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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 son 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. Mrs. Meeker was the mom of the family and just like most moms her number one priority and guiding principle is to keep their family together. While Sam and Mr. Meeker where arguing about the war she tried as hard as she could to try to get them relax. After father died, Mrs.
Meeker had to sacrifice whatever spare time she had to keep the family moving. She would continue Mr. Meeker s footsteps by not letting Tim getting near the war which almost happened once. An example of this is when she told Captain Betts, Not my boy. You don t involve anymore Meeker's in this terrible war. Also, when Sam became stationed at Redding she tried to convince Sam with all her heart to get him to stay home and not go back to the army.
She tried as hard as she could to keep whatever was left of her family together. Sam also had a guiding principle. He never wanted to be an outcast. He always did things that he would be one of the people with a good repute and people would like him.
Sam valued always being part of the group and never being the outcast. He showed this many times starting with joining the army. All his friends at Yale were joining the army and so he didn t want to risk the way his friends felt about him so he joined the army. When Tim asks Sam why he didn t stay in college, Sam responds by saying, I couldn t Tim.
How could I not go when all my friends were going? When Sam did become a soldier he tried to always be very good. The reason for this was because if he became a slacker then none of his friends would like him anymore and he would be out of the group. When Sam was stationed at Redding where his family lived, even though he knew that his family needed his help at the house he refused to come back.
The reason for this was because he had made a pact with all his friends to stay in the war until it was over, and if he came home then he would be risking the way his friends thought about him. 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 was right.
From the start of the book Tim was loyal, whether it was hiding one of Sam s secrets or doing what was best for his family but not always necessarily himself. When Sam joined the army he needed to take a gun to war so he could defend himself. He asked father for the Brown Bess they had owned and father wouldn t give to him because of father s own guiding principle. Sam finally decided to steal the brown bess and Tim knew about this.
Tim knew that he had to stay loyal to Sam so he sacrificed being one hundred percent honest with his father and didn t tell him that Sam had stolen the brown bess. Another occurrence of Tim showing his loyalty was when Mr. Meeker and Tim where coming back from Verplanks Point and Mr. Meeker was captured. Tim showed his loyalty to his dad by trying to find him and not leaving him alone. When Tim finally realized he couldn t find his father he showed his loyalty to his mom by taking the supplies all by himself back to the tavern so his family could survive.
My hands shook so hard I dropped my stick and my knees were so weak I could hardly walk. Tim said this about how it felt walking back to the tavern without father. Even though he was in agonizing pain he showed his loyalty to the rest of his family by pushing on. Towards the end of the story Sam was prosecuted as a cattle thief and was to be hanged. Tim showed his loyalty to Sam twice by first pleading to the higher ranks that Sam is innocent and second taking matters into his own hand and trying to free Sam himself.
When he was about to go out of the house his mother asked what are you doing and he said, I m going to save my brother. This shows Tim s loyalty to Sam by sacrificing his own life to try and save him. 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.
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Research essay sample on Joined The Army Guiding Principle
