"Its [the Philadelphia Convention's] official function was to propose revisions to the Articles. But the delegates, meeting in secret, quickly decided to draft a totally new document. Of the 55 delegates, only 8 had signed the Declaration of Independence. Most of the leading radicals, including Sam Adams, Henry, Paine, Lee, and Jefferson, were absent. In contrast, 21 delegates belonged to the militarist Society of the Cincinnati. Overall, the convention was dominated by the array of nationalist interests that the prior war had brought together: land speculators, ex-army officers, public creditors, and privileged merchants." Did the Constitution Betray the Revolution?, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, William Marina
"While Washington and Steuben were taking the army in an ever more European direction, Lee in captivity was moving the other way – pursuing his insights into a full fledged and elaborated proposal for guerrilla warfare. He presented his plan to Congress, as a "Plan for the Formation of the American Army."
Bitterly attacking Steuben's training of the army according to the "European Plan," Lee charged that fighting British regulars on their own terms was madness and courted crushing defeat: "If the Americans are servilely kept to the European Plan, they will … be laugh'd at as a bad army by their enemy, and defeated in every [encounter]…. [The idea] that a decisive action in fair ground may be risqued is talking nonsense." Instead, he declared that "a plan of defense, harassing and impeding can alone succeed," particularly if based on the rough terrain west of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. He also urged the use of cavalry and of light infantry (in the manner of Dan Morgan), both forces highly mobile and eminently suitable for the guerrilla strategy.
This strategic plan was ignored both by Congress and by Washington, all eagerly attuned to the new fashion of Prussianizing and to the attractions of a "real" army." - Murray N. Rothbard, Generalissimo Washington: How He Crushed the Spirit of Liberty excerpted from Conceived in Liberty, Volume IV, chapters 8 and 41.
