^•^ ^ -^^ .->: aO" '^ *•"••' .^ ^b, ^^^*\o^ Jy--^^^ -1 L-?0 y^^.-. .0^ inii:-. ^.„ J" /ipm?^\ ^-r. ^°^.^ S ' ' /^ V '?^ X ♦ ^ .^^^ V -o V* ""'V ■'b. :^Ai -^tr ^o. V GEORGE WASHINGTON. From the portrait by Gilbert Stuart. George Washington PATRIOT, SOLDIER, STATESMAN FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES JAMES A. HARRISON ii PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA; AUTHOR OF " THE STORY OF GREECE," ETC. G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 37 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND S^f ^nickeibochcx ^xess 1906 ■ H 3 UCflARY of CONGRESS TwoCoi)ie$ KectWed AUG 3 1906 //Cooitfifrht Entry Glass //«- xxc. no. COPY A. ^ Copyright, iqo6 BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Ube IRnicftcibochei- ff>ics6, Ulevp Jijorh To L. L. H. AND J. L. H., The Two Who Have Contributed Most To Render This Work Possible ACKNOWLEDGMENTS * It gives the author great pleasure to acknowledge here the help afforded him in the preparation of this work by Mr. J. P. Kennedy, State Librarian, Rich- mond, Virginia ; Mr. John S. Patton, Librarian of the University of Virginia; Miss Anna S. Tuttle, Assist- ant Librarian of the University ; and Mr. R. Walton Moore of Fairfax, Virginia ; and, above all, to Mrs. J. A. Harrison for invaluable assistance of every kind always cheerfully rendered. It vv^ould be useless to enumerate the countless de- tails of the Washington Bibliography in constructing even a brief narrative like this : suffice it to say that Washington's own Writings in the exhaustive and accurate edition of W. C. Ford form the chief source of the author's statements ; and to these must be added the illuminating works of Fiske, Bancroft, McMaster, Winsor, Woodrow Wilson, Lecky, Trevelyan, P. L. Ford, and Hapgood ; Marshall, Lodge, and G. W. P. Custis. J. A. H. University of Virginia February 22, 1906 CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. "At the Fireside" ..... Emigration to New World — Differences between Old and New World — Strtiggles — Explorers — Vir- ginia in early times — Birth of Washington — "Wakefield"' — Marian Harland on Washington's birthplace — Washington's youth — His mother — G. W. P. Custis on Madam Washington — Anecdote of Washington — Mary Ball's features — Death of Augustine Washington — The widow — Washington's boyhood and early education — Surveying and mathematics — Hardships — "Rules of Civility" — At Fredericksburg — Mount Vernon — Marye's school — Willis on Washington as a school-boy. CHAPTER II. Greenway Court ..... Col. Beverley on Virginia — Its population and exploration — Tobacco — Hugh Jones on Virginia — "No popery" — Character of Virginians — Thomas, Lord Fairfax — Philip Bruce on Virginia — "Green- way Court" — Mrs. Pryor's description — "Ferry Farm" — Mary Washington — The Fairfaxes of Belvoir — Admiral Vernon and "grog" — Marriages in Virginia — Washington family — ^The navy selected for George — His uncle and mother object — Em- ployed as surveyor by Lord Fairfax — Character of his mind — His name — Salary — First-love— Verses. 17 vlii Contents CHAPTER III. A Boy's Journal ..... 34 M. D. Conway on Washington — ^The "Lowland Beauty" — Mary Gary — Poetry — Washington's char- acter — Lord Fairfax — Woodrow Wilson on Fair- fax and the pioneer life — Washington's Journal — Describes his surveyor's expedition and life — The American wilderness — Indians — Adventures. CHAPTER IV. Washington's University ... 46 Early education of Washington — Xenophon, Plu- tarch, Fenelon, Goethe — Pioneer population — Jacques Cartier — Indians in Virginia — Expansion of colonial life — Outdoor life — Death of Lawrence Washington — George accompanies him to Bar- badoes — Small-pox — Inherits brother's estates — "The Strenuous Life" — A "King George's man" — The French — First American congress — The Mon- ongahela and Alleghany — The Ohio — Fort Erie — Washington sent by Dinwiddie to negotiate with the French — Character of Dinwiddie — Expansion of France — Washington's account of his mission — The journey — A striking story — Its educational value — Lieutenant-Colonel — His address to the Half- King — A pioneer diplomat — Indian methods — The Scotch-Irish — Self-educated soldiers. CHAPTER V. Prologue to a Forest Tragedy . . 64 Inclination to war — Dangers — French aggressions — Fort Duquesne — Dinwiddie's selection of Wash- ington and Fry — Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle — Diplomacy of the i8th century — The Georgian Age — The Ohio Company — The Bourbon Alliance — Washington's brothers Lawrence and Augustine — Contents ix Salary of Washington — Coming of Braddock — Din- widdie's instructions — Col. Fry — Trent — Washing- ton first in command after Fry's death — Hardships — Washington's description of them — Death of the French commander — The Half-King — Consequences of the French invasion — Dinwiddie's account of the defeat — Washington captured at Fort Necessity — Letter to his brother — The London Magazine — ^ Alarm of the colonies — Power of France and Eng- land — The two fleets sail — Braddock sails for Vir- ginia — His presentiment — Franklin's advice to him — ^A "milk-maid's dream" — Council of governors — Franklin's assistance — Franklin and Washington contrasted. CHAPTER VI. In the Tragical Wood . ... 86 Washington appointed aide to Braddock — Corre- spondence thereon — ^The expedition starts — Delays — Ignorance of the commanders — Hewing the way — Strategic mistakes — Parkman describes the march — Braddock ambuscaded — What Washington says of the attack — Braddock' s numbers — Indian sub- tlety — Horrors of the defeat — Massacre of the Eng- lish — Braddock killed — Retreat of the English — Washington's letters on the Battle of the Mononga- hela. CHAPTER VII. The Widow Custis ..... 103 The fate of Braddock — Humiliation of Washington — Franklin on the British regulars — Washington appointed Colonel — His remuneration — Distress of the times — Washington's style as a writer — Frontier- X Contents bred commanders — War against France — The Shen- andoah Valley — Atkin put over Washington — Or- ders against profanity and drunkenness — Straits of the inhabitants — Condition of the frontier — "The Destroyer of Cities" — Washington becomes the popular toast — Lord Loudon — The census of Vir- ginia at this time — Dinwiddie leaves for England — 111 health of Washington — Meets the Widow Custis — His letter — Her character and appearance — Her family and first husband — Courtship and marriage described by her grandson — Old St. Peter's — Mrs. Carrington describes Mrs. Washington — Two views of Mrs. Washington — Theory of John Adams — Date of the marriage — Life at Mount Vernon and "The White House." CHAPTER VIIL Arcady , ...... 125 Mount Vernon — Burnaby's Travels — Washington's honeymoon — Washington orders articles from Lon- don — Letters and invoices — Arcadian life — Thanked by House of Burgesses — Passion for horses — Pop- ularity — The Washington coach — Scenes on the Potomac — Life in Old Virginia — Pithian's account. CHAPTER IX. The Golden Milestone .... 146 Address of his fellow-ofhcers to Washington — Williamsburg before the Revolution — Lord Bote- tourt — Society at the Middle Plantation — Portrait by Peale — Fox-hunting — "Jackie" Custis — The Dismal Swamp scheme — Interest in navigation — Lord Dunmore — Old Pohick Church — Bishop Meade's account — Washington a vestryman — His belief in Christianity — A communicant — Death of Miss Custis. Contents xi CHAPTER X. Old Williamsburg . . . . . 163 Virginia's three capitals — Jamestown — Williams- burg described by Burnaby — Lossing's account — William and Mary College — The Palace — The Gar- dens — Bruton Church and the Powder Horn — Hugh Jones's description of the town — The Ciphers "VF. " and "M." — The Capitol — Social life — ^Jefferson's account of the removal of the capital to Richmond — Jefferson's career at William and Mary College — Foundation of the latter — Sir William Berkeley's opinion — Distinguished graduates of the college — Influence of Williamsburg — A miniature court — Indian education — The Washingtons go to Williams- burg — ^The Burgesses — "Sons of Liberty" — Patrick Henry, his early life — Contrast between Washington, Jefferson, and Henry — The Williamsburg spirit — "The Heart of Rebellion" — At Richmond — Fire at Williamsburg — The "Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe " — John Esten Cooke's account of Williamsburg — Bishop Meade on Williamsburg — Old Bruton Church — The "Phi Beta Kappa" Society and the students — LordDunmore's message to the Burgesses. CHAPTER XL The New Forces ..... iqi Washington's letters on the Stamp Act — The repeal of the Act — An engrossing topic — John Adams' opin- ion — Unrest in America — Colonisation of the country different in different places — Virginia and Massachusetts — Patrick Henry — The Age of Doubt — The Faust-poem symbolises the situation — Change in the air — Impatience of the colonies — Spirit of the wilderness — Physical and intellectual restlessness — Beginnings of literature — Pamphlets — The year 1763 — The Treaty of Paris — English and French in America — Consequences of the treaty — Expenses of government — Walpole on France — xii Contents Growth of British rule in America — The Indians — The poHcy of France — Difificulties of the colonial system — Revenue Acts, etc. — The Navigation Act — The billeting of soldiers on the colonists — Character- istics of the American commonwealths — Growth of freedom — Grenville's policy of exclusive trade with England — The "Sea Guard" — George III sanctions the policy — The British navy becomes a police force to prevent contraband trade — Stamps introduced — Rights of American legislative bodies — February, 1765, the Stamp Act passes, providing revenue in America — Lord Bute and Charles Townshend de- vise measures to raise revenue — Taxation without representation — Standing army for America — Vari- ous measures suggested by Stamp Act at last resolved upon — Grenville's part in it. CHAPTER XII. "The Cockatrice's Egg" . . . .214 Horace Walpole on the Stamp Act — Patrick Henry's Virginia Resolutions — The "Treason" anec- dote — The "Day-Star of the Revolution" — The "Member from Louisa" — The "Parsons' Case" re- called — The vote — Henry's own account of the origin of the "Resolves" — Madison's doubts — Washington's letters on the situation — To George Mason — "Boycotting" English goods — Mason's an- swer: pleads for reciprocity — Washington's letter to a London business house — ^To Bryan Fairfax — The tea-tax — ^Affairs at Boston under Gage — Op- pression of Parliament — "The crisis has arrived" — Arrival of the tea-ships. CHAPTER XIII. ''The Deadly Tea Chest" . . . 240 Watchwords of Revolution — Tea the symbol — Tea-drinking in the i8th century — Fiske on tea — Contents xiil Ensuing discontent — New England at this time: its character — Massachusetts and its pecuHarities — Love of pohtics and idealism — ^John Harvard and his college — Contrast between Harvard and William and Mary College — A group of celebrated men — Effect of the Virginia Resolutions — Troops arrive — The Boston "Massacre" — Committees of Cor- respondence, circular letters, etc. — The Tea-party of December, 1774 — Sam Adams: his influence — New England character at this time. CHAPTER XIV. The Struggle Begins ... 