Choosing Seven Characters to Tell a Revolution

Today Boston 1775 welcomes author Ray Raphael as a guest blogger, discussing how he approached his latest book on the American Revolution.

All of us who live part of our lives in Revolutionary America have a story to tell, a journey. My path has taken me from the under-reported common people (People’s History of the American Revolution) to the amazingly forgotten Massachusetts Revolution of 1774 (First American Revolution) to a realization that what we choose to remember (and what we therefore forget) is unduly shaped by narrative demands, nation-forming, and ideological slant (Founding Myths). From there, though, I found myself at a crossroads: should I just throw up my hands and admit that good stories are bound to distort history, or should I try my hand at weaving an honest national narrative that is more genuinely true to the people and spirit of the times?

Any good story, we all know, requires lead characters, and that has been part of the problem, for we hear from grade school on that a handful of very special men bequeathed us a nation. We in the Revolutionary War community understand how limiting and destructive that is. But can we do any better? Could we possibly choose a different set of individuals to anchor a broader tale, one that is more representative yet still personal and intimate?

That’s what I tried to do in Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation. I’ve chosen seven diverse characters, some high and some low, from different classes and regions and ways of thinking, who had a strong impact on the American Revolution and the shaping of the young nation. By interweaving these real-life stories, I hoped to access some of the deeper meanings—and also reveal the concrete, local, and very personal experiences of real people of those times.

Clearly, the selection of characters in this experiment determines the shape of the story, so my choices for the lead roles were critical. I looked over dozens of contenders and finally settled on my cast. In some sense it was arbitrary, but in another sense not, for there were serious criteria to consider:

• Candidates needed a written record to follow over an extended period of time.
• They had to appear and reappear at critical junctures so they could anchor the larger story.
• Their stories needed to overlap in some way, at least thematically and preferably in actual events, so we could gain multiple perspectives.
• They had to reveal that power passed both ways during the Revolution, from the bottom up and from the top down.

Are you with me so far? If so, given these parameters, whom would YOU choose for this experiment?

One of the characters is a given: George Washington. There is absolutely no way we can tell the larger story of the war and the nation’s founding without him. We know this. But who else?

Try this: Transport yourself to December of 1781, after the battle of Yorktown, and imagine you are pondering the historical significance of the amazing drama that has encompassed America. Which individuals, you wonder, will stand out in stories told by future historians? In other words, try to forget what happened since and ask, as a person of that time: who are the most powerful and significant players in these grand events?

I asked myself that question, and that’s how I came up with another of my central characters. One man, virtually unknown today, was undoubtedly the most powerful non-military figure in Revolutionary America. Like George Washington, he had to be in the story, for nobody else could play his role.

Beyond that, though, the choices were many. I needed to include people who were not high and mighty, for surely such folks carried their fair share. I made my final selections, and you can judge for yourselves whether these true Americans lead us to new corners, help us understand the multiple perspectives of the Revolution, and above all, make those times spring to live for us today.

But I don’t want to prejudice the case. Please “try this at home,” before looking at my book or hearing my spiel. Then, we can share and discuss our choices and reasons. There are no “correct” answers, but some choices are better than others to the degree that they open the inquiry, and all choices, I contend, will help expand the narrow textbook version that simply cannot represent the whole. We owe it to ourselves and our country to think outside that box, because until all the stories are told, we cannot sit back and say, “This is who we are as a nation.”

I’ve got a copy of Founders, so I know which people Ray chose. But tomorrow I’ll ponder how I might have tackled the same task differently (just to be perverse), and I’ll post all the suggestions and commentary you folks share. And later in the week we’ll reveal the six individuals beyond Washington that Ray focused on.

Ray Raphael will be speaking on Founders and signing copies at three historic sites in Massachusetts this week:

• 7:00 P.M., Thursday, 14 May, at the Minute Man National Historic Park visitor center in Lexington.
• 7:00 P.M., Friday, 15 May, at the Battle of Bunker Hill Museum in Charlestown; this event is sponsored by the Charlestown Historical Society.
• 1:00 P.M., Saturday, 16 May, outdoors on Worcester Common.

After that, Ray’s schedule will take him to Saratoga National Historical Park on the 17th, Independence National Historical Park and Valley Forge National Historical Park on the 21st, and the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., on the 22nd.

