Let us take the gravest first.  It has been confidently asserted that Washington was not an American in anything but the technical sense.  This idea is more diffused than, perhaps, would be generally supposed, and it has also been formally set down in print, in which we are more fortunate than in many other instances where the accusation has not got beyond the elusive condition of loose talk.

In that most noble poem, the “Commemoration Ode,” Mr. Lowell speaks of Lincoln as “the first American.”  The poet’s winged words fly far, and find a resting-place in many minds.  This idea has become widespread, and has recently found fuller expression in Mr. Clarence King’s prefatory note to the great life of Lincoln by Hay and Nicolay.[1] Mr. King says:  “Abraham Lincoln was the first American to reach the lonely height of immortal fame.  Before him, within the narrow compass of our history, were but two preeminent names,—­Columbus the discoverer, and Washington the founder; the one an Italian seer, the other an English country gentleman.  In a narrow sense, of course, Washington was an American....  For all that he was English in his nature, habits, moral standards, and social theories; in short, in all points which, aside from mere geographical position, make up a man, he was as thorough-going a British colonial gentleman as one could find anywhere beneath the Union Jack.  The genuine American of Lincoln’s type came later....  George Washington, an English commoner, vanquished George, an English king.”

[Footnote 1:  Mr. Matthew Arnold, and more recently Professor Goldwin Smith, have both spoken of Washington as an Englishman.  I do not mention this to discredit the statements of Mr. Lowell or Mr. King, but merely to indicate how far this mistaken idea has traveled.]

In order to point his sentence and prove his first postulate, Mr. King is obliged not only to dispose of Washington, but to introduce Columbus, who never was imagined in the wildest fantasy to be an American, and to omit Franklin.  The omission of itself is fatal to Mr. King’s case.  Franklin has certainly a “preeminent name.”  He has, too, “immortal fame,” although of course of a widely different character from that of either Washington or Lincoln, but he was a great man in the broad sense of a world-wide reputation.  Yet no one has ever ventured to call Benjamin Franklin an Englishman.  He was a colonial American, of course, but he was as intensely an American as any man who has lived on this continent before or since.  A man of the people, he was American by the character of his genius, by his versatility, the vivacity of his intellect, and his mental dexterity.  In his abilities, his virtues, and his defects he was an American, and so plainly one as to be beyond the reach of doubt or question.  There were others of that period, too, who were as genuine Americans as Franklin or Lincoln.  Such were Jonathan Edwards, the peculiar product of New England Calvinism; Patrick Henry, who