On the night of August 29, 1776, the American Revolution should have ended.

Washington's army was trapped on Brooklyn Heights, backs to the East River, facing a British force that outnumbered them and had just routed them in battle. General Howe had every advantage. All he had to do was press the attack or wait for the Royal Navy to sail up the river and cut off any retreat. The Continental Army would be destroyed or captured. Washington himself would likely hang. The rebellion would be over before it truly began.

Howe waited. No one is entirely sure why. And that night, a fog rolled in.

There was no weather forecast in 1776. No radar, no satellites, no five-day predictions. You woke up and looked at the sky. A commander planning a retreat across a river, at night, with a beaten army and the enemy watching, had no way to know if the weather would cooperate. Washington ordered the evacuation anyway. They began ferrying men across in whatever boats they could find, working in darkness, trying to move nine thousand soldiers before dawn revealed what they were doing.

They didn't finish in time. The sun rose. The British would see them, exposed on the water, and it would be slaughter.

Then the fog came. A thick cover that hung over the river and the Brooklyn shore, hiding the final boats as they crossed. By the time it lifted, the army was gone. The British found empty trenches and abandoned campfires.

One fog. A different weather pattern that morning and there is no United States of America.

We tell the story of the founding as if it were inevitable. The Declaration was signed, the war was won, the Constitution was ratified, and here we are. It has the quality of myth, of destiny working itself out. Of course, it happened this way. We exist, so it must have been meant to be.

But that's not our history.

The men and women who lived through it knew better. They knew how close the whole thing came to collapse, repeatedly, at every stage. Military disaster, political fracture, financial ruin, personal animosity: any of these could have ended the experiment before it took hold. What we inherited was not the inevitable product of great forces moving through history. It was the unlikely result of specific people making specific choices under pressure, often with no good options and frequently with no idea whether what they were doing would work.

This matters because if the founding was contingent, so is its survival. We didn't earn what we have. We inherited it. And inheritance comes with obligations that are easy to forget when you start believing the inheritance was guaranteed.

Two men, more than any others, illustrate what the founding required and how easily it could have gone differently.

George Washington was not the most brilliant of the founders. He wasn't the deepest thinker, the best writer, or the most creative political mind. What he had was something rarer: a temperament suited to the impossible task of holding the thing together.

The Continental Army was a disaster for most of the war. Undersupplied, undertrained, underpaid, and usually outmatched. Washington lost more battles than he won. After the rout at Long Island came more defeats: the fall of New York, the retreat across New Jersey, an army melting away as enlistments expired and men simply went home. By December 1776, the Revolution looked finished.

Washington's response was the crossing of the Delaware, the Christmas night attack on Trenton. It was a desperate gamble born of desperation. The army had weeks, maybe days, before it ceased to exist. He attacked in a sleet storm, at night, with men who had no shoes, against professional soldiers. It worked. It shouldn't have, but it did. And it kept the war alive long enough for something to change.

What Washington understood, and what made him irreplaceable, was that his job was not primarily to win battles. His job was to keep an army in the field. To hold men together through conditions that should have broken them. To be present, calm, visible, and unbroken when everything around him was falling apart. The Revolution survived because Washington's character made it survivable.

This is where the mythos of Washington is built. It carries him into public life where he easily could have become as powerful as a king. The very thing the Founding was looking to abolish.

After the war, Washington had the army's loyalty, the public's adoration, and a Congress too weak to stop him from doing anything he wanted. The Newburgh Conspiracy of 1783 was a real movement among officers, furious at not being paid, ready to use force against Congress or to make Washington a military ruler. He could have ridden that wave. He could have told himself it was necessary, that the country needed strong leadership, that the civilian government was failing.

He didn't. He went to Newburgh and talked the officers down. He made clear, in a way that could not be misunderstood, that the military would remain subordinate to civilian authority. Then, when the war ended, he resigned his commission and went home to Mount Vernon.

This was without precedent. George III reportedly said that if Washington actually gave up power and returned to his farm, he would be the greatest man in the world. He did. It set a pattern that held: the peaceful transfer of power, the subordination of military to civilian rule, the idea that the office matters more than the man holding it. None of this was inevitable. All of it depended on one person choosing, against his own interest and against the urging of those around him, to let go.

