Americanism Redux

December 18, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1775

It’s that time of year. At certain points on the calendar, you say that for yourself, your family, your community, your nation, your whatever.

Another word for it?

Ritual. Now is the time of this ritual.

* * * * * * *

Outside the wooden house and wooden church where he serves as minister, Ebenezer Parkman hears the sounds and smells the aromas.

Of this ritual, every December.

Butchering the livestock.

Cattle and hogs mostly, they are killed and their carcasses drained, carved, soaked, boiled, salted, and barreled. Some smoking goes on for the meat not in the barrels.

You see and smell this everywhere in the north and much of the south and absolutely in Parkman’s village of Westborough, Massachusetts. The cold or chill of December makes it the right time to do the butchering, which makes it a ritual of life here in these parts.

Dogs go crazy at the blood and raw meat. Cattle and hogs still left living are upset, as are the horses and mules. People yell, shout, curse, and command. They work hard, quickly, with care, with planning, and organize family activities around the task. Ritual.

Reverend Parkman is more than a little upset with one of his parishioners. The man insists he has to do his butchering when the time is right; the Sabbath date doesn’t matter. Sunday be—he looks closely at the preacher—…darned.

Parkman winces at the man’s casual and impatient response to his question about waiting one more day ’til Monday.

It’s a ritual on its own time.

* * * * * * *

Outside the thick stone walls of Quebec in Canada, Continental General Richard Montgomery writes a letter to his wife, Janet. He’s remembering some of their rituals as a married couple in the last month of the year. I wish I was there with you, warm and snuggled next to our fireside, he writes. But he’s far away, one of the co-commanders of the Continental force that’s attempting to besiege British Redcoats inside Fortress Quebec. With too few men, too little ammunition, too scarce artillery, and too a lot of everything else, this siege is looking like a hopeless enterprise and the mission to make Canada the fourteenth colony in rebellion against England is increasingly a dead strategy.

I miss our rituals, Wife Janet.

Husband Richard has two weeks left to live.

* * * * * * *

Artillery, by God, he’s got it! As of today, 250 years ago, Henry Knox has successfully overseen the dangerous crossing over ice-covered Lake Champlain by forty-two sleds dragged by eighty pairs of (unbutchered) oxen. Cannon and ammunition fill the sleds. With the icy lake behind, more than two hundred snow/ice/sludge/mud-covered miles remain before Knox can deliver this cargo to General George Washington outside Boston, Massachusetts and the Continental siege of British Redcoats trapped inside New England’s biggest town. Once in Washington’s control—and if Knox completes the journey—the well-traveled artillery can be used in the next phase of the siege of Boston. Cannon balls, mortars, and exploding shells can be hurled at the surrounded enemy forces.

It’s a ritual with all of its own steps and procedures. But you can’t do any of the meaningful ones without the proper gear.

Some rituals need their stuff.

* * * * * * *

(the smallpox germ)

Speaking of the situation in Boston, Dr. Samuel Gelston is on Nantucket Island and he’s furious that the rebel army has besieged the military forces of his beloved England. Gelston hates, hates, hates the colonial union and all thing of colonial protest. He’s been thinking of how he can best support the British imperial cause and he’s got his answer in the form of a ritual.

The ritual that has been developed in Boston and surrounding towns of how to deal with the worst thing on earth—smallpox. They have a ritual, of sorts, in coping with epidemics, pandemics, and plain-old outbreakdemics of the dreaded disease.

Here is Dr. Gelston’s plan: to do everything in his medical power to spread the disease among the Continental Army and the homes of people who support it. They’ll panic, kick into coping mode, and everything else will recede into the background.

The presence of the ritual tells you smallpox is in the fabric of their lives.

* * * * * * *

(the flag of their language)

As Gelston conceptualizes his plan, two Frenchmen are talking with each other in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where General George Washington has his Continental Army headquarters at Longfellow House. Like Gelston, they have plans. Pierre Penet and Emmanuel de Plinene are at Cambridge as secret emissaries of the French imperial government. The two Frenchmen have persuaded Washington that a pathway may be whereby French weapons and ammunition may be supplied to the Continental Army via the West Indies and fake organizations.

