Americanism Redux
October 30, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1775
An emotion has a map. You start at a known point and then, consuming energy from some source, go further and further and further. Eventually, you are at the emotion’s edge and frontier. Beyond that, uncharted territory where the emotion takes a form you never imagined, or you stumble upon another emotion at a convergence of trails.
Today, 250 years ago, emotion approaches the end of the map.
* * * * * * *
In a mapless place in a future Maine, a wilderness, a tense votes occurs. A group of starving, ill-clad, and desperate men are voting whether to go forward and try to catch up with the force led by Benedict Arnold, or return to the Dead River and claw their way back to Kennebec and the Continental Army’s home at Cambridge.
Raise your hand if you vote “forward”. Raise your hand if you vote “backward”.
It’s tied. Half want to continue. Half want to stop and return.
All eyes turn toward Colonel Roger Enos, the men’s commander, who had purposely not voted. He’s got the designated role of tiebreaker if needed.
Well, it’s needed.
Snowflakes fall where the rain splashed down a few days before. Ice in the water, ice on the river banks, ice crusting on muddy ground. Enos is 46-years old, a veteran of the French and Indian War, and a friend of the notable irregular Israel Putnam and his exploits of bravery.
Enos looks at the men. Every man now staring at him has the same gaunt look, the same ragged and filthy uniforms, the same aching fingers clutched around muskets and hatchets, the same damp bags of soggy food tied to their belts, the same sunken feeling of expectation.
Enos exhales, his breath forming into chilly white puffs. He decides and makes a majority of one.
It’s no, we’re not going on, we’re heading back to Washington’s camp. Arnold will have to understand.
Emotions fill each man around him. Like the vote, the emotions are equally divided into relief for one-half and rage for the other-half.
* * * * * * *
In Cambridge, the revised destination of Enos’s men after their desperation election, George Washington writes a letter to other people in future Maine. The people of Falmouth have sent written pleas for help, for defense, for security after the shelling and fire-bombing of their town by British naval vessels. Like Enos’s men, they are desperate.
Washington replies in a formal letter as the Commanding General of the Continental Army. He writes eloquently of their misery, shows genuine compassion for the victims and gut-level disdain for the conduct of a supposedly civilized enemy. He tells them he wishes he could no more…but…
- don’t have the resources AND I don’t have the authority.
Your obedient servant…
Inside himself, Washington winces. He’s waiting for some future moment that will justify the decision.
It’s an emotion of despairing expectation.
* * * * * * *
A white man and a black woman have strangely corresponding emotions as of today, 250 years ago.
The white man is Dr. Benjamin Rush, an insider and activist in Philadelphia. He’s been watching George Washington and hearing and reading what others say and write about him as the Army’s top commander. Rush believes Washington shows “a display of the most wonderful talents for the government of an army.” Not command, not generalship, but government. Moreover, this “governmentaling” talent is so amazing to Rush that he judges such ability only comes along every three hundred or four hundred years from the will of “Providence.” Washington, to Rush, reveals that “there is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chamber by his side.”
The black woman is Phillis Wheatley, once enslaved and now free outside Boston. She’s just finished her poem that honors Washington. She’s invoking an image and vision that none have really done thus far in America. She’s referring to “Columbia” as a feminine embodiment of liberty and freedom. It’s Columbia’s cause that the pro-colonial rights supporters are seeking. It’s Columbia’s survival at stake in the imperial-colonial clash. And through it all up to this point it’s Columbia who finds George Washington as her cause’s greatest leader, the sign of Providential hope.
In expressions of emotion built on top of reason, Rush and Wheatley agree on the cause and on Washington’s unique position in the cause.
* * * * * * *
For those people in and around Boston, emotions wield a special power by today, 250 years ago.
William Tudor has counted seven Massachusetts officers in the Continental Army who are now accused and convicted of corruption, graft, and theft. Taking advantage of confusion over spending public money on war materials and war supplies, the Sinful Seven—for that’s how Tudor sees them—have been caught in a betrayal of trust. The men in their units had elected them to leadership positions in the belief that they were upright and upstanding. The Seven’s guilt shakes the confidence of Tudor and others.
Dr. Benjamin Church’s trial continues in the outskirts of Boston. He, too, is accused of betrayal, having spied for and passed secret colonial-rights information onto British officials. Church’s defense amounts to an emotional plea for understanding his fear and terror at the thought of the British crushing the colonial-rights movement. His decisions, he says, were reflections of his emotional state.
People in or close to the Continental Army are in their own state of near-panic at not finding the book they want. It’s a four-volume series written by Bernard Forest de Belidor, a French military officer skilled in the mathematics, geometry, engineering, and hydraulics of siege warfare. They’re running in and out of bookshops and private libraries in search of the book that can instruct them in winning the siege of British-held Boston.
And among the British in Boston is the new commander of Redcoat forces in the town, General William Howe, successor to Thomas Gage now recalled to England. Howe has today called for all local residents still in Boston to form into “companies”, or military units, that can be used in both the current and the coming crisis. All new units will be subject to his command, declares Howe.
The vicinity in and around Boston is boiling with emotions of fright, terror, and dread.