256 The cup runs over — Grievances of a decade — ' ' Eng- land has long arms" — Views of Fox, Burke, and Chatham — Jefferson's opinion of the causes of the war — The Boston Port Bill — Excitement spreads — The Fairfax County "Resolves" — Gaiety at Wil- liamsburg — Day of fasting — Lord Dunmore dis- misses Burgesses — Delegates appointed to a Congress at Philadelphia — The Virginia delegates, Wadiington among them — Grievances rehearsed — John Adams' opinion — Congress assembles, continues seven weeks in session — Adjourns to meet next year — Its charac- ter — Preparations for war — Convention at Rich- mond in 1775 — Henry's words, "Give me liberty or give me death!" — The clash at Lexington, April 19th — Paul Revere — "Rape of the Gunpowder" at Williamsburg — Congress convenes a second time at Philadelphia, May loth — Washington elected com- mander-in-chief of American forces — His letter to Mrs. Washington — Colonial troops assemble near Boston — The words of Chatham — Inaction of the British — Character of colonial troops — ^Anecdote of American marksman — Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775 — Lack of discipline — Losses in the battle — Siege of Boston — Washington's headquar- ters at *'Craigie House" — Declines salary — Con- xiv Contents sends arms and officers — La Fayette, De Kalb, Kos- ciusko arrive — Pulaski, Steuben, De Grasse, D'Es- taing, Rochambeau — Events of 1777 — Disaster to Burgoyne — His Indian allies — Burgoyne's character — The Adirondacks in summer — At Saratoga — Gates and Schuyler — Battle of Bennington — Surrender of Burgoyne, Oct. 17, 1777 — Arnold and Schuyler — The former's character — Baroness Reidesel's account — Schuyler's magnanimity — At the South, end of 1777 — Sir William Howe leaves New York secretly and lands 18,000 troops near the Elk River and captures Philadelphia — Brandywine — Franklin's opinion — British forces divided — La Fayette's de- scription of the patriot army — Effects of the capture of Burgoyne and of Philadelphia — France acknow- ledges the independence of the United States. CHAPTER XVI. On to Yorktown . . . . .312 Valley Forge: 1778 — Despair of the Americans — Steuben and La Fayette : their accounts — The Tories — News of the French treaty — Charles Lee — A foreigner's description of Washington — The "Spur- ious Letters" — Intrigues of the Conway Cabal — Sir Henry Clintoii evacuates Philadelphia in June, 1778 — Defeat of the English at Monmouth — The traitor Lee — La Fayette's account — A gleam of light — Philadelphia again the capital — Thacher describes the General — Condition of the currency — Washing- ton's letters to Harrison and Nelson — Winter- quarters in 1779 at Middlebrook and Elizabethton — Letter of Franklin's daughter — Defence of the Hudson — The French fleet — Conduct of the Tories and Hessians and Indians — The French minister Luzerne: his opinion of Washington — Rochambeau's fleet comes — British Southern campaign — Charles- ton falls — The two Indies: contrast — Weakness of Congress — Washington thereon — The treason of Contents xv temporary accounts of Washington — His dispatches to Congress — Lack of money and ammunition — Washington, FrankHn, and Jefferson originally opposed to separation — Army divided into three corps — Wilkes' petition — Arnold, Allen, Schuyler, and Montgomery in Canada — Death of Montgomery at Quebec — First flag of the Union unfurled, Jan- uary I, 1776: description — March 20, 1776, Ameri- cans enter Boston — Lord North's "Manifesto" — Hessians hired — Congress thanks Washington — He occupies New York — Its importance — Arrival of Lord Howe's fleet — The Declaration of Inde- pendence, July 4, 1776 — Thomas Jefferson writes it — Its opening paragraphs. CHAPTER XV. The Heart of the Revolution . . 283 Declaration of Independence read to troops — The loyalists; their sufferings — Washington's characteris- tics as a commander — The "Fabian Policy" — Opin- ions of Fiske, Green, and Thackeray — Character of George III : Green's opinion — Miss Burney's Diary — Second year of the Revolution — Southern campaign — British at New York — Weakness of the British commanders: their blunders — Autumn of 1776 — Tactics of Americans — Battle of Brooklyn Heights — Washington evacuates New York — Fall of Fort Washington — Desertions and illness — Capture of General Charles Lee — Corn- wallis thinks the war over — The Jersey campaign — Battles of Princeton and Trenton — Crossing of the Delaware — Howe offers terms of peace — The year 1777: Chatham speaks against employing Indians — Washington favours standing army — Made dictator for six months — Plots against him — Never smiles — Congress flees from Philadelphia to Baltimore — Suf- ferings of the soldiers — Winter-quarters at Morris- town — Inertia of Howe and Comwallis — France xvi Contents Arnold: his career — Reprimanded — Major Andre and Arnold: their plot — Washington's position: his account — Capture of Andre and flight of Arnold — Andre hanged — Chastellux on Washington — - Thacher describes Andre's execution — ^Affairs at the South — Lincoln captured — Gates put in command at the South — Tories in the Carolinas — Impolicy of the English — Lodge's account — Errors of Gates — Defeat of Americans at Camden — Sumter, Corn- wallis, Tarleton — Comwallis trapped: compared with Burgoyne — Character of the Revolutionary "Rough Riders" — General Greene — Battle of Cowpens — Guilford Court House — Barbarities of Tarleton — Moultrie — Comwallis retreats — Marion and Sumter — Help of France — Robert Morris's finan- cial policy — French fleet at Newport blockaded — De Grasse sails for the Chesapeake — Allied ar- mies move from New York — Condition of Virginia — Tarleton 's raid on Charlottesville — Comwallis reaches Yorktown in August — Washington comes to take command with 16,000 troops — Dissensions among commanders — Comwallis invested — October 19th he surrenders — ^The closing scene. CHAPTER XVII. The Ebbing Tide ..... 345 Horace Walpole again — His comments on the sur- render of Comwallis — Tom Paine on the crisis — Seven years of war — Beaumarchais and Franklin — Vergennes, the French premier — Franklin's repu- tation abroad — John Adams and John Jay, his asso- ciates — Their mission — Death of John Parke Custis — Washington visits his mother — Ball at Fredericks- burg — Goes to Mount Vernon and Philadelphia — British retreat to Charleston — Its evacuation^ The year 1782 — Peace desired — Sir Guy Carleton sounds the colonies on a settlement — Proposition to make Washington King — Washington's indigna- Contents xvii tion — Rodney defeats De Grasse — Privateering on the seas — John Paul Jones' achievements — Founds the navy — Fears of Washington — De Broghe's de- scription of the Americans — Rochambeau's praise — Washington at forty-nine — Serious situation at the American camp — Armstrong's address — Gates treachery — Threatened mutiny. CHAPTER XVIII. A "Merrie Christmas" .... 366 Nov. 30, 1782, Prehminaries of peace signed at Paris — American and British commissioners — Mu- tinies — General Gates concerned in them — Washing- ton to Greene on the end of the Southern campaign ; to Congress ; to Hamilton — Prays for union — Writes to La Fayette on States' rights — Dread of disunion — Carleton notifies Washington of the ratification of peace — Letters of tliG two commanders thereon — First salute of 17 guns fired — A retrospect of 175 years — The famous "Circular Letter" of Washing- ton : the four fundamentals of American independ- ence — Christian tone of the document — Trevelyan's account of Washington's churchmanship — His habit of prayer and worship— =Incident at Morris- town of Washington communing — Announces him- self a member of the Church of England — Five great English statesmen — Society of the Cincinnati founded — General Knox the founder — Washington its president — Opposition to it — Nov, 2, Washington bids farewell to his troops — Treaty of Paris between England and America signed at Paris Sept. 3, 1783 — Its ten articles — Franklin's influence — Adams and Jay co-operate — Lecky on Franklin — Washington surrenders his sword to Congress at Annapolis — ■ Mount Vernon memories— Thackeray's contrast be- tween the two Georges — The General's farewell words — The last solemn act — Off for Mount Vernon. xviii Contents CHAPTER XIX. Birth of the Constitution . . . 388 Peace only apparent — Golden Age expected — A Spanish view — The great West — The Indian wars — George Rogers Clark and his conquest of the North- west Territory — Lodge's description — Patrick Henry apprises the Virginia Legislature of Clark's achieve- ment — Perils of the time — Washington to La Fay- ette; to General Knox — A foreigner's impression — Made a Mason — Improvements at Mount Vernon— r His life there — A Briton's account — Solicitude for his guests — Danger of civil war after Yorktown — A critical period — McMaster's view — Assertion of States' rights — 111 treatment of Tories — Repudiation of debts — Shays' Rebellion crushed by General Lincoln — A demoralised currency — The coins of 1784 — The inland navigation scheme suggests the new Federal Union — A commercial convention with Maryland succeeded by a general convention at Philadelphia in 1787 — La Fayette's anxiety — Mar- shall's description of the origin of the Philadelphia Convention — Washington a delegate — May 2, 1787, the date of the Philadelphia Convention — Madison's letter — Federalism of Washington — Elected presi- dent of the Convention, which continues in session four and a half months — Madison's journal — Injunc- tion in secrecy — Clause in Madison's will as to his diary — "The Federal Pyramid" — Franklin's witty paper — Only three fail to sign the Constitution — The States gradually ratify the Constitution The Virginia Convention of 1 788 : how divided on the Constitution — Washington's Diary on the Conven- tion's work; compromise its key-note. CHAPTER XX. First Citizen of the United States . . 422 Washington choice of the people as President — His reluctance — Death of Mary Washington — Custis Contents xix describes it — John Adams Vice-President — Diary of Washington — Congress assembles at New York — April 30, 1789: the first inauguration — The Cabinet — Rules of etiquette, hours, dress, etc. — The soldier becomes the statesman — Two great measures: neu- trality in foreign troubles and moral alliance with Great Britain — The first Thanksgiving Day and the first census — Ceremony at visits — Philadelphia be- comes seat of government till 1800 — Washington City planned and laid out b}^ Washington, Major L' Enfant, and others — His illness — Makes tours in New England and the South — John Hancock visits him — Presents from Europe: portraits, statues, busts, etc. — Congress and the Supreme Court — Fiscal policy of the United States — The Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania, 1794 — The Golden Age of the Republic — Erskine's Eulogy — Indian policy — St. Clair's disaster in the West— Close of the first ad- ministration — Washington re-elected — Letters of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Randolph urging him to accept — Faith in Providence — John Adams again elected Vice-President — The second administra- tion — The French Revolution — Tension between France and England — War declared — Neutrality of the United States proclaimed — Excitement— Britain refuses to surrender the frontier fortresses — Jay negotiates a treaty with England, in 1 795-6 — Genet's meddling course — Fluctuations in Cabinet — Army and Navy — ^Treaty with Spain — Severe criticism of the President — His bitter resentment — The "Spurious Washington Letters" again — Retires in 1797 — Results of his second administration — His Farewell Address — Wilson's opinion of it — Adams succeeds him — Washington appointed commander- in-chief of the army against France. XX Contents CHAPTER XXI. The Glimmering Taper" . . " . . 449 "Farmer Washington" — His occupations at Mount Vernon — The "Parting Guest" — Last days — Insults of France — ^The expiring century — Illness and death. ILLUSTRATIONS GEORGE WASHINGTON . . Fl'Olltispiece From the portrait by Gilbert Stuart. THOMAS JEFFERSON .... I4 From the painting by Gilbert Stuart. THE FIRST CABINET ..... 32 From an old print. MOUNT VERNON ....... 50 From a photograph. Washington's autographs .... 68 benjamin franklin in 1779 .... 84 From an oil-painting in the possession of the His- torical Society of Pennsylvania. GENERAL ISRAEL PUTNAM .... I02 From the painting by H. I, Thompson, in the State House, Hartford, Conn. BATTLE OF PRINCETON DEATH OF MERCER . II4 From the painting by Col. John Trumbull. INTERVIEW OF HOWE's MESSENGER WITH WASH- INGTON . . 