“Freedom is not free, as the saying goes. Maintaining the republic has been the work of people shedding blood, sweat, and tears for 240 years. That herculean effort was not driven by politics alone; it rested on a culture that kept the citizenry active and engaged in the project of their own self-government at every level of community.”
–Daniel Krauthammer, “What Makes America Great?”, The Weekly Standard, May 8, 2017
Photo above: Haitian Monument; Franklin Square, Savannah, GA; commemorating “the contribution of The Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue to the fight for an independent America. One of the few black regiments to fight for the American side in the Revolutionary War, the soldiers were recruited from present-day Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue.”
“Every society requires warriors to defend its version of civilization. ‘If none of us is prepared to die for freedom,’ the Yale historian Timothy Snyder recently wrote, ‘then all of us will die under tyranny.’ These willing citizens we call soldiers don’t choose what their war will demand, or where or when they will be asked to fight, but they knowingly accept these conditions nonetheless.”
–M.L. Cavanaugh, U.S. Army strategist, “Their Chairs Are Empty, but We Know What Their Sacrifice Was For”, Wall Street Journal, May 27-28, 2017
“There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature & fortune have measured to him.”
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Rutledge, Monticello, December 27, 1796
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Photo above: Haitian Monument; Franklin Square, Savannah, GA; commemorating “the contribution of The Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue to the fight for an independent America. One of the few black regiments to fight for the American side in the Revolutionary War, the soldiers were recruited from present-day Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue.”