From Point X to Place Y in Port Z, a one-by-one scheme that can grow into a routine which would mature into a process. Sounds like a ritual in the making as constructed in the minds of the two Frenchmen.

* * * * * * *

Washington followed his approval of the French plan with a recommendation that the two men travel to Philadelphia to meet with delegates of the Second Continental Congress. That’s their call, said Washington. The Virginia general now turns to another issue—he’s lamenting his failure to develop a new tradition that he’d considered weeks ago. Washington had the idea early on to have regularly scheduled dinners with influential people from Massachusetts. He believed these dinners would help strengthen ties between they and he, between Massachusetts and Virginia, between north and south. All of this was essential, in Washington’s view, in the hard work of making the colonial union work, in making it successful. But he hadn’t seen it through—a trillion daily headaches and crises-fires demanded his attention and the dinners had gone undone. Now, today 250 years ago, Washington is considering unearthing the notion and giving it a go.

He’s hearing that “jealousies” are on the rise at the highest levels of the Colonial Union. The ritual that never got a try might be one answer to putting out this worrisome fire.

* * * * * * *

Reverend Daniel Fuller is walking among the Continental Army’s newly dug entrenchments and the freshly built outposts on the hills surrounding Boston. A native of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Fuller is in the vicinity to check out the state of things as a fervent support of the Colonial Union and the Continental Army. Fuller likes what he sees and imagines a conversation between himself and “the people of England” as he shows them the trenches and forts. “How well prepared we are (and) You Now may see to defend ourselves and meet our Enemy,” is what he’d say to them. Look at the charred buildings and bricks of CharlesTown next to Boston and see how we’ve gone from a peaceful people to a war-hardened world.

Look, beware, and be warned, he wishes he could tell the English, because we have reluctantly learned to accept, and master, the rituals of war-fighting and war-making.

* * * * * * *

(site of Koquethagechton’s ceremony)

Well…maybe.

The Reverend Fuller had reached his conclusion, a rather positive one at that, but the delegates of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia were immersed in a somewhat different sense of things.

Roughly fifty delegates were daily reading letters and reports that detailed the shrinkage of Washington’s army, the weakness of the siege at Quebec, and perhaps most of all, the dominance of non-war topics at crucial moments like now.

A dispute between Pennsylvania and Connecticut over a Connecticut-inspired settlement in the Wyoming River valley of Pennsylvania consumed a great deal of time and energy. The delegates had hoped to have a vigorous debate about Washington’s strategic and tactical choices at Boston but issues like the Wyoming-settlement controversy had taken over the daily sessions.

John Hancock, a delegate from Massachusetts chosen to be the Continental Congress’s President, has decided to develop a ritual for the group. He has organized a formal reception and ceremony at the Pennsylvania State House for Koquethagechton (White Eyes), the Lenapi (Delaware) Native leader from the eastern Ohio River valley. The moment has all the feel of an official welcome for a head-of-state which, somewhat, Koquethagechton is to the delegates.

In his closing address to the Lenapi leader, Hancock said, “We are glad to see you, and we bid you welcome to this council fire, kindled for all the United Colonies. We have heard of your friendship for your Brethren, the white people, and how useful you have been in preserving peace and harmony between your nation and us, and we thank you for those services.”

“We are pleased that the Delawares intend to embrace Christianity. We will send you, according to your desire, a minister and a schoolmaster to instruct you in the principles of religion, and other parts of useful knowledge. We shall be happy in improving every opportunity that shall offer for convincing your nation, and all the other nations of Indians, of our friendly dispositions toward them. Before you leave this city, we will give you some particular testimony of our regard for you.”

It’s a brand-new ritual for the central entity of the Colonial Union.

* * * * * * *

Elsewhere in Philadelphia a 38-year old English immigrant sits at his desk. The quill pen in his hand practically flies across the pages, now nearing forty-six in their numbers. His goal is to smash everything that reeks of kingly imagery, of monarchical power. Just a few more sentences and he’s done.

Royal ritual-slayer, Thomas Paine works at a feverish rate on a tract he’s calling “Common Sense.”

