How one thing leads to another sometimes
We started off with Roger Simon’s wondering if his new book would be reviewed in the NYT. That led us to the feud between Simon’s publisher and the NYT book review. The Roger Kimball piece mentioned Harvey Mansfield’s bad treatment at the hands of the Times, and we recalled mentioning Mansfield at one point ourselves. This led us to a review by Mansfield of a book by Richard Brookhiser, and finally to an interview of Brookhiser about George Washington that included this:
Washington is a little hard to figure out, although I do not think impossible. He was an Episcopalian-an Anglican or an Episcopalian-all his life. He was a vestryman. His attendance at church was fairly regular, although not by any means “every Sunday.”
He never took Communion, although Martha always did. I don’t know what to make of that and I don’t know any historian who has figured it out. There was a case in Philadelphia where an Episcopalian minister gave a sermon, when Washington was in church, criticizing people who did not take Communion. And Washington apparently never went back to that church, seeing the sermon as perhaps directed at him.
Washington makes a few references, in public and private writings, to Christ-very few, although some of them are important. The 1783 Circular to the States I just read from ends with an exhortation that Americans should imitate Christ, that that will lead to their political happiness.
But the word that comes up a lot in his writing, both public and private, is “Providence.” He seems to have felt that Providence was an active force, that it was the disposer of events. He speaks of the interpositions of Providence throughout the Revolutionary War. My hunch, my biographical hunch, is it that the moment when this was fixed in his mind was probably Braddock’s defeat in 1755, when Washington is a 23-year-old colonel, Virginia militia colonel, on General Edward Braddock’s staff. Braddock is taking an army into Western Pennsylvania to try to capture Fort Duquesne, what is now Pittsburgh, which the French hold. They’re set upon and more than decimated, one of the greatest debacles of British imperial war.
Washington is one of the few senior officers who survive. Braddock is killed. Most of Washington’s peers in the officer corps are killed. He has two horses shot out from under him. He has bullets shot through his coat. And after this, Washington writes a friend a letter in which he says “See the mysterious works of Providence, the transience of human things.” So I think that was a very sobering experience to him as a 23-year-old. That’s my hunch.
Interesting, and not something we recall reading previously. Finally, that bit on Washington puts us in mind of Fouad Ajami’s fond remembrance of Samuel Huntington, and his “argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture” in American history. All in all, a couple of hours well spent. Thanks, Roger.