Americanism Redux
July 30, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1776
Tall words have a height you always look at. They draw your gaze. Up, up, up.
But they can feel too high, remote, unreachable at the top regardless of how impressive they are.
You know some of those words: vision. And purpose. Collaboration might be another. Make your own list of tall words. Keep it short for sanity’s sake.
A lot of tall words have taken root as of July 30, 250 todays ago.
And maybe 250 minutes from now, you’ll start to notice a few tall words in your world.
* * * * * * *
Just last week, Continental Army Lieutenant Isaac Bangs was talking about “defence of those Rights & Privileges which the God of Nature hath bestowed” and “Liberty & prosperity of all his Creatures.” A lot of tall words there, containers of big ideas. But this week, down to now, Issac’s been horribly sick and his sights lower. He’s managed to read a letter from his mother, scribbled letters to friends and family, and, feeling a tiny bit better, traveled a short distance by boat around New York City. He feels on the mend, hoping he can use the latrine without much pain or mess. Isaac will check on other sick soldiers in his unit, to see if they’re improving, too.
* * * * * * *
(Phillips)
Jonas Phillips is a merchant living in Philadelphia. He secured a copy of the Declaration of Independence—with its philosophical beginning, hefty list of grievances, and no signatures. He places the copy in a packet, along with a letter of explanation to a friend of his living in Amsterdam in northern Europe. In the letter, Phillips extols the virtues of the Declaration, discusses the role of God, or Yahweh, (Jonas is Jewish), states that 100,000 men have joined the Continental Army (the effective number is one-tenth that figure), and to give his Amsterdam friend a way to grasp what’s going on in America, compares the situation to a century-and-a-half before when the Dutch overthrew Spanish imperialists. That scholars in 1776 know the uprising spanned nearly eighty years and call it “wars of independence” (plural!) isn’t mentioned by Phillips. Stuffed with tall words like Declaration, God, 100,000, and an elevated historical example, Phillips seals his letter and walks it to a nearby ship for sailing to Holland. Then it’s back to Market Street where it’s textiles and dry goods all day long in Phillips’s enterprise.
* * * * * * *
The Declaration is printed and its journey continues into numerous communities in Virginia, Rhode Island, Maryland, and New York. Groups of people in these places immediately organize ceremonies to announce and celebrate the document. They share some features: a speaker reads it aloud to the gathered crowd, military units march and fire weapons, a dinner is hosted, with drinks and toasting (up to thirty at a seating, and often with a strange specificity, “To The Friends of the United States in every Part of the Earth”). The soldiers and residents at Fort Ticonderoga in northern New York add a twist to their schedule: they change the name of a tall height in the area, the one overlooking their star-shaped outpost: it’s Rattlesnake Hill no longer but Mount Independence instead.
These are moments of people taking their outlook to a taller plane. A question worth of asking of them is what they get when they get there—what, if anything, they can put in their pockets and take with them back down the heights to the ground of daily work and hourly effort.
* * * * * * *
(Rush)
With Declaration ceremonies rippling outward from Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush is all heads-down at Pennsylvania State House. A seal of approval has been given and delivered to him for his newly elected position as one of Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Continental Congress. Get to work, it’s done. There’s your chair, that’s your desk, here’s your quills, here’s your parchments. Oh, and over there, from the New Jersey table, his father-in-law Richard Stockton casts an occasional look Rush’s way. Benjamin married Julia, Stockton’s daughter, six months ago. Two sides of the Delaware River, joined in marriage and now with maybe a baby on the way. They’re not sure yet. Give it a few days and Julia will have a better feel of things.
Rush is absolutely sure of one thing—the tall is great but the grind is the key. At ground-level the Declaration will be made real, or not.
Rush writes this to a Virginian friend, a fellow doctor: “I have stolen a few minutes from the Congress into a committee room to drop you a few lines, not to inform you of any news, but to convince you that in my political as well as medical line, I am still your friend. What shall I sas of the august assembly of our States? It is a wide field for speculation. Here we behold the strengths and weakness of the human Understanding and the extent of human virtue & folly. Time will meliorate us. A few more misfortunes will teach us wisdom & humility, and inspire us with true benevolence. The republican soil is broke up—but we have still many monarchical & aristocratical weeds to pluck up from it. The history of the Congress that will sit in the year 1780 will be the history of the Dignity of human nature. We have knocked up the substance of ralty but now & then we worship the shadow. Oh liberty, liberty. I have worshipped thee as a substance, and have found thee so. The influence of the Declaration of Independence upon the Senate & the field is inconceivable. The militia of our state pant for nothing more than to avenge the blood of our brave countrymen upon our enemies on Staten Island.”
This is the ground, this is the present, and Rush stakes his claim to optimism.
