Revolutionary Moment
Special Screening,
Q&A Saturday
Editor’s note: This is 11th in the series of “Revolutionary Moments,” published periodically by The News-Gazette, and written by RHS Executive Director Eric Wilson and other local historians. The three-year series commemorates two-and-a-half centuries of “American Evolution,” leading up to the twinned 250th birthdays of Lexington and Rockbridge in 2028.
This Saturday, July 11, at 10 a.m. join the Rockbridge Historical Society at Lexington’s historic State Theater for a premiere community screening of “Young Washington” (trailers are viewable online).
With thanks for the support of the film’s distributors and local R/C State Cinema 3 manager Nathan Workman, attendees can pay standard admission at the door for the one-time showing. Audience Q&A will immediately follow the two-hour movie, led by RHS Executive Director Eric Wilson, and other local Revolutionary-era and military historians.
With its limited national release on July 4, the dramatic feature film stars Ben Kingsley, Kelsey Grammer, Mary-Louise Parker, and William Franklyn-Miller as George Washington.
Its storyline turns to the anxieties and ambitions of the young Virginian in the 1750s, before he was appointed to command a newly formed Continental Army in 1775, then consequently elected as the United States’ first president in 1788. This, still decades before delivering his fabled Farewell Address in 1796 and signing an emancipatory last will and testament after his final retirement to Mount Vernon.
Here in Lexington, in the first half-century following his death, Washington’s exploits in war, peace and politics would become commemorated at our emerging pair of educational institutions, Washington College and Virginia Military Institute. In 1856, a bronze cast of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s iconic 1788 statue was dedicated a t V MI. I t s till f aces Old Barracks’ Washington Arch, standing confidently with both martial sword and fasces, as well as a civilian cane and cultivating plow.
A decade earlier, he was even more simply and serenely elevated as an “American Cincinnatus” in a rough-hewn, toga-clad statue carved by Lexington cabinetmaker Matthew Kahle. In 1844, the wooden tribute had been placed atop Washington Hall: the central building on the colonnade of the college that was renamed for him after his foundational 1796 gift to Liberty Hall Academy, then nominally coupled with his kinsman when the school’s first post-Civil War president, Robert Edward Lee, died in 1870.
The lightly fictionalized film frames a new and narrower spotlight on the social world and inner workings of the young surveyor and future plantation owner who would come to own vast stretches of land in and beyond the Appalachians (he’s conventionally said to have surveyed Natural Bridge on those travels in those same years, though the documentary evidence is unclear). Its central scenes hone in on the dueling courage, persistence and naïveté that marked Washington’s early years and ambitions as a young colonial officer fighting for the British crown.
The cinematic narrative climaxes in the contested frontier of “Ohio Country” – just beyond the boundaries of Virginia, south of present-day Pittsburgh – when Col. Washington’s 400-strong Virginia Regiment and accompanying Iroquoian warriors surprised a French scouting party, seizing Ensign Jumonville as a prisoner of war before he was killed by the revenging tomahawk of the Seneca “Half-King,” Tanacharison. The reprisal followed quickly, with 800 French soldiers, Canadian militia, and other indigenous allies hounding the British and colonial troops into their hastily constructed “Fort Necessity”: a crushing defeat now known as the Battle of Great Meadows, on July 3, 1754.
Under Washington’s command, the ambush’s preemptive if lesser-known “Shot Heard Round the World” would be compounded by his fateful signing of the official surrender papers, in which he acknowledged the assassination of a foreign officer (perhaps unwittingly, thanks to the ambiguous translation from French by his Dutch interpreter). Together, those fateful actions would soon precipitate the continent’s sprawling “French and Indian War”: recalled as “The Seven Years War” by its even wider cast of European parties, and memorably characterized by Winston Churchill as “The First World War.”
As Wilson noted, “These trials and humiliations – jointly forged in Virginia’s 18th century hinterlands and the straitening protocol of colonial and royal chambers – are often forgotten in public memory. But they illuminate a vital precedent to Washington’s subsequent military rebellion, which has been more familiarly remembered through the long five-year march of sieges, retreats, defeats, and bounceback victories: organizing an “American Dunkirk” at the Battle of Brooklyn, crossing the Delaware, weathering the frozen encampment of Valley Forge, and tightening the noose with the French navy at Yorktown, when “The World Turned Upside Down.” Through these early risks, stumbles, and rallies, the film highlights a pivotal moment when the future general, as the saying goes, “had to learn how to lose, before learning how to win.”
More details will follow regarding another “coda” to this screening that RHS is planning to hold as part of its Revolutionary Films series on Thursday, July 16, at 6 p.m. at the Rockbridge Regional Library. To extend these newer flashbacks from Washington’s younger days, RHS will curate a series of classic film excerpts and recent documentary clips that chronicle the general’s and president’s career, through and beyond the American Revolution itself.
For more video teasers and historical contexts, see RHS Facebook and Instagram pages, or contact [email protected] with questions about the event.
