World Unity 34

    When George Washington took the oath of office in 1789 in New York as the first president of the United States, the occasion was so solemn that it was indeed like the awesome moment of the birth of a nation except that no nation came into being and Washington was not sworn in as the head of any state. He considered his role as president that of a referee. Most American historians nonetheless crowned the event as the birth of a nation and volumes have since been written attempting to unite American history since the arrival of Europeans in the seventeenth century as the story of the germination and birth and growth of a nation. This view is false. George Washington as commander of the Continental Army had led a rebellion that was not a national event since he fought in a civil war between colonists subjects of the British Parliament and King. It is fairly easy however for historians to call anyone who lived in the thirteen colonies an American and any action of the central government set up by the rebels national. George Washington became president of a federal government of thirteen states whose governors had powers that could be described more accurately as national than his. The truth is that as law and as fact there was no national government anywhere because none of the American governments were fully sovereign. The states had great powers and reinforced by the powers granted the Federal Government, they acted as sovereign nations. A state governor had the same police powers as any nation-state governor. The people lived under state constitutions and state courts and they now had the fantastic new liberty of having the right under the Constitution to cross state borders and live in any state they chose with full political rights. State governments were now even more secure in their power since a provision in the Constitution allowed them to appeal to the American army for help in putting down insurrections in their states. George Washington was a charismatic figure like Napoleon in Europe and he could have embodied a nation as did Napoleon if there were a basis for one. Instead he was a referee. He had as head of the executive branch sovereign powers over the military and diplomacy. But he did not fight any foreign state and the diplomatic actions he undertook did not affect Americans greatly. Foreign nations recognized the new government as a nation because it acted as a nation when dealing with them. At home, citizens of the new form of the union were enthused with developing their states and the continental territories open to them all the way to the Mississippi River. Foreigners and American historians called them Americans  living in an American nation, but the title given their president at his inauguration, “George Washington, president of the United States” indicated that the country Americans lived in was the United States. They did not care much how foreigners and historians defined their political system as long as it let them live freely as free men on the move in free states and wide-open territories.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall