|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Above: West front of the Washington Mansion at Mount Vernon.
Arise! ‘tis the day of our Washington’s glory;
The garlands uplift for our liberties won.
Oh sing in your gladness his echoing story,
Whose sword swept for freedom the fields of the sun!
Not with gold, nor with gems,
But with evergreens vernal,
And the banners of stars that the continent span,
Crown, crown we the chief of the heroes eternal,
Who lifted his sword for the birthright of man!—Hezekiah Butterworth, “Crown Our Washington.”
Monday, February 17, 2025 is to-day’s legal celebration of Washington’s Birthday – or Presidents’ Day, as many have come to call it. Of course, our first president was actually born on February 22, which – when I was a boy – was the day on which we celebrated it, regardless of what day of the week it fell. Doubtless an inconvenience to government and private taskmasters alike, in 1968 Congress decreed that it and a number of other less important civil holidays were to be shifted to the nearest Monday. This had the unintended consequence of reducing each of them, including the first president’s natal day, to merely the last day of a three-day weekend.
But time was in my own memory, when Washington’s birthday was celebrated as a sort of secular major Saints’ Day. Cherry pies were a major feature of the day, in deference to the manufactured myth about the boy Washington refusing to lie to his father about chopping down a prized tree of that type. His images on both quarter coin and the dollar bill remain constant reminders of he whom we called “The Father of His Country” – and foreign characters responsible for the current form of government of their countries were approvingly lauded as the “George Washington” of their countries – as for example, the Republic of China’s Sun Yat-Sen. “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” the phrase coined in his honour by his comrade-in-arms, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, was endlessly repeated. Countless classrooms featured his picture and Lincoln’s in public and Catholic schools alike. The day or two before the day itself often featured pageants or programmes in his honour.
Apart from the name of both the capital city of the nation and the northwesternmost of the lower 48 States, there were and are countless counties, cities, towns, and streets across the country named for him. The centre of his cultus was and is his home at Mount Vernon. In the District of Columbia are not only the Washington Monument but the Apotheosis of Washington inside the dome of the Capitol. Among other places of Washingtonian veneration are the George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Virginia, Longfellow House (Washington’s Headquarters) National Historic Site in Massachusetts, Morristown National Historical Park in New Jersey, Valley Forge National Historical Park (and the George Washington Memorial Chapel) in Pennsylvania, Wallace House State Historic Site in New Jersey, Washington’s Headquarters State Historic Site in New York, Independence National Historical Park in Pennsylvania, and Federal Hall National Historic Park in New York City, where he was sworn in as our first president. Given his wide movements from Virginia to Massachusetts during the Revolution, there are a great many buildings where he had headquarters, and even more that can boast “George Washington Slept Here.” His ancestral home of Sulgrave Manor in England is preserved in his memory. So too with the various churches wherein he worshipped; the George Washington National Masonic Memorial in Alexandria is a tribute to his time in the craft, although there are claims he came into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. Whether or not that be true, he prevented his troops from celebrating Guy Fawkes during the Revolution.
In any case, so long as the United States were sure of themselves, and the majority of their inhabitants assured of the greatness of their country, he was revered. Indeed, not only was he a key focus of the American Civil Religion, when the Southern States seceded, they adopted him as a patron of their own – the seal of the Confederate States of America featured an equestrian picture of Washington. For the Confederates, their experiment in secession was simply following the example of George and the other Founding Fathers in seceding from the British Empire; the Lost Cause of the Confederacy became a sort of Shia version of the National Civic Religion. The Sunni Unionists, on the other hand, adopted the murdered Lincoln as a sort of Christ-like Saviour figure. That these two versions of the national secular faith could co-exist helped heal the wounds of war quickly, so that a mere 50 years later the aged veterans of both armies could reunite in each other’s arms at Gettysburg.
That religion of America in which the images if not the realities of both Washington and Lincoln played so great a part had been consciously invented by several people, including Noah Webster and Parson Weems, creator of the Cherry Tree fable. It allowed folk of all faiths and none to apply their religious sensitivities to serving their country without any other basis of unity. But it was undergirded by a moral consensus – Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and most other people believed for the most part in a common set of rights and wrongs. When that shattered in the 1960s, the national faith began to decay. To-day, for many Americans, Washington was merely a slaveholding rich white man. The demi-god of the Capitol is reduced to a Wokish slur.
