Americanism Redux
April 16, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1776
In life, pressure is basic. Always there but sometimes, wow, those sometimes, they’ll define you.
Often mislabeled as crisis, pressure is as pervasive as air and water. Pressure has a rate, a weight, and a state. Pressure is background, foreground, and centerground.
It’s today, 250 years ago, and pressure will not be denied.
* * * * * * *
The walls of the main meeting room at Pennsylvania State House can’t take much more.
The pressure of debates and arguments—and also those thought inside heads but left unspoken by voices—strains every relationship among the delegates of the Continental Congress.
A few days ago they voted to become “a committee of the whole” in order to grapple with the contents of a bundle of letters from Continental Army Commander George Washington. Washington’s on the move from Boston to New York City, likely the next scene of bloody and potentially pivotal battles. These interactions will be ominous, full of foreboding. Next day, they hold off. Pressure builds.
They’ve resolved to recommend to every colony’s assembly, council, legislature, committee of safety, and whatever other euphemism for “a formal pro-colonial organization” has been concocted to communicate as soon as possible to “foreign nations” the Continental Congress’s recent decisions on trade and commerce. So, about an unspecified high number of messages are expected to be written and loaded onto ships for countless destinations abroad. It’s communication by frenzy, compelled by pressure.
And woven around these moments, hour after hour, delegates in the meeting room clash over independence and reconciliation, over fact or fiction of imperial representatives coming to see them, over effective and ineffective war-making, over who’s appointed and not appointed, over contracts made and contracts broken, and over every big item blown out of proportion and every small item with immense importance rushed through. How long can it go on? Pressures mount.
Sunlight through the windows. Candles when it’s darker. Powdered wigs on desks. Thick papers in stacks. Quill pens and black ink in bottles. Pots for spit. Wooden chairs creaking and squeaking. Sit here long enough and you’ll swear the floor is moving and the walls are shaking.
Only pressure can suffocate in the fresh spring air.
* * * * * * *
John Adams feels it, shows it. The pressure has found him.
On the good side, Adams’s vision retains its sharpness. Having never set foot there and relying only on reports, he assesses in astonishing scale Virginia’s condition of war and society. Despite a vast disparity between rich and poor and the wealthy’s resistance to “Common Sense”, he predicts an inevitable shift to independence. Also, he continues to see clearly on the horizon what others view as dots or dust: that first, the colonies need new governments; second, the governments need to confederate as they are, in union; and third, the confederated union interacts with other nations to finalize treaties acknowledging this new “Sovereign State”. As to how and when, Adams’s sight fails him.
Pressure pulls his vision into his lower self, where he sees only the never-can, never-will, and never-known. He mires in the bogs of ungiven accolades, which he claims are heaped upon others like Common Sense’s author, who Adams now denounces as capable of destruction and nothing else, as tiresome and hackneyed and nothing new, as over-hyped and over-used and nothing more. Adams further criticizes the prospects of virtue, saying that up and down the Continental coast, the obsession with prosperity feasts on people’s goodness and from such reality, what’s the chance of anything better. The prosperity sickness could afflict his own children, he declares, and if so, he’ll prefer if they never speak to him again. He tells himself he’ll be content, childless, with his work. Adams also swats away his wife’s gentle hopes and words about the new chance for women’s rights in new governments. Pressures won’t allow it.
* * * * * * *
Adams’s soulmate, Abigail, is having some of these same feelings hundreds of miles away at their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. Only days ago she was elated at the thought of amazing changes and possibilities. By today, though, she’s writing to a dear friend to confess that she knows she’s failing her children—with all the pressure to attend to the farm, keep track of craftsmen and workers, and help out with town and county’s war-related problems, Abigail has no time—none—to educate the Adams children. It’s eating her up inside to know that the chance of a new life from the current war will demand much of everyone, and yet her children will have fallen behind in their education.
A new source of pressure slams into Abigail as well. She’s visited Boston and talked with other people who’ve either visited as well, lived there, or know people who live there and from it all, a horrible picture emerges. Streets filled with trash, buildings burned out, wreckage in lots and barnyards, people with looks of trauma, bodies dead from smallpox, starving animals, and much, much more. This is war’s path, its trail, marked by the beast that’s now gone elsewhere. How anything can come from such devastation is unknowable in light of her husband’s declaration that virtue is everywhere insufficient.
