I am reading Valiant Ambition, the third book in Nathaniel Philbrick’s history of the American Revolution, subtitled, “George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution.” It gave me a reminder of why the lessons of history are so important in guiding our actions and attitudes in the present.
In Valiant Ambition, Philbrick writes about the battle of Brandywine, in southeastern Pennsylvania. “After the Battle of Brandywine,” he writes, “a British officer listed the nationality of the rebel prisoners,” adding:
If this list is any indication, most of the soldiers in Washington’s army had been born not in America but in England, Ireland, and Germany, with only 82 of the 315 prisoners (approximately 25 percent) listed as native born. This meant that while the vast majority of the country’s citizens stayed at home, the War for Independence was being waged, in large part, by newly arrived immigrants. Those native-born Americans who by mid-1777 were serving in the army tended to be either African-Americans, Native Americans, or what one historian has called “free white men on the move” . . . (p. 187).
He adds further that these soldiers “did not have the education and social standing of the zealous patriots who had served during the early years of the Revolution, but they would become the battle-hardened backbone of the Continental army” (ibid.).
Today, almost 250 years later, it is good to be reminded that we have always been a nation of immigrants—immigrants who feel deeply the value of our liberty and are willing to fight to achieve and to sustain it.
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Philbrick, Nathaniel. Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.
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