* * * * * * *
The Meeting Room where Rush and Stockton work clangs with basic disagreements. The other two committees established to separate and sever the bond with England—the detonation by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a title earlier suggested by his new friend Benjamin Rush—are locked in dispute. The activity to produce, one, an Articles of Confederation and, two, a Foreign Treaty has clattered to a halt over designing individual states for representation, voting, and whether claimed territories all the way out to the “South Sea” (Pacific Coast) will be retained or surrendered by them. One delegate also bangs back open a months’ old brawl about sequencing—maybe the Declaration of Independence should have come last, AFTER completion of the Articles of Confederation and Foreign Treaty. Other fundamental problems loom large, including how to negotiate deals with Native tribes to ensure the safety of people living inland. Debates about policies to respond to Native armed power take up substantial time and energy among Rush, Stockton, and the rest of the delegates in the Meeting Room.
The tall words of the Declaration—”political bands”, “self-evident”, “unalienable”, and more—have diminished only a few of the obstacles ahead. Get the shovels and start digging the rocks out.
* * * * * * *
Two Native men evaluate the tall words they’ve been hearing. Joseph Denaquara is one of four Micmac tribal leaders who is in Windsor, Massachusetts (now Maine) waiting for a carriage and horses to arrive. He and his three companions have agreed to ride to New York City to talk with General George Washington about supplementing the Continental Army with units of Native warriors and local mixed-race men. As of today, Denaquara is open to hearing potential terms and conditions of service for these men. That long trip from Windsor to New York City will certainly affect his outlook on what he’ll actually do, giving him reason for optimism, pessimism, encouragement, discouragement?
Meanwhile, Guyashuta of the Seneca tribe is in western New York. An acquaintance of Washington’s for the past twenty years, Guyashuta is the opposite of Denaquara, with a growing disinclination to assist the Union and not much more enthusiastism about helping the British either, for that matter. He prefers to lock out both sides from Seneca lands. The unanswered question is what course of action gives him the best chance to shut the lock.
For both men, the tall words they’ve been hearing include “goodwill”, “honor”, and “friendship”, more in promised treaties than in approved Declarations. They’ll have to decide what these words amount to. A lot rides on their decision; a way of life depends on it. They don’t get elected to the Congress and they don’t get chairs at the table. For them, a momentary leverage has sprouted from the soil of war and violence. Each side wants to deal for their services, at least for as long as blood stains the ground in the shadow of tall words.
* * * * * * *
Yes, those Declaration celebrations are well-orchestrated, well-attended, and after all the toasting, well-lubricated. General George Washington, however, isn’t seeing the benefits that others would have predicted from enthusiastic receptions of the Declaration. Enlistments of men to serve in the Continental Army until the end of the year are at the speed of a slow crawl. Worse, among those men effectively available to him to defend New York City—only 9,000 of 15,000 meet that minimal standard—he’s seeing an appallingly high rate of military crime against local residents. Soldiers threaten and intimidate civilians, rob them when they try to bring garden produce to sell at open markets, steal from barns and sheds, and insult neighboring families. Washington issues several orders that declare violators of decency and discipline will be whipped and fined. He cannot understand how soldiers who were civilians only weeks ago are now so mean-spirited in their daily dealings with local people, the same population they may depend on for help and assistance.
Washington fears that the public could turn against the Continental Army and, by extension, the Declaration of Independence. Tall words make for a hard fall.
* * * * * * *
The furor over the Union’s war losses in Canada are as fierce and ruinous as ever. Delegates blast each other about blame and causes. Similar outrage can be heard in state/colonial legislatures across New England. Anger has also expanded to include current decisions to abandon the outpost of Crown Point on Lake Champlain and retreat south to Ticonderoga, or to hold the line and try to fight the British and allied Native and Canadian soldiers there at the midpoint of the lake. Wartime defeat is, at this moment, expressed in opinions about these two physical places. A person’s answer of “Crown Point” or “Ticonderoga” will reveal much about their deeper attitudes on the war here.
Cancer-like, the viciousness has spread across many military units in the north. Within New Jersey’s units stationed at Ticonderoga, for example, Lt. Col. Matthias Ogden ridicules a fellow officer, William Winds: “He is…a professed enemy to subordination, and has an utter aversion to discipline…He is not possessed of one qualification that distinguishes a gentleman, nor has he genius or education. His whole study is to gain the applause of the private soldiers, at the expense of every officer in the regiment. He is hated by all his own officers, except two, and despised by every gentlemen in the Army.”
Bitter relations and hateful feelings mar the day-to-day work that needs doing before victory can rise from defeat. In too many tents the emphasis is on score-settling rather than preparing for the enemy.
* * * * * * *
A mist swirls around the bottom of the tall words. In community after community in all thirteen states-from-colonies, disease has come calling and is not yet ready to leave. Smallpox.
One scene typifies the horror that spans the coast:
A man has walked into a camp in Port Tobacco, Maryland, according to Continental Army Captain Bennett Bracco, “who communicated the infection …a day and a night in company with all the soldiers here. Some combed his hair, and others slept with him.” Numerous men in the unit are now seriously ill and Bracco doesn’t know if he should isolate them or try to inoculate them. He awaits guidance and direction, the next bundle of papers delivered.
And thus is today in camps, homes, villages, and towns, on dirt roads and cobblestone streets, in bedrooms and church pews and open-air spaces. Smallpox respects nothing besides cell and germ. Smallpox drags life into its most compressed form, to a sign on the body. Smallpox seeks to kill anyone capable of tall words, small words, and no words at all.
* * * * * * *
As the Declaration celebrations move across the landscape, groups of people tackle the challenges looming in front of them.
In Connecticut and New Jersey neighbors band together. Local women and elderly men conclude that with men of a particular age range absent for the war-fighting of an independent Union, it’s up to them to combine and pick up sickle, scythe, and knife and go into the fields to harvest the golden crops. That’s the imperative.
At the same time, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, four tradesmen and their families—women and the elderly again among them—have finalized arrangements to provide important wartime items for the county’s volunteer militia. Leonard Oaler will make cart, carriage, and wagon wheels. Christopher Peter will make socks and stockings. Michael Shirdle will make clothes. Casper Eglee will make beer. All four family-based enterprises sign contracts with the Committee of Inspection and Observation of Lancaster County.
To the fields and work shop they go. One step at a time.
Also
M. Garnier is the French charge-d’affaires in London, England. Yes, he’s got routine diplomatic tasks to perform as a representative of the French monarchy, nation, and empire in front of the British government, cold-war rival of France. But more than that, and everyone knows it, he’s watching public affairs closely, analyzing trends and reporting back to his political superiors in Paris. He reports:
“If we proceed…to our political interests, we will probably find that it is essential to weaken a Power which claims sovereignty over three parts of the world and, after appropriating the empire of the Sea to itself, applies tyrannical methods to trade…Never perhaps has a more important event offered itself to the speculations of France. The essential thing is not to fail without distrubing the peace of the other States (of Europe), if it is possible.”
* * * * * * *
(Deane)
Silas Deane is struggling to keep his identity as a merchant in Paris intact. Not easy to do when his real assignment is to secure any and all aid from France for the Union cause. Suddenly, almost inexplicably, he learns this week that a line of credit worth a million French livre has been opened covertly for the American war against the British. It’s a lifeline of liquidity in the cold war.
* * * * * * *
(Tesuque Pueblo)
A handful of families live in the Tesuque Pueblo, nine miles north of Sante Fe. Most of them speak the Tewa language and cultivate small field of crops. They’re also hosting tonight a group of ten travelers, a combination of Spanish missionaries and Spanish soldiers from Sante Fe. The group is on the first day of a long journey to the Great Basin, seeking to map the region as Europeans for the first time.
Every step they’ve taken today between Sante Fe and Tesuque Pueblo amounts to the continuance of Spanish influence in this vast space, launched here more than two centuries ago.
The rivalry and endurance of empire unfolds on the ground.
For You Now
The tall words draw our gaze. They merit study and examination. They are important.
The Declaration is a tall-word document because it’s a vision statement. A destination appears, as does the rationale and basis for it.
It can’t do a lot of things, though.
Well below the tall word of vision the work occurs. From the top, a leader who doesn’t bother to know the work–who clings to the vision as the leader’s primary duty–will lose all track of perspective, thinking only the commanding heights hold the significant people and events. They’ll learn their errors soon enough, not least of which is that the more isolated at the top, the more meaningless the words. Before long, no one listens and no one will bother to know who or what is at the top. The top will belong to someone else.
Under the top, problems live. Ask George Washington. More than two weeks earlier all of his soldiers, every one, listened to the vision communicated to them. And the crime problem then went up. The recruitments went down or stayed listless. Smallpox remained deadly. Infighting over Canadian setbacks intensified. So much for what the tall words did.
People working below the top can forget how their efforts connect to what’s above them. They’ll lose sight of the vertical and the upward. Before long, the horizon disappears, too, and gives way to an endless flatness.
The best condition is mutual—that tall words need a ground-level, and ground-level needs a higher sense.
The Declaration isn’t an end. It’s barely a beginning. Rhetoric soars but gravity rules. As things ultimately find their way back to the ground, they’ll sort out and prove one way or the other as to the Declaration’s viability. And on the ground, waiting for the descent, is the hard surface of war and its bitter harvest.
Tall words like vision are vital. No question. The work in the dirt is as well.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: how do you keep a higher vision in mind when doing the daily work?
(Your River)
