Americanism Redux
May 28, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1776
Okay, no one remembers. No acknowledgement or gratitude. But, really, who cares? You know what you did.
You know that you took an active, bold, and significant step that was substance and symbol all at once. Your presence and your conduct moved things forward and made a point about the larger cause and vision.
You know what you did.
It’s today, May 28, 250 years ago and you’re entering Americanism Redux.
* * * * * * *
Around 10am, the meeting begins in the space on the first floor of the Pennsylvania State House. Historic in the big scheme of things, massive when you step back, see clearly, and think it through.
Outside the State House, Philadelphia does what Philadelphia does—gets to work, opens up shop, hauls and counts, fixes and sells. Mind the bacon, bring the bacon, eat the bacon. Horses clop on cobblestones, pigs grunt and snort, cows moo, roosters crow, hens cluck, geese honk, and people talk, curse, pray, and laugh. Of course, added to this now is a constant uproar over the war, the issue of independence, and the local clash over who decides. There are hours when you can’t hear the loudest hog over all the people yelling.
Inside, a day begins behind the closed windows. Look closely at the glass and you’ll see soft swirls and other imperfections. Further through, into the space, is a distorted mix of daylight and candlelight. A neatly dressed man sits in an elevated, larger desk and chair in the front, reaching for a gavel. That’s Preside/nt John Hancock, who’s about to steady down the delegates in their seats. Also toward the front is another man seated in a chair, the six-foot three-inch George Washington, uniformed and booted. A slight squeak comes from his wooden chair. Hancock calls the meeting to order and delegates glance before asking the first question.
A Union goes to work. Been this way all week long, 250 years ago right now.
* * * * * * *
It’s Commanding General George Washington with a top team member of his just off to one side, the newly promoted Major-General Horatio Gates. They’ve traveled south from New York City.
They’re here, representing the Continental Army, meeting with their bosses and superiors, the Continental Congress and its delegates. The purpose is for the military commander and his subordinate to share information with the delegates, answer their questions and follow-up, get their decisions on major elements of strategy for the year, and finalize that everyone knows what they know, hears what they hear, and understands going forward. Oh, and that detail about Hancock’s desk and chair elevated over Washington’s? That’s essential, vital, and fundamental—bedrock beneath structure. In the Union, it’s the people’s view that the civil and governmental hold both first and final authority and power, with the military and armed forces offering support and supplementation. Or as it might be said in the streets outside the room: dog, meet tail.
* * * * * * *
The meetings—and it’s known this will take some days to do—launch with delegates asking questions and Washington and Gates offering answers. The process soon gets clumsy, tripping up any momentum that needs to come as details and analysis flow back and forth. To remedy, the delegates choose twelve from their number to make a committee for more direct and worthwhile dialogue. Moreover, a second committee of six forms to conduct talks with the General about the desperate military situation in Canada. The upshot is that Washington and Gates’s remarks have to keep a coherence across two broad sets of war topics and outcomes, Canada as an established region and greater New York City as a selected region. Each set has its own actors, dynamics, facts, rumors, and more.
However, by having the number of questioners reduced to twelve and six, Washington is able to communicate in a setting similar to the “councils of war” that he’d established in the Continental Army. It was less inquisitory and more interactive, less piece-mealed and more connectable.
Besides the formats, the committees and delegates continually loop in fresh information from newly arrived letters and reports, some of which Washington had a hand in developing and some of which not.
* * * * * * *
These interactions are just a slice of the items chewed on during each day in the room. The range is mind-boggling: from butter to guns, money to land, lead and salt mines to socks and shoes, compensation of suffering to incentives for improving, one person to groups of unnamed persons. Perhaps the most astonishing thing is that the entire structure doesn’t collapse at any given moment.
All of this is a drastic change to Washington from his late 1774 days as a delegate in the first such session of what is now the Continental Congress. It’s not at all different, though, from the load he carries every hour back in Continental Army encampments up in New York City or, earlier, outside Boston. One thing more about what is or isn’t different—Washington is speaking now in a subordinate position at Pennsylvania State House far more than he ever did while he was a fellow delegate in Carpenters’ Hall.
