point of ordering them treated well. That stood in contrast to the British and Hessians, who massacred wounded rebels and had tossed their prisoners from the New York battles of 1776 into squalid prison ship hulks in Brooklyn's Wallabout Bay. Some 12,000 died in the floating hells, their bodies rowed ashore daily for shallow burials. Walt Whitman, in his youth, would find their rotten bones and caved-in coffins amid the shifting sand of the Brooklyn shore.
Whitman, like most of his generation, absorbed the Revolution as a secular religion with Washington as its god. He would have understood Young Lady's mind, even if he eschewed her meter. He wrote of Washington as "one pure, upright character, living as a beacon in history." To him, Washington, before Lincoln arose, was the tender, loving father-figure. In one poem he has Washington kissing his generals on the cheek in tearful farewell -- an image about as likely, given Washington's steely nature and character, as the cherry-tree chopping incident.
In Whitman's intellectual ancestry is "Young Lady," upright at her desk, by candlelight, with a Philadelphia winter blowing outside, puzzling out the rhymes and believing, really believing, in the virtues of George Washington. Believing that they were what justified the revolution, and that those virtues, expressed at that moment, were being built into the edifice of a new nation.
The mythology still lived in 1860. Both sides in the Civil War claimed to uphold the true American values -- that is, the Revolutionary values. Not just their political rhetoric but the letters and diaries of soldiers. Leaving aside specific attacks on tyrants or traitors, it is impossible to tell North and South apart when they write positively about what they believe they are fighting for: "those institutions which were achieved for us by our glorious revolution ... in order that they may be perpetuated to whose who may come after" ... "the same principles which fired the hearts of our ancestors in the revolutionary struggle" ... "the perpetuity of Republican principles on this continent depends upon our success." Which was the soldier from Alabama, which from Connecticut, which from Tennessee?
James McPherson, working in the wake of the Vietnam War, explored the motivations of Civil War soldiers:
A veteran who became a student of the Civil War after his tour in Vietnam was awestruck by the dedication of soldiers in that earlier conflict. In all his Vietnam experience he had met only one American "who had the same 'belief structure' as the Civil War soldiers." In Vietnam "the soldier fought for his own survival, not a cause. The prevailing attitude was: do your time ... keep your head down, stay out of trouble, get out alive." How different was the willingness of Civil War soldiers to court death in a conflict whose casualty rate was several times greater than for American soldiers in Vietnam. "I find that kind of devotion ... mystifying." ["For Cause and Comrades," pp. 4-5]
Of course McPherson, and perhaps his unnamed student, had their own generational attitudes toward the war in Vietnam. But it seems the sea-change in American attitude was something that took place before Vietnam; World War II soldiers, who had cause to take up patriotic themes without embarrassment, tended to have no patience for such talk. The prevailing attitude wasn't the same as Vietnam, but perhaps was closer to it than it was to the Civil War: "Do your part, keep your head down, get home in one piece."
LOSING OUR RELIGION
There came a time, after the Civil War, after the centennial of the Revolution decade, after everyone with any living memory of it was dead, that thoughtful Americans could look ahead to a fuller, more mature contemplation of their history. By 1885 a majestic national historian like John B. McMaster, with a huge audience at his knee, could write about Washington the man, in ways more remarkable than the myth, and ready to step forth from behind the statuary:
No other face is so familiar to us. His name is written all over the map of our country. We have