Colonies & Settlement

Portrait by Artist to Come


QUICK FACTS
  • Compared to the West Indies, British North America was economically trivial in the 18th century. In 1773, for example, British imports from Jamaica alone were five times more valuable than those from all of the North American colonies combined.
CONTENTS

     

Territories

  • Kentucky County
  • New Hampshire Grants (Vermont Republic)

As students of Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau are always reminding us, the age of reason was really an age of sentiment. In this too, Washington was a man of his age. When he established the first general decoration in the American Army, the Purple Heart, it was not (as it became in the twentieth century) an award available to all soldiers wounded in the line of duty. Only privates and noncomissioned officers could win the original Badge of Military Merit, a cloth-shaped heart sewn over the man’s actual heart, which allowed him to pass all guards and sentinels which officers are permitted to do. The symbol was not of heart’s blood shed, but of virtue proceeding from the heart. Limiting the award to nonofficers was meant to indicate that great virtue can be shown regardless of rank — that in Washington’s words, the road to glory in a patriot army and a free country is thus open to all.

Garry Wills
Cincinnatus: George Washington & the Enlightenment (1984)