Founders

When we pause once a year to remember 1776, we invoke the names of wise aristocrats, learned in political theory -- Jefferson, Adams, Madison. Or we toast the likes of Franklin, Hancock, Washington; practical men of business and wealth who set the country running.

The historian Gordon Wood has pointed out how this remarkable oligarchy created a nation where, whether they knew it or not, the power would pass down after them in such a way that men like them would rarely if ever rise to rule. And they have not, and we marvel, today, at why such an American generation has not come again.

But they were not the whole revolution. The people -- at least the third or so among them who supported the idea -- made the revolution. This is as much their day as Jefferson's. Their political theory may have been wanting, their views on race certainly were deplorable by modern standards, but neither were they sitting passively at home in June 1776 while the great minds pared Tom's prose in Philadelphia. If they did not hear the Declaration read aloud that day, it was because they were too busy, about and doing.

Every July 4 I make a silent toast to one cluster of them, in the county just west of Philadelphia. I'll share them with you this year. They are a knot of families named Hannum, Gibbons, Harper, Cheyney, and Vernon that I once untangled in the course of researching a book.

There was so little of them left; not enough material to make a book of its own, Perhaps just enough for a long blog post. The moths have eaten the rest, if it ever was written down, and what's left mostly are a few family stories that break through the silence like a glimpse of landscape on a fog-bound day.

This was barren soil to sow a revolution. It was a Quaker county, but the ranting religious immigrant families long had settled into a conservative hierarchy fond of the king. The Revolution's few friends arose among the families that had been read out of the Quaker meetings for being too obstreperous and witty, for playing fiddles or arguing about theology like the Scots-Irish men they tended to marry.

They had known from birth what it means to live true to yourself in a monolithic culture that held other principles. They had found each other, and woven their families together in two or three generations of marriage.

* * *

Persifor Frazer and Polly Taylor married in 1766 and lived a decade later with their four young children on a farm in a hilly district a few miles from a lazy creek called the Brandywine. The land had come through her family, but it was Persifor who farmed it and who mixed in local politics, in the perpetual minority party in the county, headed by Anthony Wayne, that resisted a growning Crown power.

When Pennsylvania formed its troops for the Continental Army in early 1776, Frazer was elected captain of a company in the Fourth Battalion, which had Wayne for its colonel. He already was in uniform when the Declaration was signed.

The war came home for these people on Sept. 11, 1777, when the British marched up from Delaware bound for Philadelphia, and George Washington tried to stop them at the Brandywine. "September 11th" always was Brandywine day when I was growing up there, and Chris Sanderson the old fiddler came to our elementary school and told the stories. I suppose that's changed now.

The little Frazer girls were at school in Thornbury that day. They heard the gunshots and cannon firing on the hot fall day. Sally, the oldest, was 8 then. The teacher went out and listened for a while, then returned and said, "There is a battle not far off, children; you may go home."

"As we returned, we met our mother on horseback," Sally wrote years later, "going over towards the place of action, knowing that ... our father must be in the midst of the affray."

The Americans held the river crossing, but the British pulled off a daring move and, relying on loyalist guides to take them over the up-stream fords, dropped a third of their army on Washington's right and caved in the rebels' flank. Washington had had confused reports all day from this quarter, some saying the British had a force headed in that direction. But the most authoritative reports from his officers reported no enemy in front of them.

At one point a local farmer, one of the Cheyneys in the extended clan, rode in and insisted a large redcoat attack loomed on the right. Washington took the reports of his own officers, naturally, as more reliable than that of a local farmer, but Cheyney broke into an impassioned insistence: "If you doubt my word, put me under guard until you can ask Anthony Wayne or Persie Frazer if I am a man to be believed." Then he turned on the staff officers, who perhaps hads been snickering at the clodhopper, and fulminated, "I would have you know that I have this day's work as much at heart as e'er a blood of you."

The names of Frazer and Wayne evidently moved Washington to send reinforcements to his right, just in case. Washington knew the value of such men, though they lacked the polish of staff officers. The reinforcements arrived in time to help hold off the heavy British attack, which did come after all, long enough for most of Washington's army to escape the trap.

* * *

The British moved on after them, but they took time to smoke out the rebels they knew lived in the neighborhood. History books may have forgotten their names, but the British army knew them. And they knew there was a chance they could catch the troublemakers at home, or at least harrass their families.

Two days after the battle, a British detachment showed up at Frazer's home. Polly Frazer, hearing the approaching hoofbeats, chased her children, along with an aged aunt, some servants, and a wounded American soldier, into the woods and stayed to face the British alone.

A British officer confronted her: "Where are the damned Rebels?'' She told him there were none about. He cursed her, while soldiers pushed into the house and stripped the barn, looking for stores of weapons, and incidentally taking as plunder anything that could be sold or eaten. They carried off the family's wheat stores and its horses.

The British officer in charge then tried a more logical approach with Polly Frazer. He told her how American military leaders who joined the British were well rewarded for their loyalty. No doubt Polly knew it was true, but she laughed him off.

