A Man to Remember

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Oh, where are the curly-fused cannon crackers of yesteryear--so thick, so roundly red, so pregnant with earsplitting, tooth-jarring noise? Where are the backyard skyrockets, with their colored, cone-topped heads and their delicate pinewood sticks? Where are the politicians who spoke, jowls aquiver and veins distended, on the glorious day amid the pleasantly acrid smell of burnt powder? Where are the red, white and blue floats built on flat bed-trucks? Where is the George M. Cohan roll for the player piano and the rock salt for the ice-cream freezer on the back porch?

Gone! All gone! New Englanders, it is true, will get a taste of traditional glare and excitement when Independence Day rolls around this week--the "Horribles," grotesquely costumed children, will parade along a few village streets, and some towns will light big bonfires at midnight on the Third (a pile of barrels a hundred feet high awaits the torch on Salem's Gallows Hill). But the U.S. as a whole will have a much more sterile diet--packaged fireworks shows in city parks and packaged patriotic sentiments on television.

For most Americans, the Fourth has become a day of escape rather than an occasion of patriotic remembrance and celebration. Beaches, amusement grounds, baseball parks, golf courses, trout streams and picnic areas are crowded. The U.S. countryside echoes the rhythmic "ka-bunk, ka-bunk, ka-bunk" of white-wall-tired family automobiles whanging over the endless, shimmering, concrete slabs of four-lane highways. Occasionally, the rhythm is disturbed by the screech and crash of shiny sedans meeting in bone-shattering collision (the National Safety Council's estimated traffic death toll for the holiday: 290). Cities lie in Sunday silence.

The Spirit of 76. Although the Old-Fashioned Fourth is dead, the nation today is more clearly than ever a vast and teeming monument to the Spirit of '76. The potent and bubbly brew of '76 was compounded of two unlike elements. Rebellion against tradition and authority, a spirit present in all men everywhere, was stepped up in America by the individualism of the frontier and the frontiersman's vision of a future that would escape and dwarf the past. This was part of the Spirit of '76, and it marched west with the mountain men, the wagon trains, the steam cars, and the jalopies of the Great Depression.

But '76 was not this rebellious individualism alone. Equally present was a reverent conservatism, also intensified by the conditions of colonial life. The challenge and menace of the wilderness livened the idea of Divine Providence. Old rights, old truths became more precious in a new land. The rebellious colonists sought and found freedoms and powers their ancestors never had; to that extent the American spirit was and remains progressive. But the rebellious colonists were as conscious of traditional rights to be preserved as of new rights to be won; to that extent the Spirit of '76 was profoundly conservative.*The American genius cannot be understood either as progressive or conservative. It lies in the tension between the two, and the tension does not exist mainly in clashing parties or "forces"; it exists mainly inside Americans.

In some degree this tension pulls at all peoples. In the American case, both the progressive and conservative poles are stronger, and the tension between them is maintained without crackup through the extraordinary political and philosophical character which the revolutionary colonists gave to the U.S. in its painful years of birth. The Founding Fathers knew or sensed that they were embarking on an epic journey. With a passion for history and political principles unequaled in any group of leaders before or since, they ransacked the political possessions of Western civilization beginning with Greece & Rome--and packed their bags with minute purpose. Much was discarded as unsuited for the future. What was retained out of the long experience of Europe was the more tenderly cherished.

The 300 million Americans who, since July 4, 1776, carried this luggage to continental conquest and world leadership, exhibit in their personal and public characters the dynamism of high tension between contrasts. This is not a quiet or consistent people. Its restless side is mirrored in Thomas Alva Edison and Upton Sinclair and the music of George Gershwin. This same people reveres Robert E. Lee, a Christian conservative rebel, and produces figures like Henry Ford, a radical businessman, and William Green, an archconservative labor leader. Of the 300 million Americans, none has shown in his own person the contrast, the tension of the American spirit more than George Washington, whom the orators of the Old-Fashioned Fourth loved to call the Father of His Country.

He enjoyed the life and tradition of an English country squire. Yet again & again he left his comforts to ride into the nearby wilderness. There, this man with a deep sense of the past surveyed the land of the future. He was famed among his neighbors for a strict probity in business dealings, and again & again was asked to act as executor of estates and guardian of minors. Yet he was a gambler. He gambled at cards and on horses; his project to drain the Dismal Swamp (it is only partly drained to this day) was in a line of wild American land speculation that did not end with Addison Mizner at Boca Raton. Washington gambled at war: with his neck, when he took up arms against the king, and with his army, in bold flashes that interrupted months of the utmost military caution. Despite, or perhaps because of Washington's conservative reverence for God, church and tradition, he turned against the king in whose army he had served, became the driving force in the greatest change of his day, and the true parent of a nation that has changed and changed, and yet has veered far less radically from the basic tradition of Europe than has Europe itself.

Every Inch a General. The second Continental Congress, which met in Philadelphia after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, hesitated hardly at all in picking Delegate George Washington to command the American army. Delegate John Hancock nursed improbable dreams of military glory for himself, but Massachusetts, which had started the war, dared not suggest one of its own for high command lest the rest of the colonies touchily let Massachusetts try to finish the war, too. Washington was a Virginian, and thus politically eligible; he had commanded troops, and furthermore he looked like a general.

At 43, he was fair, broad-shouldered and huge for his day (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.), with a horseman's muscular thighs, penetrating blue eyes, and an impressive air of command. Mounted on a white charger and arrayed in uniform (he thoughtfully wore the blue and buff of the Fairfax County militia to Philadelphia), he was a sight few men ever forgot. Congress was also impressed by his quiet good sense, his ability to bide his time, his capacity for decision.

The delegates, nevertheless, did not know how well they had chosen. Washington became the Revolution. His towering will, his awesome patience were often all that kept it alive. He was bitterly realistic about his country's weaknesses, but he never lost an intuitive understanding of its strength. His understanding fed the iron nerve which could risk everything on terrifying military gambles when his back was to the wall.

He is remembered as a remote and austere figure, but George Washington had his little frailties and vanities. His temper was almost always held in check, but dishonesty or cowardice could set him into thunderous bursts of rage. He imported silk stockings and silver-buckled shoes (always broad-toed and comfortable) from England before the war, and seldom missed an opportunity to have his brown hair (worn clubbed, and sometimes supported in a sort of snood) trimmed, combed and powdered by a barber.

He suffered all his life from that peculiarly leveling ailment: bad teeth. He scrubbed them with "spunge" brushes from England, and rinsed them in all manner of lotions, but they decayed, one by one. He was in agony from toothache at the siege of Yorktown, and, in the hope of doing some dentistry upon himself, wrote to a friend for a small file which he could thrust between his molars. He was a theatergoer. He loved to dance. He fished, shot ducks, and rode to hounds with reckless competence. He suffered from sunburn, and in later years was not too dignified to inspect his acres with a large umbrella affixed to his saddle horn.

A Gentleman in the Woods. Though a gentleman born, he was earthier, more practical, more ambitious, and tougher-fibered than history might imply. The Washingtons, like many other upper-class Virginians of the early 1700's, were land-rich and money-poor. George's father Augustine was educated in England, and the family was guided by the manners, dress and loyalties of English society. But they lived plainly and often dangerously--the western frontier was at their door.

George's formal education was short and haphazard. He was tutored for a few years in reading, writing and geography. He copied out maxims from Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company & Conversation. He studied mathematics: "Having two of ye sides of a right Angle plain Triangle, given to find ye third side." At 16 he went off as a surveyor's assistant on wild, western lands owned by a vastly wealthy family friend, Lord Fairfax. He roughed it in the wilderness, saw Indian war dances, was attacked by "Lice Fleas" from a backwoodsman's verminous pallet, and had to suffer their attentions in silence until he could strip the next day to rid himself of "ye Game we had catched ye Night before."

