The British musicians had it right when they played The World Turned Upside Down on October 19, 1781.  On that day British forces commanded by Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis marched out of their fortificationsat Yorktown, Virginia between ranks of Continental Army and Frenchtroops. Cornwallis, feigning illness, dispatched Irish born Brigadier General Charles O’Hara to do the distasteful duty.  O’Hara attempted to offer the sword of surrender to the senior French officer, the Comte de Rochambeauwho declined pointing to General George Washington.  Washington, irked at Cornwallis’s breach ofdecorum, likewise refused to accept the sword from an inferior officer.  He chose his subordinate, General Benjamin Lincoln, who had been humiliatedat the surrender of Savannah, Georgia, to accept the sword.  7,087 British and German mercenary officers and enlisted men and 840 sailors from the British fleet in the York River lay down theirarms.

In 1779 Clinton moved up the Hudson but was checked by a counter-offensive by outnumbered Continental units under General Mad Anthony Wayne.  Skirmishes at Verplanck’s Point and at Stony Point showed that the Continental infantryhad become formidable and were an enormous boost to morale.  With the Continental also still in possession of key fortifications on the Hudson, Clinton was forced to turn back again.

While Washington went into another brutal winter encampment a Morristown, New Jersey, Clinton and much of his Army sailed south where they took Savannah from troops under General Benjamin Lincoln.  As much of the fighting shifted south, Washington’s influence in Congress was at its low pointand he could not get his choice of Nathaniel Greene to take command there approved.  Instead they appointed the official victor of Saratoga, Horatio Gates, who had been involved in plotsto replace Washington in over-all command.  Gates failed badly and was finally replaced by Green who initiated a Fabian strategy of hit-and-run attacksand engaging in bloody battles which the British technically won but sustained heavy losses.  The British, now under Cornwallis after Clinton returned to New York, were forced to retreat north into Virginia where the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington’s young favorite, was playing cat and mouse with British raiders under Tory Col. Banastre Tarleton and turncoat Benedict Arnold.

The winter of 1780-81 instead of concentrating the army in one encampment as in the past, Washington dispersed his regimentsto towns around New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in order to supplement inadequate rations from Congress with foraging opportunities.  On New Year’s Day, 1781 veteran troopsof the Pennsylvania Line, some of the finest troops in the Army under the command of Anthony Wayne, mutinied.  They had not been paid by Pennsylvania since enlistment.   In fact the only money most had ever seen was a paltry $20 enlistment bonus, far less than that paid by other states.  They had enlisted for “three years or the duration of the war” and figured that their enlistments expired on the First.  They resolved to march on Philadelphia to demand back pay.  One officer was killed trying to prevent it.  A committee of sergeants was elected to present their petition and negotiate.  They organized themselves into unitsand set off on an orderly march.  

When Clinton heard of the mutiny, he offered the men immunity and parole plus enrolment bonuses and standard Regular Army pay if they would switch sides.  But the men refused and declared their loyalty to the new nation.  Washington and Wayne were sympathetic to the men and wrote in their behalf to both Congress and the government of Pennsylvania.  Eventually the crisis was averted due to loans arranged by financier Robert Morris.  Pennsylvanian agreed to discharge the three year men who did not accept a new, more generous, re-enlistment bonus.Approximately 1,250 infantrymen and 67 artillerymen were discharged.  Some later returned to the service for new bonuses.  Only 1,050 remained on the rolls.  Some regiments were disbanded and their remaining officers and men transferredto other units.  Almost everyone was given a furlough to go home with instructions to assemble with their new regiments which were each posted to different towns.  Almost all came back.  By spring Wayne was able to take command and march his men out for another campaign season.

The close thing, which had sent Congress into a panic, was indicative of Washington’s struggle keeping his army together and effective.

The years of effective stalemate between Washington’s main army and Clinton in New York was the background when Rochambeau arrived at Newport, Rhode Island along with a formidable French fleet under Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse, and $20,000 in coin for the cash strapped Continental Army.  Together Washington and the French hashed out the plan to move swiftly to trap Cornwallis’s army in Virginia before Clinton could re-enforce it.  The audacious details of moving two entire armies—4,000 Continentals and 5,000 French—by a combination of forced march and sail all the way from Newport to Virginia were mostly the work of Washington himself.

The result was that the trap was successfully sprung, a text book siege and gallant final assault, plus the French fleet fighting off the RoyalNavy and preventing re-enforcements.  The world was indeed turned upside down.  But the war was not over.  Clinton still had a large Army in New York and fighting on the western Frontier continued with ever greater cruelty and brutality on both sides. 