"You do not know Colonel Frazer," she said, "or you would not suggest such a thing, nor would he listen to me were I to propose it." Furthermore, she said, if her husband did take sides with the British, she would "never consent to have anything more to do with him."

Before they left, the officer told Polly he had orders to arrest Frazer and burn the house and barn. "But," he said, in a generous gesture, "I give them to you."

Polly didn't buy it. "I cannot thank you, sir, for what is my own, and if you had such orders you would not dare to disobey them."

* * *

After the American defeat Frazer had been sent out to scout the local roads to watch the movements of the main British army and report them to Wayne. In fact, he had left his farm just a few hours before the British arrived.

He was captured spying two days later and sent to the notorious Walnut Street prison in Philadelphia. There, contrary to British military regulations, the provost, a loyalist horse-breaker named Cunningham whose name once was despised and feared, kept the prisoners in misery, torment, and starvation.

Cunningham and his immediate superior made sure word of conditions in the prison never reached higher authorities. But Polly Frazer and Jane Gibbons arranged to smuggle out a letter written by the prisoners. They visited their husbands with permission from the authorities. While they were leaving, the provost ordered them searched. Polly meekly submitted, while Jane raised a royal row about it and tried to flee. The guards grabbed her and Tory women were brought in to subject her to a scrupulous strip search.

The unoffending Polly got out with a cursory examination, but it was she who had the prisoners' letter in her petticoat, along with a sample of the mouldy bread they were fed. They left the city and dashed up to Washington at Valley Forge, who appealed to Howe's sense of military honor with the result that conditions in the prison improved.

* * *

Persie and Polly are buried in the old graveyard at Middletown Presbyterian Church. Their house was abandoned after a fire gutted it in 1926. A chimney and a wall are all that remain. I can't even find a picture of them to break up the text of this long story.

Below the pantheon of the Founders were the practical operators like Anthony Wayne, who also tend to get into the history books in a few places. But below them were the Frazers and thousands like them. And below them still were a class of young families who didn't even own land and whose very names are too smudged to read on the muster rolls anymore, but who pitched into the cause such fortunes as they had, along with their lives and sacred honor. Never forget that had "this day's work as much at heart as e'er a blood of you."

Public Virtue

After the Revolution, Americans were republicans but they did not agree on what a republic looked like. The political philosophies came in a thousand exceptions, shades, and hybrids, but away from the center stood two powerful poles, which have been described as the "classical/puritan" model of republicanism and the "modern/agrarian" model.

That they tended to have their bases in different ends of the new nation, the first in New England and the second in the South, is no accident. This touches on the image of Roundhead New England vs. Celtic South. It's an overworked cliche, but there's an element of truth in any idea around long enough to be a cliche.

Different strains of republicanism flourished in between -- in Dutch New York and Quaker Jersey and Pennsylvania. And they played important roles in the young nation. But the two poles of republicanism remain solid anchors in our national life, and it is impossible to understand America's maddening contradictions without reference to them.

As Americans set up their infant republic, one of the images foremost in their minds was how republics die. All the classical republics, then knew, had come to an end in anarchy and then tyranny. Classical and modern writers had taken up the theme of the death of a republic so often and so minutely that by the 18th century the process could be described in almost clinical medical terms. The learned men knew it from their classical educations, and the common people knew it from the popular plays of the day, such as "Julius Caesar" and Addison's "Cato" (which Washington had performed for the troops at Valley Forge, notwithstanding a Congressional ban on theaters).

[The influence of theater on Revolutionary-era politics probably was enormous, and I don't know if anyone has studied it properly. Otway's "Venice Preserved," for example, was one reason Venice was not brought up among the model republics when America's Founders were doing their work. How different the country might have been without that now-forgotten play.]

The vital principle in keeping a republic alive was public virtue. This was virtue in the classical, not the Christian, definition. The Christian, seeking to be not of this world in Roman times, turned pagan virtue on its head.

Classical virtue was not in the least bit meek, but it strove to be first in doing good for one's country and coveted the glory that comes with unrelenting devotion to the good of the people. It expressed itself in endurance, industry, frugality, and probity -- many of which were consistent with Christianity. Gertrude Himmelfarb has ably condensed the classical idea of virtue as "the will and capacity to put the public interest over the private."

This was the pulse and ichor of a republic. Washington said it plainly in his Farewell Address, "It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government." His successor, John Adams, wrote, "There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real liberty."

It was perfectly obvious to the Founders that public virtue could be the province of free men only. One who was bound by debt or loyalty to other men was not free to give himself totally to the good of the public. That accounts for the Founders' general horror of debts, banks, lenders, and mortgages. It accounts for why many states required voters or office-holders to be men of a certain income or property. This was at heart a republican, not an aristocratic, principle.

But North and South diverged on how best to keep the tree of public virtue well-watered and flowering. The puritan republicans upheld personal morality as the solution: A virtuous people could not help but be a virtuous republic. Agrarians looked to the structure of a limited government and to an ordered, hierarchic society to keep the republic healthy.

