Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés

Afterword

This essay departs somewhat from the theme of this volume to address the issue of leadership, a subject on which Don Higginbotham did some of his best work about thirty-five years ago. His perceptive essay on the military dimensions of leadership appeared in a volume emanating from a Library of Congress symposium in May 1974 entitled Leadership in the American Revolution.1 To my knowledge, this book was the last to address this subject from a general perspective, but it was hardly the last word on it. Only two of the five pieces it included, Higginbotham’s and an essay by Marcus Cunliffe on leadership in the Continental Congress, systematically addressed the problems of definition involved in the study of leadership.2 The discussion that follows is a highly speculative effort to untangle and comment on some of the problems that went largely unaddressed in that volume . The general problem I will focus on is how relatively new, dependent, and supposedly underdeveloped societies find leaders—first, for developing resistance movements of the kind that emerged in colonial British America in 1764–65; then, for steering a coalescence of those movements through a successful war for independence; and finally, in the war’s wake, for creating a new extended federal polity that drew heavily on colonial experience. To put the question more directly—and more narrowly—where did colonial British America find not only George Washington and his protégés, but also the much larger group of civil stewards who guided colonial polities from resistance to Independence and on to republican statehood and national union? As the title, “Unanticipated Challenges and Unexpected Talents,” is meant to suggest, however, the emergence of previously undetected talents for leadAfterword Unanticipated Challenges and Unexpected Talents— Leadership and the Colonial Matrix Jack P. Greene 258 Jack P. Greene ership is only one of three elements in the interpretive equation. The second element, and necessary precondition, is the appearance of unanticipated challenges sufficient to create the opportunities necessary to bring those talents to the fore. In a 1780 remark, John Adams succinctly laid out the larger parameters of the problem. “When a society gets disturbed,” he wrote, “men of great abilities and good talents are always found or made.”3 In this expansive pronouncement, which seems to apply to all societies at all times, Adams begs a series of interesting and important questions that together constitute the third element in my interpretive equation: (1) What is the relationship between the “great abilities and good talents” discovered in times of disturbance , and previous experience? (2) What is the relationship between that previous experience and the broad social milieus in which it was acquired? and (3) What is the bearing of previous experience and existing social conditions upon the outcomes of efforts to meet contingent disturbances? In brief, what are the social and experiential foundations of leadership in such situations? Because 90 percent of my intellectual energy over the past few years has been directed toward unraveling the main discourses or languages by which, in the eighteenth century, metropolitan, not colonial, Britons talked or wrote about the wider British Empire, I shall here approach this large topic by focusing on the much narrower question of why so many metropolitan Britons underestimated the colonial capacity for resistance. Certainly, the metropolitan British political and military establishments were deeply surprised by the caliber of the leadership exhibited by the colonists at every stage of the resistance from the Stamp Act crisis onward. Opponents of the government’s coercive policy—and they were numerous—liked to poke fun at those people who, largely uninformed about the character of the several parts of the overseas empire, blindly supported administration measures. Thus, in 1778 an anonymous wag calling himself a West India merchant published a series of letters in the London Evening Post in which he recounted an alleged conversation among members of Parliament. When one inquired of another whether he ever gave himself “the trouble of examining and considering the subject” of taxing the colonies, his respondent declared: “Oh yes, that I’ve done in this case long ago.—I’m quite sartin that we are to tax the West-Indies, as well as the West of England.” “You mean the North-Americans, I suppose, Sir?,” asked his interrogator. “Why, you knows,” the respondent answered, “its all the same thing:— North-America, Bingal, Virginny, Jemaiky, is all in the Indies, only the sea folks [18.219.22.169] Project MUSE (2024-04...