The proposition for which you contend, or for which you profess to contend, for I decline to believe that anyone of your name really accepts such stuff, is nothing but the old principle of the bully and brute. The little man must yield where his case is shown to be hopeless and save the brute's time and money. After every battle of the revolution the British and the loyalists thought that your ancestor and his friends ought to give it up, and this went on for over seven years in spite of the assistance of France.
I am inclined to think that if you were really put to the test you would not live up to your own principles. I am inclined to think that if I and several others, outnumbering you in the proportion of the English to the Boers, should present revolvers and say that being men of better business capacity we would now kindly take charge of your private affairs and manage them for you to your great advantage, you would not act quite as piously as you preach. The one or two drops of the blood of old John, which are still hidden in your veins, somewhere down in your boots, would suddenly rush to your heart and inflame it. You would duck under those revolver muzzles and come at our stomachs in a way that would keep us moving. We should undoubtedly very soon have your dead body with which to conduct some sort of brutal and stupid British triumph; but we should never be able to say that we had made a political slave of a living Adams.
I have not space here to take you all through the revolution and remind you of every scene in which your ancestor figured. But I shall finish what I was saying about Washington when his army was reduced to 3,300 and he was prepared for a grand trek to the Alleghenies. He did not have to resort to that because General Howe did not press him any further. For political reasons, which we cannot go into here, Howe preferred that Washington should raise another army if he could.
Howe retired to New York and spent the winter there with his large force of 30,000; but at Trenton and Bordentown on the Delaware River some fifty miles away he placed two isolated outposts of about 1,500 Hessians each. Washington collected more men until his 3,300 had become 6,000 and with these raw militia he gobbled up those Hessian outposts just as the Boers have been gobbling up similarly placed British outposts. When a force of 8,000 British came out from New York to reoccupy Trenton, Washington cut in behind them, and at Princeton, finding some more British coming up widely separated and unable to support one another, he beat them in detail.