History's Shadow at Wiliiamsburg

By Hugh Sidey

The eight previous economic summit meetings were pageants of wealth and power, set in or near grand palaces that were built with the sweat and blood of ordinary people. For the ninth summit, the scene was turned on its head. The buildings of Williamsburg, where the leaders of the seven major industrialized democracies gathered over the weekend, could be tucked into one wing of Versailles, the site of last year's meeting. Marble, granite and gold gave way to wood, brick and pewter. Vistas of canals and cobbled courtyards yielded to intimate gardens of a few square yards and dusty streets that could be walked in minutes. Wiliiamsburg is a reminder of the limits of government and the power of freedom.

No matter how intractable their problems seemed -- and in deed high interest rates and the too strong dollar defy ready solution -- these special visitors did not need to go home emptyhanded. Wiliiamsburg, after all, was a gathering place of ideas that shaped America and influenced the world. And for men and women who care to look and listen, great thoughts renew themselves in the modest homes, the taverns and the government buildings.

The founding impulses of America were not original. They came from the Magna Carta, from the British Bill of Rights, from Locke and Montesquieu, from St. Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa ("Since all men are by nature free, then government rests on the consent of the governed") and a hundred other places. The young, exuberant colonies fused them into revolution.

Britain's Margaret Thatcher could summon up the image of 1769, when the Virginia assembly, protesting the British Revenue Act, was dissolved by Governor Botetourt. In defiance, the assemblymen moved up Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester Street to the Raleigh Tavern, where next day they reconvened in the Apollo Room and drew up a boycott of British goods. It was a warning that the British ignored, to their regret.

The memories are layered. Francois Mitterrand could savor echoes from that same Apollo Room. It was there that France's Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the Revolutionary War, was welcomed back to the U.S. in 1824 and toasted as a soldier of liberty.

In Wiliiamsburg, George Washington nurtured his friendships with Virginia's revolutionary leaders, and took military commissions that sent him to the frontier in the French and Indian War. Did Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, beset by European complaints about burgeoning U.S. deficits, know that his earliest counterpart, Alexander Hamilton, commanded the bayonet attack on the British redoubts at Yorktown, only 13 miles from Wiliiamsburg, in the decisive battle of the Revolution?

No voice from Williamsburg's past shouts louder than that of Patrick Henry, who in 1765 protested the British Stamp Act ("Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell"). Standing near the doorway of the House of Burgesses was Thomas Jefferson, then a 22-year-old law student. He listened as the passionate Henry paused before mentioning the name of the British King ("Let George the Third profit by their example"), then heard the cries of "Treason!" that reverberated through the colonies. While Thatcher could ponder her myopic forebears, Mitterrand could indulge a Francophile chuckle. On the fateful day that Henry spoke, there was a still unidentified spy from the French government among the listeners. He reported the British predicament to Paris in accurate detail.

The shadowy George Mason, near neighbor of Washington's and brilliant political writer, drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights in Williamsburg. A copy was dispatched to Philadelphia, where Jefferson read it just before he sat down to draft the Declaration of Independence. His masterwork had many glints of Mason.

The receptive observer in Williamsburg could carry away even more than sketches of great men and political events. That small band of Virginians two centuries ago relished good wine, played their fiddles with delight if uneven skill, spent the gentle evenings talking about literature, philosophy and the new findings in medicine and science. They examined the delicacy of the bloom in more than a hundred small gardens and inhaled the subtle scents of the catalpa trees ("Almost everything grows that is put into the ground," marveled a Swiss visitor in 1701). They worked and studied prodigiously for their beliefs, a diligence that became the young nation's defining trait. Lawyer George Wythe, whose house on the green is a visual joy, started a student in Greek at dawn and by evening had taken him through Latin, mathematics, French and English literature. Young Jefferson studied 15 hours out of every 24. "Determine never to be idle," he told his daughter. "It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing." No better epigraph could be found for the leaders meeting at Williamsburg two centuries later.

-- By Hugh Sidey This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.