He burned to acquire land, wealth, and above all, honor in the eyes of his fellow Virginians. He cultivated prominent men. At 21, by virtue of his own eagerness and the good will of Robert Dinwiddie, the colony's stiff-necked royal governor, he set off through the western wilderness on his first military mission--charged with warning the French not to encroach on crown claims in the Ohio Valley.

The fur-hungry French refused to back down. Washington quickly became Virginia's first soldier--a distinction, to be fair, which few others sought. He learned at first hand the slippery and thankless art of Indian diplomacy. He tested his courage when the British expeditionary force of General Edward Braddock was all but wiped out in an ambush in the Monongahela River forests. Washington, white-faced, weak and reeling from a "violent illness," rode for twelve hours before reaching the scene of the battle, had two horses killed beneath him, felt four bullets tear through his clothes, but never faltered in his duty. Divine Providence, he decided, protected him.

He was given command of the ist Virginia Regiment and the responsibility for protecting every scattered settler on its borders. He learned hard lessons: the difficulties of recruiting Americans for military service, the harsh necessity of discipline (once he hanged two deserters on a 40-ft. gallows to impress his less than ardent troops), the jealousy and backbiting inherent in public service.

In the end, he became embroiled in a bitter quarrel with the British army over his rank and rights as an officer. He rode all the way from Virginia to Boston in an effort to get due recognition for his seniority over certain English-born officers.

The Ragged Army. He gave up his commission in disillusionment--to marry a rich widow, gain election to the House of Burgesses (he bought vast quantities of ale and rum, as was the custom, to get out the vote), and to live the life of a prosperous but restless country gentleman. But he did not falter, 16 years later, as the fever of rebellion swept the colonies. "The . . . peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood or Inhabited by Slaves," he wrote. "Can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?"

British generals nevertheless were to be forgiven for feeling that the rebellion was merely an exhibition of rashness by excited colonials. The colonies, only tenuously united and notoriously ridden by rivalry, had little industry (even minor manufacturing was restricted by British policy), no military tradition, almost no military stores, no fleet, no allies, and, by European standards, no army worthy of the name. They faced the wealth and trained troops of a great military power (England sent the biggest expeditionary force in its history to America), backed by the world's greatest navy, by savage Indians, and by droves of American loyalists.

At Bunker Hill, New England militiamen had already accomplished what seemed like a miracle: they had proved that colonials could stand fast in the face of a British charge (although many of them were to run like rabbits in the future), and that their marksmanship and ability to fight from cover were military talents the British could not match.

The siege of Boston introduced Washington to his awful responsibilities. Sixteen thousand Americans were camped in a great semicircle around Boston. They had, somehow, to be fed, disciplined, taught some rudiments of military maneuvering--and used against the enemy. Few had uniforms. Few had enough powder--in fact, Washington discovered there was hardly enough powder in the whole country to fight one battle.

The soldiers got noisily drunk, tore up farmers' fences for wood, quarreled with their officers, and carried on lewdly with female camp followers. New Englanders, thei commander noted privately, "are an exceedingly dirty and nasty people." Washington personally had to issue the most elementary sort of orders: that drunkenness be prohibited, that soldiers keep themselves and their camps clean. He had to do so throughout the war. He also had to put up for years with an even more horrifying phenomenon, which presented itself at Boston: his army began melting away, for militiamen, enlisted for short terms of only a few months, went home when their time was up, and always tried to take their muskets with them.

He was saved from committing his unwieldly, untrained and dwindling force to an assault on Boston by long-suffering gangs of soldiers, who dragged heavy cannon over the snow all the way from old Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain to Boston. When the cannon were mounted on Dorchester Heights, the British sailed away to Halifax.