But the American Revolution was now another world war, an extension of a long series of European and colonial conflicts between the British and the French.  The interests of both nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and India were now in play in addition to the fate of American Independence.  The treasuries of both countries were being bled dry and their military and naval forces stretched to the limit.  In ParisBenjamin Franklin and John Adams now had leverage to open negotiations to end the war with recognition of U.S, Independence.  But the process would take time.

Under the circumstances neither Washington nor Clinton wanted to risk their armies wastefully.  They went into a long period of wary, watchful waiting.

Today is George Washington’s Birthday except it isn’t unless you live in Virginia, Illinois, Iowa, or New York.  Those are the only states that still mark the occasion as an official stand alone holiday.  And outside of the old boy’s native Virginia you would be hard pressed to find evidence of it outside of mattress sale ads.  Nobody gets off work for it anymore.  Schoolsare generally in session working too hard cramming for standardized testing to do much about it.  Since Ditto machines became obsoleteI doubt if second graders even get silly Cherry Tree handouts to sniff and color.  Of course, George usually gets top billing with Abe Lincoln for the Presidents Day Federal holiday, but it’s just not the same.

Too bad.  The Father of Our Country, First in War, First in Peace, First in the Hearts of his Countrymen, etc. was an interesting dude.  He was one of the few who can truly be said to indispensable men of their age.  While not the stiff plaster saint devoid of commonhuman foibles often depicted, he had enough grit, determination, and personal rectitude to hold an Army in the field for eight years against the mightiest empire on Earth with precious few victories under his belt and yet prevail—with a little help from the French.  He then helped shepherd a unique new republican government into existence and became the unifying leader that kept the component states from flying apart by centrifugal force.  And most astonishing of all, he walked away from power at the appointed date and let another take his place unchallenged or molested.  That unprecedented act set in motion 220 years of—mostly—peaceful transfers of power.  If things seem to be spinning out of control this year, it is no fault of Washington’s example.

To begin with George wasn’t even born on February 22.  He first saw the light of day on February 11, 1731 under the old Julian Calendar then still in use by England and its colonies.  He was an ambitious 21-year-old in 1752 when Britain adopted the Gregorian Calendar losing 11 dates and changing his birthday.  It must have been confusing and disorienting.

He was the son of a second marriage of a modestly prosperous planter and member of the gentry.  His Father died when he was just 11 years old and he became the ward of his older half-brother Lawrence who had married into the fabulously wealthy Fairfax family, Virginia’s largest landowners. The boy, without a fortune of his own, famously mooned over the lovely Sally Fairfax, the young wife of Lord Fairfax himself.  She may, or may not, have encouraged the attentions.  George wrote up rules for himself to adopt the manners of the aristocracy and get ahead in the world.

He received a middling education from a localAnglican priest and dreamed of following brother Lawrence into service in the Royal Navy.  His domineering mother squashed that dream when he was 15 and the right age to have a midshipman’s berth purchased for him.  He took up surveying when he was 17 and laid out tracts in the western counties of Virginia, sparking a lifelong interest in western lands.

When Lawrence died in 1752—the year of the calendar change, George came into his estate, Mt. Vernon named for the Admiral who Lawrence had served under.  The next year he was appointed a district adjutant of the Virginia Militia with a rank of Major.  

His military career got off to a fast start by essentially starting a world war.  Dispatched to protect the interests of the Ohio Company land speculation scheme, Washington discovered the Ohio Company fort at the present site of Pittsburgh had fallen to a party of French and their Native allies and that they were building their own Ft. Duquesne.  The young officer and his militia men along with Mingo allies ambushed the French party killing most of them including its leader Joseph Coulon de Jumonville.  Jumonville may have been killed by the Mingos while Washington’s prisoner.  The story is unclear.  

Washington began to build his own Ft. Necessity near the former Ohio Company post but his party was attacked and he was captured by the French before he could complete it.  He was paroled and expelled by the French and allowed to return to Virginia with his troops where he was greeted as a hero.  The French accused him of assassinating Jumonville and after a couple of years of diplomatic wrangling the incident became the casus belli of the Seven Years War or the French and Indian War in North America in 1756.

None-the-less he was exhilarated by the battle and wrote to his brother, ““I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.”

Given Washington’s unique experience it was no surprise that he was tapped as the senior American aide to British General Edward Braddock in 1755 for his expedition to expel the French from the Ohio country.  It was the largest deployment to date of British Regulars who along with colonial militia and Native allies were supposed to capture Ft. Duquesne.  Because no American officer could serve above the rank of captain without appointment from London, Washington was denied a field command at the rank of major and reluctantly was officially listed as a volunteer aid to the General.  Braddock was a conventional European soldier with no experience in the irregular warfare of the frontier.  He tried to push a heavy column over the mountainsand through thick woods while hacking a stump road for the baggage train and artillery.  It was slow going and gave the French, alerted by their Native allies, ample time to prepare.

Finally, on Washington’s recommendation, Braddock split his forces with a fast movingflying column leaving the heavy construction crews and baggage behind with a rear guard.  Braddock took command of the lead column with Washington, who had been ill with fever, at his side.  At the Battle of the Monongahela the well prepared French and Indians ambushed the lead column, cutting it to pieces and mortally wounding Braddock.  Washington coolly rallied the British and Virginia Militia and organized an orderly retreat from what had been a rout.  He had two horses shot out from under him and his coat was torn by four musket balls.  The expedition limped home.

Washington was hailed as a hero by his troops, but the British held him at fault for his advice on splitting the force.  He was not posted to the next British expedition against the French.  And his hopes for a Regular Army commission and a scarlet coat were dimmed.  

Instead Washington was created Colonel of the Virginia Regiment and “Commander in Chief of all forces now raised in the defense of His Majesty’s Colony” in 1755.  The regiment, known as the Virginia Blueswas the first in the Colonies to with full time professional soldiers, who were regularly drilled and outfitted with full uniforms and military equipment rather than ill organized, equipped and trained Militia turned out for short service.  

The troops were mostly draftees from the poorest levels of Virginia society and included some mulattos and native “half-breeds”.  Washington whipped them up into a respectable fighting force and deployed them in a string of frontier forts and blockhousesto protect settlers from Indian raids sponsored by the British.  He led his men in brutal campaigns against the Indians where his regiment fought 20 battles in 10 months and lost a third of its men. As a result Virginia’s frontier suffered less than that of other colonies.  Years of low level frontier warfare followed.

In 1758 he and elements of his regiment were part of a new drive against the French in the Ohio country—the Forbes Expedition.  Despite the ultimate success of that expedition which ultimately drove the French from Ft. Duquesne, Washington saw little action and that was an embarrassing snafu—his men and a British unit mistook each other for the French in the heavy woods and 14 men were killed in a friendly fire disaster.

That might have contributed to Washington’s decision to resign his commission when he got home, but more likely was his continuing disappointment in the British refusal to incorporate the Blues into the Regular Army with a commission for himself.  Despite his love for the military, he “retired” to manage his Mt. Vernon estate and other properties in in December of 1758.

But there seems to have been an even more compelling motive.  On January 6, 1759 he married 28 year old Martha Dandridge Custis, a wealthy widow with two children despite the fact that she was older than him and he still secretly pined for Sally Fairfax.  But Martha was still beautiful, charming, and compatible.  She also had shown she could capably manage a plantation on her own.  She was an excellent partner for the ambitious George and soon they were devoted to each other and he dedicated himself to raising her children when it became apparent that he would have none of his own.

Martha was, in fact, not just wealthy, but baring the Fairfax family, one of the richest persons in Virginia.  She brought with her not only more plantations and property but hundreds of slaves most of which she retained in her name but who joined the score or so that Washington owned and were soon all working under his exacting direction.  The young retired officer had vaulted from the middling gentry to the front ranks of the Virginia aristocracy with all the prestige and responsibility that entailed.

Washington threw himself into the management of his properties, especially the home estate at Mount Vernon.  He began expanding the modest home his brother had left into to the impressive white mansion we see today with additions and modifications being constantly made.  He rode the extensive grounds daily personally overseeing the work of the plantation and spent hours at his desk planning and pouring over business matters.  

Seeing other Tidewater planters beginning to suffer from a total reliance on tobacco as a cash crop as it exhausted the soil and yields fell off, Washington sought to diversify his planting and began to employ the earliest innovationsin scientific farming including crop rotation being explored by Scottish agronomists.  He put in wheat, rye, oats, flax, and hemp in addition to tobacco.  He strove to make the plantation as self-reliant as possible building grist mills, whiskey distilleries, saw mills, a rope walk, and directed wheels and looms in the slave quarters spin flax and wool to yarn and weave the homespun into rough cloth.  He raised fine horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs and his busy smoke houses produced plenty of bacon and fine hams.  The sale of his surplus production eventually rivaled the revenue from his tobacco barns.  He grew richer by the year.

