There is a habit of mind that built this country: the willingness to risk everything for what you will not live to see.That is the central lesson of the founding.
The founders called it virtue, and they staked their lives on it — pledging their sacred honor with a firm reliance on divine Providence.Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of men put their names to a declaration that could have been their death warrant, because they believed people could govern themselves and that no king held a birthright to rule them.Arrayed against the colonies stood the greatest empire on earth — a professional army of more than 50,000 British regulars and hired Hessians, hundreds of cannons, and the most powerful navy in the world.
Against it: a ragged Continental Army of farmers and tradesmen, no more than ten to fifteen thousand men, poorly trained, with a fraction of the artillery and no fleet to meet the Royal Navy.That they might defeat this machine was, by any measure, absurd.
Yet Washington — never more so than the night he crossed the ice-choked Delaware to strike at Trenton — proved the point: not numbers, but genius and indomitable will, carried the day.We remember Washington.We should also remember those beside him, all but forgotten.
Among them was Billy Lee, an enslaved Black man who was far more than a valet.He rode with Washington into the thick of battle and became one of his most trusted confidants, at his side through every campaign of the war, from the crossing of the Delaware to Yorktown.AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDRENWashington was himself a slaveholder; yet, alone among our founding presidents, he freed the people he enslaved in his will — freeing Lee at once, with a lifetime pension.
Though free to leave, Lee chose to live out his days at Mount Vernon, a measure of how close the two men had become.That the first President’s closest companion was a man he had once enslaved is one of the most e...