130 After the painting by M. A. Wageman. xxu Illustrations WASHINGTON MEDAL (1776) MARTHA WASHINGTON .... From the portrait by Gilbert Stuart. WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE After the painting by E, Leutze. GEORGE WASHINGTON ..... From the painting by Rembrandt Peale. Repro duced by permission of C. Klackner, N. Y Copyright, 1894. Washington's coat-of-arms washington at monmouth From a design by F. O. C. Darley. surveyor's manuscript .... washington entering new york city . From the engraving by A. H. Ritchie after the original painting by F. O. C. Darley. WASHINGTON ARCH, NEW YORK CITY . JOHN ADAMS ....... From a steel engraving, carpenters' hall, PHILADELPHIA Wherein met the first Continental Congress, I774- MAJOR-GENERAL CHARLES LEE .... From an English engraving published in 1776. MAJOR-GENERAL NATHANAEL GREENE From the painting by Col. John Trumbull. Washington's headquarters at newburgh- on-the-hudson THE BRANDYWINE AT CHADD'S FORD PAGE 140 160 196 208 218 226 240 248 2C4 276 280 284 306 Illustrations XXI 11 PAGE THE SURRENDER OF YORKTOWN . . . 316 From an old print. WASHINGTON AT TRENTON, JANUARY 2D, 1777 . 328 From the engraving by Daggett after the original painting by Colonel Trumbull. THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE .... ;^;^6 From a French print, 1781. JOHN JAY '350 From a steel engraving. MAJOR-GENERAL BENJAMIN LINCOLN . . . 354 From a steel engraving. MAJOR-GENERAL HENRY KNOX .... 396 From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. FRAUNCES' TAVERN 4OO From an old print. WASHINGTON MONUMENT ..... 428 Looking across the " Flats." GEORGE WASHINGTON CHAPTER I AT THE FIRESIDE HEINE'S fanciful story of the wondrous cactus that slumbered a hundred years, and then sent up a strange and dazzling flower came lit- erally true in the thorny evolution of American history. The flowering of Washington out of the cactus-like environment of American life in the eighteenth century is one of those psychological problems not wholly explicable on the ground of environment alone. Heredity, of course, had a crowning part in it. The strenuous character of the race has evolved in hundreds of years of struggle with men and things. When the brothers, John and Lawrence Washington, first emigrated to Virginia in Cromwell's day, the character of the strain had already been stamped with ineffaceable marks. The Transatlantic Virginian was the Transatlantic Eng- lishman transformed into something more enduring, more tenacious, more granite-like in its hardness by incessant battling w^ith aboriginal conditions; with the Redskin, with the wild wilderness, with the merchant adventurers, the London Companies, the 2 George Washington wrangling burgesses, with governors like Sir Wil- liam Berkeley and soldiers like those prominent in Bacon's Rebellion. The incessant friction of colonial life in its semi-civilized stages sharpened the blunter specimens of English urban and civic life to a keenness and a fighting edge which, transmitted from father to son, became fixed in a type, and ex- panded into a character that was strangely com- posite, that drew into itself many elements, and became at last a moral and intellectual fabric of enduring strength and originality. What differen- tiated the Greek from all others was probably the Sea that shone and shimmered into his life at every angle, and fed the life of his soul with its subtle influences. What differentiated the Transatlantic Englishman from his island brother was the For- est with its vast stretches of mysterious, unex- plored territory filled witl a subtle foe whose activity was perpetual. The Redskin thus became a prime factor in early American education. The differentiations went on from the time '' the Kingdom of Virginia " sprang out of the soft Western seas, and the land of the Powhatans and the Lady Pocahontas tickled the im- agination of the poetic Elizabethans. A grave, seri- ous, solemn, efficacious type was evolved, which waited a hundred, or a hundred and fifty years be- fore its eyes twinkled in the sunny faces of William Byrd or Benjamin Franklin. The first two hundred years were a determined struggle for existence, along a coast-line 1800 miles and more in length, as it stretched in sinuous course from Boston to At the Fireside 3 St. Augustine and New Orleans, the edges of a mighty volume whose inner pages were writ large in labyrinthine wilderness, unexplored mountain, river, and savannah, and the endless vicissitudes of frontier life. Life on a gigantic scale opened before the dazzled eyes of John Smith, La Salle, Hernando de Soto, Marquette, and the Jesuit Fathers, and, unawed by its immensity, the joyous, tireless explorers pushed on up river and down lake, over mountain and through primeval forest, until their eyes fairly blazed with enthusiasm as their tongues told, in Purchas and Hakluyt and in the Jesuit journals, of the wonders of this Western " Orient " which many of them still supposed to be the golden Cathay or shadowy Cipango of Columbus and the poets. It has required four hundred years and more to send a thin wave of population over this colossal region, and it will require four hundred more to peo- ple it as densely as the European homes from which the early navigators and immigrants sprang. The triumphant conquest of the edges of these unimaginable lands occupied one hundred and fifty years, in the course of which, a new and noble type of immigrant manhood and womanhood saw the light. The petulant spirit of the five millions of Elizabethans, " cribb'd, cabin'd and confined " with- in the narrow limits of the British Isles, burst forth with overwhelming gaiety, as if in a huge carnival celebration, and, despite hunger, starvation, death in a thousand cruel forms, martyrdom in strange 4 Georg-e Washing-ton unheard-of ways, torture and torment, continued to pour forth in numberless streams until the coast- line of the New World grew into a wonderfully picturesque and powerful duplicate of the European, like, yet marvellously unlike, in its varying features and phenomena. The eyes that look out from the old portraits belonging to this time have a singular depth and intensity, as if their owners beheld visions never before imagined by the commonplace dames and cavaliers across the water. Religion acquires an incandescent glow unknown in the older coun- tries, and enshrines itself in temples and tabernacles erected on the borders of the wilderness, in the tim- bered town, among the plantation oaks, or appears passionately supplicating mercy in the quaint intro- ductory clauses of old yellow wills and ancient vestry books. It was in the beautiful and romantic Virginia of this time, the Virginia of Indian unrest and semi- civilisation, that George Washington was born at the old homestead of Wakefield, in Westmoreland County, February the Twenty-Second (New Style), 1732, about ten in the morning. Wakefield was one of the homes of the Washing- ton family at that time, in Eastern Virginia, and there this little household (increasing year by year) lived until the house burned down, from the care- lessness, it seems, of good Madam Washington who took it into her head to burn brush and stubble raked together in the garden, and, incidentally, burnt her home to the ground. The servants fought the fire At the Fireside 5 heroically, but in vain, saving only a few articles of furniture and the ancient copy of Matthew Hale's Contemplations, Moral and Divine, now said to be at Mount Vernon. This volume had belonged to Augustine Wash- ington's first wife, Jane Butler, and descended to the second, in the easy and natural way of second marriages so prevalent in early Virginia. What manner of house it was, where this Vir- ginia family passed their earlier life, may be con- jectured from the imaginative reconstruction of its details, found in the pages of the charming his- torian, Marion Harland: " The blunted point of the triangle, formed by the creeks that furnished fat low-grounds on two sides of Augustine Washington's plantation of Wakefield, rested upon the Potomac, and was a mile in width. Wakefield comprised a thousand acres of as fine wood and bottom lands as were to be found in a county ' that, by reason of the worth, talents, and patriotism that adorned it, was called the Athens of Virginia.' The house faced the Potomac, the lawn, sloping to the bank between three and four hundred yards distant from the * porch/ running from corner to corner of the dwelling. There were four rooms of fair size upon the first floor, the largest, in -a one-story extension at the back, being * the chamber.' The hip-roof above the main building was pierced by dormer-windows that lighted a large attic. At each end of the house was a chimney, built upon the outside of the frame dwelling, and of dimensions that made the latter seem dispropor- tionately small. Each cavernous fireplace would hold 6 George Washing-ton a half cord of wood, and the leaping blaze had all seasons for its own in a region where river fogs at evening and morning were vehicles of the dreaded * ague and fever.' About the fireplace in the parlour, were the blue Dutch tiles much affected in the decora- tive architecture of the time. What a priceless scrap of bric-a-brac to a modern collector, would be one of those same enamelled squares^ bedight with a repre- sentation of ' Abraham's Offering,' or ' Moses Break- ing the Tables of the Law,' the tents of Israel, like a row of sharp haystacks, almost touching his knees, although ostensibly dwarfed in perspective until the whole camp was smaller than the tablets he hurled to earth ! — the tiles that once reflected rosily the thought- ful face of the young wife, and gave distorted images of the blonde giant, her nominal lord and master, that, by and by, missed the musing face and slighter figure for a time, and then showed a double picture, — a visage paler and sweeter than of old, bent over the baby that was, from the beginning, the image of his mother. In the one-storied chamber the Moses of the New World was born, and the mother nursed the goodly child upon her bosom, in gladness and pride of heart, until the birth of the little Betty, in June, 1733. Between the stepmother and the two sturdy sons of Mr. Washington's first marriage, there existed cordial friendliness from the hour of her installation as mis- tress of the modest mansion. An elderly kinswoman had cared for them during their father's protracted absence, but, with the recollection of their own mother, hardly two years dead, in their memories, it spoke well for the little fellows, as for the new mother, that they yielded her respectful duty. Her early life had made At the Fireside 7 every detail of country housekeeping familiar to her. The retinue of servants was perhaps larger than that at Epping Forest had been, and the appointments of the house may have included relics of such grand Hv- ing as had befitted Cave Castle, and went well with the stories, told over the logs on winter nights, of court-visits and royal preferm.ents. Apostles of De- mocracy, though the Washingtons called themselves, they were ingrain aristocrats — the greatest of them not excepted." ^ The deepest glance into these earliest years of Madam Washington's wife- and widowhood, and the boyhood and youth of George, has been cast by George Washington Parke Custis, adopted grand- son of the chieftain, to whose Recollections and Pri- vate Memoirs of Washington all later historians, from Irving and Lossing down, are indebted for their intimate details. Custis saw and remembered the great dame but dimly, personally, being a boy only four years old when she died; but he lived at Mount Vernon until he was nineteen, and gathered what he records from the lips of the Wash- ingtons and Lewises themselves. The illustrious lady was just such a woman as one might have imagined to have been most perfectly suited to be the mother of an unannounced hero — plain, dignified, sincere, strong in the possession of the homely and home-like virtues, absolutely devoid of vanity or ostentation, without frivolity or femi- nine captiousness, reticent to a degree, and so free ^ The Story of Mary Washington, by Marion Harland. 