“There is no good government but what is republican. [T]he true idea of a republic is ‘an empire of laws, and not of men.'”
John Adams (1776)
Yesterday in Patriot history in 1804, Lt. Stephen Decatur and a small band of U.S. Marines conducted a daring naval raid into Tripoli harbor. The USS Philadelphia, part of President Thomas Jefferson’s military actions against the Barbary pirates, had run aground and fallen into the hands of our adversaries. Decatur made sure it was of no use to them by burning it. That’s why the Marine Hymn contains the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli.”
