"Every day in Moscow, the Russians and the tourists troop past the guards at the tomb of Lenin and pause to look down on the corpse of the Father of the Revolution." "Presumably they do so without a shudder, for the body has been preserved by a special chemical process for nearly half a century." "These people, however, are not in Moscow." "They're in Washington and they're looking at something which to Americans is an equally sacred icon." "It is the birth certificate of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence." "Like Lenin, the Declaration of Independence is guarded day and night and it also is preserved under a special glass and coated with a chemically treated film which for two centuries has defied the ravages of time." "The first signature might well have defied them anyway." "It's that of a man from Massachusetts, John Hancock, who escaped capture in the first battle of the War of Independence, then had his ship confiscated and burnt by the British." "He wrote his signature in this large way, he said," ""so that the King of England can read it without his glasses"." "Even today, an American handing you, for instance, a contract is apt to say," ""And now if you will just give us your John Hancock."" "After him, the Declaration was signed by the five who drafted it." "Benjamin Franklin, the 70-year-old sage of Philadelphia." "John Adams, a Massachusetts lawyer, who was to become the second President of the United States." "Roger Sherman of Connecticut, once an apprentice shoemaker and now also a lawyer." "Robert Livingston, a New York owner of iron mines." "And the 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, who wrote practically the whole document." "The rest of the signers were a variety of lawyers, merchants, shippers, planters, 56 in all, who signed this birth certificate which was also a declaration of war and of revolution." "Offhand, they wouldn't strike us today as revolutionary types." "At the end of the 18th century, the very idea of revolution itself was strange." "And there were two sentences written by Thomas Jefferson in that document that were literally world-shaking." "The first one was the idea that all men are created equal and have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." "Now, there was an awful lot of argument about that phrase and, in the end, most of the men who signed the Declaration sulkily agreed to let "happiness" stand." "But then they went home and they wrote in their state constitutions," ""Life, liberty and the acquisition and protection of property."" "This was not because they were tycoons." "Property was no dowry." "It was the means of life that they'd had to wrench out of a wilderness." "But now look at this." "This was the stick of dynamite." ""To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men," ""deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."" "Well... the idea that if you didn't like the way you were governed, you being the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, that you had some right to overthrow the parliament, the king, the tribal chieftain," "this was a firebrand that was to blow up France and the German Republic and Imperial Russia and, eventually, the whole idea of Empire." "But..." "I think it's fair to say that Americans take a much simpler view of their revolution as a straightforward, heroic break with a tyrannical king and parliament an ocean away." "But it was nothing like so simple." "The rebellious nation was not a nation, but a string of separate colonies clinging to a coastline." "We tend to think of them as the only white inhabitants of the continent, but if in the 1750s you'd gone over the mountains into the interior, you would have come up against the French and the root cause of the War of Independence." "From Maine to the Ohio River, the French had built a whole chain of forts, intending once for all to hem in the English colonies and maybe to conquer the rest of the hinterland." "This one is Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in upstate New York." "The day came when the French drove east into the fringes of the English colonies and Virginia sent out a young soldier in his 20s to stop them at what is now Pittsburgh." "His name was George Washington." "He failed and retreated." "The next year, a much larger force under General Braddock literally had to hack a road through several hundred miles of the wilderness to the same fort at Pittsburgh, and he also was beaten." "So the British sent over a large expeditionary force to come to the rescue." "They eventually won, but only after nine years." "They suffered atrociously in the woods and the plains out there both from the French and their Indian allies and in pitched battles in such places as this." " They had a few battles here, didn't they?" " Yeah." "Benedict Arnold." "Oh, yeah, but he was a baddie, wasn't he, in the end?" "Yeah, he was the one." "Note the bar sinister." "Where's the bar sinister?" "How about that, the old cannon right down there?" "The Black Watch Regiment had a brutal experience here." "It had