My Brother Sam Is Dead
"...Give me liberty, or give me death," Patrick Henry once said. This is a great example of someone stating one of their guiding principles. Patrick Henry wanted liberty and nothing would stop him. He would have sacrificed his life to get liberty. In the great novel, My Brother Sam is Dead, the four main characters all live by a principle that guides their life, and they stand up for it at any cost. Their values are put to the test as they go through the Revolutionary War. Mr. Meeker, Mrs. Meeker, Sam, and Tim each have their own unique principle which guides them through the adversities they face during the war and their principles cause them to make sacrifices, which cost some of them their lives. Mr. Meeker was the father and the boss of the house. He kept everyone pretty much in order except for Sam. During this war he valued staying as far away from the War as one family possible could do. He disagreed with Sam's decision to go to war because he knew that nothing good would come out of it. In fact, after Sam and father had an argument about going to war Tim told Sam that father had cried about it, "He cried last night after you left, Sam," Tim said to Sam. When Sam asked for the Brown Bess, Mr. Meeker sacrificed his own s
on's well being to try to keep the family as far away from war as he could. Another thing that Mr. Meeker did was to not publicly speak about whether he was a Tory or a Patriot. Mr. Meeker did this because if he spoke about what side he was on then one of the sides wouldn't like him and that would put his family in danger and deeper into the war. Later on in the book, Mr. Heron, who was known to be affiliated with the war asked Tim to deliver a letter, but Mr. Meeker didn't allow it. "I don't know what Heron's game is. He talks like a Tory all right, but it doesn't all quite make sense. Best thing is not to get involved with him...Now lets forget he ever came in here." Even thought Mr. Heron said it didn't have to do with the war, Mr. Meeker sacrificed the money Tim would earn to keep his son out of the war. Also, Mr. Meeker talked to Tim a lot about how bad war was and why he shouldn't be in it. Mr. Meeker knew that he had lost one son already to the war, and he didn't want to get his other son into it, too. Finally, he didn't talk much about the war with his friends. Mr. Meeker knew that if he did this he would be putting his family at greater risk of getting more into the war because then people will start developing views about whether they are Tories or Patriots. Our principles are what guide us in life. They are what we make our decisions based upon and they are what we base our reactions on. Some of us have very strong principles and some of us don't. These four people all had very strong principles and they all sacrificed a lot because of their principles, and some of them even took the ultimate step of dying because of their principles. Tim was the main character of this story. He went from being a boy who did what he was told to becoming an adult who made decisions in the house. Throughout this book Tim goes through a lot of changes but one thing always stayed the same, and that was the ethic he had of always, no matter what, being loyal to what he believed
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1340
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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