But what was he really? Being of French-Canadian descent, I am all too aware that one of the Indians under his command killed a captured French officer in Washington’s custody on May 28, 1754 and that was one of the sparks that started the Seven Years’ War. That, in turn – despite repeated defeats at the hands of the French – led in the end to La Conquete, “the Conquest,” the formative trauma of the French-Canadian people. Of course, that was followed by the 1774 Quebec Act, in which George III guaranteed our freedom, religion, and laws – in turn costing him a great deal of popularity in the Thirteen Colonies. Above all, the Conquest preserved the French-Canadians from the horrors of the French Revolution. But in any case, Washington was not very popular among the French-Canadians.
Nor was his popularity great among the Anglo-Canadians, given that most of the first of them were Loyalist refugees after the Revolution ended. For them, Washington, and all those of his fellow rebels who had sworn oaths to the King were perjurers and traitors. For this, they could not forgive him. Interestingly enough, a number of his slaves ran off to join the King’s forces; they were not returned and would later lead lives in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
But French, Loyalists, and escaped slaves aside, what are we to make of this fallen idol on his 293rd birthday? Political considerations aside, he was a competent commander. If not the military genius that our fathers made him out to be – Sir William Howe, his major opponent in the early years of the war, allowed him and the Continental Army to escape his clutches as part of Howe’s ultimate successful desire to spite George III’s attempts at Constitutional reform in Britain – he was no fool. As he showed at Trenton and Valley Forge, he was adept at rallying and keeping together desperate troops, who would have melted away under a less able commander. If only the intervention of Louis XVI of France and Carlos III of Spain in the Revolution made rebel victory possible, it is to his credit primarily that the rebels held out until the French and Spanish got involved. Most astonishingly, although de facto possessed of complete power at the end of the war, he preferred to surrender the reins to the ineffectual Congress at the end of the war rather than rule as military dictator. His farewell to his officers at New York City’s Fraunces Tavern (to-day another Washingtonian Shrine) signalled his return to Mount Vernon. Upon hearing of the voluntary act, his late opponent, George III declared that “if this be true, then General Washington is the greatest man of the age.”
Washington, as president of the 1787-88 Constitutional Convention, played a key role in the creation of our governing document. As our first president (1789-1797), Washington set the tone for all subsequent holders of that office. For all that he never lived in the White House, he nevertheless haunts it and all its tenants. As president, he was so venerated that few dared to disagree with him publicly – save the rebels in Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion, against which he led the army. Washington began a great many presidential traditions which have survived until the present.
But the current state of affairs in these United States underscores the fact that his Farewell Address made upon leaving office has been universally ignored. He begins by warning against sectionalism and division among Americans – whatever else one says about the 1861-1865 Civil War, it killed more Americans than all of our other wars put together. One has to ask whether either fire-eating secessionism or die-hard unionism was really justified, given the oceans of blood that would be shed in their respective names. Surely any compromise was better than the thousands of lives that were snuffed out? Having witnessed the horrors of civil war in our revolution, Washington was not keen on seeing his country undergo it again – as has been said, there are no pacifists like experienced veterans. It is something to be thought about in the current war on Confederate monuments themselves – as noted, this was part of the near miraculous postwar healing process that took place.
Just as horrific to him was the idea of government dominated by parties. He described it thusly:
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual, and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty… It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
The fact that we are utterly unable to conceive of government without party strife speaks poorly for us, indeed.
He goes on to dwell on what is for him an important topic – the necessity of religion in public life:
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness–these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
How far we have departed from this view as a nation is palpable – even if one realises that in a sense, the vague pan-religiosity of which he spoke was doomed from the beginning.
After warning of the dangers of government indebtedness – something we take for granted, Washington saw another danger to the new nation – “entangling alliances.”
Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld; and it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
While he stood for friendly relations with all nations if possible, Washington believed we best employed dealing with our issues, and not meddling in the affairs of others.
Now we have a new president, and one may hope that in at least some of his choices he may see the wisdom Washington left us. Alas, so much of what Washington foresaw as ultimately ruining us has become embedded in our system. On this latest anniversary if his birth, let us re-examine his legacy – not as a mythological creature or mere symbol, but a canny political mind whose experience gave him even more depth. As we enter the 250th anniversary of our revolution, let us who are Catholics and Americans pray that our beloved Country may one day accept the Kingship of Christ, and be worthy of our patroness, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception.