The Wonderful Story of Washington Part 8

Washington was now entering heart and soul into the great controversy.

He was chosen as a delegate from the county to the colony meeting at Williamsburg on the first of August, 1773.

The Virginia delegates a.s.sembled at the capital as planned. Washington presented the resolution adopted by his county and made a fervid address in its support. It is said he declared himself ready to raise a thousand men at his own expense, and march at their head to the relief of Boston. It is safe to say that if Washington and Patrick Henry could have lived through to 1861, there would have been no Civil War, or even if the Spirit of Washington and Henry could have lived in the hearts of the people.

The Virginia convention adopted resolutions based on the Fairfax resolution, and Washington with six others, destined to become famous in American history, were appointed delegates to the General Congress, that was to meet in Philadelphia.

The high-handed measures against Boston had ruined that town. The rich became poor and the poor were at the verge of starvation, but there was no outcry. The silent misery and calm determination were a puzzle to the General who could not subdue such opposition with cannon. The people went in crowds to hear their speakers placidly arguing the conditions. There was no excuse to order the people to disperse, so that Gage found it necessary to have a law pa.s.sed that the people should not a.s.semble to discuss government affairs. But the whole problem had now taken on a larger form. On September 5, 1774, delegates from all the colonies, excepting Georgia, met in Carpenter's Hall, Philadelphia.

Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton came on to Mount Vernon, and from there the three giants of moral rights and human liberty rode on together to the meeting, affecting so deeply the eternal meaning of America.

When the question arose in the meeting concerning the voting of delegates, some colonies having more than others, Patrick Henry, with his fiery zeal, declared any idea of sectional distinctions or local interests to be absurd.

"All America," he cried, "is thrown into one ma.s.s. Where are your landmarks--your boundaries of colonies? They are all thrown down. The distinction between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders, are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American."

What a great pity that eighty-six years later, the patriotism of Patrick Henry could not have been felt, and the one great horror of American history would then never have occurred.

II. THE BUSINESS OF GETTING READY

The first General a.s.sembly in the history of the New World came together in great solemnity. They felt that it should be opened by some religious service, and yet, they feared to introduce religious antagonism, for it was a period when religious controversies were often more extreme and bitter than any political controversies.

Then Samuel Adams of reverend fame arose and said, "I shall willingly join in prayer with any gentleman of piety and virtue, whatever might be his cloth, provided he is a friend of his country."

Samuel Adams was a very rigorous Congregationalist, but religion with him had no claims that did not include justice and patriotism. He nominated the Reverend Mr. d.u.c.h.e of Philadelphia, who was an Episcopalian, to open the session with prayer.

The reverend d.u.c.h.e appeared in his canonicals attended by his clerk.

He read the morning service of the Episcopal church. The Psalter for that day of the month, the seventh, included the thirty-fifth Psalm.

The central idea of the Psalm was that of the a.s.sembly.

"Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me; fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for my help. Draw out, also, the spear, and stop the way of them that persecute me."

It is said that when the a.s.sembly was organized and ready for the introduction of their momentous business, that a long, deep, death-like silence fell upon them. Every one hesitated to begin. The sense of inaction was becoming oppressive when Patrick Henry arose.

Such a great occasion was suitable to his eloquence and when he sat down amidst the murmurs of astonishment and the shouts of applause, he was conceded to be the greatest orator in America.

This history-making convention had fifty-one delegates and it remained in session fifty-one days. The meetings were held in secret, and it is now unknown the part that Washington took in it, but, when Patrick Henry returned home, he was asked who was the most powerful councillor in the convention, and he unhesitatingly said, "Washington."

That Washington foresaw the course of events may be readily gathered from a letter he wrote at this time to a very close friend, Captain Robert Mackenzie, who had severely criticised the colonies from the British point of view. Like too many who are now charged with the destiny of the great American republic by their votes, Mackenzie could reason only on the visible results, and could not give any attention to the causes of the events. He had no spiritual valuation. He could reason only from material interests. Washington closed a very emphatic and radical letter to him with the warning and prophecy, "and give me leave to add, as my opinion, that more blood will be spilled on this occasion, if the ministry are determined to push matters to extremity, than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America."

England had been what might be termed good to the Southern colonies.

As for harsh measures, the worst from a political point of view was in dissolving the Virginia legislatures. The Southern Colonies were under the business management of descendants from the royalist cavaliers who had been driven from England by the forefathers of the descendants making up the colonies of New England. There was thus an inherited tradition of antagonism, which many well-meaning patriots a.s.sume as their basis of justice and judgment. Political welfare must be estimated from present conditions. Avengers of the ancient wrong want to punish history rather than make history. They a.s.sume that it is better to begin with what was than with what is. But in the common need, all such differences were forgotten. The differences were remembered only by the great grand-children of the revolutionary heroes.