one of the worst losses in the history of the regiment and this was in an engagement in which 15,000 British and colonial troops were stood off by 3,500 Frenchmen who had the luck to be under the command of General Montcalm." "The battle lines out there, of course, are obliterated by now by time, growth, foliage, but we do have a rather grim personal relic of these wars which is a lead bullet chewed on by a British brigadier while he was having his leg sawn off," "for it would be 100 years before anaesthetics were introduced to the battlefield." "And you can still see the indentations of his teeth on it." "The operation was successful, but the patient died of shock." "Well, at the end of this nine years' war, the American interior, from Canada all the way south for a thousand miles, was held and the French lost America for ever." "We can only guess at the cost in blood, but in money, it cost the English taxpayer a fortune and the national debt was doubled." "So, understandably, I think, the English began to feel that the colonies should do something for their own protection." "Troops would have to be raised to patrol the greatly expanded western frontier where the French and the Indians, though beaten, were still smarting." "Now, strangely, this idea came as an awful shock to the colonies." "They'd been on a very loose rein to the old country for a long time." "And the young men who'd done the fighting expected to do what Americans have done ever since after a war, which is to disarm, demobilise, forget the whole business of war and get back to normal." "But things weren't normal." "There were few jobs and there was a general depression." "And the ex-soldiers decided they'd like to pull up stakes and move on west." "And sitting in their streets and their alleys in the east, they must have thought back with much yearning to the lands they'd fought in, the new rich lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains." "This newly conquered territory was four times the area of the colonies." "To settle it now would spread the English settlements much too thin for their safety, so Parliament proclaimed that the crest of the Appalachians was the end of the line." "The lands to the west were off limits to new settlement." "Somebody said that the young colonists had seen a vision though a door that they'd prised open, and it was slammed in their faces." "The colonials felt cheated out of an inheritance and the British reminded them that it was no inheritance, but a vastly expanded frontier they would have to pay somebody to defend." "You know what caused the mischief, started the calamity?" "This." "A revenue stamp, something that we don't think twice about today when we pay, through the manufacturer, the government tax on a bottle of liquor, a pack of cigarettes, playing cards." "You see, London had given the colonists a choice." "They could either raise their own troops to patrol the frontier or they could pay for a force of 10,000 British soldiers." "Well, the colonists didn't want to do either and they offered no alternative, so Parliament passed a stamp tax to be stuck on every legal document, colonial newspaper, deed, ship's manifest, everything." "And this was the first internal tax that London had ever imposed." "That was in 1765." "# What a court hath old England of folly and sin" "# Spite of Chatham and Camden, Barre, Burke, Wilkes and Glynn" "# Not content with the Game Act, they tax fish and sea" "# And America drench with hot water and tea" "# Derry down, down, down, derry down" "# There's no knowing where this oppression will stop" "# Some say there's no cure but a capital chop" "# And that I believe each American's wish" "# Since you drench them with tea and deprive them of fish" "# Derry down, down, down, derry down #" "This single act united the scattered colonies in a fury of indignation." "The revenue agents appointed to sell the stamps were about as popular as lepers." "And if they had any sense, they quit their jobs or were quickly persuaded to do so by mobs that sacked their homes, tarred and feathered them and rioted outside the houses of the Royal Governors." "Good patriots rallied to boycott goods coming in from British ports." "Well, Britain had never dreamed of such defiance and a year later, a rather dazed Parliament repealed the Stamp Act." "There was general rejoicing." "Philadelphia delayed its celebration till the king's birthday when engraved invitations to a banquet made clear that he was good King George again, but not for long." "A tax may hurt a man's pride, but it doesn't wound his manhood." "I suppose the thing that made the colonies feel for the first time that they were outcasts from English society was the arrival in Boston harbour of four British regiments as a permanent garrison." "And something else." "Not unlike the appearance on a college campus of the National Guard, the sight in the parks and on the streets of British troops." "In 1770, there was a fatal innovation." "The abrupt appointment of a soldier, the British military commander in America, as the Governor of