Enslaved Labor and Free Labor in the Capital City

Last month the Huffington Post ran an essay by author Fergus M. Bordewich titled “Full Circle: Inaugurating Our Country’s New President in The City Built by Slaves.” It described how enslaved laborers built the Capitol where President Barack Obama was inaugurated, with reference to specific workers.

Bob Arnebeck, author of Through a Fiery Trial: Building Washington, 1790-1800, shared comments about that essay with the H-Slavery email list. I asked Bob if I could rerun his remarks as a contribution from a guest blogger because they showed how complex slavery could be in practice, especially when bosses were also trying to work with skilled free laborers and to manage a very large project. So here’s Bob:

Certainly this is the time to draw a sharp contrast between the scene around the Capitol on January 20, 2009, and, say, June 20, 1795, when work on the buildings in Washington was in full swing. However, in his Huffington Post article Bordewich misses many of the nuances of slave hire in Washington in the 1790s.

Pierre L’Enfant was the first man in charge of the federal building project in the city. Though French by birth, he had a wide acquaintance with slavery, having served in the southern campaign during the Revolution. There is no evidence that he hired slaves to work in Washington. Indeed, he had a group of 75 free workers with high morale as evidenced by their continuing work even after the commissioners ordered them to stop. They took orders only from L’Enfant, which is why the commissioner wanted L’Enfant fired.

The Capitol and White House could have been built by free labor and likely would have been if George Washington had accommodated L’Enfant so that he didn’t leave the project in early 1792. The commissioners left in charge were obsessed with fixing their costs. Slave hire was part of their effort to fix the cost of unskilled labor.

White and free black laborers worked on the same terms as slaves. The commissioners never threatened to replace free skilled workers with slaves. They tried to control the cost of skilled labor by trying to hire on a piecework basis. Scottish masons refused. Then came a crew of Irish masons who were amenable. It was not so much free labor that the commissioners didn’t like—it was wage labor.

That said, the pieceworking Irish flattered the slaveholding commissioners by requiring the commissioners to provide enough hired slaves to assist them—i.e., move the stone into place. The commissioners had perfected their system: the wages of the men moving the stone were fixed as low as possible, and the skilled workers would only get paid for the work they did, not for the time wasted waiting for stone to be hauled up Capitol Hill by slaves with no incentive to work hard. The system didn’t last long: the Irish fussed about the slaves being too slow, but then the masons skimped on mortar and the walls they worked on soon fell down.

As for the working conditions of slaves, Bordewich paints too grim a picture. They lived in camps, but so did many white laborers—there was no city there, after all. The slaves got free medical care. Indeed, when there was a smallpox scare, some slaves requested inoculation, which they received, its cost deducted from the wages paid to their masters. There was a hospital with a visiting white doctor and a resident white nurse.

Slaves worked the same hours as everybody else, and white overseers ate the same food as the slaves, and complained about it. The slaves got paid a shilling for work on Sundays and holidays, and several slave sawyers got incentive wages of a shilling a day, making a pound and ten shillings in August 1795, for example—almost $4.

Ironically, the commissioners who thought slave hire would help control their cost were blindsided by inflation at the end of the decade. Feeding slaves became expensive. So while at one time there were may have been up to 120 slaves working for the government, toward the end of the project they hired fewer slaves.

Finally, in his article Bordewich mentioned a Jerry Holland, a free black who was refused a raise even though his supervisor promised one. Bordewich has Holland disappearing in the yellowing records, a victim of racism. From my research it appears that Holland did continue working in the city. He wound up as the commissioners’ messenger. He never got his raise, though—still paid the same wage as the hired slaves.

Bob Arnebeck has created a website with essays updating Through a Fiery Trial. He was one of the first historians I saw using the web this way, and I’ve been looking for a reason to point to his site.

The Last of the Boston Light

Earlier this month, Christopher Klein, author of Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands, contributed two articles about the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island and the Continental Army’s raid on that lighthouse on 20 July 1775. But that wasn’t the end of the story, or the end of the lighthouse.

Here’s Chris’s conclusion:

Just 11 days after their first attack on Boston Light, the patriots hit again. This time, a detachment of 300 men led by Major Benjamin Tupper set out in whaleboats from Nantasket during the night of 30 July 1775 and landed on Little Brewster Island in the early hours of the morning on 31 July.

