On this Independence Day , consider how a very few people, in very dire straits, made the difference for the very existence of the nation we now know as the United States .
Consider, too, how one of those very few people was also the final president of the founding generation and how his legacy is forever connected to the Fourth of July.
By December 1776, the American Revolution was all but dead. Gen. George Washington commanded only some 3,500 troops, almost none decently trained for battle. The British had about 20,000 well-trained regulars, plus thousands more Hessians and other mercenaries. Worse for Washington, the enlistments of almost all his men were scheduled to end on Dec. 31. They were ill-fed, ill-equipped, ill-dressed, and mostly shoeless. And, after four significant battle losses in a row, they fought for a populace that had all but given up on the revolution, with large numbers redeclaring their loyalty to the British king.
Without a significant victory before Dec. 31, the revolution effectively would be kaput.
Facing those grim odds against horrible weather and with sleep-deprived men trudging on bloody, frost-bitten feet, Washington took 2,400 troops to attack a British-Hessian outpost at Trenton, New Jersey, after midnight on Dec. 26. Their breathtakingly dangerous crossing of the Delaware River was followed by a forced march of 9 miles through the dark of a brutal snowstorm. Still, with the element of surprise, their attack at dawn gained early success on the main streets of the town.
That’s when the Hessians, rallying, readied a cannon in the middle of King Street to mow down Washington’s men. If the cannon had succeeded in reversing the tide, the whole Revolutionary War effectively would have ended.
Instead, six Americans rushed the cannon. In hand-to-hand combat, they gained control of the weapon, stopping the last Hessian counterattack. The Hessians were routed, the revolution was reinspired, and a call for new enlistments was successful. The cause of American liberty quite arguably had rested on control of that cannon. Because the cannon was taken, liberty survived.
One of those six Americans who rushed that cannon, who saved the day, was badly injured, with a severed artery leaving him close to death. Yet he survived. He was just 18 years old, a Virginian by the name of James Monroe.
Monroe then served for half a century in a host of elective and appointive roles famous for their successes. He played a key role in writing the Northwest Ordinance, which provided for the administration of vast new territory without slavery. His diplomacy was largely responsible for doubling the size of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. His leadership as secretary of state and secretary of war helped turn the tide in the War of 1812, snatching what was treated as victory from the very mouth of defeat.
Elected president in 1816, Monroe so deftly navigated the politics of the day that his two terms have forever since been known as “The Era of Good Feelings,” with almost no organized opposition. He secured Florida from Spain, gained joint occupation, with Great Britain, of the vast Oregon Territory, and proclaimed the famous “ doctrine ” that bears his name, saying the Western Hemisphere would henceforth be off limits to foreign colonization.
Barely more than a year after Monroe left office, the two main authors of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, died on the declaration’s 50th anniversary on July 4, 1826. Five years later, to the day, suffering from heart failure and tuberculosis, Monroe followed suit.
In his last presidential message to Congress 200 years ago this year, Monroe wrote with civic pride about the Spirit of ’76 — of “the great cause in which we were engaged and the blessings which we have derived from our success in it. The struggle was for independence and liberty, public and personal, and in this we succeeded.”
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“There is no object which as a people we can desire which we do not possess or which is not within our reach. ... We have every motive to cling together which can animate a virtuous and enlightened people. The great object is to preserve these blessings, and to hand them down to the latest posterity,” he added.
Our job, then, is to seize and neutralize the cannon. Happy Independence Day.
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