Forge the Son: What This Book Is and Why I Wrote It

---

There is a museum in Moorestown, New Jersey called the Hessian House.

It is exactly what it sounds like. A colonial-era building where Hessian soldiers, the German mercenaries Britain hired to suppress the American rebellion, are reported to have stayed as they moved through South Jersey in the winter of 1776. A few towns over is Mt. Holly, where a skirmish was fought on December 23rd of that year, two days before Washington crossed the Delaware. The British and Hessian forces engaged there were drawn away from Trenton. That diversion is part of why the crossing succeeded.

I grew up forty-five minutes from Trenton. I grew up in the ground of the founding.

As a boy I touched the Liberty Bell. I walked the streets of Old City Philadelphia where Benjamin Franklin had walked. I stood in Independence Hall where the Declaration was debated and signed. I knew, in the way a child who grows up near something historic knows it, that the founding was not abstract. It was geography. It was the towns around me. It was the ground under my feet.

What I did not know, and would not understand for decades, was that the geography was not enough.

---

My seventh great-grandfather was named Thomas Murphy.

He was born in Salem, New Jersey in 1735. His father, John Murphy, had come over from Galway, Ireland sometime in the early 1700s. He settled in Salem County, in the southern tip of New Jersey, and built a life in a place still being built.

Thomas Murphy served as a private in the 2nd Regiment of the Salem County New Jersey Militia. He paid the supply tax in 1780 and 1781, the years the war ground on and the Continental Army needed everything the home counties could provide. He married a woman named Jane Marshall. They had a son named Thomas.

That is most of what the record gives us. A private. A militia man. A taxpayer in the years it cost something to be one. A man who showed up when the situation required it.

He is the reason I am a Son of the American Revolution. I joined the South Jersey chapter first, which felt right. My patriot ancestor served in the Salem Militia, southern New Jersey. When I moved to Indiana I transferred to the Fort Wayne chapter. But the South Jersey chapter was where it started, in the ground where Thomas Murphy had stood.

I had always known he existed. My Uncle Tommy did the genealogy research in the late 1990s and joined the SAR. I inherited the pride of it. What I did not inherit was the formation that had made Thomas Murphy the kind of man who showed up.

That gap took me a long time to name.

---

The naming happened during Covid.

I watched my country in 2020 and 2021 and I was not prepared for what I saw. Not the virus. The response to it. The speed with which Americans surrendered their thinking to institutions. The collapse of local community. The evaporation of self-sufficiency. Neighbors who had never trusted the government with anything suddenly trusting it with everything.

The vaccine mandate debate tore people apart. The sense of family and community that I had assumed was still there somewhere, underneath the noise, turned out to be thinner than I had believed. People gave up rights they did not know they had inherited. They did it without a fight. Some did it without noticing.

I am not interested in relitigating 2020. What matters is what it revealed. A people who had lost the habit of thinking for themselves. Who had no framework for evaluating claims from authority. Who had no formation behind their freedom and therefore no idea what freedom required of them.

Thomas Murphy paid the supply tax in 1780 because he understood what the cause required. He had been formed in a tradition that made that understanding possible. His grandsons and great-grandsons carried something forward. Somewhere in the generations between his life and mine, the transmission weakened. By the time it reached my generation, the pride was intact but the formation behind it was gone.

That is what Covid showed me. Not a political failure. A formation failure.

---

In 2022 my daughter was born.

Something shifted. The way things shift when you are responsible for a life that did not exist before and will outlast everything you have built.

I came back to Christ. Not the cultural Christianity I had inherited, the kind that sits in a pew twice a year and calls itself belief. A real return. A thirst, which is the right word for it, to be a righteous man. A God-fearing man. A leader of my family who had actually done the work of becoming worth following.

I started reading. The founding. The Bible. The classical tradition. The philosophical roots of the American experiment. In November 2024 I started AmRev Resurrected, partly to force myself deeper into the material and partly because the threads I was posting on X were finding fathers who felt the same absence I felt. Over two years those threads accumulated more than five million impressions. The appetite was real.

The more I read, the more I understood that the founding was not primarily a political event. It was the product of a formation tradition. A specific way of raising sons that had been practiced for one hundred and fifty years before the Declaration. The Bible. Classical antiquity. The covenant model of the Puritan settlers. The apprenticeship tradition. The expectation that a boy would become a man capable of governing himself before he was asked to govern anything else.

That tradition had been broken. Not by any single event. By the slow accumulation of a hundred years of outsourcing formation to institutions that did not share the goal.

---

In 2025 my son was born.

I held him and I thought about Thomas Murphy. A private in the Salem Militia. A man who paid the supply tax when the army needed it. A man who showed up.

I thought about the gap between his formation and mine. The distance between what he had been given and what had reached me. I thought about what I wanted to give my son that I had not been given. Not the pride. I had the pride. The formation behind it.

Forge the Son is my attempt to close that gap.

It is not a parenting book. Parenting books manage behavior. This is a formation manual. It draws from the same three streams that formed the men who built the republic: the biblical covenant tradition, the classical tradition of civic virtue, and the specific historical practice of colonial self-governance. Thirteen chapters. Four movements: Foundation, Character, Competence, Covenant.

The thesis is simple. The home is the first republic. The father is its first magistrate. The formation tradition that produced men capable of signing the Declaration, standing in the line at Trenton, paying the supply tax in the hard years, has been broken. This book is an attempt to recover it.

Not for the country first. For my son.

I am writing it as a guide for myself as much as anything else. A man who was not formed well enough and is doing the work of formation in his own life while he does it in his son’s. Washington was not born great. He forged himself, in public, under the most intense scrutiny any American leader has ever faced. The inheritance I am giving my son is not a finished example. It is a living demonstration of a man still in the forge.

Thomas Murphy showed up. He paid what the cause required. He passed something forward to a son named Thomas.

This book is what I am passing forward.

---

Forge the Son is live now on Amazon.

Kindle and paperback. The First Republic Series, Volume One.

For the fathers who grew up near the founding and somewhere lost the formation behind it. For the fathers who watched 2020 and could not name what was missing but knew something was. For the fathers who are holding a son and wondering what they are going to give him that is worth inheriting.

This is the map.

Buy on Amazon here: https://a.co/d/0ezYbsTX

---

Value for Value

This essay is the most personal thing I have published under the AmRev Resurrected name. If it gave you something, give something back.

Send it to one father who needs to read it. A man who is holding a son and feeling the weight of what that requires. Post it. Pass it forward. That is how the transmission works.

If you are ready to go deeper, the book is the next step. Everything in this essay points toward it.

If you want to sustain this work through July 4 and beyond, become a paid subscriber. Every essay between now and the 250th anniversary is one argument built piece by piece.

The republic is rebuilt one household at a time.

Start yours.

~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸

---

Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the author of Forge the Son: A Father’s Manual for Raising Sons by the Spirit That Built America.

amrevresurrected.substack.com | @AmRevResurrect | amrevresurrected.com