To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 Read Free Page A

Empire was at its peak. Just a decade earlier (in 1763) its French rival had conceded defeat in a seven-year world war. From North America (where Washington had played a role) to India to Europe and across the world’s oceans the British and French Empires had collided in an all-out struggle for supremacy.
    After a period of defeat the British switched leaders and elevated William Pitt, the Great Commoner, to be wartime prime minister. In a brief intense period of extraordinary leadership and decisive risk-taking (comparable to Churchill in World War II, but stunningly more successful), Pitt gambled again and again on brave leaders who forged victory. In 1759 Britain won a series of miraculous victories in India, Canada, and in the West Indies; terming it the
Annus Mirabilus
.
    After the extraordinary worldwide exertion of the Seven Years’ War, the British Parliament and taxpayers felt entitled to have a little help from the Americans. The London elites reasoned that they had spent all that money building an army and navy to protect North America. Now that the French had been defeated and had surrendered Canada to Great Britain, the Americans were safe.
    It was now time for the American colonists to pay for their own safety.
    There have been few moments of misunderstanding more decisive and more radical than that between the British elites and their American colonists in 1770.
    The elites in London felt they were, well, “elite.”
    The colonists in America felt they were “free and equal Englishmen under the law.”
    The British elites sought to impose their will on the colonists in what they thought was a reasonable action by a naturally governing empire.
    The American colonists resisted what they saw as a mortal threat to their very freedom and identity.
    Modern cynics find it hard to understand the moral power of the American Revolution.
    This was not just a fight over economics.
    This was a fight over fundamental rights.
    This was a battle of life and death over the nature and meaning of the American personality.
    “Live free or die” was not just the slogan of New Hampshire. It was the way many——not all, probably only a third, but a deeply committed one third——Americans felt about what was happening.
    It was this sense of fighting for their lives and their very freedom that impelled the colonists to more and more extreme measures.
    The British elites believed this was a conflict about money and about minor irritations. They simply could not believe the colonists were serious about their rights as free men and women.
    Thus when they sought to impose a tax on tea the British elitesthought they could cleverly reduce the burden by granting the East India Company a monopoly so the price of tea would actually drop.
    It was an enormous shock in London when Samuel Adams and his friends launched the original Tea Party in December 1773 and threw the tea into Boston Harbor.
    Principle, not price, was the American objection to the tea tax.
    No taxation without representation was a serious, life or death belief of those colonists who were finding themselves increasingly at odds with London.
    The second great threat to American liberty was the power of the British judges and the dictatorial way in which they wielded that power.
    Anger over the judges and a demand for trial by jury (so local citizens as jurors could set aside the judge’s power) was the second greatest demand of the colonists.
    This objection to the arbitrary power of the British elites grew gradually.
    It was said that Benjamin Franklin went to London as an Englishman and after years of living there came back to Pennsylvania as an American. He had concluded that the British aristocracy would never admit him to their ranks and never treat him as an equal. He would spend the rest of his life teaching them how wrong they had been and how expensive arrogance and haughtiness could be.
    The colonists initially had no thought of independence. They saw