The patriots overcame the guard, gained the upper hand on the British marines stationed on the island, and burned the lighthouse and buildings on the island. Tupper’s men killed between 10 and 12 British troops and made prisoners of the rest while suffering only one fatality of their own.

In his letter to the Continental Congress dated August 4 and 5 of 1775, General George Washington reported:

A Number of Workmen having been sent down to repair [Boston Light] with a Guard of 22 Marines & a Subaltern, Major Tupper last Monday Morning about 2 oClock landed there with about 300 Men, attack’d them killed the Officer, & 4 Privates, but being detained by the Tide, in his Return he was attack’d by several Boats, but he happily got through with the Loss of one Man killed & another wounded. The Remainder of the ministerial [i.e., British] Troops, 3 of which are badly wounded, he brought off Prisoners, with 10 Tories all of whom are on their Way to Springfield Gaol.

Washington’s general orders of 1 August 1775 also included this item:

The General thanks Major Tupper, and the Officers and Soldiers under his Command, for their gallant and soldierlike behaviour in possessing themselves of the enemy’s post at the Light House, and for the Number of Prisoners they took there, and doubts not, but the Continental Army, will be as famous for their mercy as for their valour.

By June 1776, the British had evacuated Boston but their ships still lurked in the harbor. When they were finally driven out of the harbor for good on 13 June 1776, the British returned the favor to the colonists and blew up the tower of Boston Light using a timed charge. It was an ignominious “parting gift” from the Redcoats, who were led by the aptly named Captain Bangs.

The British destruction of the lighthouse is the reason why the beacon at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, which dates to 1764, has the distinction of being the oldest lighthouse structure in America, although Boston Light is still the oldest light station in the country. Boston Light would lay dark for seven years before it was rebuilt under orders from John Hancock in 1783.

Today, the distinguished, bold pillar of Boston Light is a postcard-perfect lighthouse, and it is the last to retain a Coast Guard keeper. Tours of Boston Light run from Thursday to Sunday through early October. For more information, visit www.bostonislands.org.

Thanks again, Chris!

Skirmish at the Boston Light

Yesterday guest blogger Christopher Klein, author of the new book Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands: A Guide to the City’s Hidden Shores, described the importance of the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island. That first North American lighthouse is shown above in a late-1800s sketch based of a mezzotint engraving created by William Burgis in 1729.

In 1775, that lighthouse made it safe for the Royal Navy and British supply ships to navigate Boston harbor at night. The islands were the British military’s nearest source of fodder and vegetables. Aiming to strike at the Crown forces, Maj. Joseph Vose of the Continental Army led a raiding party onto the Nantasket peninsula on the night of 18 July 1775. Their ultimate goal was Little Brewster Island. Chris describes what happened next:

The patriots landed on the island on the morning of 20 July 1775, burned the wooden parts of the lighthouse, and removed three casks of oil, gunpowder, and furniture. Seeing the beacon in flames, several British barges, a cutter, and an armed schooner attacked Vose’s detachment, but only two patriots were wounded in the action.

A letter from Brigadier General William Heath to George Washington, dated 21 July 1775, recounted the actions of Vose’s detachment, both on Little Brewster Island and on other islands in Boston Harbor:

Sir

I have the Pleasure to inform your Excellency that Major Vose of my own Regiment; beside[s] securing the Barley on Nantasket; yesterday morning Landed on the Light-House Island with Six or Seven Boats, the Light House was set on Fire and the wood work Burnt, the Party brought off Three Casks of Oyl, all the furniture of the Light house, about 50 wt of Gun Powder, a Quantity of Cordage &c. (an Inventory of which will be forwarded to your Excellency;)

Some of the Brave men who effected this with their Lives in their Hands, have just now applied to me to know whether it was to be consid[ered] as Plunder, or otherwise; I was not able to detirmine this matter, but told them that I would Lay the matter before your Excellency; I would beg leave to add that these Brave men, were some of them at Grape Island, Deer Island & at Long Island when each of those Islands were Stripped of their Stock &c.

I have the Honor to be your Excellency’s most obedient & very Humble Servt
W. Heath

The British quickly deployed Loyalist workers, protected by a guard of marines, to repair Boston Light. “With this Party,” Vice Admiral Samuel Graves wrote, “the Engineers were of opinion the Light House might well be defended, until Succours arrived, against 1000 men, and the Admiral expected to have the Building soon repaired and a Light shewn as before.”

