Americanism Redux
July 16, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1776
The Big, Huge Change and Achievement is done! We did it! Feeling great.
But, yeah, we know that there is a next one waiting for us to do, right over there. It’s big and huge, too, and now we’ve got to take it on.
The first one—done. The second one—coming up.
Maybe we should hold up a minute. Do they share a connection? Does the connection offer a solution? Or is the solution, in fact, a question?
Let’s find out.
It’s today, July 16, 250 years ago and you’re in Americanism Redux.
* * * * * * *
The primary first-draft author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, is at it again today, July 16. He’s writing. Except it’s not about the document.
He knows that every flip of the hourglass tracks another hour, and another hour tracks the bomb-blast effect of the Declaration. Carried into a village on horseback and read in individual homes. Boom. Transported into a town in wagons or carriages or coaches and read in churches, taverns, and street gatherings. Boom. Sailed into ports on wind-powered or oar-pulled vessels and read dockside and merchant houses. Boom. The effect is like a bomb blast, similar to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense the prior six months but different, too, in that it’s a collective announcement by the Union’s Continental Congress.
But to repeat, Jefferson’s writing today is not about the Big, Huge Change and Achievement that begins with “When in the course of human events…”
His mind is elsewhere, writing to Patrick Henry, the new governor of Virginia—now a state and no longer a colony—to express his emerging big concern and recommended next step: there are too many Continental officers from “eastern colonies”, a feature that could dangerously skew the Union’s central armed force. Virginia, he asserts, hasn’t had as much time as easterners to identify, recruit, and appoint Continental officers. He calls for policies that rebalance the proportions.
The Declaration? Great stuff. The next major critical thing? Under-representation in the power and reality of war.
* * * * * * *
(Mary)
Inside the main house of the estate Fairhill, Mary Norris Dickinson watches after 4-year old Sally, the family’s only child. She has access to servants with limited freedom and to enslaved workers, with next to no freedom. Her wealthy parents, who nicknamed her “Polly”, are dead. Mary feels alone in the aftermath of the Declaration of Independence which her husband, John Dickinson, had opposed with all his intellect, persuasiveness, and character. She can feel his presence in their beloved library at Fairhill, enveloped by the unforgettable aroma of leather books, parchment paper, and quill pens.
He’d done more writing after rejecting the Declaration. Amazingly, in a remarkable act of leadership, Dickinson had drafted “articles of confederation and perpetual union” meant to be implemented alongside the independence announcement. He hoped they’d be adopted quickly by the Continental Congress and then enacted by the thirteen state legislatures.
Ink barely dried on the articles, John left Mary, Sally, the books, and Fairhill and rode off east as the colonel of the Philadelphia County militia. To bandage his hemorrhaging reputation after opposing the Declaration, Dickinson had left Fairhill for Elizabeth, New Jersey, leading the volunteer unit as one-part symbol of his public duty and one-part acceptance of the militia’s vital participation in the “Flying Camp”, a new concept of lethal, fast-moving warfare deemed critical to preventing a British invasion of the Delaware Bay.
On a humid night at Fairhill, young Sally rests in her bed as Mary Polly Norris Dickinson slips into an uneasy sleep. Above them, the constellation Scorpius curves across the southern black sky. A red star, Antares, beats at its heart, a twinkling reminder that Union, war, Quakerism, pacifism, independence, enslavement, self-government, and more will be rising with tomorrow’s dawn.
* * * * * * *
(Hancock)
The Declaration document as printed has two signatures and one of them belongs to John Hancock, the Continental Congress’s Preside/nt*. His name is his statement as to the importance of the Big, Huge Change and Achievement: he’s all in. And as to the next big, huge thing? A portion of his official Preside/nt’s communication to the government of Massachusetts on July 16 says it best:
After listing numerous reasons for despair, he proceeds thus: “I do therefore, once more, in the Name and by the Authority of Congress, request and beseech you, as you regard the Liberties of your Country, and the Happiness of Posterity; and as you stand engaged, by the most solemn ties of Honor, to support the Common Cause, to strain every Nerve to send forward your Militia, agreeably to the former Requisitions of Congress. This is a Step of such infinite Moment, that, in all Human Probability, it will be the Salvation of America, and, as it is the only effectual Step, that can possibly be taken, at this Juncture, you will suffer me again, more ardently to entreat your speedy Compliance with it…the Critical Period is arrived, that will seal the Fate not only of ourselves, but of Posterity. Whether they shall arise the generous Heirs of Freedom, or the dastardly Slaves of imperious Task-Masters, it is in your Power now to determine; and I am sure, as freemen, you will not hesitate a moment about the Choice.”