Virtually all of the labor was provided by his slaves, who he found more honest and trustworthythan most hired white help.  Many rose from field hands to become skilled craftsmen, overseers, and household servants.  A few were taught to read and write to help with the details of administration.  Washington was a firm and exacting master, but by the standards of the day he was a fair one.  Whipping and other corporal punishment was sparing.  And because he was interested in expanding his slave holdings to serve his bustling properties, he seldom sold his slaves or separated families.  After all, he preferred to breed slaves rather than buy them.  And unlike so many other masters, Washington did not use his female slaves as a private harem.  His rectitude and loyalty to Martha prevented common sexual abuse that was rife among slave holders. 

Still, no matter how you cut it, there is no denying that the vast wealth that Washington amassed on the base of his brother’s estates and his wife’s properties was the direct result of slavery.

Despite all of this, Washington was still in debt to his British creditors for the importation of luxury goods for his household, especially in the early years of his marriage as he sought to establish his social standing.  When Martha’s daughter Patsy Curtis died in his arms of epilepsy in 1773 it was a crushing personal blow.  But he came personally into half of Patsy’s substantial estate with which he was able to pay off his English debt in full and permanently—a rare featamong the Virginia aristocracy.

It was not all work.  Washington enjoyed the amusements of his class—fox hunting at which he excelled  developed his reputation as the finest horseman in Virginia.  He entertained a stream of guests all the cream of Virginia society and visitors from other colonies and the Mother Land.  He enjoyed social dancing at which he was said to be quite graceful.  He also assumed the duties of a leading squire like the office of vestryman at his local Anglican parish despite a growing deism that detached him from conventional and orthodox Christianity.  He joined a local Free Mason Lodge not taking it terribly seriously at first but then becoming immersed in its mysteries and rituals, the true source of the spiritual life that he could no longer find at the communion rail.  And of course in addition to minor local offices and honors, was elected a member of the House of Burgesses.  

Given his wealth and status, Washington could easily have become a Tory, like the Fairfax family he had long sought to emulate.  But beginning in the mid 1760’s he began to throw his lot increasingly with those restive under the Crown and Parliament.  Perhaps it was the lingering resentment of a soldier who was never made a Regular, perhaps it was the spirit of the age.  He was never a deep or original political thinker like George Mason or a firebrand like Patrick Henry, but he was a steady, firm political presence.  The Stamp Act of 1765 stirred him to action and became especially active after the adoption of the Townsend Acts two years later in which Parliamenttried to re-assert its authorityover the colonies with a series of taxes, levies, and punitive actions aimed mostly at Massachusetts and New York.  In response Boston merchants began to agitate for non-importation declarations by the Colonies.  

In 1769 Washington and George Mason spearheaded the movement in Virginia where the House of Burgesses passed a resolutionstating that Parliament had no right to tax Virginians without their consent.   Governor Lord Botetourt dissolved the assembly which then met at Raleigh Tavern and adopted a boycott agreement known as the Association.  It was a critical turning point.

The furor in the Colonies led to the Townsend Act to be repealedin 1770 except for the tax on tea left in place as both an important revenue source and an assertion of Parliamentary authority.  But agitation in the New World continued and in 1774 London responded with what the Colonies called the Intolerable Acts.  Washington was livid he wrote to a friend,

They are an Invasion of our Rights and Privileges…I think the Parliament of Great Britain has no more right to put their hands in my pocket without my consent than I have to put my hands into yours for money… [We must not submit to acts of tyranny] till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

Washington not only blew off steam, he acted.  In July 1774, he chaired the meeting at which the Fairfax Resolves were adopted calling for the convening of a Continental Congress.  The next month he attended the First Virginia Convention, and was elected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress.  

Meanwhile things were getting out of hand in Boston where the British had closed the port to trade, occupied the city, and quartered troops on the town.  Things blew up in April of 1775 when Massachusetts Militiamen resisted efforts by British Regulars to seize armoriesinland.  The Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Siege of Boston by Militia troops from throughout New England followed.

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia the midst of the crisis, Washington showed up in his old Virginia Blues uniform and cut a dramatic, martial figure.  His life, and the fate of the colonies, would be changed forever.  

In the 19th Century writers and philosophers of all stripes turned their attention the industrial revolution, the social injustice and inequality it fostered, and the growing rage of the displaced and oppressed.  Many notable figures—nationalists, democrats, socialists, anarchists, and utopians—entered the fray.  But one pamphlet overshadows all the rest in the sweep and enduring nature of its influence.

Meet the single most important pamphlet of all time.  Love it or loath it, it cannot be denied.

