Well, Washington’s birthday has come to us again. Despite being called “Presidents’ Day” in recent years and celebrated on the nearest Monday, February 22 is the day that the first president of the United States was born — and, not too surprisingly, was the first purely civic American holiday, after Independence Day. As we saw with Lincoln’s feast earlier this month, Washington too was blessed with what amounted to a real cultus in my youth — which like Lincoln’s, has not entirely abated to-day. Indeed, Washington’s veneration was even greater than that of the Railsplitter, although their two pictures often graced countless school classrooms side by side. As Bradley T. Johnson wrote in his 1894 Life of General Washington, “The general who never won a battle is now understood to have been the Revolution itself, and one of the great generals of history. The statesman who never made a motion, nor devised a measure, nor constructed a proposition in the convention of which he was president, is appreciated as the spirit, the energy, the force, the wisdom which initiated, organized, and directed the formation of the Constitution of the United States and the Union by, through, and under it; and therefore it seems now possible to present him as the Virginian soldier, gentleman, and planter, as a man, the evolution of the society of which he formed a part, representative of his epoch, and his surroundings, developed by circumstances into the greatest character of all time — the first and most illustrious of Americans.”
“First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen,” as he was described in his own time, Washington’s Birthday was celebrated while he was still alive — and in large measure replaced the King’s Birthday (although the fireworks, parades, and other such events that used to accompany that earlier observance were for the most part transferred to the Fourth of July). The full measure of devotion to the day and the man in times gone may be see in Schauffler’s Washington’s Birthday, another collection of prose, poetry, and school exercises in honour of the feast.
As naming both one of the United States and their collective capital after him might show, devotion to our first president has left quite a mark on the land. Although he dedicated the City of Washington, he never lived there; but visitors to the Capitol Building are intended to be awed by The Apotheosis of Washington in that structure’s rotunda. The famous portrait of him hanging in the East Room of the White House was rescued by First Lady Dolly Madison, and so did not burn with the presidential residence in 1814. But, of course, we need not journey to DC to see his picture, as Washington graces each of our dollar bills and our quarter coins.
The chief centres of his cultus are of course the Washington Monument and his old home at Mount Vernon. But there are many others — not surprising, given his many travels in war and peace. Boston has his headquarters during the siege of 1775; New York City has Fraunces Tavern, where he bade farewell to his officers, and Federal Hall, where he was sworn into office as first president; New Jersey offers his headquarters at Morristown, and the Battlefields at Monmouth Courthouse, Princeton, and Trenton; Pennsylvania offers Independence National Historical Park, where he and the other founding fathers stitched together the new country, and Valley Forge, where he and his men endured the harsh winter of 1778. So it goes, all the way down to Georgia. Colonial Williamsburg honours him and the other founders, as Yorktown Battlefield does the revolution’s successful conclusion. His birthplace, boyhood home, ancestral seat in England, and even the house he and his brother rented in Barbados are all preserved. In all of these and many other places that he used as headquarters or just stopped to rest, his memory is cherished, including many a colonial inn or private home that treasures the memory of one of his overnights. To this day, a bit of cachet remains to the sign that honestly reads, “George Washington Slept Here,” virtually guaranteeing the salability of whatever property is so designated. There is Mount Rushmore, and statues of him across the United States — not least in Glendale, California’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. Believing they were following in his footsteps, the Confederates put an equestrian image of him on their own great seal.
Religiously, there has been a bit of scramble to claim him. As an active Freemason, he has a shrine built to him by that Order that must be seen to be believed. The Episcopalians treasure the places he worshipped in Cambridge, MA, New York, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Falls Church, and Alexandria, VA, Charleston, SC, Savannah, GA, and elsewhere. There is the Episcopal Church built in his honour at Valley Forge, and he is of course commemorated in the National Cathedral. Many Catholics believe that he converted on his deathbed (a hope this writer shares), though some discount it. But observant Deist, faithful Anglican, or last-minute Catholic, the admiration Washington was held in by almost all cannot be gainsaid.
Unfortunately for the memory of Washington, was is the operative word here. As Wokery has spread, and with it a concomitant hatred of the United States, so too has a dislike of its founders and most particularly of Washington. Much is made of his being a slaveowner, and so he becomes the epitome of a nation “born in genocide, and built on slavery.” As with every other erstwhile hero of our national civic religion, the man once universally hailed as the nation’s founder is subjected to increasing attack as that nation’s elites and their sycophants become ever more hostile to their inheritance.