* * * * * * *
(Bartlett)
The first person to vote “yes” for the Declaration, Josiah Bartlett is a delegate from New Hampshire who’s been serving alongside Hancock in the Continental Congress. He’s a non-certified medical doctor who misses his wife back in New Hampshire. As of a day ago, he’s also pinpointed a sprawling factor (yes, it’s possible to pinpoint a sprawl) that’s driven things to the announcement and acceptance of independence: the conduct of the enemy—it’s been so awful, he says, that issues and topics that might have split the Union apart have been superseded by the generally destructive actions of the British. We’re Union because of them.
But Bartlett has his own view of the next step ahead. He’s upset by the escape of suspected Loyalist Robert Rogers, a New Hampshireman like him, who back in the French and Indian War helped bloody up and tear apart French and French-aligned Native tribes in northern New York. Rogers was a natural irregular fighter, a one-of-a-kind force in the woods. He’d been detained recently for his Loyalist and British flirtations. Now, though, he’s gone, slipped away, and Bartlett fears what trouble he can stir up in the upper New York region that has seen so many defeats lately for the Union. With a Rogers loosed in the wood and the taste of blood in his mouth, the northern boundaries of the Union look weak and open to permanent loss.
* * * * * * *
(Adams)
Surprisingly, that same feeling sits with Samuel Adams, Massachusetts delegate and colleague to Hancock, Bartlett, and the rest of the Continental Congressers. Yes, he’s thrilled about the Declaration, but dark-visioned Calvinist as he is, Adams sees the scorpion’s red heart, Antares, a rival of the war star, in the gorgeous night sky, blaming the months-long route to the announcement for many of the current problems. Worse, Adams notes that the Continental Congress is increasingly suffering from the venom of the dispute over who to blame for defeats in Canada. The Union’s central body meeting in Pennsylvania State House has become the site for bitter partisanship and fierce divisions as one side lines up to support General Philip Schuyler and the other gathers behind General Horatio Gates. To get beyond this “Subject so thoroughly mortifying to me,” Adams hopes the next steps of Dickinson’s “Plan for Confederation” along with “the Business of foreign Alliance” will be swiftly done and adopted.
“Let us do better for the future.”
* * * * * * *
(Alsop)
As the region of New York takes center focus for what looks like the rest of the year—even shorter for some, as Abraham Clark in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey pegs it at “a few weeks will probably determine our fate, perfect freedom, or Absolute Slavery, to some of us freedom, or a halter”—John Alsop, a member of New York’s Continental delegation, officially resigns his seat in that body. Alsop has a different outlook on the announcement of independence and his sense of the next step: “I presume, by that declaration, (it has) closed the door of reconciliation, I must beg leave to resign my seat as a Delegate from New York…”
Will Alsop follow the Dickinsonian path and act as a militia officer to defend against a British invasion? Or will he follow the recently uncovered Loyalist path and serve to aid the invaders? A third way? Which step will it be?
* * * * * * *
(the two ships)
Add the Alsop resignation and undefined destiny to the million-item list of headaches for General George Washington in New York City. Two British vessels defied every Continental attempt to prevent them from sailing up the Hudson River past Continental fortifications; soldiers themselves spent more time marveling at how fast the ships moved than firing muskets and cannon on them. The British have near-total control of water-going movement. Further, British commanders have requested a chance to talk reconciliation with “Mr” Washington, an insult to the identity of the Union’s armed forces and a wedge within the Union itself. Desertion in the Continental Army is growing at shocking rates. From the woeful prospects of Union forces in northern New York to the shaky state of Union forces in southern New York, the final colony to join with independence may be the first one to collapse from war. Washington lately called the area the “Grand Magazine” of America. Whether it will hold the Union or the Empire cannot yet be known.
* * * * * * *
(Scorpius)
Next steps are as scattered as the stars in the summer night.
