I seek to empower people by giving them something to ponder.
By Marcial Bonifacio
7-4-26
My friends and American countrymen, we rightly celebrate George Washington as the founder of our republic, the father of our Constitution, and the architect of the American presidency. Yet we rarely pause to consider the more unsettling truth that underlies each of these achievements: he should not have survived long enough to accomplish any of them. The historical record documents, across three decades of military service and multiple theaters of combat, a pattern of close encounters with death so extraordinary that Washington's own contemporaries struggled to explain it in purely natural terms. I submit to you that this record deserves careful examination, not to inflate legend, but because the evidence itself is remarkable.
The first and most thoroughly documented of these encounters occurred on July 9, 1755, at the Battle of the Monongahela in present-day western Pennsylvania. Washington, then a 23-year-old colonel serving as a volunteer aide-de-camp to British Major General Edward Braddock, rode continuously across the field of a catastrophic ambush, delivering orders under conditions that killed or wounded sixty of the eighty-six British officers present by the battle's third hour. Two horses were shot from beneath him. Four bullets passed through his coat and hat. Every other British officer on horseback was shot. Braddock himself was mortally wounded and dead within four days. Washington survived without a scratch. In a letter to his brother John Augustine Washington dated July 18, 1755, preserved by George Washington's Mount Vernon from the Founders Online at the National Archives, Washington wrote: "By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, altho' death was levelling my companions on every side." Dr. James Craik, Washington's physician and eyewitness, later told Washington's early biographer John Marshall that "I expected every moment to see him fall. His duty and situation exposed him to every danger. Nothing but the superintending care of Providence could have saved him from the fate of all around him."
Washington's second major encounter with death occurred on January 3, 1777, at the Battle of Princeton, New Jersey. The Continental Army, already exhausted from the overnight crossing of the Delaware and the surprise attack at Trenton eight days earlier, was on the verge of collapse when General Hugh Mercer's brigade was overrun and Mercer himself was mortally wounded. Washington rode forward on a large white horse, conspicuous against the field, to within thirty yards of the British lines (well within effective musket range) to rally his disintegrating troops. According to George Washington's Mount Vernon, Washington called out to his soldiers: "Parade with us my brave fellows! There is but a handful of the enemy and we shall have them directly!" His aide-de-camp John Fitzgerald reportedly pulled his hat over his eyes, expecting to see the General shot from the saddle at any moment. Both sides fired simultaneously at close range, filling the field with smoke. Historian W.J. Wood writes that "Colonel John Fitzgerald of [Washington's] staff covered his eyes so that he would not see his commander blasted from the saddle. Yet when the smoke began to clear, there was Washington, standing in his stirrups, calmly waving his men forward." The British broke and ran. Washington, untouched, shouted after them, "It's a fine fox chase, boys!" — a remark recorded by Mount Vernon and the American Battlefield Trust from contemporaneous accounts.
What is one to make of this evidence? The record establishes that upon at least five occasions when in great danger from gunfire, Washington remained unscathed — his hat was shot off his head, his clothes were torn, horses were killed beneath him, but he was never so much as scratched by a bullet, and for this immunity he consistently thanked Providence. Mount Vernon's own scholars have examined the so-called 'Indian Prophecy' — the account of an Indigenous chief who allegedly declared after the Monongahela battle that his men had fired repeatedly at Washington and missed, concluding that a spirit shielded him. Those scholars have determined that the legend as fully told by Washington's step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis in the 1820s almost certainly did not unfold precisely as described. What is not disputed, however, is that Washington escaped serious harm in a battle that killed nearly every officer around him, and that this feat, combined with his later prominence, was seen as remarkable, if not miraculous, by his contemporaries, and perhaps, even by Washington himself. The verified facts require no embellishment: on a battlefield that killed nearly every officer around him, and before a British firing line thirty yards distant, Washington was not struck. The historical record does not require a legend to produce astonishment. The record itself is sufficient.
My friends and American countrymen, we have in previous commentaries documented the five great junctures at which Washington's choices preserved the republic — Valley Forge, Trenton, Newburgh, Annapolis, and the presidency itself. What the evidence above adds to that argument is this: at two of those junctures, the republic's survival depended not only on Washington's willingness to act, but on his survival under conditions that should, by every calculation of probability, have produced his death. Had a bullet at the Monongahela in 1755 killed an obscure colonial colonel twenty years before the Revolution, there would have been no commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, no Newburgh Address, no voluntary resignation at Annapolis, and no presidency to define. Had a British musket ball at Princeton in 1777 struck the man thirty yards from its muzzle, the Continental Army might not have survived the winter of 1777, and the republic it was fighting to establish might have expired before it could be constituted. The indispensable man was, by the evidence of his own battles, a man who should not have been there to be indispensable.
Long live the spirit of George Washington and long live the Republic of the United States of America!
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