For me personally, however, the question is a good deal more complex. Being French-Canadian by blood, I am only too aware that the murder of the French officer Jumonville in 1754 by Washington’s Indian allies and the subsequent battle of Fort Necessity ultimately began the Seven Years War, called the French and Indian War in America. This conflict would lead to the conquest of Quebec, and the surrender of New France by the Mother Country to the British in 1763. This was the great trauma in history of my ethnicity, and ensured the French-Canadians, Acadians, Creoles, and Cajuns would have a very stunted development, to say the least — and is why I am writing these words in English instead of my ancestral tongue.
Yet the Conquest was not an unmitigated evil; if nothing else, it protected us from the horrors of the French Revolution. Of course, that conflict quite likely would not have occurred had France not been bankrupted supporting the American Revolution. The American rebels revolted, in part, because of the Quebec Act, through which my ancestors were guaranteed their religious freedom by George III. The Continental Congress, while duplicitously appealing to the Quebecois to join them in revolution, in a letter to the British people attacked the King for the Quebec Act. Aware of this, Bishop Briand of Quebec excommunicated Fr. John Carroll when he came to Canada to plead the rebels’ cause alongside Ben Franklin.
Washington, in both military and political offices in the pre-revolutionary era had sworn oaths to the King — as had many other rebel leaders. These he broke in order to assume command of the rebel army. This oathbreaking on the part of the revolutionaries is generally dismissed as irrelevant by most Americans. But the Catechism of Trent has something interesting to say bout the Catholic teaching on the matter: “…it is first to be observed, that to swear, whatever the form of words may be, is nothing else than to call God to witness; thus to say, ‘God is witness,’ and ‘By God,’ mean one and the same thing. To swear by creatures, such as the holy Gospels, the cross, the names or relics of the Saints, and so on, in order to prove our statements, is also to take an oath. Of themselves, it is true, such objects give no weight or authority to an oath; it is God Himself who does this, whose divine majesty shines forth in them. Hence to swear by the Gospel is to swear by God Himself, whose truth is contained and revealed in the Gospel. (This holds equally true with regard to those who swear) by the Saints, who are the temples of God, who believed the truth of His Gospel, were faithful in its observance, and spread it far and wide among the nations and peoples.” Breaking their oaths to bear truth faith allegiance to the King was no small matter.
One thing the revolution certainly did was to ensure that — unlike in the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and Brazilian empires in America, the slavery issue would not be solved peacefully. As it was, the British emancipated Black Loyalists, and took 3,000 away with them to Nova Scotia — a number of them formerly belong to Washington himself. But Washington ordered in his will that all his slaves should be freed upon his wife’s death — and moreover, unlike Jefferson, never wrote of inherent black inferiority.
Washington’s conduct in the Major André affair was universally mourned; his refusal to pardon the popular young officer was seen as spite for Benedict Arnold’s successful escape. Far more pleasant was his banning of the celebration of Guy Fawkes’ Night in his because of its anti-Catholicism. This stood him well later, in dealing with his French and Spanish allies. At the end of the war, he voluntarily gave up command and the almost dictatorial power that had accrued to his office over the course of the conflict. Upon hearing of this, his erstwhile foe, King George III, declared, “if this be true, then General Washington is the greatest man of the age.” So too with the end of his second term as our first president.
So then, on this Washington’s Birthday, what are we to make of the man? I think for the Catholic, whether or not he converted (though I hope he did), he is much like the country itself. For those who think our country perfect as she is (or at least was, until the 1960s), then he is the hero of peerless perfection, the paragon of the cherry tree fable (in honour of which cherry pie is still served in many places on the Birthday). Similarly, for the Woke, like the country itself, he is the epitome of all evil. But for us, our country must be our deeply beloved motherland, whose good we must seek despite her many flaws — above all her spiritual good, which requires her conversion. So too then, without ignoring his sins and weaknesses, we can admire Washington as “the father of our country” — and pray to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, patroness of these United States, that he did indeed convert, as we hope that one day our dear country will.
