George Washington's Ghost

By invitation his Whig allies, and a sprinkling of his newly acquired, unlikely philosophical bedfellows, racist Christian fundamentalists who demanded ‘separate development’, or Getrennte Entwicklung, as the more extreme Lutheran sects insisted on calling the policy, filled the old hall that day, sat in cliques amongst the great and the good of the nexus of the banking, industrial and commercial affairs of New England. In fact, Roger Lee’s supporters were hugely outnumbered by the real movers and shakers of the Commonwealth, the men who controlled the steel mills and factories, the banks, the railways, who oversaw the giant construction combines carving the permanent way and two and four-lane tarmac roads into the wilderness of the West, and increasingly, the men who would build the war planes and land cruisers, the ships and the bombs which would win this latest contretemps with the ‘damned Spaniards’.

Gadfly opportunists like Roger Lee, had never been a man to contemplate long-term consequences when he saw personal profit, or a chance to stab an enemy in the back. His detractors, of whom there were countless, jested sourly that Lee was the sort of man who would have given Judas Iscariot a free pass for his share of the thirty pieces of silver.

Here, in the midst of the seat of Colonial power in New England, every seat in the relatively small, historic hall where once, two centuries ago the traitors of 1776 had plotted their failed rebellion, was taken and newspaper and TV people stood at the back, waiting for the fireworks to begin.

Nowadays, from the outside the old building looked like one of the white-washed non-conformist Wesleyan chapels which dotted the counties around the city. Set in leafy grounds in the heart of the great, booming metropolis of imperial Philadelphia, the city fathers had long ago, ripped out the old fittings, and turned it in a community theatre and function room for the local Parish Council. Normally, casual visitors were discouraged; its doors were locked and the gates to the plot of land upon which it sat, barred. Unlike in Boston where public references to ‘the tea Party’ or to the so-called ‘Boston Massacre’ had always been banned outright, either in tourist literature, directional or location signage, in Philadelphia, the building was still actually called ‘Liberty Hall’ on street maps of the city’s financial district.

However, while outside there was a rusting commemorative plaque on the north wall of the building facing Chestnut Street bearing the names of the signatories to that wicked ‘Declaration of Independence’ who had been executed for their treason back in 1776; it was very much in the shadow of the twelve-feet high bronze statue of General William Howe – mounted triumphantly on a rearing thoroughbred – the victor of the Battle of Long Island, and the scourge of the Hudson Valley campaign which had sundered the defeated First Thirteen and brutally crushed the rebellion even before the winter of that fateful year, 1776, had clamped down across the land.

In their mercy ‘the English’ had only executed twenty-four of the fifty-six signatories, and many of those spared had subsequently pledged renewed allegiance to King George III, and quietly been compensated for the land and miscellaneous property sequestered by the Crown in the autumn of 1776. However, for John Hancock, President of the traitorous Second Continental Congress, there had never been any question of clemency although once he was safely buried the witch hunts had ceased, and there had been no more hangings.

Even two centuries ago the then, nascent Empire, understood that the business of ‘the Empire’ was business itself, and pogroms and blood-letting – while they had their place – were generally, bad for business.

Since the modern-day traitor Isaac Fielding had re-labelled William Penn House as ‘Liberty Hall’ in that scurrilous diatribe ‘Two Hundred Lost Years’, there had been a movement to have the ‘execution plaque’ taken down, or perhaps, removed to the Colonial Museum down on the west bank of the Delaware River.

In any event, it was a strange place to launch a Virginian election campaign; even given that Roger E. Lee was the sort of politician who only really ever went out of his way to talk to the converted.

One of Lee’s distant ancestors, Henry ‘Light Horse’ Lee, an obscure minor figure in the revolt of 1776, whom, in their wisdom the English had ‘graciously rehabilitated’, supposedly to found the most ‘loyal’ of ‘loyal families’.