Americanism Redux
May 14, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1776
They tell me a shift has happened.
After all we’ve talked about, argued over, and waited on, the major change is finally happening.
That’s what they tell me.
The separation has started.
You and me, today, 250 years ago.
* * * * * * *
It’s started. A new positioning is under way.
What began when Thomas Paine dipped a quill pen in black ink and scratched the words “Common Sense” across a parchment page has blasted, flattened, and scorched to this moment—the Second Continental Congress three days ago approved a resolution to be sent to the thirteen colonies to form their own individual governments. Now, believing that everything hinges on how the preamble to the resolution should read—painstaking choices of words, sentences, punctuation, and paragraphs—three delegates make a committee to write this introductory statement. Edward Rutledge of South Carolina (where a new constitution and government are already formed) and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia are a pair in the trio. Member #3 is John Adams of Massachusetts and like the author of “Common Sense”, has eagerly grabbed an upside down goose feather and stabbed at an ink bottle. With the moistened quill, he begins writing the all-important “Preamble.” While Adams works on the Preamble, the rest of the Continental Congress orders 300 barrels of pork to be sent north to Continental Army forces immediately and sets 6000 as the minimum number of soldiers for Boston’s defense.
Adams will finish his work by daybreak, with the fingertips on his right hand smudged in black. The pork barrels are waiting to be loaded. Confusion abounds in Boston as to the actual readiness to resist a return by the enemy.
In the Pennsylvania State House, separation has started and a new life finds position in the birth canal.
* * * * * * *
Is there momentum for the passage ahead? Not if you’re counting opinions. They’re everywhere, each demanding attention, each clogging the way forward, each requiring convulsive energy to overcome.
One of Adams’s colleagues on the preamble committee, Richard Henry Lee, judges that most delegates in the Continental Congress are fixated on other issues and problems. He sees one in particular drawing their focus: controlling the appointments for various ranks of military officers. They watch these opportunities like hawks, motivated by dozens of reasons, some good, some bad. The appointment of military officers is a form of power they jealously guard. Of the individual colonies, Lee expects Pennsylvania to be the slowest to embrace the form-your-government resolution, the obstruction in the “American machine.” That’s an intriguing remark given the reputation of Philadelphia as one of North America’s most innovative communities and Thomas Paine’s adopted home.
As if hearing Lee’s words, a Pennsylvania delegate, James Wilson, argues in debate that not all colonies have the same type of instructions from voters. Some will need time to clarify the public’s will and “before we are prepared to build the new house, why should we pull down the old one, and expose ourselves to all the inclemencies of the season?”
Though Charles Lee is the highest-ranking Continental Army officer currently in Virginia and not a delegate at the Continental Congress, he estimates that it might take no longer than two days for that colony to act on the form-your-government resolution once it’s received. Lee’s assertion is lost on Virginian Landon Carter, a friend of George Washington and Lee’s commander. Carter has read Paine’s “Common Sense” and Adams’s “Thoughts on Government” and concludes that only the people are the source of such choices as separation and independence. The problem is that people rely on poorly qualified elected representatives. Carter wishes representatives now would be asked to take specific oaths and pledges meant, and presumably designed, for this challenging period.
In Massachusetts, James Sullivan, a locally influential judge, perceives a rush to rapid change in government. He’s more deliberate, however, and wants “altering our Constitution piece by piece in a manner the least alarming to our Sister Colonies, until we shall reduce it to true Republican principles.” To him, the most dangerous threat is a sudden public thirst for paper currency and disdain for frugality. He fears a military dictatorship might be the final answer.
John Adams, a friend of Sullivan’s, advises the erection of governments in every colony, a multi-colony confederation beneath with a congress empowered above them, and then alliances with at least one foreign nation. A formal declaration of independence might come before or after the alliances. Diving into detail, Adams believes judges should have fixed salaries, while a president should be wealthy, have an extensive network, and possess a veto power; if at all possible, the election for president should be unanimous because in the current moment, division, disunity, and faction-based parties are lethal threats. Ironically, Adams blames the author of “Common Sense” for breaking down consensus among Union supporters.