Benjamin Franklin was a different kind of essential.

Where Washington embodied the temperament needed to hold things together through crisis, Franklin embodied the practical wisdom needed to build institutions that could last. He was the oldest of the founders by a wide margin: 70 when the Declaration was signed, 81 at the Constitutional Convention. He had been famous for decades, as a scientist, a writer, a businessman, a diplomat. He had nothing to prove and nothing to gain. He showed up anyway.

Franklin's gift was getting people to yes. He was the man who could sit in a room full of competing egos and contradictory interests and find the compromise that let everyone walk away with enough. At the Constitutional Convention, when the whole thing nearly collapsed over the question of representation (large states versus small states, a deadlock that threatened to send everyone home) it was Franklin who helped broker the compromise that saved it. Not because he thought the compromise was perfect, but because he understood that a flawed agreement was better than no agreement at all.

His speech on the final day of the Convention is worth remembering. He admitted he didn't approve of everything in the Constitution. He had objections. But he said he would sign it anyway, because he had lived long enough to know that his own judgment was not infallible, and because the country needed a government and this was the best they were going to get.

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us... I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution.

This is not the rhetoric of ideological purity. It's the rhetoric of a man who knows that politics is the art of the possible, that waiting for perfection means waiting forever, that the work is always unfinished and flawed and you do it anyway.

Franklin's other indispensable contribution was diplomatic. Without France, the Revolution fails. Without French money, French troops, and especially the French navy at Yorktown, the British win. Franklin spent years in Paris, charming the French court, negotiating the alliance that made victory possible. He was 70 years old, in poor health, far from home, doing work that no one else could do. The fate of the Revolution hung on whether this elderly printer from Philadelphia could convince a monarchy to fund a rebellion against monarchies.

He pulled it off. But it wasn't inevitable that he would. It wasn't inevitable that anyone could.

The point of this history is not nostalgia. It's not to suggest the founders were saints or that we should return to some imagined golden age. They were flawed men, compromised in ways we know and ways we've probably forgotten. They built a nation that permitted slavery and excluded most of its population from the rights it proclaimed. The work they left us is unfinished.

But that's precisely the point. The work is always unfinished. What they gave us is not a completed project but a set of tools for continuing the project. Institutions that can be used well or badly. Norms that hold only if enough people keep honoring them. A framework that requires maintenance, attention, and the kind of character that Washington and Franklin exemplified.

We treat what we have as if it were natural, as if free societies were the default state of human affairs and the only question is how to improve them. But free societies are not the default. They are the exception. They arise rarely, under specific conditions, and they can disappear in a generation if the people living in them forget what they require.

Tocqueville saw this almost two hundred years ago. Democracy, he said, depends on habits: habits of association, of participation, of self-governance at the local level. The institutions are necessary but not sufficient. You also need citizens who know how to use them, who have practiced the skills of self-rule, who understand that freedom is not a gift but a responsibility.

If those habits atrophy, the institutions won't save you. The hardware is useless without the software.

What would it mean to take the fragility of the founding seriously?

It would mean treating what we've inherited as inheritance: something received, not earned, and therefore something that comes with obligations. You don't maintain what you think you deserve. You maintain what you know is fragile and vital.

It would mean looking for the Washingtons and Franklins of our own time, and asking whether we're cultivating the conditions that produce them. Washington's character didn't come from nowhere. Franklin's practical wisdom was developed over a lifetime. These capacities can be nurtured or neglected. Right now, it's not obvious we're nurturing them.

It would mean remembering that the people who built what we have were not so different from us. They were ambitious, petty, brilliant, shortsighted, and brave, often all at once. They disagreed violently about fundamental questions. They made mistakes they couldn't see and compromises that haunt us still. And yet they built something that has lasted, imperfectly but remarkably, for nearly 250 years.

They didn't know it would last. They hoped. They worked. They got lucky in ways they couldn't have predicted, like a fog rolling in over the East River on an August morning.

We are living on the inheritance of that luck, that work, and those choices. What we do with it is not determined. It never was.