* * * * * * *
By today, 250 years ago, the practical results of Washington’s work with the delegates have come partly into view. Washington and the two delegate committees have hammered out their findings. They span directions to north and south, mountains and coast. They fix two points in time, one in seasons of the year and the other at the end of the calendar year. As for specifics, a defined portion of the St. Lawrence River valley would be defended to the last. Native warriors would be critical to success. A “partisan” capacity would be identified to do assigned missions. More broadly, the Union would need to have a two-to-one advantage in military manpower over the British. The new element in the manpower would be establishment of a 10,000-soldier “flying camp” that could be sent to emergency hotspots created by enemy movements, primarily in the mid-Atlantic region. Volunteer militia would be added to Continental forces until the end of the year. “An animated address (will) be published to impress the minds of the people with the necessity of their now stepping forward to save their country, their freedom, and property.”
After today, these points will go into the form of resolutions for voting by the general body. Also, details about personnel will make up the core of Washington’s remaining formal and informal meetings.
* * * * * * *
Beneath the findings, deeper currents run in Washington’s meetings and encounters. Final decisions are reached in voted-upon resolutions, with raised hands signaling “yes” and raised voices expressing “aye.” The question is how strong those individual decisions truly are—will they survive a string of failures, will they accelerate a set of successes? A great deal will depend upon relationships; they’re at least as important as any process, system, or structure in place within the meeting room (and probably more so). Every idea and opinion will filter through them. In addition, the war presses on two adjacent portions of the Union—from north to south narrowly along the Hudson River into the broader and wider Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay regions. With the quiet encirclement of a giant snake, the war also winds and coils around Washington and his Continental Army, potentially squeezing them here, in this geographic space. The survival of the Union and these men may be at stake.
* * * * * * *
Washington observes the inner workings of the Continental Congress and the effects inherent in connections to the Continental Army. Whether in formal dialogue in the room or in informal conversations in town, he learns of the body’s anxiety over Canada, the divisions over who or what is responsible for the ongoing debacle there, and the varied understandings of how far individual colonies or regions are toward separation and independence. On the latter point, he worries about a substantial group of delegates clinging to faith in British negotiation and compromise. He judges they’ll be no help in thinking innovatively about how to assist his soldiers or fight the war.
Issues fill and burst. Attention hops, now to next. Things divide and subdivide, a straight slope down to the miniscule but a hard climb up to the collective.
He’s the object of everyone’s assessment. The reaction to him is along a line of total approval and admiration on one end and guarded uncertainty on the other; no one is outright hostile to him while some are genuinely grateful for him. A few delegates, New Englanders mostly, are as supportive of Gates as they are of Washington. His every move and gesture is watched and weighed. Nothing is a monolith. Parts can break and split off, gaps can fill up with shards and pieces.
* * * * * * *
The degree of ceremony is surprising: there isn’t as much as might have been expected in light of the worshipful, glory-making, and almost messianic characterizations of Washington last year. No dinners, no toasting, no honorary speeches.
At John Hancock’s arrangement, and as another example of the warm hospitality the Preside/nt extended to Washington, local artist Charles Wilson Peale painted Washington’s portrait. This was the second occasion of Peale putting Washington on canvas. Unlike the first a few years earlier, Washington gave the artist full freedom of expression. Peale chose to depict singly Washington in front of a distant Boston, without fanfare or amplification. Peale’s setting framed this understated moment in Philadelphia.
Still, Washington did play an assigned role in a dramatic scene. He sat outdoors with Gates and the delegates of the Continental Congress and watched 2500 soldiers—some infantry, some mounted on horses, some rifle specialists, and some volunteer militia—march and conduct maneuvers. Thus, the community saw the fitness of its own armed power. Also seated with Washington were tribal leaders of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations). They looked at the armed power as well; it was hoped by Washington and the delegates that the display would convince them to help the Union’s cause as allies. But the moment threatened to get out of control as Professor James Cannon, Thomas Paine, and more radicalized supporters of separation and independence saw Washington at the event and started outlining an approach to him—they wanted his approval of their plan for a more egalitarian and inclusive military structure.
The takeaway was crystal: the Continental Congress might see Washington as one kind of symbol, while local people might see him as something else entirely.
* * * * * * *
Washington in Philadelphia is about more than the Continental Army. His wife Martha had arrived in town a few days earlier. She went early in order to get a smallpox inoculation, which she might have done in New York. Husband and wife, however, wanted to be together. Hancock had offered his house for the couple’s, which they politely declined. As of now, she’s half-way into her 13-day period of watchful waiting for the inoculation to help and not kill her. George and Martha reinforce each other as partners of life. She looks after his tendency to sink into the weight of his military work, while he looks after her need for public safety and security. Having already had smallpox—the marks are on his face—he’s at ease being with her every night in Philadelphia.