Massachusetts." "And here he is, General Gage." "He is, by now, one of the regulation villains of the American Revolution." "He was, in fact, an amiable and sympathetic soldier." "Sympathetic, not least, to the Bostonians themselves, one of whom he'd married." "When he was ordered by London to quarter troops in private houses and set up tents in their grounds, he said, and this was five years before the war," ""It is a great folly which I fear the people will resist to the death, and soon."" "It was on this spot that his prophecy came true." "It's the site of the so-called "Boston Massacre", a massacre of Bostonians by British soldiers." "This is their only memorial." "Every day from dawn to midnight, traffic roars over this circle of cobblestones, which is where the first blood was spilt." "Nearby, you see, still stands the Old State House which was then the seat of the colonial government." "In 1770, it's hard to believe now, it dominated the scene and stood near the Custom House which, as we can well understand, had become a detested symbol, the port of entry for British indignities." "Well, the massacre was soon publicised in inflammatory broadsides." "This was done by Paul Revere, the most famous silversmith in the colonies." "It was pictures like these that made sure that the echo of those shots would ring all the way down to the Carolinas." "Let's retreat from the traffic, as the angry crowd did from the shooting, into Boston's Old South Meeting House." "They brought the wounded into this place, this church, this Old Meeting House, which is a name that reminds us of one of the most durable of colonial institutions, which is the church considered not only as a place of worship," "but a court of law and a social centre, the very nub of political life." "Now, what actually happened at the Boston Massacre?" "Well, as always, there are a great variety of versions." "Some toughs attacked a British soldier, or he was showing off his swordsmanship and attacked somebody else." "Somebody was beaten up, but what they do agree about is it was a very snowy March day and a small crowd gathered around the Custom House, which was being guarded by a single sentry." "He was a young man and they started to throw stones and slivers of ice at him and he shouted for help." "Some more soldiers came running and lined up in formation to guard him." "Now, this scared the crowd and one young redcoat was clubbed and kicked to the ground." "As he got up, he slipped on the ice and his musket went off." "I suppose at the time that was the Establishment story and it was despised as such." "At any rate, after the first shot, the crowd charged forward and some of the soldiers panicked and fired." "And what happened next, as in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts in 1965 and five years later at Kent State University, what happened next has been decided ever since by the passion and the prejudice of whichever side you were on when you first heard about it." "I'm afraid that part is true because that's history." "Not what happened, but what people convinced themselves must have happened." "Well, three civilians were killed, two wounded, they died later, one of them a black man, Crispus Attucks, who today is resurrected as the first black American hero." "Such drawings as these were done by bystanders as illustrations to depositions dictated to lawyers the next day by every sort of man who was sure he knew what happened." "Well, however that may be, the fact is that the next night in this place there was an indignation meeting and one, two thousand people stayed here all night until the Governor agreed to withdraw the British regiments to the barracks." "So, you see, it's not surprising that this is where the Revolution was conceived." "This is where they invented a radical underground to advertise the injustices, the latest tax, the latest misbehaviour of the British garrison." "In fact, this Old Meeting House became so notorious as a cradle of sedition that at one point when the British heard that there was to be a protest meeting, they packed the whole place with soldiers and the speaker, Joseph Warren, had to climb in through that window," "which is still known as "Warren's Window"." "Incidentally, during the Revolutionary War, the British, I'm sorry to say, showed that crassness which is characteristic of armies of occupation." "They ripped out all the pews for firewood and turned this place into a stable and a riding school." "I think we see one thing by now." "Revolutions don't grow on trees and a revolutionary chain does not forge itself." "It has to be secured by a conspiracy." "Now, the links between all the activists in the colonies were established by something called "the Committees of Correspondence"." "And they were inspired by this man - James Otis, a Whig lawyer, a Latin scholar and a customs agent who resigned in order to argue the case against the British searching of houses without a writ." "Now, the actual founder of the underground was a disciple of his," "Samuel "Sam" Adams, a tough, tender, wily man who used to