Americanism Redux

February 26, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1776

There are times in our lives when we join something and then must disjoin something else.

Hope and pain. Construction and destruction. Living and the unlivable.

Your life is right now, today, 250 years ago.

* * * * * * *

(it was greased then)

It’s almost midnight, just a few minutes of. Cold, dark water lay around, barely moving between soggy banks. Tall black figures rise up twenty, forty, sixty feet and higher. Lacy strands hang down from them. Strong smells of smoke and ashes fill the air, moving silently among the figures right now 250 years ago.

These are the hundreds of swamp trees with moss and spindly branches holding limp above the cold, dark water. At close to midnight, everything you see is shades of uncolor, from black to gray, gray to black, the work of a planet turned away from the sun.

You’ll see Colonel Richard Caswell there, staring across the water and breathing in the smells. The aroma comes from campfires he’s ordered extinguished. As he exhales and makes small clouds in the frosty air, he’s looking at the skeleton of a bridge dismantled, also on his orders. His North Carolina militia, all 800 of them, have pried off the boards and planks, and greased the remaining hand-railings and trusses to ensure that anyone trying to cross will slip and plunge into the icy chill of the Widow Moore’s Creek. Caswell’s family—his as-of-yet unwidowed wife and eight children—are a long way from this place.

Caswell knows somewhere out there is the enemy, led by a local man who now has an officer’s title in front of his name. With that officer-man are men who could be Caswell’s neighbors, maybe an extended family member or ten, former friends, and strangers who might be a lot like Richard. Except for this: they believe in England, King George III, British imperial rule, and maybe most of all, that one thing (whatever it is) of life rooted in their Britishness as Loyalists.

So Richard waits for the first sign of human movement in the long night still ahead of him at the Widow Moore’s Creek Bridge. As the stars above him follow their dawnly path, the reality of breaking apart is in the slick pieces of wood that were once a bridge.

* * * * * * *

In these recent days leading up to the sabotaging of the bridge, Loyalist General Donald McDonald and Patriot Brigadier General James Moore had exchanged an extraordinary set of letters. They’d gone back-and-forth about the value and honor of our side, the evil and dastardliness of the other guy’s side, and the obligations toward civil conduct that must be shown if any of our guys are captured by your guys. Of course, there’s more in the wording and meaning, but basically it boiled down to that. In a belief running down to the heels of their boots, each man is on opposite sides of the swamp with a cause they think worth protecting at the cost of his own or, preferably, the other man’s life.

* * * * * * *

(Henry Laurens)

In a different Carolina, south of the broken bridge and the cold swamp, is Henry Laurens. He’s in South Carolina, Charleston specifically, and he’s taking time to put all the latest trends and events into some version of a coherent whole.

Henry feels like he’s caught between two worlds, one British and one American, sympathetic and sentimental toward the former (where one of his sons attends a type of law school) but fully active and supportive of the latter. He thinks British policymakers are pushing him and others away from dependence and toward a revolution. Henry also hears almost every day of news about another actual or potential military clash somewhere south of the Chesapeake Bay; though he doesn’t know yet about Caswell at the bridge, the midnight scene fits within a larger pattern already familiar to Henry. He sees the establishment of the Continental Navy as a small action in the present, though with powerful possibilities in the future. Laurens identifies perhaps his biggest challenge and frustration: in the same meeting on any given day, he’ll encounter honest men and knaves posing as honest men, sensible men and silly men, all laying claim to wise decisions.

In having to do this type of sorting while joining a vision and disjoining a reality, it’s enough to drive him mad.

* * * * * * *

That doggone booklet is part of Laurens’s challenges as well. In fact, it’s part of the challenge for just about anyone who can read or knows someone who can read 250 years ago this moment.

The booklet? “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine, and it continues crashing into place after place along the Atlantic coast. Now the equivalent of a force of nature, Paine’s work is a hurricane with civic, political, social, and cultural fronts.

It’s in Charleston, South Carolina where Henry Laurens listens to an increasingly avid, almost fanatical following of Paine readers who echo the call to cut the kingship chord. It’s in Newport, Rhode Island where a leading pro-colonial pastor has just finished reading the booklet and sits stunned by the contents. It’s in New York City where a newspaper, the Continental Gazette, invokes the Copernican revolution as a measure of life-changing impact by its anti-monarchical theme. And it’s in the Rappahannock River valley in Virginia where plantation owner Landon Carter throws it down in disgust, decides acceleration toward an unkingly world has gone too far, and thus starts a quest to become a moderation-oriented aide to General George Washington.

A person needing a steady hand in the act of joining and disjoining will feel an electric jolt from Paine’s written words.