It couldn’t have been more timely.  The uprisings that would sweep from France across the German states and into much of the rest of Europe were gathering steam on February 21, 1848 when a tiny faction of radical socialists from across the continent met in London and published Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, literally the Manifesto of the Communist Party. 

Now known more simply as the Communist Manifesto the 18,000 word paper bound pamphlet was authored by German Jewish journalist and intellectual Karl Marx and his close collaborator Friedrich Engels, a pioneering German-born sociologist who had made his mark with the publication three years earlier of The Condition of the Working Class in England, one of the first systematic studies of working class life.

The publication was almost instantly notorious.  Editions appeared in French and English by 1850 and were followed by translations in most European languages.  By 1857 an American edition was published by the utopian and individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews.

Exactly how much each of the two credited authors contributed to the final product is hotly debatedwith those who want to raise Marx to the level of an infallible prophet and messianic figure pumping their hero up while reducingEngels to almost a mere clerk.  What is indisputableis that in the final draft it is Marx’s vigorous and muscular rhetoric that characterized the document beginning with its famous preamble:

Did the appearance of the Manifesto inspire the rebels?  To some extent.  But most were too engaged in making a revolution to spend much time reading about one.

But Marx’s somewhat bombastic claims in the introduction to the pamphlet led authorities to believe that there was indeed a “Spectre of Communism haunting Europe.”  The rebellions peaked and then faltered for lack of clear programs and ability to build sustained organizations while the forces of reaction rallied and counter attacked with overwhelming military power.  By mid-1849 most of the uprisings were crushed and a continent-widerepression was under way.  The Manifesto was generally suppressed, although surreptitious copies continued to be circulated, often at great risk.  Identifiable Communists were arrestedand sometimes executed—but so were leaders and activists of all ideological stripes.  Thousands were forced into exile.

Marx and his wife Anna were among them.  They had to flee Brussels to join Engels in London, where he resumed work as a journalist, dedicated himself to study of the revolutionary movements and why they failed, and to assuming more formal leadershipin the Communist movement.

In 1850 the Prussian master spy Wilhelm Stieber broke into Marx’s London home and made off with the Communist League’s membership recordssetting off a wave of arrests across Germany and France.  After the Cologne Communist Trial of 1852 the League was forced to dissolve.  There after Communism existed as a current in socialismand Marx worked to get national socialist and labor parties, as well as trade unions, to adopt his analysis.  

The Manifesto was now a document for an organization that hadevaporated.  The very stuff of ephemera, at best of interest to historians, antiquarians, and haunters of dusty archives.  But instead, it not only remained in print, it spread and continued to be issued in new languages.  It was passed hand-to-hand, often clandestinely,among the scattered survivors of the ’48 upheaval.  

Marx and Engels issued editions with new introductions every few yearsin which they both explained themselves and sometimes modified views expressed in the original text.  Some local Communist grouping were established, but a generation of radicals influenced by it became militants in the trade union movement, emerging Social Democratic Parties, and labor parties.  They were among the Communards who rose up in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and were eventually crushed by the French National Guard.

The document shaped the thinking of many socialists and some anarchists who were not explicitly Communist. 

Members of all these organizations—except for avowed anarchists and anarcho-syndicalist unions—met in Paris in 1889 to form the Socialist International, better known as the Second International at which Marx and Marxism were dominant.  Of course, by this time Marx had moderatedsome of the insurrectionist views of the Manifesto and advocatedparliamentary and electoral activity through the Social Democratic parties modeled on that of Germany.  Still, despite the modified doctrine, the Manifestoremained a revered document.

In the 20th Century Lenin would resurrectthe Manifesto as a primary document to differentiate his Bolsheviks from reformist Russian Social Democrats and as a rallying pointfor his insurrectionist 1917 October Revolution.

Today Lenin’s once monolithic international Communist movement has shattered into scores if not hundredsof often warring sects, all claiming to be the legitimate heirs to Marx and Engel’s vision.  Where Communists are entrenched in state power, in practice a kind of tightly controlled state capitalism as in China and Vietnam belie the original egalitarian and mass democratic vision.

Ideologues of all stripes still issue manifestos and publish pamphlets hoping to catch lighting in a bottle and spark the next world-shaking movement.  But for the most part the pamphlets lay unread on literature tables and are rejected by those on the street to whom they are eagerly offered.

Today the newgeneration of prophets and propagandists peddle their wares on the Internet increasingly in social media.  Which makes their work even more ephemeral than Marx’s flimsy paper pamphlet.