rough up his appearance to show his bond with the common people, but he was a genuine rabble-rouser." "In fact, he was the first man to urge the actual treasonable act of calling a Continental Congress of all the rebel colonies." "And the night after the Boston Massacre, he was here." "And a little later, when the British said," ""Well, if you won't pay for your own defence with an internal tax, a stamp tax," ""we shall have to impose external taxes, say, on goods coming into the port of Boston..."" "...he called, Adams called an indignation meeting here and a crowd of volunteers was painted... all their faces and bodies with red ochre to resemble the Indians - that's why they were called Red Indians in the first place " "and fussed out with feathers, and Adams led them down to the harbour, there to throw overboard that famous shipment on which the British demanded threepence a pound tax, on tea." "Not all the tea got soaked in the harbour." "Somebody collected a few shavings... that fell on the wharf and passed it down through many generations." "And here it is, you could say the American equivalent of the key to the Bastille." "And probably the most expensive tea bag extant." "# And t'other day, the Yankee folks were mad about their taxes" "# And so we went like Indians dressed to split tea chests with axes" "# It was the year of '73 and we felt really gritty" "# The mayor would have led the gang but Boston weren't a city" "# Fol-de-rol-de-ray, fol-de-rol-de-ray, but Boston weren't a city" "# And then aboard the ships we went our vengeance to administer" "# We didn't care one tarnai bit for any king or minister" "# We made a plaguey mess of tea in one of the biggest dishes" "# I mean we steeped it in the sea and treated all the fishes" "# Fol-de-rol-de-ray, fol-de-rol-de-ray and treated all the fishes... #" "There were many other tea parties." "Down in Charleston, they let the stuff rot on the wharves." "In Philadelphia and New York, they sent back full cargoes." "And the Committees of Correspondence got busy publicising these outrages and celebrating the courage of such as these female patriots in Edenton, North Carolina, who urged people to sign a pledge to boycott British goods." "Whatever else they may seem to have on their minds, this is what they are doing - signing a pledge." ""We, the ladies of Edenton, do hereby solemnly engage" ""not to conform to that pernicious custom of drinking tea," ""and not to promote or wear any manufacture from England."" "The Committees of Correspondence ran all the way down to South Carolina, the secret and soon not-so-secret militant underground." "But the real southern end of the radical axis was over 500 miles and a whole culture away from Boston." "It was here in the capital of Virginia - Williamsburg." "It was one of the few southern cities and much the most elegant and lively." "We see it today almost as exactly as it was in the 1770s because history moved away and left it as a crumbling ghost town for a century and a half until in the 1920s the idea occurred to a local clergyman," "and was subsidised by the Rockefellers, to restore the original 18th-century buildings that were still standing, more than half the town." "Also to tear down over 450 later, uglier buildings and reconstruct the town as it was in its prime." "Now, this was made possible by a map left by a meticulous French soldier." "He was something of an amateur architect and during the Revolutionary War, he walked all over the place and noted down the furnishings and the colours of the dyes on the walls and measured not only the dimensions of the buildings," "but the arrangements of the spaces in between." "It's this which, to me at any rate, makes the town so fascinating, and I know that it's fashionable among intellectuals to decry Williamsburg as a museum." "So it is, and a very fine one." "At any rate, it's the only true picture I know of an 18th-century town in which the blanks, the spaces between the old buildings, have a true 18th-century look." "Here was the seat of government, the colonial capital where the legislature sat, and here along the streets you can see what the Virginians did with the local materials to vary the English and Dutch styles that they knew best." "Here, twice a year, when the court sat, the tobacco planters rode in to stay in their townhouses." "These periodic invaders included land-holders like Lord Fairfax with his five million acres and small freeholders from the Tidewater Country." "If they were lucky, they were invited to a ball at the Governor's Palace, which was on a scale befitting the Royal Governor of the largest American colony." "The Virginia planters lived by land and they had a very genuine grievance in being taxed by London on their land and on the crops that they shipped abroad." "Now, as everybody knows who has ever quarrelled with a business partner or started a divorce action, one real grievance sprouts a host of others and soon they were blaming London for their cost of living." "Now, the Virginians lived high, no question." "Not perhaps as high as the Governor, he