Washington's travail promptly began again the next summer. His army, beaten on Long Island, escaped across the East River to Manhattan, thanks to a fog, regiments of Salem and Marblehead boatmen, Providence, and Washington's daring. It fought and retreated to White Plains, fought and retreated across the Hudson--and across New Jersey--and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. As winter deepened, only 2,400 ragged, ill-fed Continental regulars were left. On Dec. 20, 1776, Washington wrote to Congress: "Ten more days will put an end to the existence of our Army . . ."

Lightning at Christmas. Then he gambled. Five nights later, in numbing cold on Christmas night, he took his little force across the ice-clogged Delaware. Wet, half-frozen, lashed by driving sleet, it marched nine miles to Trenton and surprised the town and its Hessian defenders. The Americans triumphed in less than two hours of fighting and without the loss of a man. They killed or wounded more than 100 of the enemy, captured 1,000 more, and with them, 1,000 muskets and six brass fieldpieces. Only three days later they audaciously invaded New Jersey again, and stayed to bleed the British at Princeton (where Washington, rallying his troops, rode unscathed within 30 paces of blazing enemy muskets).

The country was electrified, the revolution was saved. That was the pattern of the war--months of defeat, discouragement and disaster broken, when all seemed lost, by a daring stroke and a taste of triumph.

It was a big war, although many of its battles were fought by armies of only a few thousand men--it ranged from Georgia to Quebec, from New York to the Mississippi--and in the end it involved the fleets of both England and France. It progressed slowly: the British held New York for years, and months often passed without major incident. It was polite in tone: prisoners were duly exchanged, flags of truce honored, and correct notes passed between opposing commanders (Washington formally returned General Sir William Howe's dog to him when it was captured by Americans at Germantown).

Yet the fighting was often bitter-end, even by modern standards: American volunteer suicide squads were killed or wounded almost to a man in breaching the British defenses at Stony Point; Americans, Indians and British troops, their flintlocks useless from rain, milled in wild combat with knife, musket butt and tomahawk at Oriskany in the New York wilderness. Cowpens, Brandywine, Germantown--all were bloody. The revolution pitted strange adversaries. At Eutaw Springs, the American force was heavily loaded with British deserters, the British force with American deserters. Kilted Scottish-American settlers fought for the king with broadswords at Moore's Creek Bridge, N.C.

Civilian Control. Through it all, Washington's burdens grew. Congressmen hotly accused him of attempting to saddle the country with a military tyranny worse than that of England. It was 18 months before he was authorized to recruit a stable Continental line pledged to serve for the duration of the conflict. The Continental Army never had more than 16,782 regulars, and never had more than a few hundred pieces of artillery, but 2,000 private American vessels, armed with 18,000 guns and manned by 70,000 men, harassed English shipping in the hope of quick fortunes. Money to pay the troops was always short.

Washington understood congressional fears, respected its ideal of civil control, and won it over in the end with honesty --and his dogged hope of victory. He did not underestimate his army. Revolutionary soldiers might desert, but they often returned to fight again. They might break before British bayonets, but they would regroup and fight the next day. Properly led, they endured incredible hardship, often without pay, without proper clothing, without proper food.

The tide of war had begun to turn at Saratoga in the autumn of 1777, when Britain's grand plan to take the Hudson River Valley and thus split the colonies came abruptly to grief. General John Burgoyne, with 8,000 British and Hessian troops, came south from Canada almost unopposed. But General Howe, who was to go north to meet him, sailed away to take Philadelphia instead. An American army under General Horatio Gates blocked Burgoyne on high ground on the west bank of the river. Soon it did more: Benedict Arnold, the most daring, most ambitious, most feared of Washington's generals,** violated Gates's cautious orders and led two attacks, the second after his jealous superior had stripped him of his command. Burgoyne, trapped between a horde of fast-arriving militiamen and the northern wilderness, surrendered his 5,800 men, his guns, his stores, his wagons. "Turned Upside Down." It was a great victory. It accented objections by England's Whigs (notably Edmund Burke) to the war. it prompted France to contribute money, men and seapower, it enlisted the active sympathy of Spain and Holland to the American cause.

