Americanism Redux
September 18, your today, on the journey to the American Founding, 250 years ago, in 1775
Something imposes an order on things. The molecules, the atoms, the stuff, all of it is arrayed and arranged according to…Something.
The reality of that order will reflect the source from which the Something acts.
Is virtue the source? Is power the source? Is a third, or fourth, or fifth option the source?
From whatever the source, the Something will act.
It’s today, September 18, 250 years ago.
* * * * * * *
(Orders to be read)
Colonel Benedict Arnold holds the parchment paper in his hands. He reads the letter, an “Order” to him from his boss, the person above him in authority. The Order has gone from draft to a final form after a few edits that included the scratched a change of “to officers and men” to “to officers”.
Did boss-General George Washington make that change or was it a Washington aide instead? Arnold doesn’t care. He moves on with his reading.
He sees in this “Order” that the military force he’s leading to Quebec and Canada may determine the fate of the cause and the continent. He sees that he and his men are to treat local people they meet—Canadians and Natives—as friends and allies and show them care, regard, and affection. It is through the lands of these allies that Arnold and his men are traveling, a fact they must remember, according to the Order. They should also remember to act with respect in all matters of religion and spiritual faith, knowing that God alone passes judgment. Any man in Arnold’s command who harms these people or their property will have harm visited upon himself by the authority of Washington’s Continental Army and its parent, the Continental Congress.
The viciousness of war, Arnold sees in this Order, will be controlled by the virtue of their cause. See that it is so, Colonel Arnold.
* * * * * * *
(Lukens wants a harsher gavel)
Washington and an aide wrote the order to Arnold in the command tent on the heights outside Boston. Washington himself is keeping close watch on those thirty-three mutinous riflemen from western Pennsylvania that he had to discipline a few days ago. Their awful conduct illustrates the kind of thing he deeply wants to avoid in Arnold’s Quebec-bound operation. To anger the people, the public, the populace is to lose the cause before the next shot is fired.
In Jesse Lukens’s opinion, Washington was too easy on the riflemen. Lukens is one of their colleagues from western Pennsylvania, but he has obeyed all the rules and didn’t join the attempted mutiny. Today, 250 years ago, Lukens believes Washington may have shown excessive sympathy toward the men because of their long journey from the Allegheny Mountains to eastern Massachusetts. Lukens further thinks Washington’s leniency results from the fact that it’s their first offence. Putting the whichevers and howevers aside, Lukens isn’t sure the issue has been resolved. Only time, and the next battle, will tell.
* * * * * * *
(what Putnam wants to display)
If only more people could emulate General Israel Putnam. That’s the understandable reaction of New York City readers of the local Continental Gazette today.
They see a written story about a recent gesture by Putnam, one of the Continental Army generals who report directly to Washington on his core team. Putnam had learned that British commander Thomas Gage and his wife trapped inside Boston had eaten nothing but salt pork for the past several days. Putnam ordered delivery of fresh veal behind enemy lines to the Gages. Gage received the gift and followed up with an expression of gratitude to his American adversary.
Putnam, known in New England for his ferocity and daring as a legendary irregular soldier from the French and Indian War, wanted people to see that civility, kindness, and decorum still existed in an environment of organized violence.
The gift of beef is his gesture of order.
* * * * * * *
(a real song)
A handful of younger New Yorkers also have a desire to show civility and observe the guardrails.
They are a dozen or so college students from the future Columbia University, known then as King’s College. These dozen college students, Alexander Hamilton among them, have been training since spring as a volunteer military unit called the Corsican Guards. The name was in honor of their hero, Pasquale Paoli, leader of the upstart Corsican Republic struggling to break away from French monarchical rule. Paoli’s efforts have been well-covered in local newspapers.
Within the past few days, Hamilton and his college classmates have decided to change their unit’s name. They now call themselves the “Heart of Oak.” The name is from a song—the “Heart of Oak”—regarded as the musical theme and institutional brand of the British Navy, which had attempted to assist Paoli’s fledgling cause as a slap in the face to France, Britain’s global adversary.
The choice of Hamilton’s unit to rename themselves after the song is a deliberate “appropriation” of a symbol of their enemy, the British imperial government.
And who knows? Maybe the college students are on to something—perhaps the crisis between British imperial power and American rights and liberty can be redirected and resolved in a face-slapping, pistols-loaded, gentlemanly fashion. Hamilton himself has had to intervene twice to discourage mob action not far from campus.
Hamilton’s readings tell him to keep life’s worst emotions in channels that run toward control.
* * * * * * *
(they’ve piled up)
The young source of new American order is back in session in Philadelphia. Delegates of the Second Continental Congress have re-gathered for collective meetings. For the first time, all thirteen colonies have delegations seated in the room at the Pennsylvania State House. This is the embodiment of the American Union, the highest elevation in the continentally defined cause of rights, liberty, and freedom.
They’re doing what everyone does when first back at work after time away. The (e) mail. Stacks of it. They have opened and read aloud multiple letters, reports, and updates sent in the last six weeks. But there’s much more to it than simply chipping away at the pile—many of these documents involve information or decisions that drive straight at day-to-day execution of Union, of Unionization of thirteen separate colonies consisting of vastly disparate communities.
The minutes, half-hours, and hours are thick with the stuff of Union. In one instance, there is a decision to establish the roster of a Continental Congress committee on paying expenses of recruiting highly specialized military units, as well as defining the quorum through which such work can be done. In another instance, Washington asks for the Continental Congress to give to the Continental Army a shipment of enemy clothing seized locally in Philadelphia; the delegates delegate and order the shipment sent. In a third instance, four hundred blank Army officer commissions are sent to General Philip Schuyler in New York for his distribution. Each name filled on each commission will then be loyal first and foremost to…what, exactly: the Cause? Army? Congress? Himself?