set the style." "But increasingly, they complained that they were in hock to London for their carriages, their wines, their furniture and such beautiful baubles as you see here." "Candelabra from London." "Hand-made clock from Glasgow." "We've all seen a sloped-front desk, but that bureau with the beautiful side pulls is not a desk." "It's an organ, London, 1760." "This rare harpsichord made of walnut as light as honey." "London, 1762." "And in this room, a glass chandelier from London." "You see how splendidly they picked up the Chinese fashion." "This wallpaper came from Canton." "It first had to be shipped to London and then, after a middleman's cut, sent on to Virginia." "One way and another, the planters were in debt to London for two million pounds, which was 20 times the amount of money in circulation in Virginia at that time." "But for other reasons, for more idealistic reasons, anyway, this town was a hotbed of resistance." "And it's not surprising that in the more clubbable, the less theological south, the cradle of sedition was not a church, but a tavern named after Sir Walter Raleigh." "You could call this the Old South Meeting House of the Old South." "The life of most pubs guarantees a certain number of fires along the way, and this was no exception." "The original Raleigh Tavern was burned down, but it has been faithfully restored and it was in this room that the Virginians formed THEIR Committee of Correspondence." "More than that, it was here that they created the radical network of committees throughout the colonies and it was here that two men, more than any others, pushed the Virginians towards an open break with Britain." "One was Thomas Jefferson, a young country squire living off the 1900 acres his father had left him." "A lawyer who distrusted lawyers and abandoned what he called "a talkative and dubious trade"." "A godly man who yet said, "Beware of the clergy in politics."" "He went into politics when the troubles were breaking out all over as a member of the Virginia parliament, the House of Burgesses." "When the Governor dissolved it as an insubordinate body, he and 88 others came along this street to this tavern." "And they signed a pact not to import any slaves, any wines, any British manufactures." "The last straw must have been the day that riders came clattering in, having done the whole 550 miles from Boston, with the news that the British House of Commons had closed the port of Boston." "Now, imagine the port of London closed by order of the United States Congress." "Massachusetts naturally retaliated by suspending all trade with Britain." "That was enough to bring all the Virginia rebels here and proclaim themselves the first Provincial Convention, which amounted to being the very first revolutionary legislature." "All they needed now was a first-class breast-beater to goad the other colonies to do the same." "Jefferson was not the type." "Like so many of the leading revolutionaries, he was a scholar and a meditative man and he detested what he called "the morbid rage of debate"." "But there was another man who lived by it - Patrick Henry, half-Scots and half-Welsh, a formidable merger in itself, a people's lawyer with a smouldering eye, a querulous voice and a marvellous gift of the gab." "His speeches were soon forgotten, but not his knack for a trumpet phrase." ""Give me liberty or give me death."" "He lived, by the way, to a ripe old age." "His tongue was bold enough to get him declared an outlaw and within a month, a congress of the rebel colonists met in Philadelphia and the impulse to take up arms spread to the other colonies, most famously, to conquered Massachusetts." "It was on this bridge that a few farmers took their stand against a British raiding party and the war was on." "This was not a head-on battle." "The British officer in command had been sent from Boston to capture hidden stores of arms, but he was newly promoted and spoiling for blood." "He met few rebels and kept his men waiting on the bridge till they were hopelessly outnumbered." "He captured a few barrels of flour." "This sad and muddled incident would surely not have been enough to create a heroic myth." "But some of the expressions of that myth are moving and memorable because we shouldn't forget that the rebels thought of themselves for quite a long time as Englishmen who had been badly abused and felt even a kind of sympathy for the other Englishmen sent over to fight them." "I'll never forget the first time that I walked along the main street of a New England town, not so very far from here, and saw a plaque sunk in the wall of a cemetery, and on it, it said these words," ""In defence of American independence at the Battle of Ridgefield," ""April 27th, 1777," ""died eight patriots who were laid in this ground," ""companioned by 16 British soldiers," ""living their enemies," ""dying their guests."" "# When I received my deathly wound" "# I bid farewell to England's ground" "# My wife and children shall mourn for me" "# Whilst I lie dead in Amerikee #" "The British arrived as a professional army