And it appears the British did proceed quickly in their repair of the light. In a letter to John Adams, James Warren reported that by the night of 29 July the British efforts to rebuild the beacon were “in such forwardness as Actually to shew a Light.”

However, the other assessment by Graves as to the ease of defending Boston Light would soon be put to the test.

Check back at Boston 1775 on 31 July for the next chapter in the lighthouse’s war story. Thanks, Chris!

Boston Light and Little Brewster Island

I’ve flown off to Iowa to celebrate my grandmother’s 100th birthday, lucky enough to have Christopher Klein offering to fill in as a guest blogger. Chris is the author of the new book Discovering the Boston Harbor Islands, published by Union Park Press. In this article, he describes Boston harbor’s main landmark in the eighteenth century.

When Boston Light was kindled in 1716, the solitary sentinel commanding the entrance to Boston Harbor became the first lighthouse in North America. It was a magnificent triumph for the maritime interests of Boston, providing them with a competitive advantage against commercial rivals such as New York City. Not only was Boston Light the first lighthouse in North America, it was one of only a handful to be found anywhere in the world at that time.

Unfortunately, 60 years after its beams first bounced across the waves of Massachusetts Bay, the original lighthouse was destroyed in the opening act of the American Revolution.

Following the devastating battles at Lexington and Concord, the beleaguered British troops and their sympathizers under siege on the peninsula of Boston were in desperate need of supplies. With land routes cut off, the British set their sights on the farms of the Boston Harbor Islands, which remained readily available to them as their naval supremacy remained intact. The hay, vegetables, and livestock on the islands were of strategic importance to both sides, and periodic island skirmishes between the British and the colonists broke out between May and July of 1775. Long, Peddocks, Deer, and Grape Islands were all scenes of skirmishes in the spring and summer of 1775.

Perhaps no island, however, was of more strategic importance than Little Brewster Island, simply because it was the location of Boston Light. The lighthouse was still in British hands in July 1775 when the patriots, seeking to disrupt British control of the harbor, launched two daring raids on Little Brewster Island.

On the night of 18 July 1775, a detachment of approximately 400 soldiers led by Major Joseph Vose set out for Nantasket peninsula on the southern shore of Boston Harbor where they cut and removed 1,000 bushels of barley and a large quantity of hay, thus depriving the British of these badly needed supplies. From Nantasket, a company of soldiers set off in whaleboats for Little Brewster Island.

TOMORROW: The Continentals make landfall, and the British counterattack.

British Soldiers Weren't Called Lobsterbacks

A while back, Christopher Lenney, the researcher who alerted me to the possibility of a “Mount Whoredom” in London to match the one in Boston, sent me a note that said:

I may be crazy but I can find no authentic 18th C. use of the term “lobsterback” or “lobster-back” for British soldier. Can you?

So I searched for words containing the ingredient “lobster” in the primary sources on my computer. You can see the results in yesterday’s posting. Lots of mentions of “lobsters,” but not one use of “lobsterback.” Or “lobster-back,” or “lobster back.”

So Chris, author of Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England, is today’s guest blogger. (My interruptions in italics.)

“Lobsterback” has been repeated so often by historians that the term has taken on a life of its own. I learned it in school, and if you Google it you’ll find it still is a standard Revolutionary War vocabulary word. But is it really a Revolutionary-era taunt?

If you go to the standard references, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, you find that “lobster” has been used since 1643 as a slang term for English soldiers, originally said of Roundhead cuirassiers on account of their armor, not the color of their uniforms. Later it was transferred to other British soldiers with red uniforms.

“Lobsterback” is not in the OED, Webster’s Second, The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, The Dictionary of American English, or The Dictionary of Americanisms. It is in Webster’s Third (1961).

Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English lists the first example of “lobster-back” in 1822, and says it is a variant on “lobster (soldier).” The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang lists the first example as “lobster-backed” in 1809 in a non-North American source, and gives the first American usage as Crockett’s Almanac in 1840. (But see below.)