The puritan approach led to the dense volumes of blue laws in the New England states. Literally everything under the sun was considered in light of whether it might weaken the republic, and thus everything was properly subject to regulation or proscription. The result, in the extreme, was a totalitarian liberty: One was free to do anything, so long as it was not against the best interest of all.

John Adams was the perfect embodiment of this republican philosophy. Moral to the point of austerity, he railed against "vanities, levities, and fopperies." Of his children, he wrote with pride, "They shall live upon thin Diet, wear mean Cloaths, and work hard, with Chearfull Hearts and free Spirits." At least one Pennsylvanian, surveying the New England society, was reminded of the Spartans, who, the Athenian Alcibiades remarked, were so fearless in battle because death "is a welcome relief to them from such a life as they are obliged to lead."

All of which makes a stark contrast to the indolence, passion, and leisure ethic of the Southerners. Historians' views of the political philosophy of the South during the Revolution tend to miss the mark because the writers are dazzled by the twin stars of Jefferson and Madison. The two friends had a potent impact on America, but, as Southern men, they were exotics.

A more typically Southern view of the republican problem is represented by John Taylor of Caroline, who wrote, "The more a nation depends for its liberty on the qualities of individuals, the less likely it is to retain it. By expecting publick good from private virtue, we expose ourselves to publick evils from private vices."

It was a frank repudiation of the puritan model. But it was not original to him. Like the puritans, the agrarians had a battery of writers at their fingertips, such as Bolingbroke and the authors who published under the title "Cato's Letters."

To them, the ownership of property, unencumbered by debt, was the rock foundation of republican independence, virtue, and liberty. New Englanders believed in this, too, but the Southerners made it a dogma.

This led them to see the hierarchy which already existed among them as a bulwark of the republic: In their vision, the masses of slaves did the labor, and the citizens -- by definition free white males -- thus stood on a republican equality. As DeBow wrote, "No white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform the menial services of his household. ... He is a companion and an equal."

At least ideally, and socially. But there was a class of men at the top of the social order whose plantations gave them such independence and leisure that they could devote themselves wholly to public virtue, without regard for keeping food on the table. John C. Calhoun was the epitome of such a man. One reason Southerners so dominated the republic in its early generations was that the leading Northern men in Congress frequently had to drop government business or retire from office for a time and go home to make money or plow their fields. The Southern senators did not.

As odious as much of the old South is to modern attitudes, it had the approval of history. The Spartan, Athenian, and Roman republics -- the principal examples available to the Founders -- all were built on essentially the same social and economic model, with a mass of slaves at the bottom.

Indeed, the very fact of slavery among them made the Southern men more zealous about protecting liberty. Edmund Burke, looking to the Southern colonies, guessed it right in 1775, answering the question that puzzled so many Englishmen: Why the love of liberty was so strong among those who held slaves.

Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude; liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal.

If the paradox of the North was totalitarian liberty, the paradox of the South was aristocratic liberty.

As in the Athenian democracy, the people were to be consulted directly only upon the most dangerous and important questions -- such as secession. South Carolina still chose its presidential electors in the state government in 1860.

Rigorous private moral virtue was not necessary in the agrarian republican model -- and was little esteemed among men in the South. Instead, jealousy of power and careful attention to governance would keep the flame of public virtue alive. Govern well, put men of pure virtues and total leisure in power, guard against demagogues and tyrants, and live as well as you please.

Instead of the New England ideal of a government that put its thumb down on every amusement and vice, the Southerners favored a minimal government on every level, with few restrictions and coercions.

Now, think of America today, and do you not sense both those forms of republicanism -- Adams and Taylor -- twisted into our national sinews? They come up convoluted sometimes -- how is it that the very liberal modern idea of a right to privacy would be more appealing to a Southern slaveholder of 1776 than to a free farmer of Massachusetts? Which one would find it more essential to national survival to constitutionally ban gay marriage?

The Civil War upended and destroyed the South's social order, which was the basis of its political order. The Southern culture was subsumed into a Yankee-built national political regime to which it was temperamentally ill-suited. Might this not explain some of the role of the South in modern American politics?

Or this: Parisians used to say that Paris was the France of France. Texas, settled out of the hill country of Georgia and Alabama, by the most distilled and purified of the Southern whites, was the South of the South.

But what's missing, what I always miss when I lay the present atop the past and look at my country, is public virtue. I think the Founders, if they could urge on us one book every American should read in his education, would choose Plutarch's "Lives." I once wanted to do a version of it that could be easily read on a 6th grade level.

All Hail Me

So last week I promised the boss I'd write an editorial for Ben Franklin's 300th birthday to run Thursday. I looked at the schedule and saw I was due for a light workload day today, and I figured I'd research it and pull it together today.

Then I come in to work today and discover that the city editor's mother is ill and he's flown off to Chicago to be at her bedside, and I've been plugged into the slot in his place. Which means that from about 5;30 p.m., I'll be entirely occupied in getting the local section together.

So in the space of about 20 minutes I have available, I cobble together this Ben Franklin piece. Not bad, if I do say so:

"The History of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other," John Adams grumbled in 1790. "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electric rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington."

