Despite the outward signs last Monday, there's actually no such holiday as President's Day to be found in the federal statutes. Or should that be Presidents' Day? Or just plain old, apostrophe-less Presidents Day? Like its legal standing, even the name of the holiday is uncertain.

It would be a harmless practice, designating the third Monday in February as an all-purpose, all-presidents holiday, if it didn't obscure what used to be two real holidays and the real significance of our greatest presidents -- Washington and Lincoln. If we lose touch with them, we lose touch with how we came to be, and stayed, a nation. We lose touch with what we are. For without them, America wouldn't be America.

Today, February 22, is not President's/Presidents'/Presidents Day, but Washington's birthday, at least according to the Gregorian calendar we now use. He was actually born February 11, 1731 Old Style. That is, according to the calendar then in use in this part of the world. That was before the colonies skipped 11 days to make the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, and young Washington obligingly moved his birthday to the 22nd. That date would become widely celebrated even in his own lifetime by a grateful nation.

But over the years General and President Washington faded from real-life hero into icon. His was the face on the dollar bill, his the portrait that used to hang in every American classroom. Like those pictures, he became just part of the background.

In the story once told to every American schoolchild, George Washington was the little boy who chopped down the cherry tree and wouldn't tell a lie. That tall tale was invented by his biographer and mythmaker, Parson Weems, but the parson's stories can't begin to compete with the saga of Washington's real, improbable life:

An awkward, rawboned countryman teaches himself to be a gentleman by laboriously copying "The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation," and makes every one of them his own. For life. Those rules become not only his practice but his self.

A rash young soldier learns from a disastrous defeat at the hands of the French and Indians. He goes on to many another defeat before somehow emerging with a world-changing victory. It would become a pattern: As a military commander, Washington had a way of losing almost every battle but the last.

At the great, wrenching moment of decision in his time, this prosperous, ambitious Virginia planter risks everything he has--life, fortune, sacred honor--when he chooses to join the patriot cause.

A general without an army, he proceeds to raise one, and goes on to defeat the mightiest empire on the face of the earth. No wonder the band played "The World Turned Upside Down" at Yorktown.

The one thing that disorganizes more than defeat is victory. After eight long years of war (1775-83), and all the turmoil, sacrifice, divisions and confusions that go with war, the new country somehow emerged victorious. Also deeply in debt, adrift and desperate for strong, stable government. The sophisticates of Europe waited to see how long this notion of a people governing themselves could possibly last.

There used to be a name for the painful, uncertain pause in American history between the Revolution and the Constitution. It was called the Critical Period before revisionist historians got their hands on it. And it was well named, for one crisis followed another.

At one point an army demanding to be paid urged its commanding general to disband the incompetent, demoralized and widely despised Congress, and take control of the country himself. Instead, Washington resigned his commission and returned to Mount Vernon.

It would not be the first time this Cincinnatus turned his back on power and returned to his fields. Victorious generals have been known to seize power; this one could hardly wait to let it go. How antique.

As the woefully weak government under the old Articles of Confederation proved inadequate to deal with one challenge after another, the aging general would look on with growing concern as the nascent Union foundered. British troops refused to leave frontier forts, the national currency grew worthless, the economy faltered, trade was paralyzed, and the new government, largely paralyzed because it required the unanimous consent of all the states to act, seemed powerless to reverse the sad trend. Mobs marched and a rebellion flared in Massachusetts.

This leader who had surrendered the stage to others didn't just sit back and watch the dissolution of his country. To form a new, more perfect Union, he convened a meeting of the best minds and the most sagacious statesmen of his generation. As he told the delegates at the outset of their deliberations: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair." They did. Continued...