



Produced by Connie Boitano and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




THE

AMERICANISM

OF

WASHINGTON

By

Henry van <DW18>


1906

Hard is the task of the man who at this late day attempts to say
anything new about Washington. But perhaps it may be possible to unsay
some of the things which have been said, and which, though they were at
one time new, have never at any time been strictly true.

The character of Washington, emerging splendid from the dust and tumult
of those great conflicts in which he played the leading part, has passed
successively into three media of obscuration, from each of which his
figure, like the sun shining through vapors, has received some disguise
of shape and color. First came the mist of mythology, in which we
discerned the new St. George, serene, impeccable, moving through an
orchard of ever-blooming cherry-trees, gracefully vanquishing dragons
with a touch, and shedding fragrance and radiance around him. Out of
that mythological mist we groped our way, to find ourselves beneath the
rolling clouds of oratory, above which the head of the hero was
pinnacled in remote grandeur, like a sphinx poised upon a volcanic peak,
isolated and mysterious. That altitudinous figure still dominates the
cloudy landscapes of the after-dinner orator; but the frigid, academic
mind has turned away from it, and looking through the fog of criticism
has descried another Washington, not really an American, not amazingly a
hero, but a very decent English country gentleman, honorable,
courageous, good, shrewd, slow, and above all immensely lucky.

Now here are two of the things often said about Washington which need,
if I mistake not, to be unsaid: first, that he was a solitary and
inexplicable phenomenon of greatness; and second, that he was not an
American.

Solitude, indeed, is the last quality that an intelligent student of his
career would ascribe to him. Dignified and reserved he was, undoubtedly;
and as this manner was natural to him, he won more true friends by
using it than if he had disguised himself in a forced familiarity and
worn his heart upon his sleeve. But from first to last he was a man who
did his work in the bonds of companionship, who trusted his comrades in
the great enterprise even though they were not his intimates, and who
neither sought nor occupied a lonely eminence of unshared glory. He was
not of the jealous race of those who

    "Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne";

nor of the temper of George III., who chose his ministers for their
vacuous compliancy. Washington was surrounded by men of similar though
not of equal strength--Franklin, Hamilton, Knox, Greene, the Adamses,
Jefferson, Madison. He stands in history not as a lonely pinnacle like
Mount Shasta, elevated above the plain

    "By drastic lift of pent volcanic fires";

but as the central summit of a mountain range, with all his noble
fellowship of kindred peaks about him, enhancing his unquestioned
supremacy by their glorious neighborhood and their great support.

Among these men whose union in purpose and action made the strength and
stability of the republic, Washington was first, not only in the
largeness of his nature, the loftiness of his desires, and the vigor of
his will, but also in that representative quality which makes a man able
to stand as the true hero of a great people. He had an instinctive power
to divine, amid the confusions of rival interests and the cries of
factional strife, the new aims and hopes, the vital needs and
aspirations, which were the common inspiration of the people's cause
and the creative forces of the American nation. The power to understand
this, the faith to believe in it, and the unselfish courage to live for
it, was the central factor of Washington's life, the heart and fountain
of his splendid Americanism.

It was denied during his lifetime, for a little while, by those who
envied his greatness, resented his leadership, and sought to shake him
from his lofty place. But he stood serene and imperturbable, while that
denial, like many another blast of evil-scented wind, passed into
nothingness, even before the disappearance of the party strife out of
whose fermentation it had arisen. By the unanimous judgment of his
countrymen for two generations after his death he was hailed as _Pater
Patriae_; and the age which conferred that title was too ingenuous to
suppose that the father could be of a different race from his own
offspring.

But the modern doubt is more subtle, more curious, more refined in its
methods. It does not spring, as the old denial did, from a partisan
hatred, which would seek to discredit Washington by an accusation of