But the Revolution seemed lost many times in the four years of fighting which remained. The Americans endured Valley Forge, were stalemated in the north, almost deprived of the south by Cornwallis' campaigns in the Carolinas. The Continental currency depreciated almost to worthlessness, and leagues of countryside were swept by hungry foragers.

Cornwallis' army, badly worn by endless American harassment, and by such set-piece battles as Camden, S.C., Hobkirk's Hill, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, moved into Virginia and took up quarters at Yorktown. Washington was in New England contemplating an attack on New York--the French had landed 5.000 troops (who startled Americans by rigidly re- fraining from even minor thefts) to help him, and a big French fleet was preparing to sail from the West Indies. But Washington decided almost overnight to move against Cornwallis instead. The French war vessels moved to Virginia, too, and after five weeks of fast marching, Washington laid siege to Yorktown with 16,000 French and Continental soldiers. Cornwallis had gone to earth between the York and James Rivers, on a narrow peninsula, which was a normal move in time of trouble for a British commander confident of sea power. But De Grasse's French fleet controlled the Chesapeake. Cut off, hammered night & day by artillery, Cornwallis, a fine soldier, could find no way out. On Oct. 19, 1781, his 7,000 troops marched out, bands playing a march fittingly entitled The World Turned Upside Down, and stacked their arms. The war, for all practical purposes, was over. "A System of Policy." About to leave the Army, Washington wrote (in a letter presented last week to Princeton University) : "Having no reward to ask for myself, if I have been so happy as to obtain the approbation of my countrymen, I shall be satisfied. It still rests with them to compleat my washes by adopting such a system of Policy as will ensure the future reputation, tranquility, happiness and glory of this extensive Empire." The man is all in that passage--his humility, his pride, his sense of honor, his realistic misgivings, his love of order, his vision of "this extensive Empire." The nation, however, was not yet born, the "system of Policy" not yet constructed. All the courage and suffering of the war might be lost in the quarrels and confusions of a peace without policy or system.

Washington, before retirement to Mount Vernon, sternly squelched suggestions that Americans set up a monarchy with George Washington as its first king, but he wrote to friends that "something must be done or the fabric must fall . . ." His concern was not wasted; his was foremost among the influences which prompted the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which he served as chairman.

With the brilliant minds, the learned political scientists, the jealous sectional and class partisans, the great prose stylists who made up that convention, Washington could not compete--and did not try. He spoke seldom, initiated little; no section of the Constitution can be pointed to and called his. But the whole document belongs to him as much as to any man. His practical sense, his bold vision, his conservatism--all these pervade the Constitution, whose strength and flexibility have held together in high tension the disparate forces of the American character.

Still Alive. There was but one choice for the first President of the U.S.: George Washington. The office was of necessity less precisely defined than the judicial and legislative branches. It might have degenerated into a puppet presidency. Washington defined it by stepping into it. He held it in great esteem, and imparted to it the dignity of his own character. He refused to shake hands during his eight years in the office--he felt that such a gesture of familiarity was beneath the presidency--and always bowed instead. He dressed richly in velvet, wore hats plumed with ostrich feathers, rode in a six-horse coach with liveried lackeys and outriders, felt himself the equal of any king on earth, but always thought of himself as the "Most Obed. Hble Serv.t" of the U.S. people, who, decade after decade, have borne the stamp of his character.

He lived but two years after his second term was ended. In his last moments of consciousness he said, "I die hard." And so he has.

* For news of the half-forgotten, conservative side of American thought, see Books. ** Who is remembered almost solely for infamy: switching to the British cause after unsuccessfully attempting to betray West Point to the enemy for -L-20,000.

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