In America’s Historical Newspapers online, the first documented uses of “lobsterback” that I can find are in 1812-13 in The Tickler of Philadelphia:

• 8 Sept 1812: a satirical poem refers to “General Lobsterback.”
• 22 Sept 1812: “If the democrats would fight as hard as chatter and drink grog, there would not be a lobsterback in all Quebec, in less than forty-five days.” And about a man going privateering, “Perhaps he may in that station, scald the lobster-back rascals.”
• 26 Jan 1813: a letter quoted the city’s mayor saying, “Who cares for a parcel of d——d lobster back rascals and tories?”

[Additionally, I found “lobster backed” used as an insult for a British officer in Benjamin Waterhouse’s A Journal, of a Young Man of Massachusetts, Late a Surgeon on Board an American Privateer (Boston: Rowe and Hooper, 1816), which is said to have been a “best-selling account of a ship’s surgeon in the War of 1812.” Popular literature like that could have spread the term throughout the U.S. of A.

Over in Britain, Google Books finds the term in witness testimony in The Trial of Robert Surrage..., printed in Edinburgh in 1820, and in the novel The Irish Necromancer; or, Deer Park, written by Thomas Henry Marshal and published in London in 1821—all from the same general period.]

After the War of 1812, the term starts to appear in American fiction about the Revolutionary War. A short story by J. N. Barker called “The Green Mountain Boy: A Tale of Ticonderoga” in The Atlantic Souvenir: A Christmas and New Year’s Offering (Philadelphia, 1827) has Ethan Allen use this phrase as he challenges the British in the fort:

“...come out lobster back, from your shell…”

[Barker’s story was reprinted in this 1832 anthology for folks who want to read it.]

Fishing in Google, I found this passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair from 1840. The section of chapter five headed “The Boston Massacre” appears to rephrase for young ears the taunts that had been published in newspapers in 1770.

“Turn out, you lobsterbacks!” one would say. “Crowd them off the sidewalks!” another would cry. “A redcoat has no right in Boston streets!”

“O, you rebel rascals!” perhaps the soldiers would reply, glaring fiercely at the young men. “Some day or other we’ll make our way through Boston streets at the point of the bayonet!”

Thanks, Chris! It looks like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of “lobster-back” might have put it into the American literary canon. The next generation of New England writers adopted it. Edward Everett Hale used it in 1896 and 1899. Julian Hawthorne used it in a textbook in 1898, and soon it appeared in other textbooks, such as this from 1905.

Around that turn of the century, the term surfaced in several American novels, particularly historical novels for young readers: Chauncey Crafts Hotchkiss’s In Defiance of the King (NY: 1895), Robert W. Chambers’s Cardigan (NY: 1901) and The Reckoning (NY: 1907), and James Otis’s The Minute Boys of Boston (Boston: 1910). And details we learn as children have a way of sticking.

Can anyone point to eighteenth-century sources using the term “lobsterback” for a British soldier? Or should we revise our understanding of Revolutionary vocabulary? Would any late reminiscence of those times that uses “lobsterback” probably have been written long after the fact?

Epidemic Behind the American Lines

Today Boston 1775 welcomes Judith Cataldo as a guest blogger. She is researching an event occurring at the same time as the British and American military maneuvers in late August 1775: a summer epidemic of the “bloody flux,” or dysentery, in Middlesex County.

That outbreak may well have been related to the sudden concentration of men from all over New England in military camps around Boston. In his memoir, Lt. David Perry (1741-1826) wrote:

In the heat of Summer, the men were attacked with the Dysentery, and considerable numbers of them died. The people flocked in from the country, to see the camps and their friends, and took the disorder; and it spread all over the New-England states: it carried off a great many more in the country than in the camp, which seemed to dishearten the people very much.

Judy writes:

This was how I got interested in Rev War history. I was documenting the gravestone epitaphs in my home town cemetery, Needham, and found a higher number of stones for 1775 than for other years. In my travels of other graveyards I found the same pattern. Eventually, I tripped upon the Dedham Register, which had serialized a book documenting the town epitaphs with genealogical notes, and it mentioned an epidemic at that time.

Here’s the gravestone that started it all:

In memory of Mrs Esther wife of Mr Joseph Daniels who died Aug’st 1775 in ye 34th year of her age & 7 children of Mr Joseph Daniels & Esther his wife.

