George Washington's Ghost

History knew ‘Light Horse’ as the man responsible for so badly fortifying Manhattan and Long Island that George Washington and the Continental Army, had they escaped the clutches of the Howe – ‘Black Jack’ the Admiral and William the ruthless soldier – brothers at the Battle of Long Island, in August 1776, would have had no choice but to have fled up the Hudson Valley in disarray. Later, the British had installed ‘Light Horse’ as Governor of Virginia, demonstrating a Georgian sense of humour few had, until that time, suspected in the Americas, the first of several members of the Lee family to occupy the position, in which post he had, probably to nobody’s surprise, proven to be as inept as a colonial governor as he had as a general in the Revolutionary Army!

Funnily enough, although Roger Lee frequently cited ‘Light Horse’, he hardly ever mentioned Robert E. Lee, the solitary ‘great’ man of the clan; the man who might have won the Great War a year early but for a sniper’s bullet cruelly finding its mark in the forests of the Argonne in 1865. Perhaps, his reticence was because even Roger, in some crevice of his consciousness knew, just knew, that he must only pale into insignificance in the presence of such unparalleled greatness…

“My friends,” he began, with his arms apart, hands raised like a whiskey preacher, “thank you for coming here today at this momentous time in our history. Once again, we find ourselves confronted by a terrible war that was none of our own doing; into which we, the peoples of New England have been dragged by the incompetence and inattention by a foreign regime which knows little of us, nor cares…”

Lee was genuinely surprised when this opening verbal salvo did not strike a stronger resonance in the hall, or rather, hardly any response at all bar a few desultory mutters of concurrence, and one or two half-hearted claps.

Otherwise his audience simply stared at him.

War was far from, per se, bad, for the great men of New England.

In fact, all the evidence was that it was good for business.

“Many times,” Lee went on, clearly disappointed, “I took my fears, my forebodings to the Governor’s office. But was I listened to? NO! Now look where we are today!”

Problematically, any seasoned watcher of politics will confirm that even a man so full of his own importance that it never occurs to him that even his political allies regard him as a self-serving buffoon, can perchance stumble upon a magic, opinion-changing formula. Usually, by accident. In Roger E. Lee’s case, it helped his cause that he was a man compulsively addicted to the sound of his own voice and that he had the moral compass of an alley cat, because sometimes it took a lifetime to trip over, unwittingly, a cause which perfectly matched one’s meagre gifts.

“Now we are about to reap the whirlwind, my friends!”

Still, no reaction other than a few noncommittal shrugs.

Roger Lee bored on.

“The English,” he complained angrily.

Here and there people were shifting uncomfortably in their chairs.

Most New Englanders considered themselves to be English, or of Irish, or Scottish, or Welsh stock, or just plain British; it was only when you went further out West that people started calling themselves Louisianans, or Missourians, or Kentuckians, or Dakotans or Columbians, or by nicknames and abbreviations derived from the ancestral names of native tribes or lands upon which they lived, like Iowans or Lakotans, or Arizonians, or Mesans. Whereas, here in the East, everybody knew they were ‘of their colony’ yet also New Englanders, intrinsically in some way British unless they had had the sad misfortune to have come from some other European land.

“The English have already lost Jamaica and one of their battleships. At this very moment one of their monstrously expensive new aircraft carriers is sitting in Hampton Roads like a burned-out wreck. Look what has happened to stock prices in the last week! And that was before the disastrous news from the South West started coming in. Is it any wonder that the English tried to keep all that from us?”

A disinterested observer – not that there were any of those in the room – would have been hard-pressed to tell whether the souring mood of the audience was affirmative, or negative towards Roger Lee.

“Balderdash!” A man at the back yelled.

Chairs scraped as other men rose to their feet.

“Is it? Is it?” Roger Lee bellowed. “Who do you think the English will force to pay to replace the ships they are frittering away, or for the lost revenues from Jamaica, or for the armies and the aircraft they will need to keep the Spanish from fording the Mississippi in a couple of months?”

“Go back to Virginia!”

But of course, Roger Lee had a microphone and his detractors, did not and he had never been very good at listening to whatever anybody else had to say to him.