Separating has brought the principles and practices of new government to the forefront of public life.
* * * * * * *
The war, however, remains. It’s the environment surrounding separation, the atmosphere within which the topic of government ascends. Nothing escapes the touch of war.
For the Union, everything is falling apart in northern New York and Canada. Where months ago a 14th colony was envisioned, today in Montreal Benjamin Franklin and a team of representatives from the Continental Congress can’t get access to a carriage because local wagon and cart owners don’t want to be seen helping the Union. Continental soldiers and militia are hungry for lack of supplies, sick for lack of food and medicine, shivering for lack of good clothing, and impoverished for lack of pay. Incidents of disobedience of orders are rising. Rejections of court-martial punishments are evident. Desertions are a problem. Aside from a force led by Benedict Arnold working fanatically to build a small squadron of boats for use on Lake Champlain, an officer notes, “The confused state of this Country is past description.”
At Forts Montgomery and Constitution on the Hudson River, conceived as something of a Union military corridor, soldiers huddle together in wind-ridden barracks suffering from illness. They’re too weak to work on completing construction of walls and defenses. Most don’t have effective firearms. Officers and soldiers quit the terms of enlistment.
Not far away, in Albany, a plot has been uncovered. A number of Loyalists have been identified who are said to be waiting for British Redcoats invading from the north. When the British soldiers arrive, these Loyalists have plans to seize arms and rise up against Union supporters in this part of the Hudson River valley.
Up here, with the bright blue of lake and river and the dark green of pine and spruce, survival takes priority over separation.
* * * * * * *
General George Washington is in New York City, at the southern end of the Hudson River valley that he sees as the war’s dominant region. He gets bombarded with letters about the awful condition to the north, to which he offers moral support, sympathy, and encouragement. He’s also aware of the Continental Congress’s shift and positioning toward separation and independence. He sees the two things through the lens of war.
Washington urges Continental Congress President John Hancock to reform the current system for prisoners of war. Washington uses the practices of England and other nations as benchmarks for how the Union’s war-time imprisonment should look. After all, for him, a Union that formally separates and asserts its independence should want to know how other nations conduct these affairs. Also, Washington observes an inclusive characteristic to the Union’s separation and independence. Having learned that British imperial officials had paid for German military units to fight against the American Union, Washington recommends that Hancock organize German immigrants in Pennsylvania and elsewhere into secret units to infiltrate the hired mercenary forces. He regarded the quality of life for the Union’s German immigrants to be a powerful inducement for British-hired Germans to abandon the Redcoat effort. German soldiers could see as clearly as anyone else the prospects they hadn’t known in Europe. And maybe they’d switch allegiances.
For Washington, the war brings choices separation hadn’t considered.
* * * * * * *
The words of separation—embodied as they are in the form-your-government resolution and preamble—haven’t yet reached individual soldiers. Even so, they contend at this instant with war’s upheaval of their own lives.
Peter Clayes is a guard of prisoners in New York City’s old town hall. He’s facing an angry mob that has dragged a man accused of being a Loyalist; having never seen the man before, Clayes calms the mob, takes control of the man, and secures him inside the facility so he can find out what further orders. Duncan Campbell is quartermaster for his unit and the target of rumors that he’s supportive of Loyalists. He’s seeking help from Washington to clear his name. Dr. Charles Weisenthal gets paid for three months’ service in a Maryland unit. He’s beginning to consider how he can recommend changes to improve the system of medical care for Union soldiers. John Wisner is nephew to one of New York’s most fervent Union supporters. John wants to recruit a unit of riflemen as his contribution to the war effort, but something’s not quite right about his decision. He’s not certain he can stand up to whatever awaits him in battle as a unit leader. Moses Kirkland has escaped from one of those prisoner-of-war locations that George Washington wants reformed. Suspecting his coat will draw attention, Kirkland has discarded his green jacket with blue velvet facing. He’s on the run south to join up with Loyalist units that will fight the Union.
Separation fits around what these men, and others like them, are already doing. To a real extent, separation as a word is a late arrival to a separation created by war.