expecting to fight set battles." "Unfortunately, the Americans were at once too shrewd and too untrained to oblige them." "First of all, as John Adams said, the colonials divided up into one third that took to arms to support the Revolution, one third that was either openly or secretly loyal to the British and another third that didn't give a damn." "So, against the professional army of Britain with some German mercenaries there stood, on the other side, some French volunteers, but mainly a large improvised army of farmers, mechanics, tradesmen, parsons," "lawyers, grocers, hunters, trappers, con men, thieves, hoodlums." ""Never," said their sorrowing commander, "such a rabble dignified by the name of army."" "Now, how could they possibly stand up against one of the crack armies of Europe?" "Well, it's always fascinating and foolish to try and say how and why a war was won." "But through the maze of strategies and politics, there are two or three things that strike me as decisive." "For one thing, the British used smooth-bore muskets, which spread their fire not exactly at random, but they allowed for a lateral error of three feet in less than a hundred-yard range." "The British infantryman was not expected to pick off individual targets." "He stood shoulder to shoulder with a hundred of his fellows and they sprayed in the general direction of the enemy." "Now, the Americans had smooth-bore muskets too, but as the war moved into the interior, the British came up against the frontiersmen and they were not men who used guns for sport." "Their very existence depended on shooting their food on the wing, saving their families by picking off Indians in night raids, and they needed a weapon that was lighter and more accurate, and this was it." "The so-called..." "Pennsylvania flintlock." "It was developed for them by German settlers in Pennsylvania, gunsmiths who had doubled the length of the barrel and grooved it to revolve the bullets, so as to keep it on line." "Hence from this rifling of the barrel we get the word "rifle"." "They were supposed to be shorter men in those days, but they must have had arms like apes." "Look at the length of this thing!" "58 inches!" "Anyway, there it is, the Pennsylvania flintlock." "It did awful damage to shoulder-to-shoulder infantry." "A Pennsylvania Tory who had seen this weapon at work wrote a letter to a London newspaper." "And this is what he said." ""This province had raised a thousand riflemen," ""the worst of whom will put a rifle ball into a man's head at 150 or 200 yards." ""Therefore, advise your officers who shall hereafter come out to America" ""to settle their affairs in England before their departure."" "What demoralised the marching lines of the British was this reputation for sharp shooting." "It was magnified in England into a witch's curse and there were some lively desertions among men drafted for service in the colonies." "This is, I think, on the whole, a true American myth." "That legendary reputation for spotting the bull's-eye which began with the embattled farmers and was sustained down the next century and a half by Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley and Sergeant York." "This romantic tradition dies hard." "There's a lucrative industry in persuading an American that whether or not you're a fast man with a buck, you too can be fast on the draw." "# Gather round us, children, while we tell the story # 0f the mountains in the days when guns were law" "# When two families got disputing', it was bound to end in shootin'" "# So just listen while we tell you what we saw # 0h, the Martins and the Coys, they were reckless mountain boys" "# And they took up family feudin' when they'd meet" "# They would shoot each other quicker than it took your eye to flicker" "# They could hit a squirrel's eye at 90 feet #" "(GUNSHOTS)" "Like the Viet Cong, the Americans would not fight by the rules." "They were jack-in-the-box guerrillas." "They'd fight like devils for a day and a night, then they would go home and harvest their crops and then come back, then vanish in the countryside by night, then come whizzing in like hornets." "A British commander sent a complaining report back to the House of Commons." ""The Americans will not stand and fight."" "And that, I think, is it." "What baffled and eventually broke the British armies was what broke the later Roman armies in their barbarian campaigns and what for so long frustrated the American armies in Vietnam." "Edward Gibbon said it in a single sentence." "And this is it." ""The Romans were weighed down in the bogs" ""by the might of their armour." ""On the other hand," ""the barbarians were inured to encounters in the bogs."" "Or, as William Pitt said about this war..." ""You cannot conquer a map."" "Now, at the beginning of the war, it was fought mainly by northerners." "And the northerners were very quick to know it and resent it." "John Adams got the idea that if a southerner could be appointed as Continental Commander, it would mobilise both the men and the much-needed money of Virginia, and it would feel like a