C. M. Stevens

“ Washington saw the actor look at the slave and smile with an inward thought. He quickly guessed at the thought and responded, “When we profess, as our fundamental principle, that liberty is the inalienable right of every man, we do not include madmen or idiots; liberty in their hands would become a scourge. Till the mind of the slave has been educated to perceive what are the obligations of a state of freedom, and not confound a man’s freedom with a brute’s, the gift would insure its abuse.” ”

“ Of all his wonderful career, as a child born to the wealth and luxury of his times, as a landed proprietor of one of the greatest fortunes in America, as soldier, statesman and first President of the United States, there is nowhere on record a single ignoble, immoral or dishonorable word or deed in any way relating to the principles or interests fundamental for his character, mind and life. ”

“ As in our own times, big business found opportunity to fatten itself on the needs of the people. The greatness of Washington is in startling evidence when it is seen how he not only had to conduct a war and guide an unprovided army split up into rival sections, but he had to be statesman and diplomat enough to manage a menagerie of ideas ranging through the congressional sessions like animals broken loose in a circus. ”

“ We have seen this same nation violating our neutral rights, spurning our pacific proposals, her piratical citizens sweeping our ships from the seas and venal presses under her control pouring out torrents of abuse on men who have grown gray in our service. We have seen her ministers in this country insulting our government by a daring, unprecedented and contemptuous appeal to the people, and her agents at home offering conditions which slaves whose necks have grown to the yoke would reject with indignation. ”

“ Through the desperate eight years of war, in which the devastations of the British could hardly be called worse than the wrangling differences of opinion and sordid interests among the colonies, Washington had conserved and guided the struggle for American liberty, so that, at the close of the war, with the disembarkation for Halifax of troops, royalists and tories, there was a unanimous voice of harmony for a new America. ”

“ American Liberty has been a goddess of worship from the beginning, and yet we find ourselves in an endless turmoil concerning what we mean by “American liberty.”
Washington and his associate patriots wrote a great definition in history and established that definition in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, but human meaning, like the skies, seems hard to get clear and to keep clear. To know clearly what the definition of freedom [Pg 2] means and to promote it in the right-minded way, is the patriotism that identifies anyone anywhere as being American. ”

“ Presently there will be enough independent thinking for any one to consider it as unpatriotic to belong to a “party” as to belong to any other political fragment, clique, or social group, presuming to dictate what is weakness and what is strength for the individual mind as its only choice in patriotism and Americanism. America, composed of every element of humanity from every part of the earth, is the strongest nation of all time, and capable of being the clearest and most just for the freedom of the world. Here we strive for the peace of freedom in law. We war only against war. ”

“ It is doubtless of more real value to American patriotism, personal character and moral humanity, for both the heroic and the trivial to fade from our interest in the lives of Washington and Lincoln, and from the meaning of their lives for the rights of man. We need to appreciate the human struggle within themselves that made them admirable men, and we need to know it in relation to the human work around them that made them admirable Americans. ”

“ All the wealthy families were entertained at the Governor’s mansion in gorgeous style. Washington was among the first to be so honored and entertained. It looked as if all Virginia was at the feet of the royal governor, rapturously “eating out of his hand.”
The House of Burgesses convened and everything seemed to be going the King’s way, when a letter was received stating what had been done to Boston. Then things were different. Principle, freedom and sympathy joined hands, and court-flattery went to the scrap-heap. ”

“ 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 noblest 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 constitution would scarcely have been attained. ”

“ Washington began his life with a super-abundance of everything aristocratic in his age. Lincoln began his life in worldly nothingness that had indeed nothing for him but the democratic wilderness till he became a man. And yet both became the same great soul in the same great cause, the maker and preserver of American civilization, as the moral law of man and God. ”

“ It is hardly likely that the world, a hundred years later, could have known that there ever was such a person as George Washington, if his mother had not changed her mind and kept him from the boisterous turmoil of the uncertain sea. However that may be, he was sent to school instead of making a cruise in the West Indies. His study was mathematics and military tactics, the very thing most needed in the sublime undertaking that was to make his name immortal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These violent differences of opinion and the vicious personal attacks on motives, attributed each to each, has been one of the pitiable signs of injustice and incompetency in American politics. Time after time, as the presidential campaigns arrive, the fist-like will of each side is thrust into the other’s faces, as those “belonging” to a party fight to get votes for the party candidate, not for a patriotic cause. ”

“ The public-school youth, who is not in one way or another familiar with the Americanism of Washington and Lincoln, is not yet prepared either for college or for life, and, still more clearly, is not prepared to be an American. The number of un-Americans in America may, in some crisis, become appalling, if, in fact, they do not succeed in Europeanizing America. Against that possibility there is nothing to save us, if we do not save ourselves as our hereditary task of American patriotism.
Washington and Lincoln are the two incomparable constructive ideals of American liberty and manhood. ”

