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December 1, 2019 - July 16, 2020
years before the Constitution was drafted, its basic principle: “Unless the states will content themselves with a full and well-chosen representation in Congress, and vest that body with absolute powers in all matters relative to the great purposes of war and of general concern by which the states unitedly are affected, reserving to themselves all matters of local and internal polity … we are attempting an impossibility and very soon shall become (if it is not already the case) a many-headed monster, a heterogeneous mass, that never will or can steer to the same point.”
George foreshadowed our present times
Washington had come to the end of his prepared speech but his audience did not seem truly moved. He clearly had not achieved his end. He remembered he had brought with him a reassuring letter from a congressman. He would read it. He pulled the paper from his pocket, and then something seemed to go wrong. The General seemed confused; he stared at the paper helplessly. The officers leaned forward, their hearts contracting with anxiety. Washington pulled from his pocket something only his intimates had seen him wear: a pair of eyeglasses. “Gentlemen,”
Humanity vs public opinion
he said, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” This homely act and simple statement did what all Washington’s arguments had failed to do. The hardened soldiers wept. Washington had saved the United States from tyranny and civil discord. As Jefferson was later to comment, “The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”
Humanity and public opinion continued
Civilians had always seemed more important to him than soldiers. However, since there was a war, an army was an essential instrument. It should guard and preserve the population to the greatest extent it could. To repel that civilian discouragement which could foster a wavering of loyalty to the cause, the soldiers should seek an impressive record. (Washington often helped the record along with inaccurate dispatches.) Washington further realized that a war won primarily by the force of public opinion would of necessity be a war of attrition, a very long war. He yearned for military victories
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War and public opinion
“At length, my dear Marquis,” Washington wrote Lafayette, “I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, and under the shadow of my own vine and my own fig tree. Free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments which the soldier who is ever in pursuit of fame; the statesman whose watchful days and sleepless nights are spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of his own, perhaps the ruin of other countries (as if this globe was insufficient for all); and the courtier who is always watching the countenance
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Wishful thinking
He was on his way to lead an enterprise which, if it succeeded, would prove to all the world, and for the future to time immemorial, the falsity of the contention that men were “unequal to the task of governing themselves and therefore made for a master.” That contention had, down the ages, been accepted by many of the greatest thinkers. Supposing the failure of the American experiment should seem to prove them right? How long would it be before this “awful monument” to the death of liberty would forgotten, before the experiment was tried again? And if, through inability or misunderstanding,
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The plausibility of the first democratic government...the big experiment
