The character of George Washington.

• Author: Brookhiser, Richard
• Position: Profiles in History

THERE IS A LINE in the song "America the Beautiful" of some significance: "Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears." It means that the cities of the U.S., unlike those of Europe, have not been torn and destroyed by war. That is not quite right. The city I live in, New York, has been attacked twice in American history.

The first was in the summer of 1776, and George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army, was responsible for the city's defense. The Declaration of Independence had been read for the first time in New York on July 9. That very week, residents of Long Island saw a British fleet moving toward New York Harbor. The British, who made camp on Staten Island, had at their command 10 ships-of-the-line, dozens of other vessels, and 32,000 professional soldiers--including Hessians. To oppose this force, Washington had no navy nor ships and a mere 19,000 soldiers, most of them untrained militia. Over the next few months, he and his men fought two battles: the Battle of Long Island, in what now is Brooklyn, and the Battle of White Plains, north of the city. They lost both.

The second attack on New York was on Sept. 11, 2001. New York lost almost 3,000 men and women on 9/11, far more than the several hundred American soldiers who were killed in the battles of 1776. However, for the rest of the Revolutionary War, the British kept all their American prisoners on ships in the East River, where they were not well fed, had no good air, and were given barely any water, Every morning the British would say, "Rebels, throw out your dead," and corpses would be pitched overboard. Eleven thousand men died on those ships and, for years, people in Brooklyn found skeletons on the waterfront.

We lost the two World Trade Center towers on 9/11, along with several smaller buildings. George Washington lost the entire city, which the British occupied for the remainder of the war. The British also could be said to have used weapons of mass destruction, as they encouraged slaves to run away from their American masters with the promise of freedom, but any slave who had smallpox was sent back in the hope that he would infect his fellow slaves and rebel masters.

The American Revolution lasted eight-and-a-half years. It was this nation's longest conflict--longer than the Civil War and our part in World War II put together--before Vietnam. So, we have our problems--especially in Iraq--but Washington had his as well. In many ways, his were...