* * * * * * *

(a rendering of the Continental Army)

Landon Carter has at least two other people with an interest in Washington’s Continental Army encircling Boston.

One is James Dennison. If you see him alone, you might hear him whispering to himself: “James Dennison, James Dennison, my name is James Dennison”. That’s because his name is NOT James Dennison but, rather, Nick. Nick has escaped from black enslavement in the south and is nearing the greater Boston vicinity. He’s taken on a new name—yes, James Dennison—and found a brown wig to wear, along with buckskin breeches and a blue Continental regimental coat. Most significantly of all, Nick/James has become a Rifleman, a elite specialist in an elite unit, and is also introducing himself as a Free Man. Becoming an enlisted rifleman as a free black man will be his ticket to a new world—if he pulls it off.

Besides Nick/James Dennison, there is John English. John English will tell you that a Continental soldier’s life is tough—just this week there is a ban on card-playing and other activities deemed “immoral”; you are liable to punishment if your uniform doesn’t match the color of your unit’s flag; and you better regard discipline as highly as victory itself, at least that’s what the officers now say. The truth is, though, John English won’t be in any shape to tell you these things. He’s tending to his back and the ten bloody gashes left on his skin by a whipping he received from a Washington-approved court martial. English had left Arnold’s regiment and falsified enlistment into a different unit.

To join and to disjoin, that indeed is the question for these two men and, in some fashion or other, for every other man now fighting in the war.

* * * * * * *

(Plymouth)

William Watson is in Plymouth, Massachusetts with the most stubborn men he’s ever encountered.

They are the crews of two British vessels first captured three months ago. Watson has used every inducement he can think of in convincing the men to shift their allegiance from Britain to the American Union. He’s talked about personal freedom, a better lifestyle, prospects for more wealth, chances at greater personal recognition, and on and on. Nothing has worked. Then he flipped to what they don’t have—no support from England, no access to home, nothing to which they’ll return. Again, nothing worked. They won’t budge. They were captured British and British they’ll stay. Even as POWs.

They joined and refused to disjoin.

* * * * * * *

Watson is passing the problem of these crews up to General George Washington. Washington learns of this strange situation, one of the thousand other problems he’s dealing with right now is drafting a communication to a Native Mohegan leader, Joseph Johnson. Actually, an aide drafts it and Washington reviews and edits before approving. His final draft reveals some fascinating details, especially given his long record of interaction with Natives over the past twenty-five years.

First, Washington accepts willingly the language in the letter to Johnson that refers to requests and not demands. He requests that Johnson reach out to tribes in the Iroquois confederation and ask, not order, them to stay neutral in the current war. Second, Washington endorses the soft reminder to Johnson that the American Union wants only to tutor, mentor, and guide the Natives in Christian ways. Third, and crucially, Washington adopts the title of himself as “Chief Warrior” of the “Whole United Colonies”. Interesting to see that he both limits and elevates at the same time—the specific purview of war-making that extends of all the colonies in war-time resistance.

Meanwhile, two of Washington’s core team, General Charles Lee and General Horatio Gates, follow other lines of action. Lee is in New York City, feeling the pull of expectations that he should stay in New York City to work on local defenses against an expected invasion or go to Canada to shore up Continental armed forces there in the failed offensive of late last year. Gates is facilitating contacts between European officers who want to fight for the Union and Continental Congress delegates who might decide on their rank and position. Washington struggles to keep up with both Lee and Gates in addition to all his Boston-focused work.

The joining and disjoining upend ranges of space and responsibility.

* * * * * * *

(modern Trois Rivieres)

The village of Trois Rivieres, or Three Rivers, in southern Canada is a den of illness and death. Trying to avoid sickness is 44-year old William Goforth, a major in the Continental Army. He’s part of the ragged contingent of American Union soldiers left in Canada. Goforth clings to the notion that a Union victory is still possible here. In addition to the 10,000 soldiers he believes should be sent as reinforcements, he offers two striking comments on what else should be done:

a) send 20-30 Protestant ministers of different sects to preach to local Canadians; and b) send 40-50 teachers to educate young Canadians who would otherwise remain illiterate.

To Goforth, prying the Canadians loose from the British grip will involve new methods not yet tried.

* * * * * * *

The joining and dejoining is the opposite of simple and easy. People want to live their lives regardless of these decisions and 250 years ago six people illustrate the complexity of living and unlivable.

