We, the Nation, Born Under This Tree

Via HathiTrust.

It’s funny how history can converge on one moment. Take, for example, a 1919 painting by N.C. Wyeth (the father of Andrew Wyeth), titled Beginning of the American Union: Washington salutes the flag as he takes command of the Continental Army at Cambridge, 1775. The painting was commissioned by the textbook publisher Ginn and Company as the frontispiece for William J. Long’s America: A History of Our Country (1923). When thousands of schoolchildren cracked open the book, it was the first image they saw, and one of only four colored plates in the whole text. If the painting’s very title did not make it explicit, its place of prominence in the textbook would have implied that this moment, as opposed to any other moment in the Revolutionary era, was when the Union began.¹

In the painting, Washington sits atop his horse, sword drawn, dappled by the shade of a giant elm in the background, ceremonially holding his saber out from his chest. Young, almost nervous-looking aides sidle up behind him, each with his own stern, Washingtonian nose. It’s a familiar image of Washington, though rendered with a focus and intensity that are uniquely N.C. Wyeth. But while Wyeth’s talent might make the painting stand out, I think it’s really the general’s gaze that sets this painting apart from other depictions of Washington assuming command. Instead of looking down at the men before him, or looking over them in survey,² Washington gazes up and to the right, almost plaintively, like a saint—as if he is taking his orders from providence itself. According to the painting’s title, Washington is anachronistically saluting “the flag”; perhaps he salutes the idea of the flag, or some holy vision of it.

But what does it mean for this to be a providential moment? And what does it mean for the “Union” to have begun at the moment Washington took command?

When the Brandywine River Museum of Art hosted an N.C. Wyeth exhibit in 2019, the critic Philip Kennicott found that Wyeth’s works “present a mostly uncritical view of the world as Wyeth saw it, a world of upstanding men and women who were industrious, courageous and independent, and who shared a common canon of stories, myths and imagery dating to America’s Colonial past and European roots.” In other words, Kennicott argued, they are images that explore and promote American whiteness as providential, a nation formed by and exclusively for the progeny of a white-European settler-colonial project. But it’s never quite so explicit, Kennicott explained. “Whiteness,” he wrote, “in this sense, is defined by absence.”³

How can we, as historians, find what is present in that absence? One way may be to track the antecedents of images back to their source.

It’s uncanny how Kennicott’s explanation of whiteness is nearly identical to the vision of America postulated by Edward Everett (1794–1865), the great statesman and orator from Massachusetts. Everett is perhaps best-known today as the man who spoke before Abraham Lincoln at the consecration of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. In contrast to Lincoln’s two-minute address, Everett spoke for two hours, offering a nearly interminable account of not only the American Civil War’s current progress, but also its relationship to the great battles of Europe’s past, all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. Everett asserted that the American nation possessed those characteristics that make up a great nation, and therefore the nation was worth preserving despite its current calamity. He sketched out those characteristics as:

The bonds that unite us as one People,—a substantial community of origin, language, belief, and law (the four great ties that hold the societies of men together); common national and political interests; a common history; a common pride in a glorious ancestry; a common interest in this great heritage of blessings; the very geographical features of the country; the mighty rivers that cross the lines of climate, and thus facilitate the interchange of natural and industrial products, while the wonder-working arm of the engineer has levelled the mountain-walls which separate the East and West.⁴

It’s this nation in particular, a white and providential one, that N.C. Wyeth drew inspiration from in his portrait of Washington. And it’s not just that Everett and Wyeth shared the same framework of meaning and symbols. Their relationship is more direct than that: it was Edward Everett who, during the early years of his speaking career, popularized Cambridge Common—the spot under the great Elm—as the site where Washington assumed command and the nation was born.

The Washington Elm, c. 1905 (Library of Congress).

July 4, 1826, was the first time Everett—or anyone else, it would appear—told the story of Washington’s assumption of command under the Elm. To a rapt audience at Christ Church on Cambridge Common (often depicted as a steeple in background of images of Washington taking command), Everett described how “beneath the venerable elm, which still shades the southwestern corner of the common, General Washington first unsheathed his sword at the head of an American army, and to that seat was wont every Sunday to repair, to join in the supplications which were made for the welfare of this country.”⁵

The speech laid out what Everett saw as an important crossroads for the American nation. The last of the Founding Fathers were approaching death—indeed, the second edition of the printed speech included an editor’s note that, as if by providence, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passed on the very day of Everett’s oration at Christ Church.⁶ Everett stressed the importance of retaining physical reminders of America’s past, the Elm among them.

