The following are not offered for comparison to current persons in politics. They can stand in their own:
From Alastair Cooke’s America:
The first clash came at Concord, Massachusetts, a village beyond the Charles River west of Boston. The first ‘Provincial Congress of Massachusetts’ had met there in 1774, making it naturally suspect as a storehouse for military supplies. In April 1775 General Gage heard that the farmers of Concord had taken to stockpiling firearms in secret. He sent out seven hundred British troops to destroy the stores. They had a brush with a company of rebels at Lexington and then went on to Concord, where a force ready to meet them found itself outnumbered and retired to wait for more men from the surrounding country. The British might well have made a brisk search and gone back to Boston. But they were under the command of a young officer, newly promoted and spoiling for blood. He kept his men waiting for hours till the reinforced farmers and ‘minutemen’ (rebels sworn to be ready ‘at the minute’) were too much for them and they started a slow retreat. Their rear guard was peppered all the way back, and by the time they reached Boston they were out of ammunition and, to the astonishment of Gage, shaken and demoralized. The account of this beating was lavished with much heroic detail by the rebels and fired the populace in many colonies with the inspiring thought that ordinary American farmers could put British regulars on the run.
This sad and muddled incident would surely not have been enough to create a heroic myth, but some of the expressions of it are memorable and moving. We should not forget that for quite a time the rebels thought of themselves as Englishmen abused, and in many engagements felt an uncomfortable sympathy for the other Englishmen who had been sent over to fight them. In Ridgefield, Connecticut, there is a plaque sunk in the wall of a cemetery. It says: ‘In defense of American independence at the Battle of Ridgefield, April 27th, 1777, died Eight Patriots who were laid in this ground, Companioned by Sixteen British Soldiers, Living, their enemies, Dying, their guests.’
The British arrived as a professional army expecting, with companies of German mercenaries, to fight European set battles. Not enough of them had learned, at first or second hand, the lessons of the French and Indian Wars. The Americans were at once too shrewd and too untrained to oblige them with an Old World war. First of all, as John Adams said, the colonial population divided up into one third that took to arms, one third that was either openly or secretly loyal to the British, and one third that didn’t give a damn –not the best recipe for a disciplined national army. So against the army of British regulars there stood –besides some French volunteers, immensely valuable as professionals at the start –mainly a large, improvised force of farmers, mechanics, tradesmen, parsons, lawyers, grocers, hunters, trappers, con men, thieves, and hoodlums. ‘Never,’ their sorrowing commander was to lament when the going was bad, ‘such a rabble dignified by the name of army.’ How could they even hold off for six years, much less defeat, one of the crack armies of Europe?
For one thing, there was weaponry. The British for the most part used smooth-bore muskets that allowed a lateral error of three feet at a hundred yards range. The British infantryman was not trained to pick off single targets; he stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellows and they sprayed, shall we say, in the general direction of the enemy! The Americans had smooth-bore muskets, too, but as the war moved into the interior the British came up against the frontiersmen, who did not use guns for sport. Their very existence depended on shooting their food on the wing and saving their families by picking off Indians in night raids. They needed a weapon that was light and accurate and found it in the Pennsylvania flintlock, developed for them by German settlers in Pennsylvania who doubled the length of the barrel and grooved it to make the bullet spin and stay on line. (From this rifling of the barrel comes the word ‘rifle.’) It could not, however, be fixed with a bayonet.
But at long range, this weapon did bloody damage to shoulder-to-shoulder infantry. A Pennsylvania Tory who had seen it at work wrote a letter to a London newspaper offering rather chill advice: ‘This province has raised a thousand riflemen, the worst of whom will put a rifle ball into a man’s head at a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards. Therefore, advise your officers who shall hereafter come out to America to settle their affairs in England before their departure.’ This reputation for sharpshooting was magnified in England into a witch’s curse, and there were some lively desertions among men drafted for service in the Colonies. It is, on the whole, an all-too-true American myth: that legendary reputation for spotting the bull’s eye which began with the embattled farmers and was sustained down the next century and a half by Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, and Sergeant York. It is a romantic tradition that dies hard, and there is a lucrative industry in suggesting to sportsmen and country boys –and, unfortunately, to malcontents and psychotics also –that whether or not you are a fast man with a buck, you too can be a fast man on the draw.
A British commander sent home a short report that was read in the House of Commons. The gist of it was: ‘The Americans will not stand and fight.’ They were jack-in-the-box guerrillas who would fight like devils for a day and a night and then go home and harvest their crops on the weekend. They would return, not always in any discernible formation, and after a swift onslaught vanish into the country by night, and then again at some unpredictable time come whizzing in like hornets. What baffled and eventually broke the British was what broke the Roman armies in their late campaigns against the barbarians, and for so long frustrated the American army in Vietnam. Edward Gibbon said it in a single passage: ‘All things became adverse to the Romans … their armour heavy, the waters deep; nor could they wield, in that uneasy situation, their weighty javelins. The barbarians, on the contrary, were enured to encounters in the bogs.’ Or as William Pitt sadly commented, looking at his drawn battle-lines on an alien wilderness: ‘You cannot conquer a map.’
There is a further, and less dramatic, explanation for the colonists’ survival and victory. It was the consequence of one of the most perceptive deals in American history. When the war began it was fought for a time mainly in Massachusetts and the bordering North. It didn’t take the men of Massachusetts long to know it and resent it. If it was to be a continental war, the South too would have to be visibly engaged. Virginia was rich and Massachusetts was chronically short of the money for arms and supplies (like the other colonies, it never managed to pay the soldiers for long). John Adams had the notion that if a continental commander could be appointed, and he was a Virginian, then the North and the South and the Middle Colonies would have a palpable, breathing symbol of a common cause. A good deal would depend, of course, on the chosen man. Adams used his great influence with the wartime Congress now formed, first to push the idea of a continental command and then to see that it went to the man of his choice.
He was that same officer who had heard ‘the bullets whistle’ in the first brush of the French and Indian Wars: George Washington, the son of a father who had gone to school in England and had several large Virginia estates. Left fatherless at the age of eleven, the boy was shunted between two half brothers and picked up a little irregular schooling in the intervals of learning how to raise tobacco and stock and manage a plantation. He took to surveying in boyhood and decided that it was to be his profession, one that in those days sent a man roving for weeks on end, improvising his sleeping quarters, shooting wild turkey and chewing it on the bone. In the French and Indian Wars, he had suffered the horrors of Braddock’s rout. He had horses shot from under him and went home to Virginia with a local reputation for being at all times unflappable. Then his health failed him, and he resigned his commission.
At the age of twenty-seven he married a very rich widow and settled on a majestic stretch of land at Mount Vernon, overlooking the Potomac. His wife had brought him the pleasant dowry of some profitable real estate, fifteen thousand acres near Williamsburg –what by today’s exchange would be about a quarter of a million dollars –and one hundred and fifty slaves, whose condition, he confessed, embarrassed him. But he was an eighteenth-century man, and ‘emancipation’ was a remote and strange doctrine. He assumed he would live out his days as a rich Virginia planter, but then, at the age of forty-three, he received the call.
I suspect most Americans would today be put off by his air of a prosperous landowner and real-estate operator in the guise of a rather down-the-nose British colonel. His most idolatrous biographers have been unable to find much evidence of charm, or even jollity, in him. He was imperious, massively self-sufficient, and he had decided ideas about the relations of rank and rank, class and class. He did not, for instance, like to be touched, and when he became the first President he laid down a rule that people coming to see him should remain standing in his presence. He arrived for his inauguration with a flourish of outriders and he shook no hands. Thomas Jefferson was greatly offended by the color and pomp of this ceremony and thought it ‘not at all in character with the simplicity of republican governments, and looking –as if wishfully –to those of European courts.’ As he took the oath, a bystanding Senator whispered to his neighbor: ‘I fear we may have exchanged George the Third for George the First.’
Yet there were several things about him that made him the unquestioned leader of the new nation. A pervasive sense of responsibility, an unflagging impression of shrewd judgment, and total integrity. It can best be summed up in what the drama critics call ‘presence.’ But it was nothing rehearsed. It was the presence of nothing but character.
The war was only eighteen months old when it seemed that all was lost. The British captured Philadelphia, and many of the Congress took to the mountains. They were a frightened and divided body of men –divided between genuine revolutionaries and sunshine patriots, between dedicated colonial statesmen and secret Loyalists, and a clutter of money grubbers selling arms or commissions, or merchants whose anxious interest was to see that Spain got the lands beyond the Appalachians so that trade would not go West. The word got to a delirious London that Washington was trapped in a frigid valley, and that the war was over. The first part was correct –but not the second.
In the bleakest winter, of 1777–1778, Washington was camped in Valley Forge, about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. He picked it for obvious military advantages. It lay between a creek and a broad river, and the hills were high enough to survey the main supply routes from the South into New England and the roads from Philadelphia that led to the gunneries and powder mills of the interior. He refused to go inland and leave the fertile Pennsylvania farming country as a granary for the enemy. He refused also to commandeer the villages, which hadn’t enough food for the swarms of refugees from Philadelphia. So he chose this bare place, and his eleven thousand men built their tents with timber from the neighboring woods.
In the beginning life was bearable, even agreeable. The men were snug in their new huts, the generalissimo moved into a solid farmhouse. Mrs Washington came to stay, so did some of the officers’ wives. There were cheerful dinner parties and no lack of food and wine. But the party was short-lived. The winter snows came early, and by January there were oceans of mud. Congress wouldn’t, or couldn’t, commission supplies and told Washington to plunder the nearest farmers, which he refused to do. When the main stores ran low, the men started to forage for hickory nuts and the more edible local fauna. By March –when the countryside was blasted by blizzards –a third of them were down with typhus or smallpox and, of course, dysentery. Medical services barely existed, and the besieged army began to thin out alarmingly, if not from disease and actual starvation, then from desertion. Half of the living had neither shoes nor shirts. In the end, Washington was left with something over three thousand men, technically able-bodied, actually half starving. To this implacable man the ordeal was grim but quite simple. Being an eighteenth-century gentleman-soldier with a puritan core meant that when the chips were down all the agreeable things of life –parties, good food, comfort, professional dignity –were baubles. The winds whistled and the food gave out and the fields stank with death and Washington’s life simplified itself into one hard principle –duty.He had given his word that he would hold on with his army, however sick and bedraggled it might be, and he proceeded to do so. The spring came in and epidemic sickness flourished. But then the French formally entered the war and poured in men, money, arms, and supplies. They lined up with Washington’s ragged survivors and, to put it simply, the Revolution held. It was not won for another four years, and the third year was the darkest of all –but the obdurate, placid commander stuck it out.
When he died he was not yet a legend. To many of the revolutionary leaders the memory of him was of a man indomitable in war. But to others, to some of the governors, and the press, he was insufferable in peace: for signing a treaty that called for payment of all pre-revolutionary debts; for confirming the restrictions on New England’s trade with the West Indies; for silencing his enemies in the press with public prosecutions; and for many other real and fancied iniquities. And when he left the Presidency the Philadelphia Aurora editorialized: ‘If ever there was a period for rejoicing, it is this moment.’
But by now Washington towers over the generations of notable Americans as Shakespeare towers over the literature of England. About every thirty years some debunker starts to chip away at this monolith. He is rumored to have padded his army expense accounts. He is suddenly redrawn as ‘a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, an exploiter of mines and timber.’ However, as Calvin Coolidge once said, wheeling his chair around and looking up at the Washington Monument: ‘He’s still there.’ So he is.
When the war was won, there must have been a deal of guilt in the fawning respect that important men, Congressmen in particular, showed toward him in public. They had quit and he had stayed. Perhaps only another soldier, and that the greatest, could truly gauge the fortitude it took to weather the military extremity of the bad years. At any rate, when Washington died and the word got to Europe, Napoleon himself was seen to bow his head. In the English Channel, the British fleet fired a salute of twenty guns.
@f00l You might be interested in reading The Glorious Cause, both the one by Robert Middlekauff (Pulitzer finalist) AND the ‘novelization’ by Jeff Shaara (in the vein of Gods and Generals). Both reinforce Washington’s personality as described above.
@compunaut
Turns out I own that on both Kindle and Audible I think AMZ ran it as a Kindle DOTD sometime back in 2014. Never read tho. So thx. Dling to Audible client at this moment.
When I was a teenager and in my 20’s I thought history was a big bore. Now that I have some appreciation of how hard it was to get from there to here by any path, I love reading history.
It is difficult, and in some quarters thought to be almost tasteless, to talk sense about Lincoln. But we must try. For the holy image and the living man were very far apart, and keeping them so does no service either to Lincoln or to the art of government. Like all strong characters, he was well hated, and like most frontiersmen who have come to high office –like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson –he was ridiculed for his directness and country manners. The London Times called him ‘the Baboon.’ Lincoln had a gangling gait, a disturbing fondness for rough stories, and a maddening habit of being, in a kind of tooth-sucking way, wiser and sharper than you. (To make it worse, most of the time he was.)
Like all strong Presidents he enraged the Congress by sweeping and arbitrary acts that went, much of the time, beyond the Constitution –or in any case beyond the balance of presidential and Congressional authority that is inevitably tipped in the President’s favor in time of war. Indeed, until he was dead Lincoln was never wildly popular. When the war started he used the executive power solely –to proclaim an insurrection, declare a blockade, suspend habeas corpus, expand the army, order emergency spending –and for a year or two he had a dreadful time getting Congress to approve his conduct of the war. Congress would not ratify his acts till the summer of 1861, and it was only two years later that a Supreme Court bolstered with Lincoln appointees upheld him by the whisker of a 5 to 4 majority. Proclamations were his favorite weapon, whereby, most notoriously, he threw thousands of people into jail without trial, on suspicion of treachery or disloyalty. The debunking temptation must nonetheless be resisted. Because he was not a saint, there is no obligation to see him as a tyrant or a hypocrite. He allowed the fiercest freedom of criticism in Congress, in the press, and in public protest meetings. He handed out appointments irrespective of party or military status. He learned very quickly about war, spotted the character flaw in a likable general and fired him, and in the end picked the best. And he was so lacking in egomania that he could tell his generals that ‘when you are in the field, you are the Union.’ He had an extraordinary feel for the humanity of quite inhuman people and tolerated them long enough to get them to do what he wanted –contractors, war profiteers, wheeler-dealers, the scum of the Republic. He dignified the trade of politician like few men before or since.
By some brain chemistry that has never been explained, Lincoln transformed in middle life his whole style of speaking and writing. His early speeches are frontier-lawyer baroque, stuffed with the fustian of his time. We know that he steeped himself in the subtleties of Shakespeare, the cadences of the Bible, and the hard humanity of Robert Burns. And somehow, and conspicuously during the war, he became what he always must have been: a shrewd, honorable frontiersman of very great gifts. Not the least of these was his ability to express a hard, unsentimental truth in the barest language every tinker and tailor could understand:
I have found that when one is embarrassed, usually the shortest way to get through with it is to quit talking or thinking about it, and go at something else.
*Ihave no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
He exemplified better than any statesman until Churchill the Churchillian line: ‘The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.’
He is admired, of course, because he led the winning side. He is revered because he wrote –when the South was sure to lose –the Emancipation Proclamation. We often overlook the fact that this stirring document was intended to apply only to the Southern states, and not the slave-owning border
states; Palmerston’s verdict is still fair comment –that Lincoln undertook ‘to abolish slavery where he was without power to do so, while protecting it where he had power to destroy it.’ But the overwhelming aspect of his reputation is that he was assassinated, and so he was canonized, because a halo descends on all the murdered Presidents, and on Lincoln most of all.
@f00l I can never see Alistair Cooke without remembering the ghastly disposal of his corpse. The series, and all his work, was tremendously inspiring, and taught me more American history than I ever learned in school.
@KDemo
Yes, I own the book and still remember watching the original and beautiful series on PBS. Half the places we as adults dragged my Dad to visit when traveling, I first learned about by watching his series.
I would love to visit the rest of the places he mentioned. The Cumberland Gap - driven thru it, never stopped to explore. Los Angeles. (Been only to SF in CA). The Humboldt Sink in Nevada.
@OldCatLady
I read about the bone thief rings and saw some sample x-rays - the best I can say of that is that I hope Cooke’s family was not too traumatized by it.
@narfcake - I had completely forgotten about Chester A. Arthur (and a few others ).
That’s my first time experiencing Animaniacs and JoCo. I see why you think they’re special.
@thismyusername Today the regular postperson was on the route, so I asked her. Answer: Amazon basically owns the USPO. They require delivery of all parcels, Sundays and holidays included. On those days, USPO part-timers work to deliver Amazon items, using USPO vehicles.
@thismyusername The two are not mutually exclusive. ‘The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is much stranger than we can imagine.’ J.B.S. Haldane.
George III was the last English king to try to make a go of being a serious autocrat. Didn’t work out very well politically, at home or here. He had some virtue of self-control and kindness in his private life, but was sometimes arrogant and supercilious in his royal role, esp during the early years, tho this abated long before he lost his sanity.
His heir, the future George IV (of the Regency, the life of idle fashionable luxury and the 'ton", the illegal secret marriage to a Catholic [Maria Fitzherbert], insane personal spending, the endless mistresses, an official royal marriage to Caroline of Brunswick that made the later Charles and Diana scandals look tame by comparison, and a complete lack of personal restraint), was all for political freedom and political debate, and all for the colonies.
As Prince of Wales, the future George IV used to routinely wear the “colors of the American rebels” (buff and blue) at court, family dinners, and official functions to annoy his father George III, and was rumored to sing American patriotic songs in the wee hours of official royal parties after everyone was a bit drunk. The Prince of Wales’s Whig friends such as Charles Fox (who opposed an autocratic monarchy) also wore the “American revolutionary colors” of blue and buff in Parliament.
George III was only barely connected to the policies against which the American colonies rebelled. Those belong mostly to the Tory Prime Minister, Lord Frederick North.
After the final defeat at Yorktown, George III was so despondent that he drafted, but never submitted, his own letter of abdication:
“His Majesty with much sorrow finds he can be of no further utility to his native country, which drives him to the painful step of quitting it forever. In consequence, His Majesty resigns the Crown of Great Britain to his son and lawful successor George, Prince of Wales, whose endeavours for the prosperity of the British Empire, he hopes will prove more successful.”
John Adams, the future President, arrived in London in May, 1785 to assume the ambassadorial position, United States Minister Plenipotentiary to Britain. On the day he was presented to the King, he said this:
"Sir, The United States of America have appointed me their Minister Plenipotentiary to your Majesty . . . It is in Obedience to their express Commands that I have the Honor to assure your Majesty of their unanimous Disposition and Desire to cultivate the most friendly and liberal Intercourse between your Majesty’s Subjects and their Citizens . . . The appointment of a Minister from the United States to your Majesty’s Court, will form an Epocha in the History of England & of America. I think myself more fortunate than all my fellow Citizens in having the distinguished Honor to be the first to stand in your Majesty’s royal Presence in a diplomatic Character . . .”
George III, who had reconciled himself to the loss of the colonies, said this:
“I wish you Sir, to believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I have done nothing in the late Contest, but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do, by the Duty which I owed to my People. I will be very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the Separation, but the Separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the Friendship of the United States as an independent Power. . . let the Circumstances of Language; Religion and Blood have their natural and full Effect.”
Thanks, John Q Adams.
@thismyusername
Good ol’ Zach. Thought they might go with Millard Fillmore.
Pixilated dog is hilarious!!
The following are not offered for comparison to current persons in politics. They can stand in their own:
From Alastair Cooke’s America:
The first clash came at Concord, Massachusetts, a village beyond the Charles River west of Boston. The first ‘Provincial Congress of Massachusetts’ had met there in 1774, making it naturally suspect as a storehouse for military supplies. In April 1775 General Gage heard that the farmers of Concord had taken to stockpiling firearms in secret. He sent out seven hundred British troops to destroy the stores. They had a brush with a company of rebels at Lexington and then went on to Concord, where a force ready to meet them found itself outnumbered and retired to wait for more men from the surrounding country. The British might well have made a brisk search and gone back to Boston. But they were under the command of a young officer, newly promoted and spoiling for blood. He kept his men waiting for hours till the reinforced farmers and ‘minutemen’ (rebels sworn to be ready ‘at the minute’) were too much for them and they started a slow retreat. Their rear guard was peppered all the way back, and by the time they reached Boston they were out of ammunition and, to the astonishment of Gage, shaken and demoralized. The account of this beating was lavished with much heroic detail by the rebels and fired the populace in many colonies with the inspiring thought that ordinary American farmers could put British regulars on the run.
This sad and muddled incident would surely not have been enough to create a heroic myth, but some of the expressions of it are memorable and moving. We should not forget that for quite a time the rebels thought of themselves as Englishmen abused, and in many engagements felt an uncomfortable sympathy for the other Englishmen who had been sent over to fight them. In Ridgefield, Connecticut, there is a plaque sunk in the wall of a cemetery. It says: ‘In defense of American independence at the Battle of Ridgefield, April 27th, 1777, died Eight Patriots who were laid in this ground, Companioned by Sixteen British Soldiers, Living, their enemies, Dying, their guests.’
The British arrived as a professional army expecting, with companies of German mercenaries, to fight European set battles. Not enough of them had learned, at first or second hand, the lessons of the French and Indian Wars. The Americans were at once too shrewd and too untrained to oblige them with an Old World war. First of all, as John Adams said, the colonial population divided up into one third that took to arms, one third that was either openly or secretly loyal to the British, and one third that didn’t give a damn –not the best recipe for a disciplined national army. So against the army of British regulars there stood –besides some French volunteers, immensely valuable as professionals at the start –mainly a large, improvised force of farmers, mechanics, tradesmen, parsons, lawyers, grocers, hunters, trappers, con men, thieves, and hoodlums. ‘Never,’ their sorrowing commander was to lament when the going was bad, ‘such a rabble dignified by the name of army.’ How could they even hold off for six years, much less defeat, one of the crack armies of Europe?
For one thing, there was weaponry. The British for the most part used smooth-bore muskets that allowed a lateral error of three feet at a hundred yards range. The British infantryman was not trained to pick off single targets; he stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellows and they sprayed, shall we say, in the general direction of the enemy! The Americans had smooth-bore muskets, too, but as the war moved into the interior the British came up against the frontiersmen, who did not use guns for sport. Their very existence depended on shooting their food on the wing and saving their families by picking off Indians in night raids. They needed a weapon that was light and accurate and found it in the Pennsylvania flintlock, developed for them by German settlers in Pennsylvania who doubled the length of the barrel and grooved it to make the bullet spin and stay on line. (From this rifling of the barrel comes the word ‘rifle.’) It could not, however, be fixed with a bayonet.
But at long range, this weapon did bloody damage to shoulder-to-shoulder infantry. A Pennsylvania Tory who had seen it at work wrote a letter to a London newspaper offering rather chill advice: ‘This province has raised a thousand riflemen, the worst of whom will put a rifle ball into a man’s head at a hundred and fifty or two hundred yards. Therefore, advise your officers who shall hereafter come out to America to settle their affairs in England before their departure.’ This reputation for sharpshooting was magnified in England into a witch’s curse, and there were some lively desertions among men drafted for service in the Colonies. It is, on the whole, an all-too-true American myth: that legendary reputation for spotting the bull’s eye which began with the embattled farmers and was sustained down the next century and a half by Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, and Sergeant York. It is a romantic tradition that dies hard, and there is a lucrative industry in suggesting to sportsmen and country boys –and, unfortunately, to malcontents and psychotics also –that whether or not you are a fast man with a buck, you too can be a fast man on the draw.
A British commander sent home a short report that was read in the House of Commons. The gist of it was: ‘The Americans will not stand and fight.’ They were jack-in-the-box guerrillas who would fight like devils for a day and a night and then go home and harvest their crops on the weekend. They would return, not always in any discernible formation, and after a swift onslaught vanish into the country by night, and then again at some unpredictable time come whizzing in like hornets. What baffled and eventually broke the British was what broke the Roman armies in their late campaigns against the barbarians, and for so long frustrated the American army in Vietnam. Edward Gibbon said it in a single passage: ‘All things became adverse to the Romans … their armour heavy, the waters deep; nor could they wield, in that uneasy situation, their weighty javelins. The barbarians, on the contrary, were enured to encounters in the bogs.’ Or as William Pitt sadly commented, looking at his drawn battle-lines on an alien wilderness: ‘You cannot conquer a map.’
There is a further, and less dramatic, explanation for the colonists’ survival and victory. It was the consequence of one of the most perceptive deals in American history. When the war began it was fought for a time mainly in Massachusetts and the bordering North. It didn’t take the men of Massachusetts long to know it and resent it. If it was to be a continental war, the South too would have to be visibly engaged. Virginia was rich and Massachusetts was chronically short of the money for arms and supplies (like the other colonies, it never managed to pay the soldiers for long). John Adams had the notion that if a continental commander could be appointed, and he was a Virginian, then the North and the South and the Middle Colonies would have a palpable, breathing symbol of a common cause. A good deal would depend, of course, on the chosen man. Adams used his great influence with the wartime Congress now formed, first to push the idea of a continental command and then to see that it went to the man of his choice.
