Science & Tech Quote by Henry Knox

A soldier’s complaint, but also an early diagnosis of what the Revolution actually left behind: not a nation, but a quarrelsome contraption. Knox’s phrase “political machine” is doing pointed work. It’s not the romantic vocabulary of liberty; it’s mechanical, cold, and implicitly malfunctioning. The United States, in his telling, isn’t a newborn republic learning to walk. It’s a rigged assembly of “thirteen independent sovereignties” whose default setting is friction.

The specific intent is practical and urgent. Knox is warning that the postwar order under the Articles of Confederation can’t coordinate money, law, or security because the parts keep grinding against one another. “Perpetually operating against each other” makes disunion sound less like a temporary political spat and more like a continuous process - a machine designed to produce conflict. Then comes the sharper blade: the states are also working “against the federal head,” turning the central government into something like a brain with no nervous system, issuing signals the body ignores.

The subtext is anxiety, and not just constitutional. Knox had watched an army nearly unravel over unpaid wages and a government unable to tax or compel. “Ever since the peace” lands like an accusation: victory didn’t solve the hard problem; it exposed it. Coming from a military man, this isn’t abstract federalist theory. It’s the worldview of someone who believes cohesion is survival. The line anticipates the push for a stronger Constitution by framing decentralization not as principled liberty, but as chronic sabotage.