In a modern staging of 18th Century American history, we see that the great leaders of an independent America – the brilliant thinkers like Jefferson and Franklin and the Adams family, and the Federalist writers like Hamilton and Madison and John Jay – would today be fighting annexation from a power-hungry and publicity-thirsty clique.
But as I try to write about Independence Day as an academic historian, I have to correct a popular mistake that is being perpetuated by our current state educational curriculum. The mistake is that there was something in our history called an “American Revolution.”
An easy way to understand a real revolution is to think of literal revolution as the turning of a wheel. In the French Revolution, King Louis XVI started out on the top spoke of the wheel, but when the wheel turned, he was crushed onto the bottom part. To the top eventually rose a practically homeless and unknown Italian officer in the French army named Napoleon Bonaparte. In Russia, Czar Nicholas II started out on top, but when the wheel was turned, Nicholas was smashed on the bottom. On top rose a political fugitive disguised in a curly wig named Vladimir Lenin.
In what properly must be called the “American War of Independence,” there was none of this Ferris wheel turning and changing of top and bottom. It was more of a terrible divorce or a tortuous mitosis than a revolutionary cycle. In 1775, George III was the only big wheel. But he stayed there for many years, talking to a favorite tree long after he lost America. In the meantime, American had grown its own big wheel in George Washington.
Now, switch to July 4, 2009.
I wrote the above opening paragraphs top my piece for the West Ranch Beacon for July 4, 2008, when there was a very hot debate that is still going on about what kind of government is worthy of the people of the Santa Clarity Valley. Should there be a centralized government from out of the Santa Clarita City Hall, the concept of centralization long identified as the core belief of the political left, where control is the highest value of a culture? Or should there be a distributive government, historically longed for by everyone except the left, where political participation is circulated among talented and willing people so that even the most remote edge of a community never suffers from stagnation or political gangrene?
George Washington clearly saw the need for a good central government, as shown in his support of the Federalist Papers and his own identification as a Federalist. But – as I will describe here – Washington was also very much an incarnation of a Greek democrat, believing that a good central government must work in a collegial partnership with good local leaders on every outskirt.
It doesn’t take much history to see that the evolution of civilization grows in jump starts from the strength of outstanding personalities. Washington was one of those powerful personalities, probably closer in a class with Moses than you or I. Well, maybe not you, but he was certainly in a station closer to Moses than I am.
I firmly believe that you can study the lives of the ten most important founding fathers after Washington and still not learn about what was happening to America in July 4, 1776 like you would learn from reviewing the single remarkable life of George Washington.
And here he is again, George Washington as seen by one more grateful American on this July 4 season:
He was stubborn.
Washington spent most of his accumulated days at the First Continental Army’s winter quarters in 1777-1778 requesting basic food and clothing from the Continental Congress for his hungry and cold army. Just as commonly, the Continental Congress wrote back to urge Washington to rethink his vow to never take food or clothing from the outlying civilian populations by the force of a bayonet.
Washington was a straight-forward rather an elegant person of words. He did not have the formal education of a John Hancock. And this was a time in history where there was a very rare opportunity to attain historical greatness. For this reason, Hancock – whose ego was on par with his enormous signature on the Declaration of Independence – had a lobbied hard to wrest the Continental Army away from Washington into his own personal command. Now, in an opportunity to be Washington’s benefactor, Hancock chose a time of crisis to instead become Washington’s catty tormenter
Instead of using his clout as past president of the Continental Congress to send any food to the army in Valley Forge, Delegate Hancock sent a packaged salted fish for Washington to eat himself.
As Washington watched his wretched soldiers being constantly drilled to stay warm, he wrote back to Hancock the frostiest letter that may have ever been preserved for historical purposes.
Washington may have preferred to have had one of his agents in Philadelphia simply shoot Hancock – but he couldn’t because he still needed the Continental Congress down the road. But history proved Washington right. In a nation that finally followed everything Washington recommended, there proved to be no place for John Hancock in this Washington-remade world. Hancock’s large signature for independence on July 4 ended up being the only thing that outlasted him.
Washington also proved right in treating all the civilian populations around the battlefield areas correctly. Before the long eight-year War of Independence was over, America’s various civilian populations – even those that had started the conflict as British sympathizers – ended the war supporting Washington over the British armies that had desperately stolen what they could from them.
Washington’s stubbornness may have been terrible for those on the wrong side of it, but for everyone else it was like an unexpected refund. Even when Washington insisted on recreating a revised city of Athens off the Potomac River to unmistakably assign Greek democracy to the United States of America, his stubbornness prevailed. While Boston, Philadelphia and New York have all changed with the times, Washington’s pantheon vision of an Athenian Washington DC has remained intact. It seems no one wants to cross Washington’s wishes even centuries after his death – another likeness he seems to share with Moses.
He was loved.
When the long War of Independence finally ended – I try to this description of the war as often as I can to help knock out the misuse of the word “Revolution” – Washington called his soldiers together so he could give them a farewell talk. Maybe Washington was also a little like Moses in being unsure about words – even the book of etiquette he had written for his own benefit worried most about the improper use of language. In any case, Washington was much more uncomfortable giving any impromptu talk than he was carefully reading a talk from script.
But then, unexpectedly, Washington couldn’t read his script with the tears in his eyes. Finally, he put on a pair of reading spectacles Benjamin Franklin had made for him.
His no-longer-so-young soldiers first sobbed quietly, but this soon cascaded into open weeping in the ranks. Later it was discovered that Washington’s long-time soldiers simply were not prepared to accept any sign of aging in their long-time, beloved commander.
This rare love and loyalty to a commander over the years was in no part tied to any softness Washington showed his soldiers. If a breakdown in discipline were to jeopardize the security of his army, Washington would have a weak link whipped faster than Captain Bligh. But the rigid discipline he installed in his ranks ultimately saved the lives of countless American soldiers through many years of hazardous fighting against a British Army known as the world’s most effective fighting force. In fact, so few soldiers died under Washington’s command throughout the long war that if he had simply been supervising the boy scouts of his day, he would have been commended for keeping them intact for so long.
He was classic.
In 1775, Washington traveled from his Mount Vernon home in Virginia in his old colonel’s uniform he used to fight against the French. When he arrived in Philadelphia to receive the command of the Continental Army, he was driving a Greek chariot, somewhat as Achilles was described when dragging the body of Hector before the walls of Troy. He was also escorted by 500 horsemen somewhat in the style of an arrival by Alexander the Great.
In that book Washington wrote to help control his own etiquette, he extolled Greek-style stoicism as a proper attitude. That meant to him to be constantly on the watch to withhold what he might have wanted to say.
But Washington seemed to recognize that he made such a formidable impression without even saying a word that speaking even slightly too much for him might become overkill. Certainly his words could stop everything from working around him. So he preferred to be silent so that the people around him – the Hamilton’s and the Jefferson’s and the Madison’s and all the founding fathers included – might give a creative free play to their own lively intellects.
Washington’s stoicism was especially evident when he accepted the presidency of the 1887 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. On-the-site chroniclers remembered Washington bringing up only one point-of-order during the entire convention.
But as Benjamin Franklin observed, Washington had such a presence that he could control all of Constitutional Hall just by standing by the door.
Surely our own Shouting Frank Ferry would turn not just red but different shades of purple trying to wrest center stage away from a silent George Washington visiting ye olde City Hall.
Happy Independence Day, everyone.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.
Comments
1 · as published