He was that same officer who had heard ‘the bullets whistle’ in the first brush of the French and Indian Wars: George Washington, the son of a father who had gone to school in England and had several large Virginia estates. Left fatherless at the age of eleven, the boy was shunted between two half brothers and picked up a little irregular schooling in the intervals of learning how to raise tobacco and stock and manage a plantation. He took to surveying in boyhood and decided that it was to be his profession, one that in those days sent a man roving for weeks on end, improvising his sleeping quarters, shooting wild turkey and chewing it on the bone. In the French and Indian Wars, he had suffered the horrors of Braddock’s rout. He had horses shot from under him and went home to Virginia with a local reputation for being at all times unflappable. Then his health failed him, and he resigned his commission.
At the age of twenty-seven he married a very rich widow and settled on a majestic stretch of land at Mount Vernon, overlooking the Potomac. His wife had brought him the pleasant dowry of some profitable real estate, fifteen thousand acres near Williamsburg –what by today’s exchange would be about a quarter of a million dollars –and one hundred and fifty slaves, whose condition, he confessed, embarrassed him. But he was an eighteenth-century man, and ‘emancipation’ was a remote and strange doctrine. He assumed he would live out his days as a rich Virginia planter, but then, at the age of forty-three, he received the call.
I suspect most Americans would today be put off by his air of a prosperous landowner and real-estate operator in the guise of a rather down-the-nose British colonel. His most idolatrous biographers have been unable to find much evidence of charm, or even jollity, in him. He was imperious, massively self-sufficient, and he had decided ideas about the relations of rank and rank, class and class. He did not, for instance, like to be touched, and when he became the first President he laid down a rule that people coming to see him should remain standing in his presence. He arrived for his inauguration with a flourish of outriders and he shook no hands. Thomas Jefferson was greatly offended by the color and pomp of this ceremony and thought it ‘not at all in character with the simplicity of republican governments, and looking –as if wishfully –to those of European courts.’ As he took the oath, a bystanding Senator whispered to his neighbor: ‘I fear we may have exchanged George the Third for George the First.’
(Cont)
@f00l Holy crap. I am renaming you Thread Killa!
@f00l
Yet there were several things about him that made him the unquestioned leader of the new nation. A pervasive sense of responsibility, an unflagging impression of shrewd judgment, and total integrity. It can best be summed up in what the drama critics call ‘presence.’ But it was nothing rehearsed. It was the presence of nothing but character.
The war was only eighteen months old when it seemed that all was lost. The British captured Philadelphia, and many of the Congress took to the mountains. They were a frightened and divided body of men –divided between genuine revolutionaries and sunshine patriots, between dedicated colonial statesmen and secret Loyalists, and a clutter of money grubbers selling arms or commissions, or merchants whose anxious interest was to see that Spain got the lands beyond the Appalachians so that trade would not go West. The word got to a delirious London that Washington was trapped in a frigid valley, and that the war was over. The first part was correct –but not the second.
In the bleakest winter, of 1777–1778, Washington was camped in Valley Forge, about twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. He picked it for obvious military advantages. It lay between a creek and a broad river, and the hills were high enough to survey the main supply routes from the South into New England and the roads from Philadelphia that led to the gunneries and powder mills of the interior. He refused to go inland and leave the fertile Pennsylvania farming country as a granary for the enemy. He refused also to commandeer the villages, which hadn’t enough food for the swarms of refugees from Philadelphia. So he chose this bare place, and his eleven thousand men built their tents with timber from the neighboring woods.
In the beginning life was bearable, even agreeable. The men were snug in their new huts, the generalissimo moved into a solid farmhouse. Mrs Washington came to stay, so did some of the officers’ wives. There were cheerful dinner parties and no lack of food and wine. But the party was short-lived. The winter snows came early, and by January there were oceans of mud. Congress wouldn’t, or couldn’t, commission supplies and told Washington to plunder the nearest farmers, which he refused to do. When the main stores ran low, the men started to forage for hickory nuts and the more edible local fauna. By March –when the countryside was blasted by blizzards –a third of them were down with typhus or smallpox and, of course, dysentery. Medical services barely existed, and the besieged army began to thin out alarmingly, if not from disease and actual starvation, then from desertion. Half of the living had neither shoes nor shirts. In the end, Washington was left with something over three thousand men, technically able-bodied, actually half starving. To this implacable man the ordeal was grim but quite simple. Being an eighteenth-century gentleman-soldier with a puritan core meant that when the chips were down all the agreeable things of life –parties, good food, comfort, professional dignity –were baubles. The winds whistled and the food gave out and the fields stank with death and Washington’s life simplified itself into one hard principle –duty.He had given his word that he would hold on with his army, however sick and bedraggled it might be, and he proceeded to do so. The spring came in and epidemic sickness flourished. But then the French formally entered the war and poured in men, money, arms, and supplies. They lined up with Washington’s ragged survivors and, to put it simply, the Revolution held. It was not won for another four years, and the third year was the darkest of all –but the obdurate, placid commander stuck it out.