8 George Washing-ton from self -consciousness that she did not hesitate, without any sense of false shame or humiliation, to receive Lafayette and his distinguished company, rake in hand, arrayed in the unpretentious homespun and sun-bonnet of the time. Her calm placidity of temperament was as if carved out of marble, or moulded into the antique lineaments of Judith or Miriam. No exultant cry ever broke from her lips, no matter how dazzling might have been the distinc- tions heaped, in flattering phrase, on his head, from the time when, by a kind of irrepressible buoyancy, the young son began to rise and to win one colonial dignity after another, as major, lieutenant-colonel, colonel, burgess, commander-in-chief, president: all seemed, to this undemonstrative woman, a matter of course, just as it should be. Though endowed with this apparent equability of temperament, Mary Washington's nature glowed with a suppressed fer- vour which transmitted itself to her son, and in him became power of endurance, passion for command, ambition to do and to dare in the colonial wars, spontaneous assumption of leadership, and the nat- ural and easy command of men. Ardour, thus spir- itualised, coins itself into the noblest ideals, into the tireless feet that explore the sources of the Nile, into the pen that writes the " Cosmos," into the exqui- site harmonies that well up in the soul of Beethoven. Whether it take a martial or a musical, an intel- lectual or a physical turn, the fire that burns inward, the vestal flame on the altar of the soul, must be there, radiant, if still, not noisy and crackling. At the Fireside g Everybody who came near either Washington or his mother felt the suppressed glow that was in them. Intense heat sometimes has the effect of cold. Mil- ton's remarkable epithet, " burns frore," aptly de- scribes the burning frost of Washington's nature, the fiery chill that embarrassed his companions even in their most intimate intercourse with him, the latent fire that sometimes, though rarely, leapt to his lips in impassioned phrases. This notable characteristic came from Mary Ball, and shines forth in many of the anecdotes related by Custis and her grandson, Lawrence Washington of Chotank. Says the latter : " I was often [at the Washington home] with George, his playmate, schoolmate, and young man's companion. Of the mother I was ten times more afraid than I ever was of my own parents. She awed me in the midst of her kindness, for she was, indeed, truly kind. I have often been present with her sons, proper, tall fellows too, and we were all as mute as mice ; and even now, when time has whitened my locks, and I am the grand-parent of a second generation, I could not behold that remarkable woman without feel- ings it is impossible to describe. Whoever has seen that awe-inspiring air and manner so characteristic in the Father of his Country, will remember the matron as she appeared, when the presiding genius of her well- ordered household, commanding and being obeyed." Custis, in the odd Johnsonian English of the early nineteenth century, thus describes her personal features : lo George Washington '' In her person, the matron was of middle size, and well-proportioned ; her features pleasing, yet strongly marked. It is not the happiness of the author to remember her, having only seen her with infant eyes. The sister of the Chief, he perfectly well remem- bers. She was a most majestic-looking woman, and so strikingly like the brother, that it was a matter of frolic to throw a cloak around her and placing a mili- tary hat on her head, such was her amazing resem- blance, that on her appearance, battalions would have presented arms and senates risen to do homage to the Chief." The death of Augustine Washington, in 1743, when George was only eleven years old, broke up the happy Wakefield life and left the lady a widow at the early age of thirty-five, with a family of four sons and one daughter, besides the two sons of her husband's marriage with Jane Butler. Her admi- rable relations with these step-children incidentally throw a pleasing light on Mary Washington's home life, and the affection of Lawrence (one of these sons) for his half-brother George illustrates the cordial feeling among its various members, which was a distinguishing mark of the whole kith and clan of the Washingtons. The idyll of Wakefield must have been almost as simple and unaffected, as devoid of incident and as undramatic, as that of the famous vicar painted by the contemporary Goldsmith. An earnest, seri- ous, yet delightsome boyhood seems to have been that of Washington : hunting, riding, shooting, fish- At the Fireside 1 1 ing, all healthy open-air exercises, filled its busy hours of morning and afternoon ; and the few hours dedicated to intellectual work resulted in imparting to the boy, first at his mother's knee, then at the hands of Master Hobby, the sexton, and, later, at an " old-field " academy in or near Fredericksburg, the rudiments of a plain English education. Essen- tially a man of action, Washington never wholly rid himself of the defects and limitations of an early imperfect education. " William and Mary " and Princeton were then flourishing institutions, not impossibly distant from Fredericksburg, yet Wash- ington was not sent to these institutions as Jefferson and Madison were, only a decade later. Latin and French, the not unusual polite accomplishments of the day in the colonies north of Virginia, were prac- tically unknown to the Virginia schoolboy whose business-like turn of mind, influenced perhaps by its knowledge of the family's large possession^ in land, fixed itself almost instinctively on mathe- matics, and, among the various branches of that science, chose surveying as the most remunerative. In the same manner, Thomas Jefferson, Rogers Clark, and John Adams — not to mention the omnis- cient Franklin — directed their early faculties, anc trained them by the surveyor's instruments of pre- cision to those habits of exact thought which so signally distinguished three, at least, of these early typical Americans, and helped to make them tower above their contemporaries in scientific attainments. Intimacy wnth the field and forest, with the flow- 12 George Washington ing expanse of river and estuary, with the mighty stretches of virgin wood that travelled in almost lim- itless undulations towards the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, thus entered naturally and indispen- sably into the lives of the young Americans, and evoked in them the self-reliance, fearlessness, per- sonal hardihood, and undaunted courage character- istic of the men of that day. If there is one feature more than another which astonishes the enervated idler of our days, it is the enormous personal sacrifices made by the men and women of the American eighteenth century, the ex- haustless stores of physical strength required by the itineraries described in the memoirs of the period, the patience and prowess absolutely demanded by the smallest journey into the wilderness, and the Spartan toleration of hunger, fatigue, want, and dis- ease^ entailed by birth on this primitive society. The softer courtesies of life were, however, not wholly neglected in the young Washington's early education. " Among the manuscript books of George Wash- ington, preserved in the State Archives at Washing- ton City, the earliest bears the date, written in it by himself, 1745. Washington was born February 11, 1 73 1, O. S., so that when writing in this book he was either near the close of his fourteenth, or in his fif- teenth year. It is entitled Forms of Writing, and has thirty folio pages ; the contents, all in his boyish handwriting, are sufficiently curious. Amid copied forms of exchange, bonds, receipts, sales, and similar At the Fireside 13 exercises, occasionally in ornate penmanship, there are poetic selections, among them lines of a religious tone on * True Happiness.' But the great interest of the book centres in the pages headed : ' Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.' The book had been gnawed at the bottom by Mount Vernon mice, before it reached the State Archives, and nine of the no Rules have thus suffered, the sense of several being lost. " The Rules possess so much historic interest that it seems surprising that none of Washington's bio- graphers or editors should have given them to the world. Washington Irving, in his Life of IV asking- ton, excites interest in them by a tribute, but does not quote even one. Sparks quotes fifty-seven, but inex- actly, and with his usual literary manipulation." ^ It was in 1739 that Captain Augustine Wash- ington moved to Fredericksburg, a little town on the Rappahannock, founded in 1727, by Colonel Willis, husband of Washington's aunt and god- mother. The family before this had resided, di- rectly after George's birth, at Hunting Creek (after- wards Mount Vernon), having left Wakefield for that purpose. Mr. Conway establishes the fact that Washington's earliest recollections were with the beautiful estate belonging to his half-brother Law- rence, and named by him '' Mount Vernon," in honour of the gallant English admiral under whom he had served at Carthagena and Porto Bello. " Among the shiploads of convicts probably im- ^ M. D. Conway's George Washington's Rules of Civility, 1890, pp. 7-8. 14 George Washing-ton ported for labour purposes by Captain Augustine Wasliington, was one who had scholarly attainments, possibly a political exile, to whom, after his mother, Washington owed his earliest teaching. Some among these convicts were learned Scotchmen, men of rank and distinction, exiles for conscience' sake after Crom- well's insurrection and the return of the Stuarts ; they were not necessarily criminals. Indentured servants and ' Redemptioners ' (men who purchased their free- dom, in exchange for their passage money over the Atlantic) were often persons of some literary accom- plishment, who taught the children of their employers and thus ingratiated themselves as schoolmasters, clerks, bookkeepers, and the like with the high-born Virginia families. The classical scholar need not be reminded of Epictetus, ^sop, and Horace for exam- ples of slaves and freedmen who have become the world's most celebrated and most admired teachers. " Probably the school founded by James Marye [continues Mr. Conway] was the first in the New World in which good manners were seriously taught. Nay, where is there any such school to-day? Just this one colonial school, by the good fortune of having for its master or superintendent, an ex-Jesuit French scholar, we may suppose instructed in civility ; and out of that school, it was little more than a village, came an exceptionally large number of eminent men. In that school, three American Presidents received their early education — Washington, Madison, and Monroe. '' In the manuscript of Colonel Byrd Willis, already referred to (loaned me by his granddaughter, Mrs. Tayloe, of Fredericksburg), he says: 'My father. THOMAS JEFFERSON. From the painting by Gilbert Stuart. At the Fireside 15 Lewis Willis, was a schoolmate of General Washing- ton, his cousin, who was two years his senior. He spoke of the General's industry and assiduity at school as very remarkable. Whilst his brother and other boys at play-time were at bandy and other games, he was behind the door, ciphering. But one youthful ebullition is handed down while at that school, and that was romping with one