Martha Died August 31 in the 5th Year [she had been born 8/19/1770]

Sarah Died Sep’r 2nd in her 9th Year [born 4/9/1767]

Esther Died Sep’r 4th in her 12 Year

Anna Died Sep’r 7th in her 2th year [baptized 5/10/1773]

Josiah Died Sep’r 7th in the 6th year [born 4/9/1769]

Elizabeth Died Sept 12th in her 11th year 1775 [born 7/17/1765]

Joseph Died June 1st 1777 in his 16th year [born 2/24/1762]

The Rev. Samuel West, minister of Needham in 1775, mentioned this epidemic and the Daniels family in his autobiography:

The Dysentery soon prevailed in the American Army & Extended itself more of less through the country. Although it prevailed most in the Town near camp My parish partook largely of this calimity. We buried about 50 persons in the course of the season. Some families were dreadfully. One in particular a Mr Joseph Daniels buried an amiable wife & 6 promising children in about 6 weeks—we often buried 3 or 4 in a day. My time was wholly devoted to visiting the sick, attendance on the dying and dead.

Proportional to population, four deaths in Needham in 1775 would be about 200 people a day today.

Thanks for sharing that work, Judy!

Guest Editorial: George 1 to George 43

Today’s special Boston 1775 entry comes from Ray Raphael, author of The First American Revolution, A People’s History of the American Revolution, and Founding Myths. You can download Ray's lecture on “Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and ‘the Body of the People’” at Old South Meeting-House in September here.

**************************************

Instead of turning to friends of George 41, his own father, George W. Bush 43 could turn to someone of even greater authority and impeccable credentials: George 1, the “Father of our Country.”

On September 14, 1775, less than three months after he assumed command of the Continental Army, General George Washington ordered Colonel Benedict Arnold (whom we know today in quite a different context) to lead an invasion of British-held Quebec. Before sending Arnold on his way, Washington issued an enlightened set of instructions, words that should perhaps be heeded by modern American commanders before they march into foreign lands:

First, Arnold was to gather reliable intelligence: “You are by every means in your power to endeavour to discover the real sentiments of the Canadians towards our cause & particularly to this expedition.” To accomplish his mission, Arnold and his soldiers would first have to win the hearts and minds of the people, French Canadians and Indians who had only recently been subjected to British rule. Without their “favourable disposition,” Washington predicted, the expedition would inevitably flounder and fail.

If “real” intelligence suggested the people were “averse” to an American presence, Arnold was to adjust his plans accordingly: “In this case you are by no means to prosecute the attempt. The expence of the expedition & the disappointment are not to be put in competition with the dangerous consequences which may ensue from irritating them against us.”

Arnold should also return if the weather became too severe or if any other “unforeseen difficulties should arise.” In short, Washington gave Arnold free rein to “cut and run” should the circumstances turn sour.

Knowing that his troops (white and Protestant) did not share the values and customs of Canada’s inhabitants (Indian and Catholic), Washington insisted that soldiers still treat the locals charitably, never insult them, and above all, avoid “ridiculing” their religious ceremonies. “As the contempt of the religion of a country...has ever been deeply resented, you are to be particularly careful to restrain every officer & soldier from such imprudence & folly.”

Any soldier who failed to treat the people and their religion respectfully, Washington said, should be given “such severe & exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportionate to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause.”

While clamping down on American miscreants, Washington insisted that all prisoners of war be treated “with as much humanity & kindness as may be consistent with your own safety & the publick interest.” He told Arnold to restrain his troops “from all acts of cruelty & insult which will disgrace the American arms—and irritate our fellow subjects against us.”

Finally, Washington instructed Arnold to spend his limited funds with “frugality & oeconomy,...keeping as exact an account as possible of your disbursements.”

Although General Washington issued strict instructions to those below him, he himself ceded to orders from a higher power: the Continental Congress. “You are to regulate your conduct in every respect by the rules and discipline of war,” his commission from Congress stated, “and follow such orders and directions from time to time as you shall receive from this or a future Congress of the said United Colonies.” Washington accepted his commission from Congress with a humility not characteristic of recent times: “Tho’ I am truly sensible of the high honour done me in this appointment, yet I feel a great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities & military experience may not be equal to the extensive & important trust.”

Historical parallels are never perfect, of course. Times do change. So in the unlikely event that George 43 does decide to follow the advice of George 1, he will have to adjust his actions to suit the unique circumstances of today. George 1 did not have to worry about WMDs hidden deep within Canadian bunkers, for instance, nor did he benefit from the extensive “military experience” George 43 received in the Alabama National Guard.