Ephraim Anderson believes a next step should be the Continental Congress’s adoption of an explosive device that he says can destroy the British fleet in New York harbor.
Thomas Johnson, drafting a newspaper essay in Maryland that he’s writing as “An American”, asserts that the next step should be a written constitution with a tripartite division of powers, clear accountability of officials through elections, the tangible feature of a virtuous citizenry, and an avoidance of extremes in too much governmental power and too much popular passion.
The newly free John Newton is on the run somewhere in Virginia, pursuing his next step. He’s been in Virginia for a year, learning to be a barber and hair-dresser while enslaved. He says he’s from South Asia, likely in modern India, and that prior to Virginia he’d been in England for ten years. It was during that time that he took on his name—drawn from the former slave trader and trafficker who had written words for the song “Amazing Grace.” For the Southern Asian man known as the Virginian John Newton, the next step is to live out the lyrics.
Tsi-yu-gunsini, which translates roughly into English as “Dragging Canoe”, is somewhere along the central Appalachian Mountains, site of modern Tennessee. He’s coordinating and planning Cherokee Native attacks on former British/now Union settlements in these mountains. They’ll start any day now as the Big Huge Change. But coming his way is word that the British, his allies, have failed in their attack on Charleston, South Carolina. An eastern front that could have helped his strategy in the west will have disappeared with arrival of the news he didn’t want to hear.
* * * * * * *
The Big Huge Change and Achievement, followed by a next step with the potential to make it real or not—it may surprise you when it gets here.
Also
(Beaumarchais)
Pierre Beaumarchais can’t decide which he wants more.
On one hand, he’s at the center of a dual imperial strategy. He’s the front man for the fake entity called Hortalez & Company. It’s the organization that both the French and Spanish monarchs are using to funnel money, supplies, and weaponry to the Union cause in America. The goal is to weaken and undercut British efforts in the great chess game between European Powers. A real case can be made that, as far as the British-Union clash in America goes, he’s the single most important individual in Europe.
That’s fascinating but it’s not enough. Pierre is also in love. He’s in a scandalous relationship with a young Swiss-German woman named Marie-Therese de Willermaulaz. They’re unmarried, living together, and the target of whispered gossip throughout imperial Paris. Pierre and Marie-Therese are passionately in love and it’s difficult for him to be away from her. Every moment given to the Union in the New World is a moment not devoted to her in the Old World.
Pierre’s in a semi-secret world of both public and private lives. Reality sits in truth and deceit, each maintained through calculation and accident, revelation and fate.
For You Now
The Declaration is done and now fanning out up and down the Atlantic Coast. That’s the Big, Huge Change and Achievement. But now comes everything else. None of it is scripted and, more importantly, not that much of it is agreed upon.
This is your core point for this entry.
The odds are good that everyone will more or less understand the Big, Huge Change and Achievement. Your coming challenge and the object of your next due diligence is to find out what everyone thinks is the next critical step to making it real. I’d suggest that you’ll begin seeing separation and divergence from almost the moment of asking. So this is the key—ask your followers what they think is the next step.
All you need do is think back on our entry to get a picture of next-stepping.
Thomas Jefferson thinks about officer composition by state. John Hancock thinks about the state composition of support and involvement. Samuel Adams thinks about divisions inside the primary body of state participation. And on and on.
Remember, each of these three leaders sit in the same small meeting room for much of the time 250 years ago. Yet within days of the Big, Huge Change and Achievement they’re moving in some surprisingly disconnected directions.
Then there’s the off-hand remark by Josiah Bartlett. He’s the one who commented on the fortuitous fact that the British have done things so badly that it’s joined people into a Union by reaction. The unifiers wear red coats. But what if the enemy doesn’t always act so stupidly, recklessly, or thoughtlessly? What if they wise up? Will the Union hold in the face of a strong and effective enemy?
You’ll need to know what it is that can help hold your followers together in moving beyond the Big, Huge Change and Achievement toward the next step that, in reality, makes or breaks it.
You want to keep that scorpion in the sky.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: will it bother you if there is limited agreement on the next step?
(*Note for new readers: Preside/nt is not a typo—it reflects my finding that the office of the American President begins in the Continental Congress with the person specifically chosen to preside. The American understanding of the executive branch starts with Preside/nt, the person who presides.)
(Your River)
