Americanism Redux
July 31, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1775
(The Five Man Electrical Band–Signs, 1971)
I’m looking for signs of what I want or what I dread.
Is this a sign? Is that a sign?
Today, July 31, 250 years ago.
* * * * * * *
(the grave)
A friend of Abigail Adams tells her the latest from inside the Redcoat-controlled town of Boston. It’s a sign no one would have expected, she believes.
The friend says that the body of Dr. Joseph Warren, killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill six weeks ago, one of the most esteemed and respected leaders of the colonial rights movement, is the victim of atrocity.
It’s reported, rumored, and regarded that some British soldiers cut off the head of Warren and carried it through the cobblestone streets as a warning. It’s further said that the body of Warren was found underneath the corpses of other people killed in the battle.
That’s the sign Abigail sees in her mind from her window not far from Boston.
* * * * * * *
George Washington is seeing some of the signs he’s been hoping for at the semi-circle war front of Boston. Over the past ninety-six hours a series of skirmishes have occurred between American units and British units. The operations have been largely the result of American planning, which has included the careful use of riflemen—using drone-style tactics and capability. With American morale in the ascendent, the success of the operations thus represents a form of “offensive initiative”.
It seems a new line of reality has opened in Washington’s mind: the ultra-thin border between training and readying a new army on one hand while maintaining a credible deterrent against wholesale enemy aggression on the other.
Washington’s mental maintenance of this ultra-thin border is an hour-to-hour proposition.
* * * * * * *
(Kent’s house and tavern)
Forty-six men crammed into Cephas Kent’s tavern. A vote is called. At issue is who will command the 500-man regiment from Dorset, in the New Hampshire Grants (future Vermont) that will then be attached to the new Continental Army led by George Washington. You all know the choice:
Seth Warner or Ethan Allen.
Forty-one to five.
That’s a sign if there ever was one.
Say hello to 41-vote getter Seth Warner, Colonel of the regiment soon to be called “Warner’s”. Say goodbye to 5-vote getter Ethan Allen, the man who led a rag-tag bunch of armed men in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga on southern Lake Champlain some three months back. You may remember Allen’s stirring demand of surrender to a dazed British officer: “In the name of the Continental Congress and the Great Jehovah!!”
Few people embodied the belief in the link between political and spiritual causes more than Ethan Allen.
Oh, and one more thing before you leave our group, Allen…
…don’t let the door hit you on your way out the tavern.
* * * * * * *
There’s a quartet of startings, launchings, opening-ups, and beginnings this week leading up to today, 250 years ago. One: the Second Continental Congress newly established Postal Service led by newly named Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin. Two: the Army Chaplaincy in the Continental Army. Three: the Army Medical Service in the Continental Army. Four: the Judge Advocate’s Corps in the Continental Army.
They have at least two things in common, one known by them, the other known by you, later. They start this week. And you know that in your world and your life 250 years later, they continue this week.
* * * * * * *
Finishing up work can amount to a trail of signs left.
In Philadelphia, the delegates of the Second Continental Congress wrap up their work. They’re listing six major items they’ve accomplished or produced. The list will be printed and available for public distribution. Each person who reads it will decide for himself or herself if they judge the half-dozen items worthwhile or not. The list will be their sign.
On this last day before an extended recess, a four-man committee reports out on a longstanding task. Back in February, British Prime Minister Lord North had written and sent to the colonies a “conciliatory proposal” in which imperial-colonial relations could be restored to original conditions if the colonies agreed to pay stipulated amounts of taxes. The four-man committee produces a document today, 250 years ago, that amounts to a long “NO THANKS”.
Included in their rejection is this: “This proposition seems to have been held up to the world to deceive them into a belief that the colonies are unreasonable.”
One thing also: of the six items on the list of completed tasks is the Second Continental Congress’s decision to adopt recommendations for financial contributions “proportional to the population” of each colony with “all people” counted in each colony, respectively. No arguments over it, no fuss made about definitions and countings, no heavy-lifting on delicate compromises and grand bargains.
That will come, years later, in the same room of Pennsylvania State House during the hot summer of 1787, over how, why, and whether to count state’s enslaved people in a state’s human population. But here, 250 years ago, the moment comes and goes.
* * * * * * *
Connecticut’s Eliphalet Dyer is one delegate ready for the recess. “We are all exhausted sitting so long at this place and being so long confined together that we feel pretty much as a Number of passengers confined together on board ship in a long Voyage,” states Dyer, who waits for a sign on when the journey will end.
Outside his boardinghouse window, time, like a River, keeps running.
* * * * * * *
(two men pack up the Book)
Do they need to start running, too?
