Frankly, I find it impossible to reconcile the good Canon’s version of our Church’s history with the known facts. There was no “Presiding Bishop” created by the founding documents to be “the head of this new Church”, much less a lead bishop “reflecting the principles of the young republic” — see the details about the gradual establishment of that office, and its subsequent mushrooming into its current form, in this earlier post.
Moreover, the Church of England and its bishops were emphatically not unwilling to “embrace [their] child’s new status.” They simply had to eliminate certain procedural hurdles, and to iron out a few doctrinal differences, before they could proceed with consecrating an American bishop, all as explained (in painstaking detail — which I know for many readers is the bugaboo of this blog) in this post, in which there are full links to all the historical documents. There, one will learn, for example, that far from being unable to “convince Church of England leadership to consecrate indigenous bishops for the fledgling Church”, the Rev. Dr. White was one of the first two American bishops to be consecrated by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury. That august official, together with the Archbishop of York, went to great lengths to accommodate the desire of the “fledgling Church” to have proper bishops to lead it, and to ensure that it was truly a church founded in the image of the Church of England, if not under its jurisdiction.
Revisionism is a lifestyle: theology, canons, history. No surprise. Newspeak apparently rocks at 815.
Shortly after the treaty of peace (1783) The English bishops had an act passed by Parliament allowing them to ordain clergy for foreign service without requiring them to take the oaths of allegiance and two clergy were ordained for Maryland under this act. One of them was Mason Locke Weems who wrote the cherry tree biography of Washington. That act was modified to authorize the consecration of three bishops for America – White and Provoost 1787 and Madison 1790.