Adams usually was most right when he was most grumpy. This week, on his 300th birthday, Ben Franklin seems more alive than ever. Franklin & Marshall College has been bringing Franklin to life locally in a multitude of ways that never would work for John Marshall.

Franklin was the oldest of the major Founders, but he remains the most modern, the most accessible. He was the one without a powdered wig, the one often painted with a sly smile on his lips that suggests a very clever dirty joke has just popped into his head.

His lightning rod is still the standard design, and he foreshadowed the sound byte with his pithy maxims in "Poor Richard's Almanac." Franklin was a generous public philanthropist — as well as a relentless nepotist. He was the American Paris loved, and he loved it in return, or at least the female half of it.

If George Washington was young America's model of nobility and self-sacrifice, Franklin was its living embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, and the dream of the self-made man. The first "Poor Richard's Almanac," in 1733 when Washington still was in diapers, addressed the reader:

I might in this place attempt to gain thy Favour, by declaring that I write Almanacks with no other View than that of the publick Good; but in this I should not be sincere; and Men are now a-days too wise to be deceiv'd by Pretences how specious soever.

It was another New Englander, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who noticed Poor Richard's proverbs were "all about getting money or saving it." It was modern historians who noted the amount of material in them that was plagiarized.

He was the original spin doctor and self-promoter. Voltaire had praised to the skies the Pennsylvania Quakers and their system of government; did the Parisians mistake Franklin, the agnostic son of Puritan Boston, for a Philadelphia Quaker? Very well, he would let them, since it redounded to his praise. In fact, he even gave the false image a little polish from time to time.

Yet when the Revolution broke, Franklin had headed the Pennsylvania junta government that coldly swept the Quakers out of power and property, and whose dictatorial reach horrified the more thoughtful political men among the Founders.

In our self-deception, we believe only Virginians were tainted by slavery, but Franklin bought, sold and advertised slaves all through his life, despite a late-in-life, and perhaps halfhearted, lending of his name to the abolition movement.

It is impossible to praise one of his virtues without discovering a matching vice on the flip side. And in this, too, is he not like us? Moreso than the marble figures we imagine the other Founders to be?

Between the two, George's noblesse oblige and Ben's acquisitiveness, Franklin's model has been more of a success with us. When we celebrate him, we celebrate us.

Religion and Democracy

My country is torturing itself with a feud over religion. I feel sorrow for my Christian friends who again must suffer the spectacle of their Christian god being evicted from the government institutions of the United States. This time, again, the battle is over the Pledge of Allegiance as recited in the public schools.

Though not a Christian in any sense, I neither mock the faith nor regard it as irrelevant in the modern age. Rather, I appreciate its central and necessary function in American democracy.

And stop and think, fellow free-thinkers and pagans and non-Christians: Would you replace the mosaic of American Christianity with another faith? Which one? Where would you find one more inclined to steer its adherents toward public virtue, love of humankind, humility, tolerance, optimism, and non-violence?

Like the liberal Founders, who did not practice the Christian faith or believe in its theology, I would do nothing to discourage the American people from their Christianity. Even Jefferson, the deist/Unitarian who so riled the pious Christians of his day, understood this. One Sunday morning, as president, he was walking to church service, prayer book in hand, when a friend accosted him and said, "You going to church Mr. J. You do not believe a word in it." [Americans were more familiar with their presidents then].

Jefferson replied, "no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir."

(Of course, he never denied that he didn't believe a word of it.)

George Washington, the practical plantation-manager among the learned Founders, often spoke about the political importance of religion. He did so in his "Farewell Address" (based on a draft by Hamilton), where he named it along with education and public credit as things productive of "public felicity." He was not talking about government-sponsored religion. He was talking about the people and their faiths. Plural. When it came to the government, Washington was no less a separationist than Madison and Jefferson. He had had first-hand experience with the problem -- or rather the twin problems -- of the people failing to accommodate one another's beliefs and the government's heavy-handed impositions.

As commander in chief during the Revolution, Washington outlawed New England regiments' "Pope's Day" buffoonery because it offended his Catholic soldiers. Politically correct? He had a war to win and he needed everyone. In 1777 he opposed a congressional plan to appoint brigade chaplains in the Continental Army. "Among many other weighty objections to the Measure," he wrote to John Hancock (then president of Congress), "it has been suggested, that it has a tendency to introduce religious disputes into the Army, which above all things should be avoided, and in many instances would compel men to a mode of Worship which they do not profess."

America could survive without its Pledge of Allegiance, without its flag, without its public schools. But not without its public virtues, which are driven by its religious sensibilities. Madison used to say that such things could be superfluous to a "nation of philosophers" who were motivated by "the voice of an enlightened reason." Nobody in Philadelphia in 1787 had any illusion that they were living in such a nation. All they had to do was walk a few blocks up to Market Street for evidence.

