First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [183]
Long before the Treaty, in 1777, while hostilities were still alive and Britain was blockading ports of entry along the American coast, the Andrew Doria, bearer of the first greeting, was burned by her crew in the Delaware to prevent British seizure. Her former companions of the first squadron of the navy and of the first combat, the Columbus and the Providence, met the same fate, burned or blown up by their crews to prevent seizure by the enemy. The Cabot, and the Alfred, on which the flag of the Continental Congress was first raised in Philadelphia, were captured by the British. The Providence, last survivor of the originals, was destroyed in 1779 in the Penobscot in Maine. When commissioned in 1775, the squadron had been called “the maddest idea in the world.” Now scattered in ruined timbers along the banks of the Delaware and on the shores of Narragansett and Chesapeake bays, the charred relics expressed the note of sadness that lies beneath human affairs.
A private sadness that haunted Washington to the end was in having no child of his own to be his continuance. He had not grasped the fact that an autonomous America was his child. Yet he was as proud and confident of its future as any father could be of a promising son. In an enraptured, if now heartbreaking, vision of America, he said in his Last Circular to the States, issued in June, 1783, that America “seemed to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity. Heaven has crowned its other blessings by giving the fairest opportunity for political happiness than any other nation has ever been favored with and the result must be a nation which would have a meliorating influence on all mankind.”
Following his lead, historians of the 19th century, believers in progress, drew their nation’s history as a steady advance of liberty, starting from the winning of the Revolution, which was considered the outstanding success in history of a popular military action, while the state it created was seen as having a mission assigned by God to build a model political nation of justice and equality and self-government. At the end of the 20th century we see in that proud design a more somber story, of injustice toward native Americans evicted from their lands, of inequality for those born of different colors and faiths, of government not by the best but by a collection of shoddy and peccant men, inept and corrupt yet always laced with workers and dreamers of a change for the better.
The two centuries of American history since the salute to the flag of the Andrew Doria can be celebrated for many things: for the opening of refuge for the wretched of other lands yearning to breathe free, for laws to establish the rules of decent working conditions, for measures to protect the poor and support the indigent, but the state of “human felicity” that Washington believed “must result from the sovereignty of America” has not been the outcome. Two thousand years of human aggression, greed and the madness of power reveal a record that blots the rejoicing of that happy night in Philadelphia, and reminds us how slow is the pace of “melioration” and how mediocre is the best we have made of what Washington and Greene and Morgan and their half-clad soldiers “without the shadow of a blanket” fought through bitter winters to achieve.
If Crévecoeur came again to ask his famous question “What is this new man, this American?” what would he find? The free and equal new man in a new world that he envisaged would be realized only in spots, although conditions for the new man would come nearer to being