That’s the question pounding in the heads, hearts, minds, and souls of two men in Virginia. They’re both Christian ministers and they’re both fearing for their lives.
One is John Wingate, of Orange County. He is a priest in the Episcopal Church of St. Thomas Parish. People found out that he had in his house a set of pro-imperial power articles and essays. A group demanded them, seized them, and burned them, and then ran his out of the local church. Since then, Wingate has been depending on the fact that people used to like him as his only defense from punishment and torture. But every person he meets today, 250 years ago, might have changed their mind about him and could inform the local “Committee of Safety” of his fallen status.
One is James Herdman, of Culpepper County. He is a Scottish minister in a Presbyterian Church and his “crime” is that he refused to participate in the publicly declared day of fasting and prayer and week and a half ago. Culpepper’s local “Committee of Safety” is asking for guidance from the Second Virginia Convention still meeting in Richmond on what to do with—and to—Herdman. Eject him? Jail him? Torture him?
The Convention’s answer will be the sign they’re looking for in Culpepper County. Let us know and we’ll get it done.
* * * * * * *
You’re looking for the signs.
Also
(Cook rounds the bend)
It’s been a long, long time since Captain James Cook has seen a sign written in English and in England. He’ll see his first today, 250 years ago, and he and his ship Resolution round the bend of Spithead and head toward Portsmouth, England, their first landing point after a three-year journey (are you listening, Eliphalet Dyer?) in the southern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
It’s also the start of what every successful expedition of discovery seems to produce—an argument over who has the publishing rights to the first written account of the experience.
All those legal words in English will make Cook wish he was back in the southern Pacific counting dolphins.
* * * * * * *
(his hands still shake today)
In northern England, in Leeds, the Christian reformer and preacher John Wesley continues to recover from an illness that nearly killed him. His near-death experience had followed a deeply-felt letter he had sent to British Prime Minister Lord North, in which Wesley urged North to cease all armed aggression against the colonies in America. Wesley professed he was opposed to much of the American colonial cause but that violence should not be the imperial answer. That Wesley had almost died from disease after sending the letter did not strike him as a sign from God.
What is a sort of sign, though, is the state of Wesley’s recovery, a sign surely seen in the regained strength that enables him to write eight letters over the past two days, 250 years ago. His letters are filled with advice and guidance, two things that his many followers seek, and cherish, from him.
In one of the letters Wesley inserts this suggestion: “At such a time as this, when our foreign enemies are hovering over us and our own nation is all in a ferment, it is particularly improper to say one word which tends to inflame the minds of the people.”
As Wesley lays his pen aside, he notices that his hands are still shaking, a final sign of the illness he’s trying desperately to place behind him.
For You Now
(the 45-record by a one-hit wonder)
I’ll start with the sign that first struck me:
That quartet of 250-year old things that began a quarter-millennia ago this week.
What accounts for their continuance? What do they do now that traces back to first principles? What do those 2.5 centuries mean to them today? Is the span of time a burden, a blessing, or both? These are questions of leadership rooted in the past as a quantity and as a resource.
Moving on.
Eliphalet Dyer invokes the image of a boat on water. You gotta know I’ll land there.
He frames the image from his in-the-present experience with other people in a space they all share, the large meeting room of the Pennsylvania State House. That’s his boat.
But what if someone tells him the boat is a lot bigger than that. It’s big enough to encompass the encampments of the Continental Army surrounding Boston. It’s big enough to encompass Warner’s Regiment now forming out of the tavern in Dorset. It’s big enough to encompass whatever the pair of Committees of Safety decide to do with two dissenters in rural Virginia.
Dyer could hear it all and still say: “that’s not my boat. My boat is right here within these four walls painted in a color later called ‘Liberty Gray’.” (I know it’s called that because it’s the color on my library walls, chosen after calling the staff at Independence Hall and getting the color code.)
Back to the signs—and yes, the one-hit wonder song from 1971. My Wesley-ish suggestion to you is: while you’re looking for the signs you hope to see and the signs you hope not to see, stay open to the signs about the width and breadth of the community of people around you.
That community may be much bigger and encompassing than you realize and, thus, from a Dyer-Plus vantage point, it may alter the signs you actually see.
Before you go, one fill-in-the-detail item. Joseph Warren’s head was not severed from his body. Several months later, Paul Revere will be part of the effort to exhume Warren’s corpse. Revere will say nothing about the state of head and body—a silence that is telling—but will instead focus on performing the first dental forensic identification procedure in history. He recognizes dental work he’d done for Warren long before the bullets, and the rumors, began to fly.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: is there a real need to help Dyer see beyond the walls of his present moment?
(Your River, the Broken Skull River, in honor of the false rumor)
