Originally Posted by Joe Obenberger

Ah, but the American Revolution wasn't about grabbing land. It wasn't a war against the Indians. Many of the founders were veterans of the French and Indian Wars, twenty years earlier, in which both the French and the English worked together as allies with various Native American tribes to fight the other. Even Benjamin Franklin served for awhile as a company commander in the English forces. Washington made a great reputation as a leader, and that's why the Continental Congress sought him out to lead the military. In the generation of the Revolution, the generation of the Founders, settlement over the mountains was just beginning, and that start was generally peaceful. You write about the Founders, that particular generation and that particular Revolution - but they simply were not men of ambition to conquer new land, but people of principle, influenced by free thinkers, conserving and protecting rights they felt to be natural. In no way did their philosophy - or their way of war - resemble that of ISIS. They fought to preserve their own rights against tyrrany. ISIS fights to conquer territory and inhabitants upon whom they force their will. Diametric opposites.