This concept of virtue was crucially important, and the Founders wrote of it often. But they defined it differently than we do. To them, it didn't mean not drinking too much or sleeping around (though certainly they'd discourage these things), but, as their favorite political writer, Montesquieu, put it, virtue in a republic means "the love of the laws of our country" and "a constant preference of public to private interest."

Just one example: When my wife and I recently went looking for a place to donate our mite to help hurricane survivors in the Gulf, we pretty much knew it was going to be a church charity of some sort. A pagan/freethinking household, we never set foot in a church except as tourists. We ended up giving mostly to the Mennonites. [You can be sure they're not going to go out and blow half of it on Hummers and martini lunches for their executives.] This didn't bother us at all. Maybe someday there'll be an Agnostic World Disaster Relief Fund. Maybe.

But God does not belong in government itself. Rather, religion serves as the counterbalance to the popular liberties the government protects and is forbidden to touch. And it serves as a counterbalance to the competitive essence of our social system.

DeTocqueville, as usual, hit the nail on the head:

At the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything.

Why did the Founders omit it from the Constitution? Because they believed it to be rooted in man's nature, and to be flourishing in the American people. They did not have to build religion into the Constitution any more than they had to build Independence Hall before they met in it.

Because it is no business of government to promote God. True faith has wellsprings in the home. The Scandinavian nations all have official, government-supported churches. And the citizens there are among the most secular in the world. The religions that received the most governmental support in early America -- the Church of England in Virginia and the Congregational church in New England -- are among the least flourishing in the country today. The Amish, among whom I live, are people of deep piety; they run their own school system, according to their own model. And they do not teach anything about religion and God in the classroom. That is the job of the parents and the preachers.

And to the Enlightenment sensibilities of the Founders, to make religion the direct object of government "would be counterproductive, undermining the natural impulses that gave birth to them and kept them alive" [Gertrude Himmelfarb] .To put all in one place -- the government and the religion, is to unbalance this, and it is religion that will be most corrupted.

Part of the problem here is that the Founders also did not conceive or make provision for a national system of public education. This, like religion, they left to the people, or to the states.

I am sorry to see so many Christians aggrieved by this court decision over the Pledge. But the ruling is correct, both constitutionally and spiritually. By now, most people familiar with the case know the "under God" was inserted into the pledge a half century after it was written. The error is not in removing it; the error was made in 1954. We are correcting it now.

The blame, if any, resides not with the judges, but with those who insist on setting up their particular statue of the Christian god in the political edifice of the nation, where it does not belong. I cannot but think some of them do this pugnaciously, knowing politicians will be too craven to follow the constitution and thus enrage their constituents, knowing the courts eventually will have to do it, and the sight of God carted out of the public schools or the courthouse will create the impression of religious persecution. Sadly, this narrative seems to suit some people.

As I was Saying

You'll have to pardon me, I get carried away sometimes. Yesterday, for instance, in responding to the revelation that some important media mavens inside NBC News suppose the British Crown regarded some of our early presidents as the equivalent of Islamic terrorists.

That's just the kind of thing that sets me off, and I went on such a tear defending the Founders that I never got around to addressing how the British leadership regarded Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe (the only presidents to have taken part in the Revolution).

As difficult as it is to be patient with this sort of rascality, it's just barely possible that Williams' co-workers are sincerely ignorant or were seduced by the sirens of the current dominant school of anti-American historians, who have been luring every notion of American exceptionalism onto their rhetorical rocks.

The first thing to bear in mind is that the American rebels of 1776 thought of themselves as Englishmen upholding traditional rights of free Englishmen. Their political revolution was deeply conservative, like the Southern revolt of 1861.

And the American rebels had many sympathizers in the British military -- including the Howe brothers -- and many friends in the civil government, even among its top leaders. William Pitt commended the colonies for resisting the Stamp Act, and Edmund Burke's "Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies" once upon a time was memorized by American schoolchildren. Evidently this ended before the days when NBC news producers went to school.

These were no mere reflexive "root against the home team" types such as we have got a lot of in the U.S. today. Rather, men like Pitt and Burke saw in the American colonists the pure essence of British love of liberty, which they felt was threatened at home in England as well as abroad by an encroaching royalty. Burke, a true conservative, was able to distinguish among revolutions. He supported the American colonists when they stood up to the Crown, but he deplored the French Revolution -- the one that actually invented the word "terrorist" -- as antithetical to all good British, and human, virtues.

Indeed, there was much bitter feeling in Britain toward the Americans after the success of our Revolution. But it had the feel of a familial dispute, a sense of ingratitude in the heart of the mother country at her impudent children.

As for the crown itself, the anecdote is told by the painter Benjamin West that when he talked to King George III during the war, the monarch asked him what he thought George Washington would do if he prevailed. Return to his farm, West predicted -- accurately.

"If he does that," King George remarked, "he will be the greatest man in the world." When news of Washington's death in 1799 reached Europe, the British channel fleet, then at war with America's nominal ally France, paid honor to the president's memory.