When he died he was not yet a legend. To many of the revolutionary leaders the memory of him was of a man indomitable in war. But to others, to some of the governors, and the press, he was insufferable in peace: for signing a treaty that called for payment of all pre-revolutionary debts; for confirming the restrictions on New England’s trade with the West Indies; for silencing his enemies in the press with public prosecutions; and for many other real and fancied iniquities. And when he left the Presidency the Philadelphia Aurora editorialized: ‘If ever there was a period for rejoicing, it is this moment.’
But by now Washington towers over the generations of notable Americans as Shakespeare towers over the literature of England. About every thirty years some debunker starts to chip away at this monolith. He is rumored to have padded his army expense accounts. He is suddenly redrawn as ‘a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, an exploiter of mines and timber.’ However, as Calvin Coolidge once said, wheeling his chair around and looking up at the Washington Monument: ‘He’s still there.’ So he is.
When the war was won, there must have been a deal of guilt in the fawning respect that important men, Congressmen in particular, showed toward him in public. They had quit and he had stayed. Perhaps only another soldier, and that the greatest, could truly gauge the fortitude it took to weather the military extremity of the bad years. At any rate, when Washington died and the word got to Europe, Napoleon himself was seen to bow his head. In the English Channel, the British fleet fired a salute of twenty guns.
@mfladd
Worth the reading.
@f00l - Wow, you completed the thread in one fell swoop! You saved so much time. Thanks so much!!!
@f00l - I agree, it’s just going to take a little to get through it. Worth reflecting on the holiday.
@KDemo LOLOL
@KDemo
Was thinking about doing similar right after midnight. Happy the thread is perhaps more diverse that I had thought of. That’s good.
@f00l - Okay, finished reading and I am richer for it. Thank you.
When men were men indeed. How have we lost so much humanity?
@KDemo
They had some notion of “honor” and the best ideals of the Enlightenment and John Locke.
And they understood how to survive in the wilderness.
Practical, honorable idealists.
@f00l - It did start on a somewhat lighter note. Works both ways, I hope.
@f00l -
Perfect.
@f00l You might be interested in reading The Glorious Cause, both the one by Robert Middlekauff (Pulitzer finalist) AND the ‘novelization’ by Jeff Shaara (in the vein of Gods and Generals). Both reinforce Washington’s personality as described above.
@compunaut
Turns out I own that on both Kindle and Audible I think AMZ ran it as a Kindle DOTD sometime back in 2014. Never read tho. So thx. Dling to Audible client at this moment.
When I was a teenager and in my 20’s I thought history was a big bore. Now that I have some appreciation of how hard it was to get from there to here by any path, I love reading history.
Another president
From Alistair Cooke’s America
It is difficult, and in some quarters thought to be almost tasteless, to talk sense about Lincoln. But we must try. For the holy image and the living man were very far apart, and keeping them so does no service either to Lincoln or to the art of government. Like all strong characters, he was well hated, and like most frontiersmen who have come to high office –like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson –he was ridiculed for his directness and country manners. The London Times called him ‘the Baboon.’ Lincoln had a gangling gait, a disturbing fondness for rough stories, and a maddening habit of being, in a kind of tooth-sucking way, wiser and sharper than you. (To make it worse, most of the time he was.)
Like all strong Presidents he enraged the Congress by sweeping and arbitrary acts that went, much of the time, beyond the Constitution –or in any case beyond the balance of presidential and Congressional authority that is inevitably tipped in the President’s favor in time of war. Indeed, until he was dead Lincoln was never wildly popular. When the war started he used the executive power solely –to proclaim an insurrection, declare a blockade, suspend habeas corpus, expand the army, order emergency spending –and for a year or two he had a dreadful time getting Congress to approve his conduct of the war. Congress would not ratify his acts till the summer of 1861, and it was only two years later that a Supreme Court bolstered with Lincoln appointees upheld him by the whisker of a 5 to 4 majority. Proclamations were his favorite weapon, whereby, most notoriously, he threw thousands of people into jail without trial, on suspicion of treachery or disloyalty. The debunking temptation must nonetheless be resisted. Because he was not a saint, there is no obligation to see him as a tyrant or a hypocrite. He allowed the fiercest freedom of criticism in Congress, in the press, and in public protest meetings. He handed out appointments irrespective of party or military status. He learned very quickly about war, spotted the character flaw in a likable general and fired him, and in the end picked the best. And he was so lacking in egomania that he could tell his generals that ‘when you are in the field, you are the Union.’ He had an extraordinary feel for the humanity of quite inhuman people and tolerated them long enough to get them to do what he wanted –contractors, war profiteers, wheeler-dealers, the scum of the Republic. He dignified the trade of politician like few men before or since.
By some brain chemistry that has never been explained, Lincoln transformed in middle life his whole style of speaking and writing. His early speeches are frontier-lawyer baroque, stuffed with the fustian of his time. We know that he steeped himself in the subtleties of Shakespeare, the cadences of the Bible, and the hard humanity of Robert Burns. And somehow, and conspicuously during the war, he became what he always must have been: a shrewd, honorable frontiersman of very great gifts. Not the least of these was his ability to express a hard, unsentimental truth in the barest language every tinker and tailor could understand:
I have found that when one is embarrassed, usually the shortest way to get through with it is to quit talking or thinking about it, and go at something else.