of the largest girls. This was so unusual that it excited no little comment among the other lads.' It is also handed down that, in boy- hood, this great soldier, though never a prig, had no fights, and was often summoned to the playground as a peacemaker, his arbitration in dispute being al- ways accepted." The admirable w^isdom of the no '' Rules of Ci- vility " must have sunk deeply into the heart and soul of this young scholar in a time when books were few and scarce, and maxims such as these had time to germinate, flower, and fruit in the life and conduct of the susceptible pupil. The last of these useful maxims became the guiding-star of Washington's whole career : *' Labour to keep alive in your Breast that little Spark of Celescial fire called Conscience." This noble saying, due to the wisdom of the Jesuit Fathers among whom the Rev. James Marye had been educated, and of whose organisation he was once a member, became incarnate in the life of the illustrious American whose boyish hand transcribed it in quaint co]iy-book style and orthography. " The Rules of Civility " is, in its w^ay, a volume on Moral 1 6 George Washington Philosophy whose assimilation and digestion are ac- centuated at every point of Washington's public and private life. The Hebrew nation, in its Books of Wisdom, had condensed the marvellous essence of a worldly phi- losophy which has signally influenced its entire des- tiny and, through it, the fates and fortunes of every code of modern jurisprudence. French urbanity, on the other hand, concentrates itself in these golden maxims and, by a happy antici- pation, forehadows the profound influence of France on American affairs. It is a prophecy of Lafayette. CHAPTER II GREENWAY COURT ! AN IDYLL OF THE SUMMER ISLES OVER the spacious plantations of Virginia was scattered, in Washington's youth, a popula- tion of some 80,000 or 90,000 men, women, and children who had come thither in miscellaneous ways, some by birth, some from over seas, as Bohe- mians and wanderers on the face of the earth, some urged by love of money, traffic, or adventure, others fired by the imaginative pictures of the poet-travel- lers, Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, or Columbus. One hundred and twenty-five years had sped swiftly by since the first ship cast anchor off Jamestown, and the first load of anxious immigrants began gathering up their old-world belongings and drag- ging them laboriously and cautiously ashore. The clock of the Stuarts, which ticked so loudly in 1607, had subsided into the even-paced timepieces of the Georges, two of whom had already occupied the throne of the mother-country, three thousand miles away. The two or three little fissures, made in the mountain-wall of the unexplored New World at Hampton Roads, at Plymouth, at Manhattan, at Philadelphia, had widened into sluice-gates through which poured ever-broadening streams of European life and trade and population, that up every creek 17 1 8 George Washington and river and valley veined the land, like a human face, with the arteries, of Eastern civilisation, and everywhere sowed sinuous lines of settlements from the ocean edge to the great inland oceans of fresh water that stretched far to the north-west. Of this expanding " England in Virginia," Colo- nel Robert Beverley, its picturesque colonial histo- rian, wrote in 1705 ^ : " The Country being thus taken into the King's Hands, his Majesty was pleased to establish the Con- stitution to be by a Governour, Council and Assembly. . . . This was a Constitution according to their Hearts' Desire, and Things seem'd now to go on in a happy Course for Encouragement of the Colony. People flock'd over thither apace ; and, not minding any thing but to be Masters of great Tracts of Land, they planted themselves separately on their several Plantations." It is no wonder that the land-loving *' American " of that day distinguished himself by taking up these enormous tracts of land when we read on in Bever- ley : " Here they enjoy all the benefits of a warm Sun, and by their shady Groves, are protected from its In- convenience. Here all their Senses are entertain'd with an endless Succession of Native Pleasures. Their Eyes are ravished with the Beauties of naked Nature. Their Ears are Serenaded with the perpetual murmur of Brooks, and the thorow-base which the Wind plays, when it wantons through the Trees ; the merry Birds, too, join their pleasing Notes to this rural Comfort; ^ Robert Beverley's Virginia, p. 47. Greenway Court 19 especially the Mock-birds, who love Society so well, that whenever they see Mankind, they will perch upon a Twigg very near them, and sing the sweetest wild Airs in the World : But what is most remarkable in these Melodious Animals, they will frequently fly at small distances before a Traveller warbling out their Notes several Miles, an end, and by their Musick, make a Man forget the Fatigues of his Journey. Their Taste is regaled with the most delicious Fruits, which without Art, they have in great Variety and Perfec- tion. And then their smell is refreshed with an eter- nal fragrancy of Flowers and Sweets, with which Nature perfumes and adorns the Woods almost the whole year round. Have you pleasure in a Garden? All things thrive in it, most surprisingly ; you Can't walk by a Bed of Flowers, but besides the entertain- ment of their Beauty, your Eyes will be saluted with the charming colours of the Humming Bird, which revels among the Flowers, and licks off the Dew and Honey from their tender Leaves, on which it only feeds. It's size is not half so large as an English Wren, and its colour is a glorious shining mixture of Scarlet, Green, and Gold. Colonel Byrd, in his Garden, which is the finest in that Country, has a Summer- House set round with the Indian Honey-Suckle, which all the Summer is continually full of sweet Flowers, in which these Birds delight exceedingly. Upon these Flowers, I have seen ten or a dozen of these Beautiful Creatures together, which sported about me so fa- miliarly, that with their little Wings they often fann'd my Face." ^ This delightful Virginia of bird and beast and * Robert Beverley's Virginia, p. 6i. 20 Georg-e Washington flower emerges from fragrant clouds of tobacco- smoke, in the early historians, and lends itself to anecdote and idyllic description, of which the fol- lowing extract gives characteristic specimens : ''Among other Indian Commodities, they brought over Some of that bewitching Vegetable, Tobacco. And this being the first that ever came to England, Sir Walter thought he could do no less than make a pres- ent of Some of the brightest of it to His Roial Mis- tress, for her own Smoaking. " The Queen graciously accepted of it, but finding her Stomach sicken after two or three Whiffs, it was presently whispered by the earl of Leicester's Faction, that Sir Walter had certainly Poison'd Her. But Her Majesty soon recovering her Disorder, obliged the Countess of Nottingham and all her Maids to Smoak a whole Pipe out amongst them. " As it happen'd some Ages before to be the fashion to Saunter to the Holy Land, and go upon other Quixot Adventures, so it was now grown the Humour to take a Trip to America." ^ This " bewitching vegetable " thus cast its spell over the whole lifetime of Colonial Virginia, as, later, after 1776, the characteristic fragrance ema- nated from tea. On the moral and intellectual side a glimpse of this enchanted Virginia may be got through the con- temporary eyes of the Rev. Hugh Jones, one of the Fellows of William and Mary College, and its chap- lain, who wrote : * The History of the Dividing Line, p. 5. Greenway Court 21 " Virginia equals, if not exceeds, all others in Good- ness of Climate, Soil, Health, Rivers, Plenty, and all Necessaries, and Conveniences of Life: Besides she has, among others, these particular Advantages of her younger Sister Maryland, viz. Freedom from Popery, and the direction of Proprietors ; not but that Part of Virginia, which is between the Rivers Potomack and Rappahannock belongs to Proprietors, as to the Quit- Rent ; yet the Government of these Countries (called the Northern Neck) is under the same Regulation with the other Parts of the Country. " If New England be called a Receptacle of Dissent- ers, and an Amsterdam of Religion, Pennsylvania the Nursery of Quakers, Maryland the Retirement of Roman Catholicks, North Carolina the Refuge of Run- aways, and South Carolina the Delight of Buccaneers and Py rates, Virginia may be justly esteemed the hap- py Retreat, of true Britons and true Churchnien for the most Part ; neither soaring too high nor drooping too low, consequently should merit the greater Esteem and Encouragement. '' The common Planters leading easy Lives don't much admire Labour, or any manly Exercise, except Horse-Racing, nor Diversion, except Cock-Fighting, in which some greatly delight. This easy Way of Living, and the Heat of the Summer makes some very lazy, who are then said to be Climate-struck." ^ Again, the following extract illustrates quaintly the ultra loyalty and churchmanship of the Old Vir- ginia parson, burning with enthusiasm for King and Church and drinking confusion to all Papists and dissenters : ^ The State of Virginia, Hugh Jones, p. 48. 22 George Washing-ton " And as in Words and Actions they (ministers) should be neither too reserved nor too extravagant ; so in Principles should they be neither too high nor too low : The Virginians being neither Favourers of Popery nor the Pretender on the one Side, nor of Presbytery nor Anarchy on the other ; but are firm Adherents to the Present Constitution in State, the Hanover Succession and the Episcopal Church of England as by Law established ; consequently then if these are the Inclinations of the people, their Minis- ters ought to be of the same Sentiments, equally averse to papistical and schismatical Doctrines, and equally free from Jacobitish and Oliverian Tenets. These I confess are my principles, and such as the Virginians best relish, and what every good Clergy- man and true Englishman (I hope) will favour; for such will never refuse to say with me : God bless the CJiurch, and George its Defender, Convert the Fanaticks, and baulk the Pretender. " For our Sovereign is undoubtedly the Defender and Head of our national Church of England, in which Respect we may pray for the King and Church; but Christ is the Head of the Universal or Catholick Church, in which Respect we wish Prosperity to the Church and King." ^ These " climate-struck " Virginians w^ere fast de- veloping into a manly and valiant race, who built for themselves log palaces on the margin of the illimitable waste, erected forts and palisades that soon transformed themselves in the oceanlike ver- dure around, into Miranda's Enchanted Isle deep in ^ The State of Virginia, Hugh Jones, p. 96. Greenway Court 23 the summer woodlands, and lacking only the '' glis- tening spangles," that Captain John Smith saw in their sylvan streams, to bud forth into true Golcon- das and Islands of the Blest, albeit anchored fast not in the waters of the New Atlantis, but to the sturdy trunks of the ancient aboriginal forests. On one of these Summer Isles of plantation life, deep in the primeval woods, far out on the outposts of that lovely valley, where the sparkling Shenan- doah danced between beautiful mountains on its crystal pilgrimage to the Potomac, had settled Thomas, Lord Fairfax, scion of the illustrious race that had served under Cromwell, the accomplished contributor to Addison's Spectator, on lands, mil- lions of acres of which he had taken up by patent or purchase at the time of which we speak. The emotions of the merchant adventurers, as they sighted these lands of the Hesperides and the charms of the environing scenery, are vividly por- trayed for us by an accomplished antiquary and annalist of these virgin times : " It requires no extraordinary imagination to