He then turned his attention to the question of who, then, composed this nation. If a nation and its form of government form reciprocal structures, then the question for the nation became:

whether we shall behold in one of the brethren of the human family, the New Hollander [i.e., the Aboriginal Australian], making a nauseous meal from the worms which he extracts from a piece of rotten wood; or the African cutting out the under jaw of his captive to be strung on a wire, as a trophy of victory, while the mangled wretch is left to bleed to death, on the field of battle; or whether we shall behold him social, civilized, christian; scarcely faded from that perfect image, in which at the divine purpose, “Let us make man”…⁷

The descriptions of those unwanted in the American nation were purposely grotesque, and in them we can see ur-examples of common American racist projections: food disgust and the imagined violence of the other. We could even draw a line from Everett’s description of the “New Hollander” and the “African” to Donald Trump’s now infamous assertion that the U.S. does not want immigrants from “shithole countries.”

Edward’s larger point was that a civilized government could only be constituted from a nation of civilized (white) people. If American democracy was somehow providential, and if a government reflected the character of its people, then America’s providential government was a reflection of the white European settlers who created it, and the descendants of those settlers were best fitted to hold that government’s reins.

What makes Everett’s memorializing of Washington and the Elm even more significant to understanding American whiteness is the fact that, at least as he describes, the event never happened. Washington did take command on that day, perhaps even near that spot, but the moment was much rainier and more subdued than Everett preached or Wyeth painted. And though you can still find, standing in a rather cluttered memorial plaza on Cambridge Common, a tree marked as the Washington Elm by a granite “tombstone” marker (“Under this tree WASHINGTON took command of the American army Jul. 3d 1775”) that tree is not the Washington Elm, but rather a “replica” planted in 1975. The 1975 replica tree replaced another tree, planted around 1946, which itself replaced another tree planted around 1934, which replaced another planted in 1875 when the supposed original tree began to look sickly. (And that tree did not actually keel over until 1923, so for forty-eight years there were two Washington Elms!)⁸

That the Washington Elm should persist, despite having been thoroughly debunked for decades, isn’t that unusual. America is littered with bogus historical markers, especially those detailing the mythic activities of George Washington and other Founding Fathers.⁹ The question becomes, does the insidious logic of the white nation exist within those memorials today? Can the sanctification of that moment under the Elm be separated from its meaning for the white nation as postulated by Edward Everett?

A couple hundred yards from the spot of the Elm stands a gate erected to Harvard’s longtime president Charles W. Eliot, who was also Vice President of the First International Eugenics Congress and publicly opined that “each nation should keep its stock pure.” On one of the pillars of Eliot’s gate, under a neoclassical scroll, the alumni who paid for it wrote, “Something of him will be a part of us forever.” I think of that when I walk my child past the Elm to daycare, and when he plays among the bunged-up cannons on the plaza. And I know, for white America, it is true.¹⁰

Print created c. 1908 (Library of Congress).

1. You can find the painting in the Brandywine River Museum of Art’s collection here, as well as a similar sketch by Wyeth here.
2. The most common representation of this scene is the Courier and Ives colored engraving found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
3. Philip Kennicott, “N.C. Wyeth painted the world full of beauty, resilience and adventure. And full of white people,” Washington Post, July 3, 2019.
4. Edward Everett, Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions, vol. 4, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1868), 657.
5. Edward Everett, An Oration Delivered at Cambridge, on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of the Independence of the United States of America (Cambridge, MA: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826), 2.
6. Ibid., 11, 49–51.
7. Ibid., 15.
8. For a debunking of the Washington Elm tradition, see Samuel Francis Batchelder, The Washington Elm Tradition: Is It True? (Cambridge, MA, 1925), published online by the Cambridge Historical Society. Also see J. G. Jack, “The Cambridge Washington Elm,” Bulletin of Popular Information (Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University), 3rd ser., 5 (Dec. 1931), 69–73.
9. For a litany of Washington myths and ahistorical markers, see Edward G. Engel, Inventing George Washington (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
10. Adam S. Cohen, “Harvard’s Eugenics Era,” Harvard Magazine (March/April 2016); “College Impress on Politics,” San Francisco Call, Aug. 6, 1912.