Thank you Smintheus for sharing the Huffington Post article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... about George Washington and his strong stance against the torture of prisoners during the Revolutionary War. Without Washington's leadership I might not be alive today. So take a break from candidate diaries and celebrate Presidents Day with me.
(This is a re-release in honor of Presidents Day. I originally published it late on Friday so I don't think that too many people got to read it.)
One of my mother's ancestors was a German who came to America as a Hessian soldier to kill Americans. I don't know how a young man makes the decision to leave his homeland, to go to a country where he doesn't speak the language and has no familial ties. To pick up a gun in a battle that wasn't his and possibly die alone and unloved. Was he in search of money or adventure or maybe to escape trouble at home... we'll never know what his motiviation was. But travel to America he did, possibly as early as 1775. My ancestor was eventually captured at Yorktown in 1781 and held in a makeshift prison in the city of Frederick Maryland. I can imagine that the conditions that the captured Hessians endured were not exactly cozy, but he was well enough and strong enough to escape one dark night two years later while he was being moved to another prison in New York.
Two years spent in a foreign prison after years "in country" killing Americans. How easy it would have been for his American captors to make him wish he had never been born. If he had been beaten, or tortured do you think he would have stayed here and put down roots? I'm thinking uh, no. The British forces were nowhere near as kind to American POWs. Perhaps as many as 10,000 died onboard ships in New York and Philadelphia from intentional neglect, disease and starvation. But the Americans my ancestor was paid to kill treated him well enough that he eventually made his way to the German communities of southern Pennsylvania. He found a wife, bought farmland and began a family. He joined the local militia. He worshipped at the church of his choice, free of persecution or harrassment. Sadly his life was cut short by the yellow fever epidemic that swept through Philadelphia in 1793 taking his life and the life of one of his sons.
I write this because the stance that George Washington took against torture and then instilled in his commanders during a fight for the survival of a young nation matters today when other forces would again threaten our survival. The easy, pragmatic route that Bush and his cabal have taken by allowing the torture of foreign combatants has weakened us, humiliated us and now threatens the lives of every man and woman who wear our uniform in countries all around the globe. But thanks to the wisdom of President Washington, I am here today. My Hessian ancestor, enemy combatant though he once was, leaves a long proud lineage of soldiers, inventors, lawyers, farmers, artists and just plain folk. I think sometimes about the American families of the men that my ancestor fought against, maybe wounded and killed. I hope that his time served in that Frederick jail and the life that he lived afterwards made amends for the lives that he took. I hope that the next President will help us make amends to the world for the gross missteps of a modern President who makes a mockery of justice through water boarding and other forms of torture and deprivation. I can only hope.