ap- preciate the emotions which stirred the breasts of the voyagers as they entered the Chesapeake, and sailed up the wide stretches of the Powhatan in the spring of 1607. Those were hours that offered the amplest compensation for all the hardships which they had endured. They had just finished a tedious and dan- gerous passage on the bosom of unknown seas. In the bleakest period of winter, under leaden skies and with sombre landscapes, the country which they had 24 George Washing-ton reacheci would have been delightful to them; but, clothed in the verdure of the Virginian May, when the greenness of the foliage and the tints of the wild flowers have their deepest and softest coloring, it was quite natural that visions of an earthly Paradise should have arisen before their eyes, accustomed for so long a time to the heaving plains of the Atlantic. The lofty trees on the banks, representing many familiar and many new varieties, the noble breadth of the river, the balmy air laden with the odors of expanding leaf and blossom, the clearness of the atmosphere which produced such striking vividness of coloring, the bright sunshine, the strange birds, adorned with so many brilliant hues, flying hither and thither over the surface of the stream, or moving about in the branches of the trees that grew near its brink, the schools of fish that were constantly breaking the sur- face of the river into patches of flashing silver, the painted savages staring at the little fleet as it passed slowly along, all united to create a novel scene touch- ing the sensibilities of the dullest and most prosaic of the adventurers. Nor was it the less inspiring when they recalled that they were the first persons of their race to look upon that beautiful expanse of river and forest, which, for a length of time almost incalculable, had existed just as they saw it then. " The charming impressions as to the physical as- pect of the country were confirmed by subsequent ob- servations. Sir Thomas Dale, writing in 1613, only a few years after the first colony was established on Jamestown Island, declared that his admiration of Virginia increased as his opportunities for informing himself about its resources enlarged, and that he be- Greenway Court 25 lieved that it would be equivalent to all the best parts of Europe taken together, if it were only brought under cultivation and divided among industrious people. Percy was equally emphatic in asserting that if the promoters of the Virginian enterprise would only extend the adventurers a hearty support, the new country would be as profitable to England, in time, as the Indies had long been to the King of Spain. Whitaker describes it as a place beautified by God with all the ornaments of nature, and enriched with his earthly treasures. ' Heaven and Earth,' exclaimed Captain Smith, ' never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation.' Williams apostrophized it as Virginia the fortunate, the incomparable, the garden of the world ! which, although covered with a natural grove, yet was of an aspect so delightful and attract- ive, that the most melancholy eye could not look upon it * without contentment, nor be contented without ad- miration.' ' For exactness of temperature, goodness of soil, variety of staples, and capability of receiving whatever else is produced in any part of the world, Virginia,' he remarks, * gives the right hand of pre-em- inence to no province under heaven.' * Where nature is so amiable in its naked kind,' asks the author of Nova Britannia, ' what may we not expect from it in Virginia when it is assisted by human industry, and when both art and nature shall join to give the best content to men and all other creatures ? ' 'I have travailed,' said a leading member of the London Com- pany, ' by land over eighteen several kingdoms and yet all of them, in my minde, come farr short to Vir- ginia.' '' Such in part was the testimony as to the general 26 George Washing-ton beauty and fertility of Virginia in its original con- dition." 1 Greenway Court, the home of the Fairfaxes (twelve miles S. W. of Winchester), was the spot in this picturesque Virginia whither the youthful Washington, at sixteen, now wended his way, eager to begin the work of surveying, for which he had specially prepared himself under Master Williams and the Rev. James Marye. Uncertain as the times are, we yet catch direct and searching glimpses of young Washington, as he flits to and fro in the fluc- tuating anecdote biographies of a later time eager to glean every ray of light radiating from this obscure period, and to concentrate it upon the figure of the growing man. From wills and letters and genealo- gies, from clerks' records and dusty church-wardens' books, from bundles of yellow MSS. tied up and stored away in antique secretaries, from private stores and public record-offices, pours this light and floods many a dark corner of Virginia history. Mrs. Pryor has vividly illuminated the twilight period of Washington's life as follows : '' Augustine Washington selected a fine site on the banks of the Rappahannock, opposite Fredericksburg, and near * Sting Ray Island,' where the very fishes of the stream had resented the coming of Captain John Smith. The name of this home was Pine Grove. The situation was commanding, and the garden and orchard in better cultivation than those they had left. * Bruce, Econonvc History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, vol. i, pp. 73-75. Greenway Court 27 The house was like that at Wakefield, broad and low, with the same number of rooms upon the ground floor, one of them in the shed-like extension at the back ; and the spacious attic was over the main building. It had its name from a noble body of trees near it, but was also known by the old neighbors as * Ferry Farm.' There was no bridge over the Rappahannock, and communication was had with the town by the neigh- bouring ferry. ' Those who wished to associate Wash- ington,' says another writer, ' with the grandeurs of stately living in his youth, would find all their theories dispelled by a glimpse of the modest dwelling where he spent his boyhood years. But nature was bountiful in its beauties in the lovely landscape that stretched before it. In Overwharton parish, where it was sit- uated, the family had many excellent neighbors, and there came forth from this little home a race of men whose fame could gather no splendor, had the roofs which sheltered their childhood been fretted with gold and blazoned with diamonds. The heroic principle in our people does not depend for perpetuity on family trees and ancestral dignities, still less on baronial man- sions.' " Augustine Washington died in 1743, at the age of forty-nine, at Pine Grove, leaving two sons of his first wife, and four sons and one daughter our Mary had borne to him, little Mildred having died in in- fancy. We know then the history of those thirteen years, the birth of six children, the death of one, fin- ally the widowhood and desolation of the mother. " At the time of his father's death, George Wash- ington was only eleven years of age. He had been heard to say that he knew little of his father except 28 Georg-e Washington the remembrance of his person and of his parental fondness. To his mother's forming care he himself ascribed the origin of his fortune and his fame. *' Mary Washington was not yet thirty-six, the age at which American women are supposed to attain their highest physical perfection. Her husband had left a large estate under her management, to be surrendered in portions as each child reached majority. Their land lay in different parts of the country, — Fairfax, Stafford, King George, and Westmoreland. She found herself a member of a large and influencial society, which had grown rapidly in wealth, import- ance, and elegance of living since her girlhood and early married life in Westmoreland. Her stepson, Lawrence, married a few months after his father's death, and she was thus allied to the Fairfaxes of Bel- voir — allied the more closely because of the devo- tion of Lawrence to her own son George. Lawrence, with his pretty Anne Fairfax, had gone to live on his inherited estate of ' Hunting Creek,' which he made haste to rechristen in honor of an English admiral, famous for having recently reduced the town and for- tification at Porto Bello ; famous for having reduced the English sailors' rum by mixing it with water. He was wont to pace his decks wrapped in a grogram cloak. The irate sailors called him and the liquor he had spoiled, ' Old Grog.' The irreverent, fun-loving Virginians at once caught up the word, and hence- forth all unsweetened drinks of brandy or rum and water were ' grog,' and all unstable partakers thereof, ' groggy.' " ' ^ Mrs. Pryor, The Mother of Washington and Her Times, p. 90. Greenway Court 29 The fertility of the New World soil was at least paralleled by that of the immigrant families, the abundance of the land being often more than matched by the superabundance of the children. The numerous and prolific marriages had rapidly peopled the Old Dominion with a steady growing stock of sturdy planters and settlers, for whom pro- vision had to be made by anxious fathers and moth- ers, whether among the lands already possessed by patent, purchase, or marriage, or in the new coun- tries and directions everywhere opening westward and southward toward the central rivers and valleys of the American Continent. There were six sons of Augustine Washington (two by the first and four by the second marriage) to be provided for, thought of, settled in life, liber- ally allowanced, as became Virginia gentlemen. Lawrence (the eldest) was a graceful and polished cavalier who had entered the British Navy, married a Fairfax of Belvoir, begun the erection of the stately chateau of Mount Vernon in 1743-45, and had been amply remembered by his father. There were still John and George, Charles, Samuel, and Augustine (called August) to be considered. The fascination which the sea had exercised over Lawrence Washington, and the possession of influ- ential friends in that quarter, probably impelled him to select the navy as a promising possibility for George to whom he was specially devoted. Accordingly, when George was fourteen, a mid- shipman's warrant was obtained for him, every prep- 30 George Washing-ton aration was made for his departure, the very ship on which he was to take up his new hfe lay at anchor in the Potomac, when the anguish and timidity of Madam Washington, and an emphatic letter of dis- approval from her brother Joseph Ball, who was living at Stratford-by-Bowe, near London, broke up the arrangement and George's career as a future Nelson or De Ruyter was for ever closed. Mr. Joseph Ball's letter, as Bishop Meade quotes it in Old Families of Virginia, is as follows. ^ *' Stratford-by-Bow, 19th of May, 1747. " I understand that you are advised and have some thoughts of putting your son George to sea. I think he had better be put apprentice to a tinker, for a com- mon sailor before the mast has by no means the com- mon liberty of the subject; for they will press him from a ship where he has fifty shillings a month and make him take twenty-three, and cut and slash and use him like a negro, or rather like a dog. And, as to any considerable preferment in the navy, it is not to be expected, as there are always so many gaping for it here who have interest, and he has none. And if he should get to be master of a Virginia ship (which it is very difficult to do), a planter that has three or four hundred acres of land and three or four slaves, if he be industrious, may live more comfortably, and leave his family in better bread, than such a master of a ship can. . . . He must not be too hasty to be rich, but go on gently and with patience, as things will naturally go. This method, without aiming at ^ Old Churches, etc., vol. ii, p. 128. Greenway Court 31 being a fine