A Man to Remember

Monday, Jul. 06, 1953

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Cornwallis' army, badly worn by endless American harassment, and by such set-piece battles as Camden, S.C., Hobkirk's Hill, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, moved into Virginia and took up quarters at Yorktown. Washington was in New England contemplating an attack on New York—the French had landed 5.000 troops (who startled Americans by rigidly re- fraining from even minor thefts) to help him, and a big French fleet was preparing to sail from the West Indies. But Washington decided almost overnight to move against Cornwallis instead. The French war vessels moved to Virginia, too, and after five weeks of fast marching, Washington laid siege to Yorktown with 16,000 French and Continental soldiers. Cornwallis had gone to earth between the York and James Rivers, on a narrow peninsula, which was a normal move in time of trouble for a British commander confident of sea power. But De Grasse's French fleet controlled the Chesapeake. Cut off, hammered night & day by artillery, Cornwallis, a fine soldier, could find no way out. On Oct. 19, 1781, his 7,000 troops marched out, bands playing a march fittingly entitled The World Turned Upside Down, and stacked their arms. The war, for all practical purposes, was over. "A System of Policy." About to leave the Army, Washington wrote (in a letter presented last week to Princeton University) : "Having no reward to ask for myself, if I have been so happy as to obtain the approbation of my countrymen, I shall be satisfied. It still rests with them to compleat my washes by adopting such a system of Policy as will ensure the future reputation, tranquility, happiness and glory of this extensive Empire." The man is all in that passage—his humility, his pride, his sense of honor, his realistic misgivings, his love of order, his vision of "this extensive Empire." The nation, however, was not yet born, the "system of Policy" not yet constructed. All the courage and suffering of the war might be lost in the quarrels and confusions of a peace without policy or system.

Washington, before retirement to Mount Vernon, sternly squelched suggestions that Americans set up a monarchy with George Washington as its first king, but he wrote to friends that "something must be done or the fabric must fall . . ." His concern was not wasted; his was foremost among the influences which prompted the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which he served as chairman.

With the brilliant minds, the learned political scientists, the jealous sectional and class partisans, the great prose stylists who made up that convention, Washington could not compete—and did not try. He spoke seldom, initiated little; no section of the Constitution can be pointed to and called his. But the whole document belongs to him as much as to any man. His practical sense, his bold vision, his conservatism—all these pervade the Constitution, whose strength and flexibility have held together in high tension the disparate forces of the American character.