“ The Indians saw Washington as one of the boldest, riding fearlessly over the battlefield, carrying the General’s orders. The chief and his warriors had singled Washington out as one they must kill. They had tried their best but their bullets never found him. At last they would not waste their bullets on him because he had a charmed life, under the protection of the Great Spirit. And who knows about these things! Everything may not be of inevitable physical order! The simple Indian may have been nearer the truth than would be any psychological or scientific explanation. ”

“ From the aristocratic tables and home comforts of Mount Vernon and Belvoir, the youthful Washington began roughing it in the forests and along the streams of the Shenandoah. He had begun to adapt himself to the primitive conditions of his country and to share the coarse fare of the commoners that composed the civilization of the new world. ”

“ One cannot read it through with its ignoble intrigues, unpatriotic dissentions, and dangerous rivalries without feeling that Washington combined great manhood, great leadership, great statesmanship and great generalship, and that no other man of less character and genius than that could ever have welded together such discordant and diversified elements into a means sufficient to achieve the independence and liberty of America. ”

“ The good of the country is found to be, not so much in the political platform of parties but in the character of men, harmonizing with the rights of man. It is thus that the congressional resolutions and the party wrangling of Washington’s time, as in that of Lincoln, are wholly discredited in estimating the lives of those great leaders of the American mind. In its full view, the American ideal is seen to be that the man or woman who presides decently and righteously over the humanity of self or family or group is president of the human world. ”

“ Meanwhile, the prediction of the Duke de Choiseul that the colonies would rapidly see they had no need of England, and would as rapidly cease to fear its military power, was coming true. Irritation followed fast upon irritation, and arrogance bred resentment and retaliation so rapidly that it requires many a volume to tell it all. The colonists had to fight the battles of the border warfare, pay the costs, support the arrogant officers sent across the water, and yet find themselves regarded as inferiors fit only as producers for a land across the sea. ”

“ The virtue innate in a people may be utterly destroyed by bad institutions, for ‘the virtue,’ as Jay wrote to Washington, ‘like the other resources of a country, can only be drawn to a point by strong circumstances ably managed, or strong governments ably administered.’”
When it came to a question of who should be commander-in-chief of all the armies, the disruptions and jealousies of the sections seemed dangerously near wrecking any united action, which obviously must be fatal to any independence more than they then had from Great Britain. ”

“ As we take a swift view of those times, we are apt to suppose that the change of mind, uniting the colonies in opposition to Great Britain, came suddenly and unanimously, but, as in all places and situations, where there is freedom of thinking, the general conviction came slowly, especially the conviction to use force in the defense of the rights of of man as learned in the hard freedom of the wilderness. What we might call the high-water mark of mind, in favor of force for maintaining colonial liberty, was that of Patrick Henry, whose slogan was “Give me liberty or give me death.” ”

“ Washington’s labor was likewise lightened by the inspiring patriotism of many other noble makers of the new America. Thomas Jefferson, who became the third president, was of priceless service. His call to American patriotism may be well illustrated in a few of his most quoted statements:
“The man who loves his country on its own account, and not merely for its trappings of interest or power, can never be divorced from it, can never refuse to come forward when he finds that it is engaged in dangers which he has the means of warding off.” ”

“ George Washington has his place in American history, not only as being the great commander-in-chief of the American revolutionary army, but as being no less influential and powerful as a political leader and constructive American statesman. ”

“ The ingenuous youth of America will hold up to themselves the bright model of Washington’s example, and study to be what they behold; they will contemplate his character, till all his virtues spread out and display themselves to their delighted vision ”

“ Washington’s life was a fine human model through all the periods of his career, but the heartening lesson of Lincoln was in his unconquerable struggle to master a way of life, in the course of which could appear his worthy human task.
Lincoln’s man-making process especially proves, even as Washington’s life had already shown, that there must be a fundamental honesty of purpose in building up the mind or no one can ever arrive at manhood, character or more abundant life. ”

“ No man of colonial times lived more under English aristocratic influence than Washington, and yet it only served as a contrast in which to define his principles of liberty, his meaning of manhood and his vision of humanity. So, also, no man of his times was more under the belittling trivialities of frontier destitution and ignorance than Abraham Lincoln, but it only served as inspiration and revelation for his moral duty in the supreme crisis of the American nation. ”

“ Washington and Lincoln were continuously expressing themselves in word or deed, but always striving for the reasonable in a clear-minded way. Their mind-making was always the process of achieving a humanity-mind capable of clear world-wisdom. In that kingdom alone is the Americanism that is human liberty, the rights of man and the moral redemption of the world. ”

“ Washington’s methods now look so reasonable and practical that we wonder how the people could be so ignorant, blind and obstructive, but a century later than our time may [Pg 131] show us to be stoning our prophets and killing our saviors, just as they have done through all the periods of history. It is the disastrous tribute that democracy pays to partisanship, and that humanity has always paid partisan leadership. ”

“ From the front door of his father’s house, on the estate that was a few years later named Mount Vernon, could be seen many miles of the Potomac River, and a wide sweep of the shores of Maryland. All that can enter into making life delightful flourished abundantly about the cradle of this child, and contributed toward his preparation and development for leadership, that was to produce a new power in the cause of human freedom for the world. ”