Americanism Redux
August 7, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1775
A moment has a sound.
Of joy, fright, shock, power, fear.
You hear the sound as the moment surrounds you.
So many sounds of today, 250 years ago.
The challenge is to draw from the sounds a feeling of direction.
* * * * * * *
(a peaceful Newmarket)
He still hears the crashing of his front door.
Benjamin Stevens is seeking justice for an attack in his own home. Thomas Piper smashed through the front door of Stevens’s house, struck him with a large wooden rod, beat him with his fists, and spewed over him every spit-formed insult and curse you can imagine.
Stevens is filing charges today with a judge in Newmarket, New Hampshire, where both victim and perpetrator live.
The motive is unclear or, at least, unwritten. But in today’s world, everyone starts with the same assumption—I’ll bet it’s about the crisis between the British colonies and the British empire.
* * * * * * *
(Thomas Brown is there somewhere)
He hears the angry voices near front porch and the swooshing sounds made as he slashes at the fifty enraged men a few feet away. Then, life goes blank as together a powerful thud and black-out pain hit the back of his head.
With his head throbbing and his eyes blurred, Thomas Brown smells smoke. He then feels a rope tied around his hands and a tree against his back. He is immobilized near a friend’s home at New Richmond, South Carolina, where he’d been staying for a while. Dry wood stacked around Brown’s feet are lit and on fire. Hot tar is poured onto his body and knives cut away skin on the top of his head.
It’s the result of what he refused to do back on the porch: renounce his loyalty to the King of England.
Brown screams.
He’ll live, but he won’t walk the same way again, and he won’t ever forget the mingling of the sounds from himself and the men around him.
* * * * * * *
(ancestor of the presidential Roosevelts)
West of New Hampshire, a man with a Dutch accent speaks aloud in a group.
“Aye!!”, shouts Isaac Roosevelt, his hand raised. Roosevelt is a member of New York’s provincial assembly. This week he and his colleagues—the group claiming authority and legitimacy for itself in defiance of British imperial rule—have enacted a set of laws to channel and control loyalty and anti-loyalty. They’re authorizing any organized local committee to bring charges against someone in New York colony believed to be providing material support or information to the enemy. If found guilty by the committee, the accused will be fined and imprisoned for three months. Those accused and found guilty of bearing arms with the enemy will suffer similar punishment.
The provincial assembly seeks to establish the legal boundaries for dealing with people who support British rule. Isaac Roosevelt hopes the new laws will seal off the tensions from spilling over into brutality. How effectively those boundaries are themselves policed is…uh…yet to be shown.
The sounds will tell the story.
* * * * * * *
(they’re empty)
You’ll hear not one peep of sound from the man with the blue ribbon. A half-hour of stunned silence.
An eyewitness reports that blue-ribbon-wearing General George Washington fell into a silent shock for thirty minutes this week when he learned that the new “Continental Army” he’s commanding outside Boston is nearly out of gunpowder. Next to none, down to the last cups of the black dust.
After thirty minutes of agonizing silence, Washington decides that on his own—by himself—he will meet with the Governor of Massachusetts to explain secretly the crisis point and panic moment: gunpowder must be found immediately or this cause is lost. Washington realizes the meeting must be face-to-face and private. Any leaking of the news will have disastrous consequences.
The sounds he wants to hear, first, is the Governor saying yes and, second, the unloading of wooden casks filled with black powder. Time will tell.
* * * * * * *
(what he craves)
Can sounds be standardized? If so, go tell George Washington how it can happen.
Besides being almost out of gunpowder, Washington has another problem of catastrophic dimensions. Barely any of the units in the Continental Army have standard policies for numbers of men, numbers of officers, definitions of seniority, and a dozen other features. If a Continental Army is to exist, Washington believes, it must have standard policies across all units. Without it, the very concept of “union” will sink under its own weight. Washington also knows that the colonies are deeply jealous and suspicious of
each other and will see any heavy-handed effort at standardization as surrendering influence, power, and position.
In the form of a letter, Washington turns to his boss, the Preside-ent of the Second Continental Congress, John Hancock, for advice on how the Congress can take over the issue.
The last sound Washington wants to hear is his own voice barking the command: “I command you to standardize!”
* * * * * * *
(the mast on the left was saved)
That’s a sound that would not be well-received on Prospect Hill overlooking Boston.
Connecticut’s soldiers have turned out again for a ceremony on Prospect Hill, the spot where they cheered and prayed during the unfurling of Connecticut’s first flag unfurled two weeks ago. This time they’re staring at a 76-foot high mast taken off a British vessel captured in one of the many recent clashes between the Redcoats in Boston and the Continental troops surrounding Boston. The towering, flag-flying naval pillar is an inspiring sight to the Connecticut men.
The mast-turned-flagpole does not violate a new standardization order from General George Washington: no soldier from any unit will be permitted to keep items seized during military operations against the enemy. In this case, the symbolism is shared by all units as honoring one of union’s colonies.
Oh, say can you see…the Connecticut flag?
* * * * * * *
(many forms of it)
Sounds of agreement. Yes, right, that’s the way we’ll go.
You’re hearing it in a village southwest of Montreal, Canada. Atiatoharongwen—dubbed Colonel Louis by English-speakers—is the leader of these Kahnawake Mohawk Natives. He, and they, agree that the villagers should join with the colonists who are resisting the polices and power of the British Empire. How this agreement translates into daily life isn’t yet known, though reports keep arriving that the colonists are planning a military expedition into Canada and may seek Kahnawake allies.
You’re hearing it southeast of Atiatoharongwen’s village, in Albany, New York. 34-year old Jacob Cuyler has thought deeply about it and now concludes that, yes, he’s ready to seek an official position in New York’s colonial resistance. He wants to be deputy paymaster for New York’s military force deploying either north to Canada or east to Boston. He’s dividing his family with his decision; a cousin supports the British and is currently the mayor of Albany.
You’re hearing it on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. David Bushnell is telling faculty and anyone who will listen about an idea he has for a man-made submersible watercraft. Bushnell also thinks the submersible can carry a bomb that could be attached to the hull of a ship and detonated, all underwater. Bushnell knows a guy who knows a guy—and he hopes he’ll hear an eager “yes, go build it!” from the second guy, Dr. Benjamin Franklin.
You’re hearing it in Seneca Town, South Carolina, where a group of Cherokee warriors have agreed to a night-time attack on the 3rd South Carolina Rangers unit. The Natives discover that the colonists have no guards posted. The colonists flee into the woods at the sounds of Cherokee war cries.
You’re hearing it in the home of Dr. John Risch in Franktown, on the eastern shore of Virginia. Yes, the agreement in the Risch home is uneasy, but it’s still agreement. Isaac and Jacob, two black men enslaved by Risch, understand that the doctor has decided to stay put for the time being. The two men are well aware of Risch, a German immigrant and bachelor, and his skill in medical surgery and money-lending. They also know Risch supports British imperial rule and is waiting things out. They’re watching Risch listen to the sounds in his own head, the inner voice that evaluates, day-by-day, the state of turmoil.
* * * * * * *
The soft sounds of a dove in flight.
These are the inner sounds of Jacob Duche, a Christian minister in Philadelphia and the designated chaplain of the First and Second Continental Congresses. He nears the end of a letter he’s writing to George Washington. Pen scratching across the parchment, Duche writes:
“My Prayers are continually for you, and the brave Troops under your Command. O my dear General! Would to God a speedy and happy Reconciliation could be accomplished without the Effusion of one more Drop of Valuable Blood. I know well, that your Humanity, and Christian Meekness, would ever prompt you to form the same benevolent Wish; and that the Love of Military Glory will in your Breast always give Way to the Love of Peace, when it can be virtuously and honorably obtained.”
The sound made by a drop of blood.
* * * * * * *
A sound can blare. A sound can ding. A sound can uplift. A sound can terrify. So many sounds in so many places, they amount to symphonies, cacophonies, euphonies, or just plain noise.
Also
(a sight)
On a cold, gray afternoon the wooden ship San Carlos rises and falls in the saltwater of the Pacific Ocean. Its captain, Juan Manuel de Ayala, orders the shipmaster to head the vessel east into the passage way no European has ever entered before earlier this week, 250 years ago. It will be called San Francisco Bay.
The wooden hull creaks with the up and down of the waves.
* * * * * * *
There’s a creaking sound, too, from the fibers of the thick rope as it stretches tight and begins the slow turning created by the suspended weight.
The weight is the lifeless body of 70-year old Maharaja Nandakumar, executed by hanging this week, 250 years ago, in Kolkata, India.
The elderly man was chief tax collector of western Bengal. He was charged, then released, then re-charged, and finally found guilty of document forgery. The strange process was driven by the wishes of British Governor-General, Warren Hastings.
The ordeal points to shadowy intrigue and vengeful bargaining in the upper reaches of British administration in the India colony.
For You Now
We’re seeing something not usually revealed in treatments of the American Revolution. We’re seeing in real-time one man’s piece-by-piece experience of what will eventually become his understanding of executive power, executive authority, executive conduct.
This is George Washington, commanding general of the Continental Army, living out daily his attempt to be the practical equivalent of an executive department of a union government. He is the executive embodied in one person, carrying out a duty with a thousand-word job description that morphs each day. His single duty is to command the union’s new army.
And so, we see him seeking to standardize across his department. We see him deciding on executive privilege, doing things in secret when he decides it’s necessary. We see him interacting with his counterpart, the legislative entity in Philadelphia.
The legislative department, so we might call it, has been functioning in its way in Philadelphia for the past eleven months. The name it has acquired after a year is the Continental Congress.
Washington does not start thinking about the presidency in 1789, or 1787. He is starting to live out aspects of the presidency and the executive branch right now, in late summer 1775. Driven by war and warmaking, he is developing the skill set and mindset of an executive leader in national civic life.
One thing more, and I’d invite your total disagreement here (as elsewhere). Something seems to be happening, feels to be happening, in August 1775. My sense is that the rate of events and actions inside the colonies and internal to the colonies has accelerated ferociously. It’s at a point where wheels are coming off and tiles are peeling away. The torture in South Carolina, the anti-loyalist laws in New York, and the judgment of Duche in Philadelphia, all point to a breakdown running far in front of higher-echelon control.
The sounds bang away and cracks creep across the glass.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: how does war treat a person’s view of power?
(Your River)