gentleman before his time, will carry a man more comfortably and surely through the world than going to sea, unless it be a great chance indeed. " I pray God keep you and yours. " Your loving brother, '' Joseph Ball." It would form an interesting subject of specula- tion to conjecture what would have been Washing- ton's future in that wonderful playground of am- bition, intellect, personal gallantry, and world-wide opportunity — the British Navy; to what heights his noble, disinterested soul might have risen, what effect such a career would have had in determining his patriotism, and the yet unknown future of American independence. Even before he was out of his teens, Washington was already exhibiting qualities so remarkable, at the very threshold of his life, that there is small doubt of his winning su- preme distinction in any position where high sense of duty, firm practical intelligence, passionate loy- alty to principle, and untiring devotion to the good of his beloved Virginia were involved. The intimacy with the Fairfaxes of Belvoir had doubtless early brought the boy under the notice of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, whose lordly domain, almost unexplored, a virgin terra incognita, stretched away westward over the Blue Ridge, in unsurveyed opu- lence. Surveying was then one of the lucrative professions for a young man of practical ability. An enormous acreage of public and private land lay practically unknown, outside the reach of the asses- 32 George Washing-ton sor. There was doubtless, too, a charm in the track- less wilderness which exercised its magic over many a young Virginian's imagination, and sent him into the woods on missions of which surveying was only one, — possibly only an excuse. With Washington, however, it was never an ex- cuse but a sober, serious profession which he pur- sued to the end of his days, with which fact, any student of his journals and note-books, from 1748 to 1799, may easily familiarise himself. His exact, detail-loving, mathematical mind took delight in the clank of the surveyor's chain, which suggested to him not the groan of the slave so much as the boundless freedom of the limitless, forest- crowned horizon. In 1748, a month before he had actually reached his sixteenth year. Madam Washington's eldest son (who had received his name from George Eskridge, her trusted friend, says Mrs. Pryor) was in the employ of Lord Fairfax as salaried surveyor, at seven pistoles a day. And out of the almost mythic recesses of this period, comes a delicate murmur and reverberation, reminding us that this extraordi- nary boy was human, quelling our mythopoetic ten- dencies, and humanising him in a half ludicrous, half pathetic way : the " Idyll of the Summer Isles " was writing its prologue. Was it the '' romping girl " of Fredericksburg, or some one of those five early sweethearts who evoked the genius of doggerel in the Father of his Country, and made his tongue spell out the difficult acrostic? At all events, there is THE FIRST CABINET. From an old print. Greenway Court 33 something delightfully human in the way he ad- dresses this unknown '' Frances," as there was, in after years, in the affectionate '' Patsy " by which he addressed the dark-eyed widow of Daniel Parke Custis. CHAPTER III A boy's journal ^^TT should be mentioned, however," says Mr. M. 1 D. Conway, " that young Washington's head was not in the least turned by intimacy with the aris- tocracy. He wrote letters to his former playmates in which no snobbish line is discoverable. He writes to his * Dear friend Robin ' : ' My place of residence is at present at his lordship's where I might, was my heart disengaged, pass my time very pleasantly, as there's a very agreeable young lady lives in the same house (Colonel George Fairfax's wife's sister). But as that's only adding fuel to fire it makes me the more uneasy, for by often and unavoidably being in company with her revives my former passion for your Lowland beau- ty ; whereas, was I to live more retired from young women, I might elevate in some measure my sorrows by burying that chaste and troublesome passion in the grave of oblivion or etearnall forgetfulness, for, as I am very well assured, that's the only antidote or rem- edy that I ever shall be relieved by or only recess that can administer any cure or help to me, as I am well convinced, was I ever to attempt anything, I should only get a denial which would be only adding grief to uneasiness.' " The young lady at Greenway Court was Mary Cary, and the Lowland beauty was Betsy Fauntleroy, v.hose hand Washington twice sought, but who be- 34 A Boy's Journal 35 came the wife of the Hon. Thomas Adams. While travelhng on his surveys, often among the Red Men, the youth sometimes gives vent to his feehngs in verse. * Oh Ye Gods, why should my Poor resistless Heart Stand to oppose thy might and Power At last surrender to Cupid's feather'd Dart And now lays bleeding every Hour For her that's Pityless of my grief and Woes, And will not on me Pity take. I'll sleep among my most inveterate Foes And with gladness never wish to wake. In deluding sleepings let my Eyelids close That in an enraptured dream I may In a rapt lulling sleep and gentle repose Possess those joys denied by Day.' "' And it must also be recorded that if he had learned how to conduct himself in the presence of persons su- perior to himself in position, age, and culture, — and it will be remembered that Lord Fairfax was an able contributor to the Spectator (which Washington was careful to study while at Green way), — this youth no less followed the instruction of his io8th rule : ' Hon- our your natural parents though they be poor.' His widowed mother was poor, and she was ignorant, but he was devoted to her ; being reverential and gracious to her even when, with advancing age, she became somewhat morose and exacting, while he was loaded with public cares. " I am no worshipper of Washington. But in the hand of that man of strong brain and powerful pas- sions once lay the destiny of the New World, — in a sense, human destiny. But for his possession of the humility and self-discipline underlying his Rules of Civility, the ambitious politicians of the United States 36 Georg-e Washington might, to-day, be popularly held to a much lower standard. The tone of his character was so entirely that of modesty, he was so fundamentally patriotic, that even his faults are transformed to virtues, and the very failures of his declining years are popularly accounted successes. He alone was conscious of his mental decline, and gave this as a reason for not ac- cepting a third nomination for the Presidency. This humility has established an unwritten law of limita- tion on vaulting presidential ambitions. Indeed, in- trigue and corruption in America must ever struggle with the idealised phantom of this grand personality." ^ " His lordship " was no other than Thomas, Lord Fairfax, " who," says a well-known historian, " himself came to Virginia in 1746 — a man strayed out of the world of fashion at fifty-five into the forests of a wild frontier. The better part of his ancestral estates in Yorkshire had been sold to satisfy the creditors of his spendthrift father. These untilled stretches of land in the Old Dominion were now become the chief part of his patrimony. 'T was said, too, that he had suf- fered a cruel misadventure in love at the hands of a fair jilt in London, and so had become the austere, ec- centric bachelor he showed himself to be in the free and quiet colony. A man of taste and culture, he had written with Addison and Steele for the Spectator; a man of the world, he had acquired, for all his reserve, that easy touch and intimate mastery in dealing with men, which come with the long practice of such men of fashion as are also men of sense. He brought with him to Virginia, though past fifty, the fresh vigor of a young man eager for the free pioneer life of such a ^ M. D. Conway, Rules of Civility, p. 43. A Boy's Journal 37 province. He tarried but two years with his cousin, where the colony had settled to an ordered way of living. Then he built himself a roomy lodge, shad- owed by spreading piazzas, and fitted with such simple appointments as sufficed for comfort, in the depths of the forest, close upon seventy miles away, within the valley of the Shenandoah, where a hardy frontier people had but begun to gather. The great manor- house he had meant to build was never begun. The plain comforts of ' Greenway Court ' satisfied him more and more easily as the years passed, and the habits of a simple life grew increasingly pleasant and familiar^ till thirty years and more had slipped away and he was dead, at ninety-one, broken-hearted, men said, because the King's government had fallen upon final defeat and was done with in America. '' It was in the company of these men, and of those who naturally gathered about them in that hospitable country, that George Washington was bred. * A stranger had no more to do,' says Beverley, ' but to en- quire upon the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lived, and there he might depend upon being received with hospitality,' and 't was certain many besides strangers would seek out the young major at Mount Vernon, whom his neighbors had hastened to make their representative in the House of Burgesses, and the old soldier of the soldierly house of Fairfax, who was President of the King's Council, and so next to the Governor himself. A boy who was much at Mount Vernon and at Mr. Fairfax's seat, Belvoir, might expect to see not a little that was worth seeing of the life of the colony." ^ * Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, pp. 49-51. 38 Georg-e Washington Thus it was that this great heart, in the immediate presence of a scion of the Old World, began to feel those human dreams and pangs to which every one has been subject since the world began. At sixteen, the precocious, self-educated boy wrote the following Journal, which, full as it is of boyish inaccuracies, is interesting not only as the first piece of authentic connected composition from his hand, but still more so, psychologically, as revealing his early grasp of detail when almost a child. Already one sees in it that developing force which led Gov- ernor Dinwiddie, six years later, to send him as a kind of Ambassador to the French, in the Ohio Valley, and publish, at the expense of the State, his graphically written Journal of the expedition. '* Journal of a Boy Surveyor "Friday, March nth, 1747-8. Began my Jour- ney in company with George Fairfax, Esqr. ; we trav- ell'd this day 40 miles to Mr. George Neavels in Prince William County. " Saturday, March 12th. This Morning Mr. James Genn, ye surveyor, came to us ; we travell'd over ye Blue Ridge to Capt. Ashbys on Shannandoah River. Nothing remarkable happen'd. " Sunday, March 13th. Rode to his Lordship's Quarter about 4 miles higher up ye river. We went through most beautiful Groves of Sugar Trees, and spent ye last part of ye Day in admiring ye Trees and richness of ye Land. " Monday 14th. We sent our baggage to Capt. Hites (near Frederick Town), went ourselves down A Boy's Journal 39 ye River about i6 miles to Capt. Isaac Pennington's (the Land exceeding rich and fertile all ye way — pro- duces abundance of Grain, Hemp, Tobacco, &c.) in order to lay of[f] some Land on Gates Marsh and Long Marsh. " Tuesday 15th. We set out early with intent to run round ye sd. Land, but being taken in a rain, and it increasing very fast obliged us to return. It clear- ing about one o'clock and our time being too Precious to loose, we a second time ventured out and worked hard till night, then returned to Penningtons. We got our suppers and [I] was Lighted into a Room and I not being so good a woodsman as ye rest of my com- pany, striped myself very orderly and went into ye Bed, as they calld it, when to my surprise, I found it to