Both John Adams (1785-88) and James Monroe (1803-06) served as ministers to Great Britain. Ask yourself if it would be thinkable for the United States to receive in official diplomatic reception Osama bin Laden or some other person it regarded as a current or recent terrorist against America. When Adams, formerly his subject, was presented to His Majesty at the Court of St. James as the first United States ambassador, the king, Adams reported to John Jay, "was indeed much affected, and I confess I was not less so." Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, met with British officials in London in the spring of 1786, while he was United States minister to France.

All of that hardly sounds to me like the way one behaves toward a terrorist enemy. But the solons of NBC perhaps know more about history than I do. I'd be curious to know their arguments.

Fragging the Founders

Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News is getting slammed for a comment on a Web site where he talks about stories in the news cycle. The topic is the suggestion that Iran's president-elect was one of the 1979 hostage-takers.

It is a story that will be at or near the top of our broadcast and certainly made for a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I'll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.

Now, as I read that, it doesn't say Williams said that about the founders. His "us" could be construed to mean "we who said the founders could be called terrorists," or to mean "we who were in the meeting." I'll leave it to him to try to step back out of that minefield.

There's so much wrong with the suggestion that the Founding Fathers were the moral equivalent of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. It's an idea so mind-bogglingly stupid that, I venture to say, only a TV news executive could have thought of it. Or a documentary film producer. Williams' tossed-off quip recalls Michael Moore taunt that the Iraqi "insurgents" are not terrorists, but "minutemen."

The indigenous revolt against the superpower army from abroad faces the same range of challenges, the same tactical choices. The insurgents inevitably will make some of the same choices, in any generation. Every war has frayed edges, and individual units under pressure may degenerate into armed gangs. You can find them in the American Revolution. But in my study of it, they occur most often among the Loyalist regiments that rode with the Redcoats, such as the notorious troops of "Bloody Tarleton.

Williams isn't writing about irregular troops, however. He's talking about the American leadership. He (or whoever at NBC advocated this nauseous moral equivalency) should take some time while sitting under the hair dryer to read David Hackett Fischer's "Washington's Crossing," and learn what made the American Revolution so different -- so exceptional, to use the damned word.

Fischer's concluding chapter explains why:

In 1776, American leaders believed that it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements in the winter campaign of 1776-77 was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution. ... In Congress and the army, American leaders resolved that the War of Independence would be conducted with a respect for human rights, even of the enemy. This idea grew stronger during the campaign of 1776-77, not weaker as is commonly the case in war.

It had been a year of disasters. The British routed the Continental army from Long Island, then captured New York City along with many prisoners. The redcoats next pushed George Washington back through New Jersey, waging an increasingly savage campaign not just against the Continental army but against the whole "Levelling, underbred, Artfull, Race of people" they found in America.

Yet early in 1777, John Adams wrote to his wife, "I know of no policy, God is my witness, but this -- Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they won't prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed, the less they succeed."

What they fought for colored how they fought. And here, too, the comparison with modern Iraq is instructive. The American revolutionaries had woven into their flag not just stars and stripes, but ideals of liberty, whether it was the learned political theorizing of Madison, the commercial common sense of Franklin, the town meeting democracy of New England soldiers, or the stoic self-discipline of Washington. Educated or ignorant, they built their cause around this quality, learned from their experiences as British citizens, and it informed their decisions on the battlefield.

Not all American leaders agreed. Others in Adams's generation believed, as do many in our own time, that America should serve its own national self-interest, defined in terms of wealth and power, and seek it by any means. But most men of the American Enlightenment shared John Adams's way of thinking. In the critical period of 1776 and 1777, leaders of both the Continental army and the Congress adopted the policy of humanity. That choice was reinforced when they learned that some British leaders decided to act differently. Every report of wounded soldiers refused quarter, of starving captives mistreated in the prison hulks at New York, and of the plunder and rapine in New Jersey persuaded leaders in Congress and the army to go a different way, as an act of principle and enlightened self-interest.

There were no Geneva Conventions in the mid-18th century, but every soldier and officer understood the customs of war, which were binding on their sense of honor as warriors. A wounded or cornered enemy could ask "quarter" from the other side, and there were standards for accepting it, or rejecting it. Plundering was universal, but if a house was occupied, and the owners did not resist, the proper plunderer always left the family enough to live on, and he did not take personal items.

There was no international bureaucracy to threaten a violator with a lengthy trial in the Hague, of course, but his own officers could order him summarily shot, which does count as a sort of deterrent. Or the bad behavior could invite like reprisals from the other side. Officers of the two armies in the Revolution traded hot charges across the lines when the system broke down.

Americans, unlike the British, generally extended the right of quarter to their enemies, even as the Americans reacted with indignation as British slaughter of wounded and helpless Continental soldiers. After the Battle of Princeton, Washington put a trusted officer in charge of the 211 captured privates with these instructions: "Treat them with humanity, and Let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren. ... Provide everything necessary for them on the road." Hessian prisoners were so well treated that, once they had got over the shock of it, they could be sent from one holding place to the next without an armed escort. After the war, almost a quarter of the Hessians remained in America. Their names still dot the phone book in Chester County, Pa., when I grew up there.