common cause." "It was John Adams who got the Congress to look around for such a man and to appoint him." "He was a small Virginia squire named George Washington, a planter with a house on a bluff overlooking the Potomac, who spent his youth managing his father's estate." "Here he raised cattle, he was out in the fields surveying, growing tobacco." "He shot wild turkey and chewed it on the bone." "In the French and Indian wars, he'd had horses shot out from under him and he came back here to Virginia with a purely local reputation for a blank refusal to panic." "Suddenly, his health failed him." "He resigned his commission and, at the age of 27, married a very rich widow and settled here at Mount Vernon." "His wife brought him the pleasant dowry of, by today's exchange, about a quarter of a million dollars," "15,000 acres near Williamsburg, more profitable real estate and 150 slaves whose condition, Washington admitted, embarrassed him." "But he was an 18th-century man to whom emancipation was a strange, remote doctrine." "And he decided that for the rest of his days, he would be a rich Virginia planter." "And then, at the age of 43, he left all this, he received the call." "If he could be resurrected, I am sure he would shock most Americans by his air of a prosperous landowner and real estate operator in the guise of a rather superior British soldier." "Even his most idolatrous biographers have been unable to find much evidence of charm or even jollity in him." "He was imperious, massively self-sufficient and he had very decided ideas about the relations of rank and rank, class and class." "He didn't, for instance, like to be touched." "And when he became the first President, he laid it down that people coming to see him should stay standing in his presence." "He certainly doesn't sound like the all-American boy." "He arrived for his inauguration in full dress uniform and a flourish of outriders and at the actual ceremony took the oath with such a lofty air that a bystander whispered to his neighbour," ""I fear we may have exchanged George the Third for George the First."" "Yet there was one thing that made him the unquestioned leader of the new nation." "He had what the dramatic critics call "presence", but it was nothing acquired or rehearsed." "It was the presence of nothing but character." "The war was only 18 months old when it seemed that all was lost in the foothills of Pennsylvania." "The British had captured Philadelphia and the Congress took to the mountains." "They were a frightened and divided body of men." "Word got to a delirious London that Washington was trapped in a frigid valley and the war was over." "The first part was correct, but not the second." "In that awful winter of 1777," "Washington camped in Valley Forge." "It surveyed the main supply routes and was a tactical place to take a stand." "And in the beginning, life was bearable, even pleasant for the commander-in-chief." "He even had time for a fellow officer to paint his portrait." "His wife came to stay with him, there was friendly company and no lack of food and drink, but soon his army began to thin out from disease, desertion, treachery and, in the end, actual starvation." "By then, only about half of his men had arms and few of them had shoes or shirts." "To this implacable man, the ordeal was grim, but quite simple." "The word was duty." "He had given his word to hold together an army that was bedraggled, ill-trained and close to defeat." "And he made it plain that he would stay with the last of them." "Well, they stayed here into the spring when the sickness was at its fiercest and then the French, who had had a good many brave volunteers over here, signed a treaty of alliance with the Americans and they lined up with this ragged army" "and, to put it simply, the Revolution held." "It was not won for another four years and the third year was the darkest of all and Washington stuck it out." "And when he died, he was not yet a legend." "Far from it." "Many of his countrymen might think he was indomitable in war, but because of many real and fancied indignities, he was considered insufferable in peace." "But by now, he towers over the generations of notable Americans as Shakespeare towers over the literature of England." "But Americans love to challenge the unchallengeable, to create a hero and then deflate him." "And about every 30 years, some debunker starts to chip away at this monolith." "However, as Calvin Coolidge said once, glancing up at the Washington Monument," ""He's still there."" "So he is." "When the war was won, there must have been a deal of guilt in the respect that important men, Congressmen, in particular, showed towards him in public." "They had quit and he had stayed." "Perhaps only another soldier, and that the greatest, could truly value the fortitude that it took to weather the winter at Valley Forge and the darkest year of 1780." "At any rate, when Washington died and the nation gave him a stately funeral," "Napoleon was seen to bow his head and in the English Channel, the British fleet fired a salute of 20 guns."