* * * * * * *

Peter Gander is a German immigrant living in Lancaster, eighty miles west of Paine and the Pennsylvania State House. Like Paine, he’s working on a project for the cause of the Colonial Union. Subjected by Lancaster’s Committee of Safety to a threat of having his name published in public documents if he refused, Gander is using his skill as a gunsmith to produce muskets and rifles for use against the British. Gander is also serving refreshments to pro-colonial soldiers who stop by his workshop. Gander gets public money for the guns he makes and the drinks he pours.

Gander has been working on the project the past few weeks. It’s not exactly a ritual but it is his new routine. And what will it take for routine to become ritual to Gander and his family? Hard to say—likely the answer will be in the cause itself, in the worth of the declared, the pursued, the actually done.

* * * * * * *

Even the worst sides of life have rituals. Enslavers have a ritual for enslaved people who escape, who help others escape, and who organize a large-scale escape and insurrection. It’s physical punishment, torture, and finally, execution.

Go to Haddrell’s Point on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina 250 years ago today and you’ll see Major Charles C. Pinckney leading 150 volunteer soldiers and fifty-four Catawba Native warriors in an all-out attack on a camp of 200 black men who’ve escaped from enslavement. The black men are attempting to join British naval forces cruising off the South Carolinian coast. Pinckney’s force kills fifty black men, twenty get away through the salt water and eventually swim or float to British vessels, and the rest are chained up and hauled back to colonial authorities. They’ll feel the effect of the ritual that is called law.

At roughly the same time, in Virginia, the Assembly has finally acted on widespread calls for a counter-proclamation in opposition to Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of two weeks ago. Colonel William Woodford, commander of the colonial force that smashed Dunmore’s attack on the Great Bridge last week, has urged a more moderate response than what most colonial-rights supporters demand. As written, Virginia law requires the death penalty for enslaved people who promote insurrection. But through Woodford’s intervention, today’s counter-proclamation is offering a pardon to any enslaved man who leaves Dunmore’s force and returns peacefully to Virginia’s enslavers. It’s a subtle adjustment of existing law, a whispered acknowledgement of new dynamics in the current situation.

A fleck of rock falls away from the ritual stone of enslavement.

Also

(Patent 1111)

Hundreds of thousands of people don’t know it yet, but a ritual they cherish will begin to change starting today in Nottingham, England, 250 years ago.

It’s there where Richard Arkwright receives Patent No. 1111 for a carding machine that improves the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of cloth-manufacturing in cotton mills. Arkwright’s assumption is that his new carding machine will be powered by horse. He doesn’t know that a much better source of power will be water.

Before long, the water-powered carding machines will be collected under one roof in large, enclosed spaces. Hundreds of people will work there, producing cloth relentlessly, ceaselessly, profitably.

And instead of marking time by how long it takes to finish a single project, they’ll be tracked by a clock on the wall, cranking, turning, spinning, carding. It’s a workday measured in hours, minutes, and seconds.

A new ritual.

For You Now

A ritual is a blend of habit, purpose, and meaning. A three-legged stool. All of them are needed. Weaken one and it’s not long before there’s a collapse under weight.

In addition to laws, speeches, essays, battles, and more, rituals are part of the story of the Colonial Union. The same pressure that helped create the conditions of the Union’s gestation are also driving old rituals away and putting new rituals in their place.

Rituals have strange life spans. Some, like Fuller’s sight of the burned-out structures of CharlesTown next to Boston, will gradually disappear when the town rebuilds. Others, like Washington’s hope for get-acquainted dinners at Cambridge, struggle to come to life at all. Still others, such as the hideous string of punishments of enslaved escapees and insurrectionists, seem totally impervious to alteration. Individual people, though, can step forward and swing the hammer at the underside. And of course, there are rituals waiting for a dawn—like an annual reading of Paine’s “Common Sense.”

Check your rituals for liveliness and expressiveness. Check your rituals for clarity and vibrancy. Check your rituals for where they point your mind and spirit, for the direction you need to go.

Suggestion

Take a moment to consider: what’s your newest ritual? What American ritual means the most to you?