* * * * * * *
The catch-up aspect of separation is visible in communities, too.
Harsh measures become more common. In North Carolina, a new policy makes it illegal to leave the colony if you owe money. You also aren’t allowed to speak or write anything in criticism of the colony’s printed bills of credit used as currency; if caught, you’ll be punished as if you were a counterfeiter. A similar style of edict is operative in Maryland where a man is being investigated for having said the Maryland Convention and Council of Safety are “irresolute and afraid to execute the trusts reposed in them.”
In more positive fashion, the port town of Newport, Rhode Island has seen a remarkable amount of unity and cohesion in organizing defenses against a future attack. Governor Nicholas Cooke earns praise for his role in helping facilitate the collaboration among residents. Towns in eastern Massachusetts have emptied their individual stockpiles of ammunition in an effort to build up Boston’s supply of war materials, while the Massachusetts Provincial Assembly announces it will ensure full back-pay for all men who provided emergency support to the Continental Army during the final weeks of the siege earlier this year. And morale rises among Philadelphia’s residents who watch a long exchange of cannon fire between two British naval vessels and an assortment of Pennsylvania and Continental Navy watercraft. The two British men-of-war ships retreat from Delaware Bay.
Over the next several days, communities will add to their existing efforts as news arrives of the form-your-government resolution and preamble.
Also
Somewhere in the western Atlantic Ocean, perhaps within sight of any random port, inlet, or rocky coastline, a special ship is said to be ready to land. It’s reported, it’s rumored, it’s imagined. Union supporters like John Jay of New York have heard—second-hand or tenth-hand—about its sighting.
The ship is said to carry emissaries from the British imperial government in London, tasked with the assignment of meeting with colonial representatives. Their goal will be to de-escalate the tensions and de-crisis the crisis. They’ll get things back to normal within the trans-Atlantic British Empire.
It’s a phantom ship, packed with hopes, crammed with dreams, almost unstoppable in the minds of some people.
For You Now
For the Union, gestation has its stages. Separation has taken a turn toward the birth canal. Union is in a different place than it was a year ago, six months ago, six days ago. It turns out the room where it’s happening is the delivery room, and Thomas Paine is the prenatal founder.
Enough people talked, kept talking, and refused to stop talking about separation to mean that now we’re acting. Finalization of the form-your-government resolution and preamble is the proof.
The impetus was “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine and the reaction among readers and listeners. As the reaction exploded, a new force could be seen and felt. It was the force of separation. The blast force and blast pattern are continuing four months after publication, regardless of John Adams’s new grumblings over it.
In somewhat rhythmic, contractional fashion, we’re seeing the governmental and the political move to the front of events. The war moves aside. Not back, and not willingly, just aside and squeezed over. Or maybe it’s become part of the living entity that’s entered the canal, a feature gained in gestation.
I want you to mark that. A major change starts but not in the manner of the flipping of a switch. Boggling to minds and sapping of spirits, we see that time, like action, is involved. Much of it is lost to memory but all of it is part of the hour-to-hour and day-to-day. We forget to the point that we almost never knew it.
In the place of lost experiences comes segmentation and categorization. That’s how we organize stuff, especially thoughts. I think we tend to segment and categorize too much, especially when we look at the past for history. Most accounts of 1776 will emphasize the May 11 resolution and subsequent preamble entirely within the confines of Pennsylvania State House. But the truth is that on the same day the resolution is brought up, there is that vote to send wooden barrels of butchered hog-parts to soldiers in the north. An accomplishment begins in Philadelphia while a disaster unfolds on the upper Hudson River. It’s best to aspire to keep the two things together at the end of the day. I see my value to you as restoring that reality.
And that’s the leadership point for today as well. Segmentation and categorization are certainly appropriate. Data, and AI, help. Just don’t overlook the interplay between the segments and categories, and don’t build barriers that prevent other sources of information and knowledge from entering. The connections, mutual dynamics, and multiple sources are where a lot of life is lived, and a lot of leadership has to occur.
Separate as you need, integrate as you must.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: where’s your natural strength between the two—to separate or to integrate? And in a period of major change, does your answer alter at all?