George’s stepson and Martha’s only son John is frustrated that both of his parents oppose his wish to join the Continental Army or Virginia militia. It’s just as well, perhaps, because his young wife Eleanor is five months pregnant at their home in New Kent County in Virginia. Their first baby died last year. John is also straining to make a go of it as an estate owner, and he’s not exactly intuitive in his economic abilities. Part of his struggles include dealing with enslaved black men, women, and children, who he counts as property.
An enslaved population is one of the facts that John has in common with his mother and stepfather. Among the dozens of George’s enslaved men is 34-year old Harry. Harry knows how to handle horses and works in Washington’s stables at Mount Vernon. Harry knows more than horses, too: he’s keeping close track of ex-governor Dunmore’s attempt to recruit pro-British soldiers from enslaved and apprenticed workers in Virginia. Harry likes what he hears—maybe the time is coming when he decides to hell with it and escapes Mount Vernon to become one of Dunmore’s Redcoats. If he does, Harry and George will have a new commonality. They’ll both be men of war.
These are some of the people in the private spaces of Washington’s life, outside of the Continental Army and the Continental Congress. Their own lives cut in different directions beyond the reach of Philadelphia.
* * * * * * *
A few more days’ work and these meetings will be completed. Washington can then leave town and head back for the presumed arrival of the enemy.
Also
Today, 250 years ago, observers in Portsmouth, England record that German soldiers are aboard five large troop transports, along with two warships, as well as four large Dutch ships being used to haul up to 900 tons of supplies for “the army at North America.”
* * * * * * *
A newspaper in Scotland reads: “The practice of inserting in daily, monthly, and other periodical papers, circumstantial accounts of successful attempts to recover persons apparently dead by drowning, or similar causes of sudden death, serves both to discover the most proper methods of treatment, and gain the confidence of the public in the practicability of recovering persons apparently dead.”
For You Now
You aren’t going to find many accounts of what I’ve just provided. I hope you find it valuable.
I do for two reasons.
First, there’s the Union, which precedes Nation.
We are a Union first, a Nation second. Union is gestative and in the DNA’d nature of the creation called the Declaration of Independence and all that comes after. The Union has three spaces—the Union House, where the Continental Congress does the governing and civil side, and which spans toward the colonial capitals; the Union City, where the Continental Congress encamps and provides armed force, the military side, and which spans toward the militia; and Union Home, where people live and work in daily life as supporters of the cause, which is all the other sides and spans, as many or as few as there are people and moods.
We’re seeing the most important highest-level gathering of Union House and Union City since the Continental Congress created the Continental Army and named its Continental Commanding General. None comes close up to late spring 1776. The unimpeachable key here is the subordination of the military to the civil, of armed power to governing power. That’s astounding how deeply they meant, and mean, this principle and philosophical point of civil-over-military and military-serving-civil.
They invited him, who came as requested and ordered, and then complied and deferred in the appearances.
The timing of Washington’s meetings is crucial. In the organizing body called the Continental Congress gathered in the space called the Pennsylvania State House, it electrifies the Union’s confidence in a fundamental value. It adds an invisible ink—red, the color of blood—to black-drawn drafts and writings, new versions of which are about to be written regarding the passage of separation into independence. It feeds the octane of a region where far-reaching changes are igniting. It gives spirit and breath to words and rhetoric. It stiffens spines and seals fates.
Second, there’s the leadership, which transcends time.
Not that it’s perfect or ideal. It isn’t. My point in invoking “transcends” is to say that the situation and cross-currents are seen again and again in a person’s leadership.
There are moments when a meeting and its conduct underscores the very essence of what and who and why you are. And beyond that, it does the same for the larger vision or cause in which you and your followers engage and are involved. The moment and space embody you. At the same time, circumstances also change in an instant, demanding your response—Washington had no idea there’d be a committee, much less two, and no expectation at all that he’d be in the middle of the community watching a military parade. He certainly would not have chosen for an unfolding disaster (Canada) to be part of the immediate backdrop. And we have to write an appeal to the public while coping with stubborn clingers-to-compromise?
Sorry, General, yes to all these. So it will be for you: sorry, yes to all yours. It’s part of keeping imperfect people together imperfectly. Not intended for the faint-hearted but possibly, certainly for you, a leader.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: can you do a meeting where your actions reveal your commitment to a truth?
(Your River)
