When I returned from Iraq in 2004, I lived in New Hope, Pennsylvania, just a few miles from the stretch of the Delaware River where George Washington famously crossed on Christmas night in 1776. Every morning, I drove past the spot where Washington loaded 2,400 freezing soldiers into small boats and led them across an ice-choked river toward a surprise attack on Hessian forces in Trenton.

For a long time, I thought of it as a historical landmark. But driving past it regularly made me think about what had actually happened there. The crossing was a desperate gamble by a commander who understood that doing nothing was the surest path to defeat. By Christmas 1776, the Revolution was hanging by athread. The crossing didn’t just help save the Revolution. It helps explain the country that emerged from it.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, we owe it to our country to recognize how profoundly military service shaped the men who created this nation. While we often think of our country’s founding purely as the product of intellectual statesmen, many of the ideas that gave birth to the United States were forged directly from the battlefield.

No two figures illustrate that better than George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. They were more than political theorists who happened to serve in uniform. They were soldiers who helped build a political system based on what they had watched succeed and fail during war.

The American founding was shaped by men who had seen firsthand what happens when government fails. Two hundred and fifty years later, that’s still a lesson worth remembering.

Washington and Hamilton were hardly the only soldiers who helped build the U.S. political system. After the Revolution, 275 veterans went on to serve in the House of Representatives, and five of the first six Speakers of the House had served in the war. This generation of veterans had watched soldiers go hungry because a new government lacked the capacity to do its most basic jobs. And they had watched a revolution nearly collapse because leaders couldn’t coordinate on resources, funding, or strategy.

That’s why the country they built for us emphasized strong institutions and robust personal freedoms. The American founding was shaped by men who had seen firsthand what happens when government fails. Two hundred and fifty years later, that’s still a lesson worth remembering.

Two men transformed by revolution

George Washington and Alexander Hamilton could not have come from more different worlds.

Washington was born into wealth and privilege on a scale that would be comparable to Jeff Bezos level net worth today. He essentially ran a plantation empire at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

Hamilton, meanwhile, was an orphan from the Caribbean who came to New York as a teenager with no money but big dreams and confidence.

Their two stories are near opposites.

One was born at the top and had everything to lose.

The other was born at the bottom and had almost nothing tangible.

Yet despite their vastly different origins, both found themselves transformed by the same experience of war. The military has always been one of the few institutions capable of bringing people from radically different backgrounds into the same reality. For Hamilton, the Continental Army was one of the few places in 18th-century America where talent could matter more than pedigree.

Washington’s decision to lead the Revolution was extraordinary given his wealth and his age. When the Revolution began in 1775, Washington was 43, which was no spring chicken back then. He had already achieved the success and status most people spend a lifetime pursuing. He could’ve easily lived a life of comfort. Instead, he spent the next eight years fighting for a cause that, for much of the war, appeared destined to fail.

Men of Washington’s wealth rarely interacted with ordinary laborers as equals, much less shared hardship with them. The Revolution changed that.

For eight years, Washington lived among soldiers whose lives bore little resemblance to his own — farmers, laborers, tradesmen, immigrants, and young men with little wealth and even less certainty about the future. He watched them endure hunger, disease, brutal cold, and death in pursuit of an idea. That experience fundamentally changed his understanding of leadership.

Before the war, Washington was a wealthy Virginia planter whose world was largely defined by land and status. After the war, he emerged as a national leader with a broader understanding of the people he served and the sacrifices they had made to create a country.

In some ways, that lesson had been 20 years in the making. It’s easy to forget that Washington didn’t begin his military career fighting against the British. He began it fighting for them two decades earlier.

As a young officer during the French and Indian War, Washington admired the British Army, then the most powerful military force in the world, and hoped to earn a commission in its regular ranks. He never did. Instead, he learned a frustrating lesson about status and power in the British Empire: Colonial officers were rarely treated as the equals of their British-born counterparts, regardless of talent or accomplishment.

The irony is hard to miss. Twenty years after being rejected from the British Army, Washington led the ragged, underfunded force that defeated it.

