Channelling George Washington: The Missing Word in the Declaration of Independence

“I bet you can’t tell me the important word that Tom Jefferson left out of the Declaration of Independence.”

“You’ve got me baffled, Mr. President. What is it?”

“Brotherhood.”

“A fascinating thought. The French included it in their declaration in 1789. Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Did anyone notice this in your lifetime?”

“It occurred to me when I became president, and tried to govern our new country. I didn’t say anything about it. But I did a few things.”

“Give us some examples.”

“I visited every state to make it clear that the president was the leader of all the people in all sections of our nation. We were already a big country, stretching for a thousand miles along the Atlantic coast. A lot of people thought it was inevitable that we’d eventually break up into smaller nations. I was determined not to let that happen. Everywhere I went, I emphasized that the presidency was a crucial office, superior to all other offices. Governor John Hancock of Massachusetts, who was mad as hell because he wasn’t president, tried to change that. Do you know the story?”

“It had something to do with who would make the first social call?”

“When I arrived in Boston, I expected the governor to greet me. Hours passed, and he didn’t appear. When I sent an inquiring messenger, I was told that Hancock considered his title superior to mine, while I was in Boston. If he visited me in the nation’s capital, which happened to be New York at the time, he’d be ready to concede my superiority and make the first call.”

“A silly but nasty game. What did you do?”

“I told Johnny that he had exactly two hours to call on me. If he didn’t show, I was leaving Boston the next morning at dawn.”

“What did he do?”

“He came huffing and puffing to my quarters, babbling that it was all a terrible misunderstanding and of course he was planning to call on me first.”

“How does this connect to brotherhood?”

“I was emphasizing that we were Americans first, and Bostonians or New Englanders or Charlestonians or Southerners second. It took some getting used to. We’d spent 150 years as individual colonies, separated by geography, customs and inevitable jealousies as we jockeyed for favors from Parliament.”

“Was Mr. Jefferson aware of this? Do you think this was why he left brotherhood out of the Declaration?”

“Perhaps. But Mr. Jefferson was more aware of another barrier to brotherhood. In a population of roughly three million, over six hundred thousand were black slaves. He didn’t see any possibility of brotherhood with them.”

“Did you?”

“Not at first. I was a typical Virginian. I owned over a hundred slaves. When I took command of the American army in July 1775, I issued an order, barring blacks from our ranks. We were besieging the British army in Boston. I was soon being visited by a startling number of black men who had fought well at Lexington-Concord and Bunker Hill. One man, Salem Poor, had a letter signed by over a dozen officers, testifying to his courage. All these black visitors told me how much they wanted to fight for their freedom. I realized I was being educated –- there’s no other word for it -- about a wider meaning of the word American. Pretty soon I revoked my order and told recruiting officers that free black men were welcome in our army.”

“That was just the beginning, as I recall it?”

“By 1781, one in every seven soldiers in our Continental Army was black. We had a regiment from Rhode Island that was almost entirely black. The rest were Indians. A lot of native Americans fought for our side in that regiment and as partisans on our borders. I especially admired the Oneidas, part of New York’s Iroquois Confederation. Before the war ended, I gave Continental Army commissions to a half dozen of them.”

“Amazing examples of what we might call invisible -- or unnamed -- brotherhood!”

“When Abe Lincoln was trying to decide whether to recruit blacks for the Union army in 1862, someone gave him a book about the blacks in the Revolution. It had a lot to do with changing his mind about whether they would make good soldiers. Before the war ended, he had over 150,000 blacks in his ranks.”

“Are there other examples of what you did to build brotherhood?”

“One of the most important was a visit I made to Newport, Rhode Island, on my way to Boston. I got a warm letter from the head of the Jewish synagogue there, telling me how proud he and his congregation were to be citizens of the United States. I saw an opportunity to make an important point for brotherhood -- and simultaneously remind people of how much Jews had contributed to our struggle for independence.

“Not many people know that side of the story.”

“There were only a few thousand Jews in America at that time. But their young men volunteered for the army by the dozens, and several bankers, such as a New Yorker named Haym Solomon, helped us borrow badly needed money.”

“With that for background, what did you say to the Jews in Newport?”

“I told them that in the new nation they had helped to create, Jews were no longer merely tolerated by the indulgence of a ruling class, as they were elsewhere in the world. Nor was any other group of Americans merely tolerated. The United States, I declared, ‘gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.’ All anyone had to do to merit the immunities of citizenship was obey the laws and give the nation his or her support.”

“That was a great way to spell out the principles of American brotherhood.”

“What better day to remember it than July 4th?”

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