* * * * * * *
Pride is the emotion that plagues John Adams this week. He acknowledges that he has intense pride in his living in Massachusetts. He lists five specific things about Massachusetts that were critical in resisting powerful imperial governors. But Adams suspects that his awareness of the place’s uniqueness is itself a problem now. It’s a person’s commitment to their locality—their localness, so to speak—that can prevent seeing the bigger picture, the higher vision and purpose, the need to take this or that step in moving the new American Union forward.
Reckoning with the emotion of pride leads Adams to recognizing the emotion of worry.
* * * * * * *
(Boonesborough)
There’s a lot of worry going around these days, 250 years ago. In one of the rough log cabins at the small outpost of Boonesborough, on the Kentucky River, Rebecca Boone isn’t certain exactly whose side the settlement is on, the pro- or anti-British. She knows the Boone clan is receiving money from the Transylvania Land Company. Some of company’s representatives had tried to assure Virginia’s imperial governor Lord Dunmore of Boonesborough’s willingness to remain in the British Empire. At the same time, another representative had communicated this week in Philadelphia with members of the Continental Congress, including John Adams. The offer was to form Transylvania, with Boonesborough at its heart, into a fourteenth colony or, if Canada agreed to align for colonial rights, a fifteenth colony.
Rebecca wonders: “Where’s it all headed?” Her emotions are a mix of confusion, uncertainty, and premonitions that the next sharp sound from the woods could mean the end of life.
* * * * * * *
(Hampton)
At Hampton, Virginia, Mary Thornton Woodford kissed her husband goodbye and closed the door behind him. She watched him leave their home and head into the bright October day. A day before, six British vessels had anchored offshore, blasted artillery fire into the town, and landed a unit of soldiers to start a conflagration similar to what had happened at Falmouth. But now Colonel William Woodford, Mary’s husband, gathered together a hundred volunteers of Culpeper militia. They’ve fired on the British soldiers and driven them back to their boats. Two of the boats have run aground and are seized by Woodford’s men. The remaining four vessels sail north.
Mary can trace her heritage back to the godmother of George Washington. In a moment like today’s—where members of Mary’s family voted with their hearts to race toward the danger—remembrance is memory heated by emotion.
* * * * * * *
From the rugged north woods to the chilly Chesapeake Bay, emotions run off the edge of the map into trackless territory.
Also
(prison site for Sayre…)
This week, King George III of Great Britain conducts one of those rituals so prevalent in British Isles. In his “Speech From The Throne To Parliament”, the British monarch declares that it’s all-out war to crush and quell the colonial uprising. It’s clear, states the king, that a group has actively wanted to become “an independent Empire” through a “general revolt.” George III adds that current actions are underway to seek foreign military assistance in the effort. Interestingly, he makes no mention—none—of an earlier pronouncement some weeks ago: he omits all references to internal enemies within the British Isles who were supporting and encouraging colonial troublemakers.
The oddness of the omission is underscored by an event happening the same day as the ritual “Speech”. Stephen Sayre has been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for a plot to kidnap George III on the day of the “Speech”. Sayre has also been released at a hearing after friends posted a bond on his behalf.
* * * * * * *
(…and Sidney, almost a century earlier)
The weekly magazine “The Crisis” continues to crank out seven-day editions that promote the colonial-rights movement. Perhaps in a nod toward Sayre’s arrest and release, the latest edition—the 41st—retells the story of Algernon Sidney had sacrificed his life for British freedoms in the late 1600s.
* * * * * * *
(the Graced ex-slaver)
Also in England, John Newton writes to his sister two days past, 250 years ago. He writes of the “free grace” from God that changed his life, saved his life, enlivens and enriches his life these days. Newton is coming up on the two-year anniversary of the “amazing grace” that he wrote as a song lyric describing his conversion from an enslaver and slave trader to Christianity and advocacy of human freedom.
It’s an emotion he can hardly put into words.
For You Now
(Washington Monument #1)
This is one of the most important weeks we’ve had in Americanism Redux. We’re watching an amazing thing happening right in front of us.
Energized by an emotion that defies measure, we are seeing people in real-time constructing a monument to George Washington. Before marble, before stone, before any sort of edifice on the National Mall in the city that bears his name, we’re seeing a white man and a black woman hold up Washington as the embodiment of the American hope, cause, and future. He’s done nothing yet on the battlefield. He’s given no speech and enacted no law. Yet here we are with the Union’s sacralization of George Washington.
And then there’s Lincoln.
When I read Wheatley’s “Columbia” poem for today’s Redux, Abraham Lincoln’s “Lyceum” speech of 1838 immediately leapt to my mind. This was the speech normally regarded as Lincoln’s first public address. It also echoes from Wheatley’s poem.
Both Wheatley and Lincoln place Washington at the center of an end, an answer, to the violence and chaos of their respective eras. Both Wheatley and Lincoln place Washington at the end of their public expression. Both Wheatley and Lincoln capitalize the entirety of their civic deity’s name: WASHINGTON.
In his first inaugural address Lincoln uses the wonderful term “mystic chords of memory” in referring to his era’s relationship to earlier times Up-Stream in American River. If you’re ever puzzled about what the phrase actually means, I suggest this:
Think of the Columbia poem and the Lyceum speech.
Mystic may be the confluence of emotion and reason. There you’ll find a renewal of an ability to sense, know, discern, and reflect above.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider: what is your dominant emotion about the American River these days?
(Your River, named Mystic)
