644
PARTISAN REVIEW
much at stake.
Here, then, was a subtext of no small importance. To be sure, the
idea that governments could be whatever free people chose to make
them remained to dazzle in
all
its Enlightenment brilliance, but if noth–
ing else, the logic inherent in the list of grievances introduced an element
of tension by suggesting that in America, at least, the question of the
proper form of government had already been answered. The Revolution
needed only to confirm that happy fact; new answers were not required.
But of course new answers were forthcoming anyway - a veritable
flood of them. And the managers of the Revolution did have the great
good sense to realize that some degree of accommodation was essential.
The clock of state could not be made to stand still in such perilous times;
even less could it be turned back to 1765. Concessions had to be made
to the widespread demand for greater popular participation in
government, if for no other reason than because the revolutionary lead–
ership lacked the means to resist them. All of its troops and most of its
political clout were committed to defeating the British. That had to
come first.
Yet what could not be suppressed could still perhaps be guided.
With proper tutoring, men tasting political power for the first time in
state constitutional conventions or newly expanded state legislatures - to
say nothing of those. who elected them - might learn to restrain their
baser passions for the sake of the general good. And to make the lessons
more palatable, real life examples of the sort of high moral character that
was wanted could be provided, examples which would serve as models,
shaping belief and behavior alike. As it turned out, too, the most useful
example by far - the one richest in instructional possibilities, the figure
endlessly held up for his countrymen's admiration in editorials and ser–
mons - was the Commander of the Continental Army itself, General
George Washington.
Recently a number of historians have stressed the lengths to which
Washington himself sometimes went in manipulating appearances to suit
his own ends. In this view, the "image" that he projected was a highly
conscious creation, and a creation first and foremost of his own design.
Unquestionably there is an element of truth here. The man who - while
the issue of the command of the army was being debated in 1775 -
chose to attend sessions of the Continental Congress in his Virginia
colonel's uniform, was hardly above self-promotion. But as Pauline
Maure has argued, if Washington became a model of a particular kind of
republican virtue, it was not without first believing wholeheartedly
him–
self
in the values and standards of conduct that model embodied. His re–
fusal to accept any monetary compensation for his services during the
Revolution was at once a calculated gesture and a matter of deep, per-