The Northern Colonies and the Southern Colonies were, true enough, antagonistic in their origin, entirely opposite in the social differences between the severe Puritan and the aristocratic Cavalier, and worse than all, they were antagonistic in their religion, the North being many kinds of dissenters, and the South, in its governing cla.s.ses, being Episcopalian. Their social, religious and material interests never had been the same, and they had little in common even in the French and Indian wars. This outline contrast is given to show how the question, especially for the South, was not material profit or of opposition to oppression from force, but was the expression of an American Ideal uniting all minds, as a meaning for the equal rights of all in our humanity. It shows that there is an ideal of human rights that has the allegiance of human hearts above all considerations of flattery, or coertion, or for any of the thousands of considerations that may cause an individual judgment or fix the will. There may be amazing differences in personal and party interests, but there can be none, even in the varieties of intelligence or conditions, when it comes to the rights to freedom in the views of genuine Americans. Only partisans attack the motives of persons who are trying to advance human liberty and peace according to the duties and rights of civilization. By such signs shall ye know them and beware. They are not Americans and their moral deformity is the peril of America. The real idealist lives the vision of moral order, not only for his group, but for all the world. The moral law for each and all is our idealism of the universe.

III. MANY MEN OF MANY MINDS

England could not manage its American colonial interests because the government had no ideal of the colonies beyond that of a commercial business, and the colonies could not handle the interests of England in America because each colony was a separate organization having political interests together in common only in the British Parliament.

On that account they never felt together, except as their mutual interest in Parliament was injured. Notice this fundamental origin of social union, and see how it had to be wrangled over from the close of the Revolutionary War in 1781, to the adoption of the Const.i.tution, and the election of a president under it in 1789. And even then, a fundamental origin for social interests, and, therefore, of patriotism, was not achieved until a frightful civil war closed the struggle for separate units of interest, as independent sovereignities, in 1865.

Mr. Curtis, an English philosopher-historian, writing about one hundred and fifty years after the beginning of these world-making origins of the American ideal, quotes Doyle's history referring to the revolt of the colonies, in which it is said, "If the Southern Colonies were to take their full share of interest in the struggle, it was clear that it must not be left to a New England army under a New England general. But we may be sure that the choice, desirable in itself, of a Southern general, was made much easier by the presence of a Southern candidate so specially fitted for the post as Washington.

Not indeed that his fitness was or could be as yet fully revealed.

Intelligence and public spirit, untiring energy and industry, a fair share of technical skill, and courage almost dangerous in its recklessness,--all these were no doubt perceived by those who appointed Washington. What they could not have foreseen was the patience with which a man of clear vision, heroic bravery, and intense directness, bore with fools and laggards, and intrigues; and the disinterested self-devotion which called out all that was n.o.blest in the national character, which shamed selfish men into a semblance of union. Still less could it have been foreseen that, in choosing a military chief, Congress was training up for the country that civil leader, without whose aid an effective const.i.tution would scarcely have been attained."

CHAPTER XII

THE HOUSE LONG DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF

I. UNPATRIOTIC CONFUSION OF OPINIONS AND INTERESTS

In order to appreciate the difficulties which Washington had to overcome, and therefore to make any just estimate of his character, his patriotism and his services in the cause of political liberty, the conditions in which he worked must be understood. It must not be a.s.sumed that he had a united country, a solid backing, and that there was unanimous patriotism sustaining him. To do so would not only be untrue, but it would belittle the almost superhuman task which gave birth to American government, and made possible the final organization through Abraham Lincoln of a land of the free, able to sustain its freedom against all the struggling masteries of the world. To suppose that Washington did his revolutionary work in the midst of reliable patriotism is as erroneous as to suppose that Lincoln did his nation-saving task in the midst of a unanimous North.

There was no such thing as patriotism at the time of Washington, according to the usual definition of patriotism, because there was no geographical territory holding a united people, for whom or for which to feel a national patriotism.

American patriotism, therefore, began in the patriotism for human rights, not thus making "a man without a country," as patriotism for humanity has been sometimes defined alike by extreme pacifists and extreme militarists, but in the fact that American democracy and humanity are synonymous terms, in all they can mean for the rights of man.

There was then no political country to be patriotic for. There were only colonies. Patrick Henry's cry, so pathetic in its divine need, and so little true for his fellows as shown in 1861, "I am not a Virginian, I am an American," rang through the congress at Philadelphia with the thrill of a new vision of human faith, but it was almost a century, through an age of desperate reconstruction, before it could be even approximately called true; before American democracy and humanity could face the warring world, the King-made world, with one meaning, one service and one moral law.

John Adams, of indisputable authority, tells us that more than a third of the property owners and men of affairs, were opposed to the revolution throughout the war.

