Birth of the US Army (the by one measure, birth of the US itself)

The first protest march probably involved some poor soldier in ill-fitting boots. The American revolutionaries didn’t have enough money for uniforms. At the beginning of what many at the time called the Civil War or the War of Rebellion, only about one in five soldiers had anything resembling a formal army uniform. The rest fought in homespun clothing, buckskins, or whatever they had.

Sociologist Max Weber famously defined government as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force - a clean, powerful idea that gets at the heart of why armies matter.

Jefferson and Madison, both brilliant and idealistic, believed that in a democracy, the military should consist of militias - ordinary citizens who would return to their farms and shops after the danger had passed. This thinking is echoed in the Second Amendment, which speaks not of a standing army but of a “well-regulated militia.”

George Washington, by contrast, had no patience for that theory. He had to win a war against the greatest professional army on Earth - and came to deeply distrust militias. He thought they were undisciplined, undertrained, and unreliable. While Madison and Jefferson saw the citizen-soldier as a bulwark of liberty, Washington saw him as someone who might fire once, then leave early to check on the harvest.

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the Continental Army, formally created by the Second Continental Congress on June 14, 1775. You could also argue the country’s birth came July 4, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, or 1789, when the U.S. Constitution went into effect.

Creating a new country is a complicated process - and it’s not finished yet.

So: happy birthday to us. And here’s to the hard, still unfinished work of building a more perfect union. You might not feel properly dressed or prepared for this work but it is yours nonetheless.