* * * * * * *
In Boston is a jail. In the jail is a cell. In the cell without any allowed access to candles for light or paper and quill pen for communication and, shockingly, with his two swollen and rubbed-raw wrists clapped in handcuffs, sits Cream Brush. Brush is a native of New Hampshire, a supporter of the British Empire, and until a few weeks ago, the most aggressive Bostonian agent of British General William Howe in seizing property of potential value to the enemy, the Continental Army. Brush awaits…what exactly…a trial? An execution? A display of sympathy by someone with a key to unchain him? Is there pressure on his Continental captors and jailers to do anything?
* * * * * * *
Jonathan Dickinson Sergeant is in Princeton, New Jersey after leaving Philadelphia. What should I do? What’s my next move? He has no idea. The New Jersey delegation to the Continental Congress, of which he’s one, has no unity whatsoever. New Jersey itself, he sees vividly, is in a similar condition. Should I stay here and try to push for unity around independence or should I go back to Philadelphia and try the same? “There is a Tide in Human things and I fear if we miss the present Occasion we may have it turn upon us,” he writes. What do I do? At the moment, all he manages is to sputter out the questions. Pressure allows for nothing else.
* * * * * * *
Like a lot of smart people, John Jay of New York City tries to make sense of insensible things by giving them a name. Sitting as he is in this next predicted site of war-making—of post-Boston landfall?—Jay calls the current state “anarchical”. It’s “anarchical” as the thirteen colonies and the Union cope with wavering between removing or repairing their bonds to Imperial Britain. Jay is desperate for quick construction of “good and well-ordered Governments in all the Colonies”. The pressure to act comes from Jay’s belief that war is the only way chosen. Wherever it lands, that place will only survive if such governing structures have been built. Otherwise, to Jay, anarchical will devolve into anarchy, hellish becomes hell itself, and words burn in the fire.
* * * * * * *
(Queen’s Head)
Also in New York City, signs of pressure take different forms. “General Orders” read aloud to Continental soldiers include an open admission that General George Washington is not yet up to speed on local conditions and will need time to grip the situation—soldiers must maintain their best behavior toward all people. Separately, General Israel Putnam is on Governor’s Island with 1000 men; he’s overseeing the shoveling, sawing, and hammering to make fortifications. But he has zero command experience with islands, waterways, coastlines, salt water, fresh water or the armies and navies that move likes pieces on the chessboard of regular warfare. Though he’s being depended on for his war-making prowess and a major fixture in the Union’s military mind, Putnam knows he’s increasingly out of his depth. Meanwhile, Samuel Francis is at the corner of Pearl Street and Broadway. He’s of mixed black and white heritage from the West Indies and at the moment is wiping down tables and doublechecking chairs for tomorrow’s Continental Army general court martial in his food-and-drink establishment called the Queen’s Head Tavern.
Ninety months from now, he’ll be doing the same thing to prepare for George Washington’s informal farewell to this Continental Army.
The pressures now make such a future impossible to foresee.
* * * * * * *
(thawed or frozen?)
It’s a solid 250 away—miles, that is, between the Queen’s Head Tavern and Fort Ticonderoga at the southern tip of the Lakes George and Champlain water system. It’s the heart of the southbound transportation line that a British invasion would likely take toward Albany and New York City.
Like the city southward, there’s a lot going on around Ticonderoga. Turn over a rock and you see pressure steaming up. A local man, Jacob Bayley, clammers for authorization to build a new road to link the northern part of this water system to ports in southern New Hampshire and New York. “Look at these charts!” is his refrain. Think of the prosperity! In less of a money-making mode, Continental General Philip Schuyler’s outlook perceives a lack of every supply imaginable for fighting the Redcoats. He’s also very ill and thus incapable of rallying much momentum at this point. He and Benjamin Franklin—on his way with a small group to Canada to seek support for the Union—can’t agree on the extent to which ice exists on these local waters. Is it thawed or it is frozen? You’ll never get a consensus from them.