Any large army is going to have in its ranks men whose better natures will unhinge in the stress of war. Horror and brutality will happen every time an army marches to battle, as sure as innocent civilians will be killed. If you can't accept that, better to be a thoroughgoing pacifist. At least it's an honest position. Better than pretending you didn't know. The job of a nation and its leaders, military and civilian, is to ensure the horrors are as few as possible, and the war crimes are exceptions.

The fact that there were many exceptions to the American ideal of 1776 -- especially in the case of loyalist legions and runaway slaves -- does not change the essential fact that the American leaders attempted not just to win, but to fight a war they could look back on with pride, and that would be a fitting birth to the nation they sought to make. And they largely succeeded. "The moral choices in the War of Independence," Fischer writes, "enlarged the meaning of the American Revolution."

The Islamist terrorists, too, have their ideals: a terrorized and repressed people, rule by the gun and the knife, Ba'athist fascism and Islamist fanaticism. They, too, make their moral choices based on their ideals. Does anyone, even Michael Moore, imagine that their "victory," should that nightmare come, would be followed by a replay of Philadelphia, 1787?

As Fischer writes in his concluding paragraph:

[American soldiers and civilians in 1776] set a high example, and we have much to learn from them. Much recent historical writing has served us ill in that respect. In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly. Too many writers have told us that we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history. It isn't so, and never was. The story of Washington's Crossing tells us that Americans in an earlier generation were capable of acting in a higher spirit -- and so are we.

[... continued here ...]

Washington's Crossing

I bought David Hackett Fischer's "Washington's Crossing" to read about a battle that figures in local lore in the part of the world where I grew up, but I ended up reading one of the most penetrating books I've yet found on military history, history in general, and what Thomas Jefferson called "human events."

When historians delve into military details, the result sometimes ends up being what James McPherson called "more and more about less and less." Not here. Fischer tells the military story in rich and human detail. British soldiers and especially their Hessian coalitionists emerge from the shadows and numbers and stand forth as full-fleshed people. But the book is more than regiments marching. Along the way, Fischer helps explain such puzzles as the fit of slave-owning into Washington's ideas of liberty, or the tension between Yankee town meeting democracy and Southern aristocracy in the colonial army.

And he does his best to revive something we've largely forgotten: What made the American Revolution so different.

Several times in reading Fischer's prose I recalled Michael Moore taunt that the Iraqi "insurgents" are not terrorists, but "minutemen." In other words, they are the moral equivalent to the American revolutionaries, and Moore predicted they will win and that they deserved to win, just as the American Revolutionaries did. Typically, Moore left it at that and never bothered to back up his assertion.

But it's not hard to see what he meant -- to the degree that he meant anything but to be a rankling nuisance. Like all Moore's deceptions, there's a dusting of truth on it. The indigenous revolt against the superpower army from abroad faces the same range of challenges, the same tactical choices. The insurgents inevitably will make some of the same choices, in any generation.

But Moore's comparison is superficial. The Iraqi insurgents are like the American Revolutionaries in the same way the death pilots of 9/11 were like the airline pilots they stabbed to death to commandeer the planes. Fischer's concluding chapter explains why:

In 1776, American leaders believed that it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements in the winter campaign of 1776-77 was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution. ... In Congress and the army, American leaders resolved that the War of Independence would be conducted with a respect for human rights, even of the enemy. This idea grew stronger during the campaign of 1776-77, not weaker as is commonly the case in war.

It had been a year of disasters. The British routed the Continental army from Long Island, then captured New York City along with many prisoners. The redcoats next pushed George Washington back through New Jersey, waging an increasingly savage campaign not just against the Continental army but against the whole "Levelling, underbred, Artfull, Race of people" they found in America.

Yet early in 1777, John Adams wrote to his wife, "I know of no policy, God is my witness, but this -- Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they won't prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed, the less they succeed."

What they fought for colored how they fought. And here, too, the comparison with modern Iraq is instructive. The American revolutionaries had woven into their flag not just stars and stripes, but ideals of liberty, whether it was the learned political theorizing of Madison, the commercial common sense of Franklin, the town meeting democracy of New England soldiers, or the stoic self-discipline of Washington. Educated or ignorant, they built their cause around this quality, learned from their experiences as British citizens, and it informed their decisions on the battlefield.

Not all American leaders agreed. Others in Adams's generation believed, as do many in our own time, that America should serve its own national self-interest, defined in terms of wealth and power, and seek it by any means. But most men of the American Enlightenment shared John Adams's way of thinking. In the critical period of 1776 and 1777, leaders of both the Continental army and the Congress adopted the policy of humanity. That choice was reinforced when they learned that some British leaders decided to act differently. Every report of wounded soldiers refused quarter, of starving captives mistreated in the prison hulks at New York, and of the plunder and rapine in New Jersey persuaded leaders in Congress and the army to go a different way, as an act of principle and enlightened self-interest.