Every decision contains a seed of power. Every seed is ordered by its own code.
* * * * * * *
One of Pennsylvania’s delegates, Benjamin Franklin analyzes the current reality in a letter to a friend.
Franklin admits that peace will elude policymakers. He predicts war will spread and continue for an unknowable length of time, likely far longer than anyone expects. The colonists, he says, have already given up their trade in resisting British power. That shot is fired, and overseas commerce is gone. Now, they’re in the process of surrendering their coastal ports and communities in the face of British naval assaults. The only thing left is the thing that’s unbeatable in Franklin’s estimation—the interior west of the coastline, the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of acres of farmland, agriculture, and cabin-based and village-based life that, he asserts, will be defended with every ounce of American blood and soaked in every ounce of enemy blood.
Franklin goes on to list off six items of grievance, fresh and unforgivable, that burn white-hot in American hearts. The single worst, to him, is conscious encouragement of Native American attacks on frontier settlers, people who Franklin states are usually unaware of problems and disturbances on the coast. All they’ll know is that they’re being attacked, killed, tortured without discrimination and without remorse.
A fellow delegate of Franklin’s, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, will one day return to the items on the elderly doctor’s list.
* * * * * * *
(new flag)
Today, 250 years ago, the shadows of Franklin’s words creep across the landscape of South Carolina.
Events are moving quickly.
The 2nd South Carolina regiment of the Continental Army, led by Colonel William Moultrie, has captured Fort Johnson a short distance from Charleston. British soldiers fled from the scene before Moultrie’s unit landed. On adjacent Sullivan’s Island, a second colonial detachment has seized a small British naval vessel. British officers aboard the Tamar and Scorpion, two vessels nearby, have started planning to blockade Charleston harbor in retaliation for these actions. Few are hurt, some property and goods have been taken, but perhaps most significantly of all, William Moultrie has sponsored the design and raising, today, of a flag of resistance, an American flag of deep blue color that matches his unit’s uniforms and a white crescent moon design with the word “Liberty” written inside. No such flag has flown before in this region.
Greater danger brews inland.
Today, along the Saluda River, is a thick wooden fort called Ninety-Six. Inside the fort stands Colonel Thomas Fletchall. He has liquor on his breath. Sweating and unsteady, Fletchall scribbles his name on a document dubbed “The Treaty of Ninety-Six.”
The treaty is an agreement between pro-British Loyalists in the Saluda River valley and pro-American supporters armed and on the march with William Henry Drayton. Fletchall’s signature represents a pledge not to assist the Redcoats and not to take up arms against colonists favoring colonial rights. For his part, Drayton’s signature represents a pledge that none of the Loyalists will be harmed or intimidated in pursuit of pro-colonial rights policies or actions. It is a kind of neutrality. Few like it, fewer respect it. Fingers are only fractions away from triggers and hands are only inches away from knives.
When the ink dries on the paper, the treaty is rolled up and carried off.
Outside the fort, beyond the river, the air has a scent. Hovering above the swamps, bogs, and forests of live-oaks draped in moss is the smell of blood-feuds and tribal violence. The smallest of sparks can ignite the warm water and soft ground, setting a fire that scorches the interior away from the coast.
You can detect this aroma of a burning match, but you can’t see its source.
* * * * * * *
Something provides the order of every world gone mad.
Also
Thanks to power, money, and status, the world of Esterhazy palace is music and art, beauty and spirit.
Today, Joseph Haydn thinks about the opera he has just premiered at the palace of Austrian Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy, the wealthy nobleman who has him under contract on his estate in northern Hungary.
The opera is “L’incontro improvviso” and it features a French comedic play set in Ottoman society. A version two centuries later might look something like…”A Princess Bride.”
Haydn feels a strain these days. His contract with Esterhazy has shut him off from other composers and musical creators. He resents the denial of creative freedom. The only consolation Haydn derives from the arrangement—apart from a steady income—is that he finds creativity in self-competition. He competes not with others but with himself, striving to produce an internal satisfaction over whatever his previous composition might have been. He judges no work outside of his own.
It’s as if the prince is the imperial country and the composer is the colony. In quiet corners of the palace, gossips whisper about how long the arrangement can last.
For You Now
The span from George Washington’s letter to Benedict Arnold on one end to the Treaty of Neutrality at Fort Ninety-Six on the other end is on a scale of Mercury to Pluto. They are bodies orbiting in great distances from one another.
Yet they do share a point of reference in the middle. The sun dictates rotation.
The sphere of heat and light for our Redux today is the cause of colonial rights, liberty, and freedom. Some feel the heat and light more than others, though all see the sphere in the center. Around the sphere our stories revolve.
The quest and the question is indeed that center, sphere, and sun. Can the cause convert into the force that holds the bodies together? The cause—the Union—is still under construction, still being built.
I’ll point you back to Benjamin Franklin in today’s Redux. His ability to put thought, ideas, and analysis onto a broad plane is stunning. He deserves our everlasting respect for that. But embedded in this spectacular turn of mind is an assumption about trading space for time.
Franklin believes that the ultimate source of American victory is endurance, a quality connected to the presence of a vast interior space. What Franklin doesn’t appear to account for—and I’m not sure who could—is that the trading of space for time would come at a cost in the nature of the cause. It’s an enormous assumption to believe that the cause would stay the same. I, for one, absolutely think it would not. Drive the cause inland, and inland, and inland, and you guarantee a change in the cause itself.
But as I said at the beginning today, Something would provide an order. Something would reconstitute the cause. Something.
Suggestion
Take a moment to consider—what do you think qualifies as our “Something” in providing our order today?
(Your River)