Ever-gifted at dissecting people’s thoughts, rhetoric, and actions when he’s not bickering about ice cover, Benjamin Franklin observes that a tripartite split over independence is plainly at work: some oppose because it’s new; some oppose because they doubt its success; and “many” oppose because they harbor a “vain hope of reconciliation”. Franklin’s formulation reflects his baggage—he’s traveling north with a view made from his experiences in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress. Perhaps the pressures are different the further you get from Philadelphia.
* * * * * * *
(commemorated)
Proof of it might be found today in Halifax, North Carolina. The assembly there votes in favor of the Halifax Resolves, a formal call from the colony’s provincial assembly for the Union to declare independence from Great Britain. They authorize the delegates of North Carolina in the Continental Congress to push for independence. Though John Adams doesn’t know it yet, his letters about “thoughts on government” written to William Hooper and John Penn of North Carolina helped build the pressure for passage of the Halifax Resolves.
* * * * * * *
(the place of the teachers and the circle)
The pressures in South Carolina spread across a broad area.
Macauley and Gordon, two teachers who had joined in partnership to create a school, realize that “from the unhappy circumstances of the times” they can no longer continue their educational venture. Macauley’s health has deteriorated under the stress, requiring him to seek a different climate. Gordon will seek to soldier on, valiantly promising to open a version of the school in a few days.
At the same time, inside Charleston, Latitia is 28-years old and a recent escapee from her enslaver. A native of South Carolina and bearer of a vicious-looking scar on her face, Latitia is known throughout the town as highly intelligent. She’s also blessed with a large circle of family and friends who’ve vowed to keep her hidden from pursuers. Latitia’s network of personal support will close tight against the pressure to give her up.
* * * * * * *
From a body of delegates to a circle of supporters, the pressure pushes hard on the reach toward independence.
Also
(Hyder Ali)
56-year old Hyder Ali is maybe Arabic, maybe Persian, but there’s no doubt at all that he is the most influential military commander in the Mysore Kingdom. For the past fifteen years, that reputation has also equated to political ruler. As master of both, Hyder Ali stands in control of this southern region of India.
Today, he’s doing what’s become increasingly necessary—he’s deepening his relationships with French officials in southern India. Ali sees an alliance with the French government as crucial to his desire to beat back British military power and the British East India Company in this section of India. Among the cornerstones of Ali’s outreach to the French is his personal friendships with Catholic clergy in Mangalore and his ability to steer trade agreements toward favored partners. Ali keeps sharp watch on the balance of trade, ensuring that Persian and Arab merchants have as much opportunity as an European trader.
It’s about calibrating the pressure.
For You Now
We’re said to have pain thresholds. That’s the line which exists separating tolerable pain from intolerable pain. An entire industry exists because of it. We even have philosophies and world-views built around it—the pleasure/pain principle, for instance.
I think we should talk more about pressure thresholds.
Pressure is omnipresent. I think it’s always there. Everything that exists has a potential for pressure inside it. What changes is its extent and level, entering our consciousness as it builds, increases, enlarges. We assume that until such expansion occurs, pressure isn’t there.
Maybe I’m quibbling, but I can’t agree. The capacity waits for the substance. The emptiness has nothing to do with nonexistence. Pressure stalks us.
I was startled to see how suddenly the pressure appeared in today’s entry. John Adams veers into a different aspect of his personality to a degree and intensity we haven’t seen. Astoundingly, Abigail has almost an identical shift where their children’s educations are concerned. Sergeant shows it, too, and Jay tries mightily to find a bulwark against it, though the thinness of his optimism underscores his sight of pressure. Two teachers call it quits in their partnership, a domino falling quietly near the southern end of the Union. Pressure put those handcuffs on a man.
The challenge of not deciding on declaring has amped up the pressure. The continued blast from Common Sense collides like waves up against the question of independence. It then rushes back against the experiences and emotions of war. Back and forth it rushes over the lives of people across the Union. Capped in the confined space of how people exist, the energy pours in to take the form of pressure.
Building.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: are you able to detect an inner Adams-like feeling as it worsens, deepens, and darkens?
(Your River)