Lecky, in his history of England, declares that an examination of the correspondence of the revolution at any period shows that, "in the middle colonies at least, those who really desired to throw off the English rule were a small and not very respectable minority. The great ma.s.s were indifferent, half-hearted, engrossed with their private interests or occupations, prepared to risk nothing till they could clearly foresee the issue of the contest. In almost every part of the States--even in New England itself--there were large bodies of devoted royalists."

After the war more than a hundred thousand, it is estimated, of irreconciliable royalists were expelled from the colonies.

When General Gage evacuated Boston, more than a thousand royalists from that immediate territory went with him to Halifax, Nova Scotia, so that our American grandmothers, even a hundred years later, when exasperated, would exclaim against their tormentor, with much of the ancient vehemence, "You go to Halifax!"

If we want to appreciate Washington and to understand his wonderful service for mankind, we must understand the difficulties and obstacles he had to overcome. The "Spirit of '76" belonged at first to only a few inspired souls, who had a wonderful vision of human rights for a new world. Right was might with them and their might-right won the great cause as the immortal "Spirit of '76."

General Washington's description of the conditions are vividly portrayed in a letter to Joseph Reed, from Cambridge, dated November 28, 1775:

"Such a dearth of public spirit, and such a want of virtue, such stock jobbing and such fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages of one kind or another in this great change of military arrangement I never saw before, and pray G.o.d's mercy that I may never be witness to again. What will be the end of these manoeuvers is beyond my scan. I tremble at the prospect. We have been till this time enlisting about three thousand five hundred men. To engage these I have been obliged to allow furloughs as far as fifty men to a regiment, and the officers, I am persuaded, indulge as many more. The Connecticut troops will not be prevailed upon to stay longer than their term, saving those who have enlisted for the next campaign and are mostly on a furlough; and such a mercenary spirit pervades the whole that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen. In short after the last of this month our lines will be so weakened that the Minute Men and Militia must be called in for their defense; and these being under no kind of government themselves, will destroy the little subordination I have been laboring to establish, and run me into one evil whilst I am endeavoring to avoid another; but the less must be chosen. Could I have foreseen what I have experienced, and am likely to experience, no consideration upon earth would have induced me to accept the command."

At the meeting of the colonies in congress at Philadelphia in 1774, George the Third saw that it was a conquest of wills and he exclaimed, "The die is cast, the colonies must either submit or triumph." But even when the British government was sending Hessian mercenaries over against the colonies, a thing regarded as a supreme outrage by those opposed to England, it was almost impossible to get together enough American patriotism to adopt a declaration of independence.

John Adams says that a large section of Congress regarded such a declaration with both terror and disgust. To those who have believed that a unanimous patriotism made only a little severe fighting necessary, backed by some clever generalship, there can be no proper appreciation of the great American achievement.

Then, as now, the prosperous did not want their prosperity disturbed by any change. They didn't want to lose their business, not to speak of their lives, by going into an army. But there had been a generation of people pouring into the colonies from the poverty-devastations of English misgovernment in Scotland and Ireland. They had never had any chance to protest against their wrongs in the old country, but fortune, or fate, or Providence, had banished them across the ocean directly into an opportunity to express their sentiments with guns, and they took the opportunity. They flocked to the recruiting stations of Washington's army.

But so unsafe were business transactions with the party fighting Great Britain that the revolution was coming to the gates of despair because of the impossibility of getting military supplies and army equipments.

There was fast growing a vision of collapse unless there was received the encouraging help of a foreign power. France in almost unceasing war with England was the only hope, and France could have no interest unless the colonies were fighting for separation from England, instead of against a tax on tea, as it bore the appearance, at the beginning, from a foreign point of view. France wanted to know what the colonies were fighting for. France wanted a bill of particulars. This brought American interests to a crisis. France had no interest in a mere family fuss. The French government could have no interest unless it was for something that lessened the power of England.

Under the early troubles, a peace party among the business interests was fast coming into power. Against this the commoners were aflame with the patriotic pamphlets of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the eloquence of Patrick Henry, the statesmanship of John Adams, and the work of the powerful-minded few who saw the sublime vision of American freedom. At last they were enabled to pa.s.s the Declaration of Independence, and France began, at first secretly and then openly, to give encouragement through money-loans, supplies, and volunteers.

Burgoyne's surrender in October, 1777, showed that America could be successful with France's help, and early in the next year France recognized the independence of the colonies. They soon made the cause of America their own, and sent over not only necessary supplies but soldiers and ships. Known budgets of expenses, used in aid of the Colonies, exceed $500,000,000, not a cent of which was ever returned or asked for. Though there was the political interest to humble England, yet France was at heart a profound lover of human freedom and political liberty. Despite the implacable enemies of republican government in Europe, France has successfully kept the dead-lines across which "they shall not pa.s.s." The moral debt which human liberty owes to France can never be paid except as it is paid to humanity, and, to that social justice, is dedicated the meaning of America.