Hamilton underwent a different transformation. The military gave him something he had never had before: belonging and opportunity. In 18th century America, land and family name determined almost everything. The Continental Army was one of the few institutions that partially suspended those distinctions. A Caribbean orphan and the son of a wealthy Virginia planter could find themselves standing in the same ranks, enduring the same hardships, and fighting for the same cause. That shared sacrifice created a sense of common purpose that civilian life rarely produced. In many ways, it still does. Military service remains one of the few experiences that brings Americans from vastly different backgrounds into the same mission and asks them to depend on one another.

Hamilton proved that talent could overcome upbringing. The Continental Army didn’t care about his abysmal start. It cared whether he could do the job.

At just 21, Hamilton commanded artillery during some of the Revolution’s most important campaigns, including Trenton and Princeton. He proved so fearless under fire that Washington pulled him onto his personal staff. Before the war, Hamilton was a brilliant nobody. By the end of it, he had become one of the most trusted members of Washington’s inner circle.

As Washington’s aide-de-camp, Hamilton drafted orders, coordinated communications, managed crises, and helped hold together the administrative machinery of the Continental Army. The position gave him access to the most influential minds in America.

But access wasn’t the only thing Hamilton gained. He also received a firsthand education in institutional failure. From Washington’s side, he watched Congress struggle to raise money, supply troops, and coordinate the war effort. He saw soldiers go unpaid, provisions arrive late, and military strategy undermined by political dysfunction.

Those experiences shaped everything he built afterward. The future Treasury Secretary spent much of his career creating the financial infrastructure the young republic lacked during the Revolution: a national bank, a stable currency, and a functioning credit system. Hamilton wasn’t solving an abstract economic problem. He was trying to ensure the United States would never again be too weak to sustain itself.

By the time the war ended, Hamilton knew everyone who mattered — and everyone who mattered knew him. That remains one of military service’s most important contributions to American life. It is still one of the few institutions where a person can arrive with little more than talent, discipline, and ambition and earn a seat at the table.

The power of giving up power

The lessons both men learned during the war would shape the country they built afterward.

Today it’s easy to forget how fragile the United States looked after the Revolution. The Articles of Confederation gave almost no power to the central government. The arrangement sounded appealing in theory. Washington and Hamilton knew better. Their support for a stronger federal government was shaped by their experience at war. They had seen what happened when leaders lacked the authority, resources, and coordination necessary to govern effectively. They had lived the alternative.

And perhaps nothing proves that more than what Washington did with power once he had it. History is full of military leaders who won wars and decided the country belonged to them. Julius Caesar didn’t surrender power. Napoleon didn’t either. Neither did Oliver Cromwell.

Washington did, though. Twice.

After the Revolution, some wanted him to become something close to a king. After two terms as president, he could have remained in office indefinitely. Instead, he walked away, establishing a precedent that would become one of the defining features of the American experiment.

That decision may have been the single most important act of leadership in American history. I doubt he makes it without eight years alongside men who had nothing but gave everything for an idea. He learned that the country didn’t belong to its wealthiest citizens. It belonged to all of them.

Neither man was perfect, nor was the country they built. A nation dedicated to liberty coexisted with slavery, and Washington himself participated in that system. That contradiction would eventually tear the country apart. Recognizing the founders’ achievements does not require ignoring their failures.

The freedoms we enjoy today were secured by ordinary people willing to sacrifice for an extraordinary cause. Our independence was won not by famous names alone, but by 250,000 soldiers whose courage and sacrifice made the country possible. Let’s remember them and their sacrifices on our 250th birthday, and never take it for granted that we’re all here to help form a more perfect Union.

The Honorable Patrick J. Murphy is a Wharton lecturer, vetrepreneur, and the 32nd Army Under Secretary after earning the Bronze Star for service in Baghdad, Iraq as an All-American with the 82nd Airborne Division — @PatrickMurphyPA on Instagram and Twitter. Murphy is a supporter of the Citizen Media Group.

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