GHOST IN THE GALLERY: GEORGE WASHINGTON LOOKS ON AS CHARLES ADDRESSES CONGRESS

“The hand of Providence has been so conspicuous in all of this,” Washington wrote. To a dispassionate observer, it seemed the height of folly for a band of upstart colonists to take on the world’s greatest empire. Victory was far from certain. The odds were stacked against the fledgling nation.

At war’s end, Washington resigned his commission and left the field.

Washington’s decision to relinquish power and return to his farm at Mount Vernon prompted his onetime opponent, King George III, to remark in astonishment: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Washington could have ruled for life. This would have been par for the course for most men, in most lands, throughout most of history. Those who won in battle fashioned themselves thrones. They did not renounce them.

But Washington was different. Our Founding Fathers were different.

In the annals of revolutions, the United States is an outlier. So much so that some historians debate whether ours can even properly be considered a revolution. The very term conjures chaos, bloodletting, and coups. Revolutions, after all, are power struggles. And power often brings out the worst in men.

Mere years after Washington’s victory, the French Revolution led to the guillotine and decades of warfare and internal strife. No fewer than 16,000 people were executed during the 10-month Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794. The toll from the revolution itself reaches well into the hundreds of thousands, with some estimates suggesting as many as 700,000 deaths, including soldiers who fought in the wars that followed.

For revolutions in the modern world, this is the norm: high-minded ideals collapse into bloody infighting, eventually leading to greater authoritarian control. Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, Iran — the list goes on. America is the exception.

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By any metric, the United States was profoundly blessed to have the men it did at its founding. They were uniquely — and supremely — gifted.

Has any nation ever had a more eloquent wordsmith than Thomas Jefferson? A more skilled diplomat than Benjamin Franklin? A more brilliant political theorist than James Madison?

These men were geniuses. And America happened to have them just when it needed them most. Other nations were not so lucky. France got Robespierre and Bonaparte. Russia had Lenin and Stalin. We avoided their fate.

This was not the last time the United States had the right leaders at the right time.

During the Civil War, America had Abraham Lincoln at its helm. An unsightly prairie lawyer whose sole experience in national politics extended to a single two-year term in Congress, Lincoln was far from anyone’s idea of a figure of gravitas. But absent Lincoln, the United States might not exist today. He held it together just as it was coming apart.

“I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln would write, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Lincoln came to feel that he was at the mercy of a higher power. “The Almighty,” he remarked in the war’s final days, “has His own purposes.”

There are other examples, many of them equally unlikely.

Teddy Roosevelt was an asthmatic, self-styled cowboy born to privilege in New York who rose from assistant secretary of the Navy to president of the United States in three years and adroitly led the country during its emergence as a global power.

His distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was a scion of wealth, crippled by polio while in his prime, whose charisma and cunning kept the ship of state afloat during the Great Depression and the worst war in modern history. “It took a man in a wheelchair to put the nation back on its feet,” one playwright said.

His successor, Harry Truman, was a failed haberdasher from Missouri who never attended college and did not enter national politics until he was 50, but whose common-sense policies helped pave the way for America’s ultimate victory against a nuclear-armed superpower.

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Years later came another unassuming Midwesterner: a longtime U.S. congressman prone to missteps, verbal and otherwise, but with a reputation for decency and magnanimity. Gerald Ford restored trust in America and her institutions. He sought neither the presidency nor the vice presidency, but as his onetime critic Sen. Ted Kennedy later conceded, he was the “right man at the right time” to “put our nation back together” after the morass of Watergate and Vietnam.

It was once fashionable to deride or dismiss our Founding Fathers, to topple their statues and desecrate their memories. But at pivotal moments, America has been profoundly lucky to have the leaders it has had. Some might even say providentially so.