*Ihave no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
He exemplified better than any statesman until Churchill the Churchillian line: ‘The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.’
He is admired, of course, because he led the winning side. He is revered because he wrote –when the South was sure to lose –the Emancipation Proclamation. We often overlook the fact that this stirring document was intended to apply only to the Southern states, and not the slave-owning border
states; Palmerston’s verdict is still fair comment –that Lincoln undertook ‘to abolish slavery where he was without power to do so, while protecting it where he had power to destroy it.’ But the overwhelming aspect of his reputation is that he was assassinated, and so he was canonized, because a halo descends on all the murdered Presidents, and on Lincoln most of all.
@f00l
The book:
https://www.amazon.com/Alistair-Cookes-America-Cooke/dp/0465018823
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_Cooke’s_America
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51VMDxs1byL.SY344_BO1,204,203,200.jpg
The TV series:
https://www.amazon.com/Alistair-Cookes-America-Episodes-Discs/dp/B00CLIUB6C/ref=sr_1_16?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1487565971&sr=1-16&keywords=Alistair+Cooke
The thirteen part TV series is worth the watching. Can be difficult to track down, but public libraries out to have copies.
The DVDs can be rented from Netflix.
@f00l
Apologizes
if I overwhelmed the thread.
@f00l - I own this book.
@f00l I can never see Alistair Cooke without remembering the ghastly disposal of his corpse. The series, and all his work, was tremendously inspiring, and taught me more American history than I ever learned in school.
@KDemo
Yes, I own the book and still remember watching the original and beautiful series on PBS. Half the places we as adults dragged my Dad to visit when traveling, I first learned about by watching his series.
I would love to visit the rest of the places he mentioned. The Cumberland Gap - driven thru it, never stopped to explore. Los Angeles. (Been only to SF in CA). The Humboldt Sink in Nevada.
@OldCatLady
I read about the bone thief rings and saw some sample x-rays - the best I can say of that is that I hope Cooke’s family was not too traumatized by it.
I may have snorted when I saw that.
/youtube Animaniacs Presidents
/youtube JoCo Presidents
@narfcake - I had completely forgotten about Chester A. Arthur (and a few others
).
That’s my first time experiencing Animaniacs and JoCo. I see why you think they’re special.
Another interesting documentary.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tv-funhouse-x-presidents/n11200?snl=1
@mike808 - Flashback! Thanks for that.
U.S. Grant had the right point of view.
Got up this AM in a usual Monday morning stupor.
Drove to the bank.
Guess what.
I blame the Presidents.
@f00l USPO, however, was operating.
@OldCatLady not here… you have a fancy one!
@thismyusername And yet the local post office was open, and mail got delivered- I got some, from a real USPO truck and all. No idea why.
@OldCatLady click here for appropriate theme music
@thismyusername Today the regular postperson was on the route, so I asked her. Answer: Amazon basically owns the USPO. They require delivery of all parcels, Sundays and holidays included. On those days, USPO part-timers work to deliver Amazon items, using USPO vehicles.
@OldCatLady I suspected it was priority mail express (what amazon uses)… but it was much cooler to think you were in the twilight zone
@thismyusername The two are not mutually exclusive. ‘The world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is much stranger than we can imagine.’ J.B.S. Haldane.
Once and future kings.
George III was the last English king to try to make a go of being a serious autocrat. Didn’t work out very well politically, at home or here. He had some virtue of self-control and kindness in his private life, but was sometimes arrogant and supercilious in his royal role, esp during the early years, tho this abated long before he lost his sanity.
His heir, the future George IV (of the Regency, the life of idle fashionable luxury and the 'ton", the illegal secret marriage to a Catholic [Maria Fitzherbert], insane personal spending, the endless mistresses, an official royal marriage to Caroline of Brunswick that made the later Charles and Diana scandals look tame by comparison, and a complete lack of personal restraint), was all for political freedom and political debate, and all for the colonies.
As Prince of Wales, the future George IV used to routinely wear the “colors of the American rebels” (buff and blue) at court, family dinners, and official functions to annoy his father George III, and was rumored to sing American patriotic songs in the wee hours of official royal parties after everyone was a bit drunk. The Prince of Wales’s Whig friends such as Charles Fox (who opposed an autocratic monarchy) also wore the “American revolutionary colors” of blue and buff in Parliament.
George III was only barely connected to the policies against which the American colonies rebelled. Those belong mostly to the Tory Prime Minister, Lord Frederick North.
After the final defeat at Yorktown, George III was so despondent that he drafted, but never submitted, his own letter of abdication:
John Adams, the future President, arrived in London in May, 1785 to assume the ambassadorial position, United States Minister Plenipotentiary to Britain. On the day he was presented to the King, he said this:
George III, who had reconciled himself to the loss of the colonies, said this:
Sir Mix-a-lot was once president?
excellent reading. You’ve given me something to find. Thanks.