Two of them are Charles Grant and Francies Dumpey. They’ve just announced their intent to marry…in Boston, of all places, the center of the British Redcoats surrounded by General George Washington’s Continental Army, a wedding in a war zone. A third is Ann Topham, wife of John who is a prisoner-of-war in Quebec and mother of a baby baptized last week as George Washington Topham. Even the baby is political. A fourth is John Galt, a member of the William and Mary College board of directors, a pharmacist, a church elder, and as soon as he can make it possible, close out the estate of a deceased friend. This executor stuff is killing him. A fifth is Walter Hattan, who late last year wrote something critical of the colonial cause in a letter and is now on trial for semi-treason. He’s received a pardon after having signed an oath of loyalty to the Union but will be denied “the peace and protection of society” if he ever questions the Union cause again. Finally, the sixth is Abigail Adams. After learning about a bitter dispute between her husband John and two other Continental Congress delegates, Abigail worries about her husband’s temper and impulsiveness making the split permanent and then God-knows-what. Such a rupture within Union leadership is dangerous, she knows, “when something great is daily expected” in Boston, “something terrible it will be.”

In homes throughout the Union, people are on edge in the joinings and disjoinings.

* * * * * * *

(a lot happens at these desks)

John Adams and the other delegates of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia grapple each day with complex issues. Just a couple of days ago, for example, they spent hours on weapons and the myriad details associated with them. It’s an illustration of how war now drives so much of their interaction, so much of their Unioning. Consider a single session:

They decide to send unused arms back to Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety. They establish a special committee of their own to encourage the making and distribution of weapons across “the United Colonies.” They pay for staff to oversee funding accounts, some of which pertain to weapons purchases. They arrange for yet another committee to examine how to increase production of gunpowder and its elements. They hear a written assessment from Washington on the plight of the army because of too few weapons, and then debate whether to segregate New England for special military funding and the need for a third new committee to accelerate innovation in weapons manufacturing. And that’s the work of one day.

* * * * * * *

The Union cranks, lurches, and rattles through issues of war. Inside, joinings fit together, disjoinings break apart, and energy boils over.

Also

(the insightful Hartley)

David Hartley in London, England writes to his friend Benjamin Franklin. Hartley notes that division and fracturing defines these times, with Genoa and Corsica splitting apart, and Spain and the Portuguese at the knife’s edge. He believes that national cohesion depends on “personal affection, parentage, and intercourse” among the various parts. When blood is spilled in war, though, Hartley concludes that everything changes.

* * * * * * *

(careful, careful)

A political cartoon drawn by Philip Dawe appears in London bookshops. Entitled “New Fashion Phaeton”, the scene is a satirical rendering of a wealthy woman weighed down by expensive and ridiculously looking clothes. She is also depicted as being lifted by a mechanical ladder out of her second-floor bedroom.

* * * * * * *

(before the fire)

In Milan, the Teatro Regio Ducale opera house burns to the ground after this year’s Carnival celebration. Like the midnight scene at the Widow Moore’s Creek Bridge in North Carolina, a heavy scent of smoke and ash fill the air.

* * * * * * *

(from the banned book)

The Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City puts forth a petition to censure Friar Manuel Antonio de Rivas for a book he recently wrote. His book’s title is “Syzigias y quadratoras lunares” and the theme is a journey to the moon in the year 2550. It’s the first science-fiction book in Latin America, as pathbreaking in its own way as Thomas Paine’s Copernican-like booklet in the British colonies.

For You Now

It’s a good thing he attached an “e” to his name.

I’m referring to 1769, the year that Thomas Pain changed the spelling of his last name to Paine.

Without that “e” we’d be too confused to understand my following point.

We’re seeing more pain in the British colonies in the early months of 1776 than perhaps we’ll ever see in the Founding period. I say this because the reality of deciding to disjoin one thing and then join anew a different thing is one of deep pain. You cut, sever, and break the old bond as you stitch, meld, and form the new bond. It’s not like adding an affiliation or connection to an existing set. Not at all. That’s not painful. What I’m talking about is genuinely painful and even heartbreaking.

You see this in all the stories of today’s entry and in others of previous weeks as well. People are going through difficult strains and carrying heavy burdens in joining and disjoining. They have much at stake and take on great risk. And all of this occurs as the war lashes into new stages of growth and Thomas Paine’s booklet hits the hearts and minds of so many thousands of people. Those are not random, knock-off facts. They connect to the joining and disjoining.

If you’re feeling more burdened than before over public life, you might be grieving about joining and disjoining without even realizing it. If you are in fact joining and disjoining, I urge you to do something: know what you’re disjoining, know what you’re joining, and know what fills in the gap between them—what accounts for the two? That third answer is key because, sooner or later, you’re going to revisit it.

Suggestion

Take a moment to consider this: what am I joining; what am I disjoining; and what goes into the space between them as the foundational reason for my change.