. If all that wasn’t enough to kill his chances, there was also this: He had ballooned to more than 250 pounds and accidentally shot off two of his own fingers.

Fortunately for America, General George Washington filled the opening based on talent rather than HR dictates or Pentagon mandates against “fat” commanders. On January 18, 1776—250 years ago this week—the trust in Knox paid off when he arrived at the Continental Army’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in advance of what he called a “noble train of artillery” carrying what many had thought immovable: the guns of Fort Ticonderoga.

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