The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White
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movement. In one scene, four of the main characters—the Irish American “Pady,” the Quaker “Simon,” the Scottish American “Sandy,” and the New Englander “Jonathan”—have largely come to agreement about the imperial crisis but suddenly come to blows as they begin to fantasize that one another are scheming counselors to the king: “Simon: If you were lord North, I would—then fetches Sandy a blow and knocks him over the bench, and breaks his arm;—whilst Jonathan and Pady keeps struggling on the floor, Jonathan cries out if you were lord Bute, but I would—and in striving to throw him, breaks his leg, and down he goes, crying out for justice.”16 Apologizing for the broken limbs, Simon says, “When I began to think of lord North, it put me all in a fume his laying the Americans at his feet,” while Jonathan answers, “That’s what made me think of Bute when you mentioned the other, and I thought they should go together.”17 One last example: Mercy Otis Warren begins her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution describing “Lord Bute, who . . . had become the director of the monarch on the throne of Britain” and by “secret influence” had made Parliament “the mere creature of administration.”18 She later mentions Bute’s retirement in 1766, but adds “there had been an extraordinary variety and succession of characters in the colonial department” who had subsequently “taken the lead in this thorny path”—she mentions lords Grenville, Rockingham, North, Hillsborough, and Dartmouth.19
Thus, the semiotic field, on the eve of the Revolution, was occupied by two complementary figures: a positively valorized George III and the negatively charged, aggregative figure of Lord Bute. George represented an executive power, a royal prerogative, an ability to act on behalf of the colonists, though acting in silence. Bute, by contrast, represented deliberative powers—suasion, rhetoric, manipulation, misinformation, and jesuitical sophistry. What is important, from our point of view, is that this pairing persisted even after the sudden emotional reversal toward the king, at which point the pairing designated differently inflected qualities mobilized for tyrannical purposes. The king still represented executive power, though in the form of coercive actions and violence, and these were complemented by the schemes and plans of Bute and his minions. Such a dichotomy is implicit, for example, in The Crisis number 18, which suggests that “Fate hangs on Bute’s proud will and George’s brow. / Below, North represents absconding Bute, / Above, a Nation dyes by Roy le veut.”20 Here George is the exterior bodily expression—the brow—as compared to Bute, whose “will” speaks of intellectual, emotional, and religious interiority.21
Generating Washington
We pause here to discuss briefly the semiotic square theorized by the structuralist linguist and narratologist Algirdas Greimas.22 Greimas argues that a given cultural situation will be structured around a fundamental opposition that expresses a logical understanding of that moment. In the mid-1770s, many British North American colonials perceived their political conflict as an opposition between a practical, politically active, yet nonintellectual kingly force and a deliberative, insinuating intellectual advisory force. What is important about this binary, for Greimas, is that, when it comes to be perceived as inadequate, its stalled logic generates its solution or transcendence—that is, a culture does not simply reset or shift to altogether different figures but attempts to develop a solution from within its semiotic constraints. What this means for the political conflict in question is that the Revolutionary response would be constrained by the terms of the initial pairing.
We see precisely this phenomenon in the emergence of Washington as a figure. Washington, we should stress, did not simply arise as a replacement for George III; he was not the same kind of figure and was in fact defined in relation to—that is, in contrast with—George III’s qualities. Remember that the king had been called on to exercise royal prerogative—executive action—on behalf of the colonists and against the evil counsel of the Butites. He had failed to act vigorously on America’s behalf and had then pursued a number of aggressive actions—repressive financial measures, military expeditions, the incitement of blacks and Indians against good English colonists—in short, all the acts of aggression enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. When “Washington” finally emerged, then, it had to address and correct this characterization—it had to embody a reactive executive position, but with the very different inflection of restraint. This difference is evident in a number of key moments in Washington’s mythological construction: his humility and hesitation upon accepting his role; his visitation of so many homes (“George Washington Slept Here”), whereby he relied on the hospitality of his “subjects”; his endurance of hardship at Valley Forge; his often defensive, evasive, and stalling maneuvers as a general; his reluctant execution of Major John André (an agonizing act of duty against his personal inclinations); his endurance of criticism and cabals. . . . In all these instances, “Washington” acts, but at the behest of the people, reluctantly, not for his personal power but in service to others. Even the famous cherry-tree anecdote from Parson Weems, which later adhered to the mythic figure, confirms this: young George’s action (chopping down the tree) serves as something for which he must take responsibility and be humbled, and the crucial quality here is less simple honesty than the shameful admission of his infantile lapse into monarchical prerogative. We might thus translate “I cannot tell a lie” as “I actively chopped down a tree and will never act so aggressively again”—it is with this gesture that he is contrasted to George III, who remained silent about his actions.23
We must stress here that we are not showing how Washington gradually, biographically, historically, came to define and occupy his symbolic position. Rather, these details are selective emphases, fabrications, or distortions of the historical record, which reveal that a “Washington” position quickly took shape in contrast to the position of King George. For this reason, the insight often attributed to Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” obscures as much as it clarifies—the American George was not simply a blue-coated leader figure substituted for a red-coated one but a different figure generated in response. The problem with many readings of Irving’s story is that they see the Washington figure as positional—that is, they assume that Washington’s special standing had to do with institutional or political power, and specifically with a hierarchy of positions of charismatic, political, or deific leadership which, when vacated, must be reoccupied. By this view, it seems quite natural that the commander in chief of the Continental Army might eventually become the president of the United States, as he moved from wartime leader to leader in peace. This spatial-positional framework also implies that “Washington” is the central cultural site in which a host of cultural issues are mediated. There are two related errors that follow from this assumption. For one thing, such readings tend to understand history as cumulative and gradualist—Washington is appointed to his military command in 1775, becomes extremely popular with his open letter demanding humane treatment of American prisoners, then becomes still more popular with his refusal of General Howe’s informally addressed letters, and so on and so forth. It is as if each episode quantitatively adds to Washington’s fame through some kind of natural progression, or as if symbolic importance is something that grows incrementally, like manufacturing output. Relatedly, there is a suggestion that “Washington” is somehow homologous to other mythological Founders. A “Thomas Jefferson” will be another variant in the master pantheon, while a “John Jay” must be read as simply a diminutive version of Washington’s grand stature.24
In light of such assumptions, it is all the more important to insist that the significance of Washington is not positional but rather relational. That is, Washington’s significance makes sense only relative to other symbolic figures and has no necessary relationship to his political or military authority. It is therefore misleading to suggest that “Washington” designates a particular abstract space in which cultural concerns—for example, nationalism—are negotiated: as we will demonstrate, this processing of cultural concerns requires a larger relational field attuned, like fictional narratives, to more complex problems. To put this differently, the symbolic figures that emerge will not necessarily serve the same abstract function any more than the knights of the Round Table all represent “chivalry”: because they exist in a relational