There were no Geneva Conventions in the mid-18th century, but every soldier and officer understood the customs of war, which were binding on their sense of honor as warriors. A wounded or cornered enemy could ask "quarter" from the other side, and there were standards for accepting it, or rejecting it. Plundering was universal, but if a house was occupied, and the owners did not resist, the proper plunderer always left the family enough to live on, and he did not take personal items.

There was no international bureaucracy to threaten a violator with a lengthy trial in the Hague, of course, but his own officers could order him summarily shot, which does count as a sort of deterrent. Or the bad behavior could invite like reprisals from the other side. Officers of the two armies in the Revolution traded hot charges across the lines when the system broke down.

Americans, unlike the British, generally extended the right of quarter to their enemies, even as the Americans reacted with indignation as British slaughter of wounded and helpless Continental soldiers. After the Battle of Princeton, Washington put a trusted officer in charge of the 211 captured privates with these instructions: "Treat them with humanity, and Let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren. ... Provide everything necessary for them on the road." Hessian prisoners were so well treated that, once they had got over the shock of it, they could be sent from one holding place to the next without an armed escort. After the war, almost a quarter of the Hessians remained in America. Their names still dot the phone book in Chester County, Pa., when I grew up there.

Any large army is going to have in its ranks men whose better natures will unhinge in the stress of war. Horror and brutality will happen every time an army marches to battle, as sure as innocent civilians will be killed. If you can't accept that, better to be a thoroughgoing pacifist. At least it's an honest position. Better than pretending you didn't know. The job of a nation and its leaders, military and civilian, is to ensure the horrors are as few as possible, and the war crimes are exceptions.

The fact that there were many exceptions to the American ideal of 1776 -- especially in the case of loyalist legions and runaway slaves -- does not change the essential fact that the American leaders attempted not just to win, but to fight a war they could look back on with pride, and that would be a fitting birth to the nation they sought to make. And they largely succeeded. "The moral choices in the War of Independence," Fischer writes, "enlarged the meaning of the American Revolution."

The Iraqi insurgents, too, have their ideals: a terrorized and repressed people, rule by the gun and the knife, Ba'athist fascism and Islamist fanaticism. They, too, make their moral choices based on their ideals. Does anyone, even Michael Moore, imagine that their "victory," should that nightmare come, would be followed by a replay of Philadelphia, 1787?

As Fischer writes in his concluding paragraph:

[American soldiers and civilians in 1776] set a high example, and we have much to learn from them. Much recent historical writing has served us ill in that respect. In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly. Too many writers have told us that we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history. It isn't so, and never was. The story of Washington's Crossing tells us that Americans in an earlier generation were capable of acting in a higher spirit -- and so are we.

***

Some of Fischer's best work is crammed into the 8-point type back in the appendices. There he gives a brief, broad-brushed, but insightful tour of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" -- both Emanuel Leutze's famous 1851 painting and the crossing incident itself -- as seen through the evolving eyes of Americans in one generation after another. As you might expect, there's a pendulum effect, with each generation to some extent reacting against the view of the one before, but at one point comes a perfect storm of negative convergence. Guess when that happened?

After discussing the "debunking" mood of popular history writers around the time of the U.S. bicentennial, Fischer turns his attention to that generation of academics. Their view of U.S. history still matters, because these men and women are dominant forces in academe and because their bile has informed many Americans now politically active.

A similar mood spread among a troubled generation of academic historians who were born in the baby boom (ca. 1941-57). They came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, when a youth revolution was bright with the promise of a new age. It was a revolution that failed in the era of Vietnam, Watergate, burning cities, and blighted hopes. A conservative revival followed. Republicans moved to the right, liberal Democrats shifted toward the center, and many on the left sought sanctuary in American universities as internal exiles from a society that turned away from them.

In the 1980s some of these internal exiles rejected all politics. Others increasingly called themselves American Marxists and predicted the coming collapse of capitalism. Then came the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union instead, and the failure of Marxism throughout the world, It was a double disaster for the American left. The result was an angry generation of academic iconoclasts, disillusioned by the failure of radical movements, alienated from American institutions, and filled with cultural despair. When the light of their revolution failed, some of them could see nothing but darkness.

More than a few became historians. Some ex-Marxists became historical relativists who beat their dialectal swords into epistemological ploughshares, and rejected ideals of objective and empirical inquiry. They judged other works mainly by ideological standards of political incorrectness such as racism, sexism, and elitism. Any work with a positive tone about the United States was condemned as "triumphalism." Their writings expressed intense hostility to American institutions and alienation from the main lines of American history.

As his artistic exemplar of this period, Fischer chooses "George Washington Crossing the Delaware" by the artist Peter Saul, of the faculty of University of Texas in Austin. "In vivid, clashing, Day-Glo acrylic colors, it shows a river crossing that has been reduced to chaos. Washington, his horse, and his men (all in tie wigs) tumble out of the boat into the river while American and British soldiers fire at each other in a battle on the ice. The values of Emanuel Leutze's painting are inverted as completely as the capsized boat."

***

Same medium, inverted values. Fallujah, during Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's reign, was no Philadelphia. On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.