be nothing but a little straw matted together without sheets or any thing else, but only one thread bear blanket with double its weight of vermin, such as Lice, Fleas, &c. I was glad to get up (as soon as ye Light was carried from us). I put on my cloths and lay as my companions. Had we not been very tired, I am sure we should not have slep'd much that night. I made a Promise not to sleep so from that time for- ward, chusing rather to sleep in ye open air before a fire, as will appear hereafter. " Wednesday i6th. We set out early and finish'd about one o'clock and then Travelled up to Frederick Town, where our Baggage came to us. We cleaned ourselves (to get Rid of ye Game we had catched ye night before). I took a Review of ye Town and then return'd to our Lodgings where we had a good Din- ner prepared for us. Wine and Rum Punch in plenty, 40 Georg-e Washington and a good Feather Bed with clean sheets, which was a very agreeable regale. " Thursday 17th. Rain'd till ten o'clock and then clearing we reached as far as Major Campbells, one of their Burgesses about 25 miles from Town. Noth- ing remarkable this day nor night, but that we had a Tolerable good Bed [to] lay on. " Friday i8th. We Travell'd up about 35 miles to Thomas Barnwickes, on Potowmack, where we found ye River so excessively high by reason of ye great Rains that had fallen up about ye Allegany Mountains, as they told us, which was then bringing down ye melted snow and that it would not be fordable for several Days. It was then about six foot higher than usual and was rising. We agreed to stay till Monday. We this day calld to see ye Fam'd Warm Springs. We camped out in ye field this night. Nothing re- markable happened till Sunday ye 20th. " Sunday 20th. Finding ye river not much abated we in the evening swam our horses over and carried them to Charles Polks in Maryland, for pasturage till ye next Morning. '' Monday 21st. We went over in a Canoe and Travelled up Maryland side all ye Day in a contin- ued Rain to Col. Cresaps, right against ye mouth of ye South Branch, about 40 miles from Polks, I believe ye worst road than ever was trod by Man or Beast. " Tuesday 22d. Continued Rain and ye Freshes kept us at Cresaps. " Wednesday, 23d. Raind till about two o'clock and cleard, when we were agreeably surprised at ye sight of thirty odd Indians coming from war with only one scalp. We had some Liquor with Us of which we A Boy's Journal 41 gave them Part, it elevating there spirits, put them in ye humor of Dauncing, of whom we had a War Daunce. There manner of Dauncing is as follows, viz. : They clear a Large Circle and make a great Fire in ye middle. Men seat themselves around it. Ye speaker makes a grand speech, telling them in what manner they are to daunce. After he has finishd ye best Dauncer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep, and Runs and Jumps about ye Ring in a most comicle manner. He is followed by ye Rest. Then begins there musicians to Play. Ye musick is a Pot half full of water, with a Deerskin streched over it as tight as it can, and a goard with some shott in it to rattle and a Piece of an horse's tail tied to it to make it look fine. Ye one keeps rattling and ye others drumming all ye while ye others is Dauncing. " Fryday, 25th, 1748. Nothing remarkable on thursday, but only being with ye Indians all day. So shall slip it. This day left Cresaps and went up to ye mouth of Paterson's Creek, and there swum our horses over, got over ourselves in a canoe and trav- elled up ye following part of ye Day to Abram Johnstones, 15 miles from ye mouth, where we camped. " Saterday, 26. Travelled up ye creek to Solomon Hedges, Esq., one of his Majesty's Justices of ye Peace for ye County of Frederick, where we camped. When we came to supper there was neither a Cloth upon ye Table nor a knife to eat with ; but as good luck would have it, we had knives of our own. '* Sunday, 27th. Travell'd over to ye South Branch, attended with ye Esqr. to Henry Van Metriss, in order to go about Intended work of Lots. " Monday, 28th. Travell'd up ye Branch about 30 42 Georg-e Washing-ton miles to Mr. James Rutlidges Horse Jockey, and about 70 miles from ye mouth. '* Tuesday, 29th. This Morning went out and sur- veyd five hundred acres of Land, and went down to one Michael Stumpe on ye So. Fork of ye Branch. On our way shot two wild Turkies. " Wednesday, 30th. This Morning began our In- tended business of Laying of[f] Lots. We began at ye Boundary Line of ye Northern 10 miles above Stumps, and run of[f] two Lots, and return'd to Stumps. ''Thursday, 31st. Early this Morning one of our men went out with ye gun, and soon returned with two wild Turkies. We then went to our business run of[f] three lots, and returned to our camping place at Stumps. " Thursday Fry day, April ye ist, 1748. This Morn- ing shot twice at wild Turkies but killd none. Run of[f] three Lots and returnd to camp. " Saterday, April 2d. Last night was a blowing rainy night. Our straw catch'd a Fire, yt. we were laying upon. I was luckily preservd by one of our Men's awaking when it was in a [^]. We run of[f] four lots this day which reached below Stumps. '' Sunday, 3d. Last Night was a much more bluster- ing night than ye former. We had our tent carried quite of[f] with ye wind, and was obliged to Lie ye latter part of ye night without covering. There came several Persons to see us this day. One of our men shot a wild Turkic. '' Monday, 4th. This Morning Mr. Fairfax left us with intent to go down by ye mouth of ye Branch. ^ Word erased. A Boy's Journal 43 We did two Lots and was attended by a great Com- pany of People, men Women, and children, that at- tended us through ye woods as we went, shewing there antick tricks. I really think they seem to be as igno- rant a set of people as the Indians. They would never speak English but when spoken to, they speak all Dutch. This day our tent was blown down by ye vio- lentness of ye wind. " Tuesday, 5th. We went out and did 4 Lots. We were attended by ye same Company of People, yt. we had ye day before. " Wednesday, 6th. Last night was so Intolerably smoky that we were obliged all hands to leave ye Tent to ye Mercy of ye wind and Fire. This day was attended by our afored, Company, up till about 12 o'clock. When we finished, we Travell'd down ye Branch to Henry Van Metriss. On our journey was catchd in a very heavy rain. We got under a straw House until ye worst of it was over, and then con- tinued our Journey. " Thursday, 7th. Raind successively all last night. This morning one of our men killd a wild Turkie that weight 20 Pounds. We went and surveyd 15 Hun- dred acres of Land and returnd to Van Metriss about I o'clock. About two I heard that Mr. Fairfax was come up and at i Peter Cassey's about 2 miles of[f] in ye same old field. I then took my horse and went up to see him. We eat our Dinners and walked down to Van Metris's. We stayed about two hours and walked back again, and slept in Cassey's House which was ye first night I had slept in a House since I came up to ye Branch. '' Fryday, 8th. We breakfasted at Cassey's and rode 44 George Washington down to Van Metris's to get all our Company together, which when we had accomplished, we rode down below ye Trough in order to lay of[f] Lots there. We laid of[f] one this day. The Trough is couple of Ledges of Mountains, impassable, running side and side together for above 7 or 8 miles and ye River down between them. You must ride round ye back of ye Mountain for to get below them. We camped this Night in ye woods near a wild Meadow, where was a large stack of Hay. After we had pitched our Tent and made a very large Fire, we pulled out our Knap- sack, in order to Recruit ourselves. Every one was his own cook. Our Spits was forked Sticks, our Plates was a large Chip; as for Dishes, we had none. " Saterday, 9th. Set ye Surveyors to work, whilst Mr. Fairfax and myself stayed at ye Tent. Our Pro- vision being all exhausted and ye Person that was to bring us a Recruit disappointing us, we were obliged to go without untill we could get some from ye neigh- bors, which was not untill 4 or 5 o'clock in ye Evening. We then took leaves of ye Rest of our Company, road down to John Colins in order to set of[f] ye next Day homewards. '' Sunday, loth. We took our farewell of ye Branch and travelld over Hills and Mountains to Coddys, on Great Cacapehon, about 40 miles. "Monday, nth. We travelld from Coddys down to Frederick Town, where we reached about 12 o'clock. We dined in Town and then went to Capt. Hites and lodged. "Tuesday, 12th. — We set of[f] from Capt. Hites in order to go over Wms. Gap's about 20 miles, and after riding about 20 miles we had 20 to go, for we A Boy's Journal 45 had lost ourselves and got up as high as Ashby's Bent. We did get over Wms. Gap that night, and as low as Wm. West in Fairfax County, i8 miles from ye Top of ye Ridge. This day see a Rattled snake, ye first we had seen in all our journey. " Wednesday, ye 13th of April, 1748. Mr. Fairfax got safe home and I myself safe to my Brothers, which concludes my Journal." ^ ^ W. C Ford, The Writings of George Washington, vol. i. CHAPTER IV Washington's university THE world has always seemed curious to know how its great men received their learning and training, how and where they were educated, who were their teachers and trainers, and what moulding influences gathered about their childhood and youth and fashioned them for their fate to be. Perhaps the most interesting of all the works of Xenophon is the limpid narrative in which he describes the birth, training, and schooling of the great Cyrus ; even the fictitious " Frenchy " biography of Telemaqiie pos- sesses a charm, quite apart from its grace of style, in the attractive way in which it represents, under antique forms and transparent pseudonyms, the up- bringing of a luxurious prince surrounded by the dissipations of a gorgeous court. Literary syba- rites linger with delight over the educational pages of Montaigne, of Massillon, and of Wilhclm Mei- ster, and in every biography and autobiography that appears, perhaps those pages are most keenly rel- ished which deal with the school life and home in- fluences of the world's noted men and women. The mother's knee antedates the school desk or the church-pulpit. The fascinating skill of Xenophon draws aside the curtain, and lets our eye rest upon 46 Washington s University 47 a mighty Oriental potentate as he is taught the elemental truths of life, to ride, to swim, to hurl the javelin, and to tell the truth, the simplest duties of everyday existence, the power of self-government and of self-control, the duties to ourselves and others : one gazes at the picture and finds the Persian system in many ways admirable. Then we turn to Plutarch and find in his marvellous biographies the Spartan and Roman, the Athenian and Oriental chapters of educational experience graphically con- trasted, and full of instruction for the modern reader interested in the pedagogical problems of the ancients. The subtle moralisings of Goethe and Montaigne afford deep glimpses into the education of their authors, and invest each with a kind of halo which sharply distinguishes the French and German systems from each other. Washington was the finest product of the planter commonwealth; his Oxford and Cambridge were the floods and fields, the ups and downs of the Old Virginia life, the experiences of the rough, prac- tical surroundings in which he found his boyhood entangled, the beguiling ways and free-and-easy hospitalities of that stately old freeman's common- wealth, which had founded itself along the Chesa- peake and the James in the golden days of Stuart and Guelph. The coming of the cavaliers had filled this New Atlantis, risen out of the Western seas, with a free and noble population, largely made up of gentle folk whose gentility had become impatient at home, and sought new avenues of relief abroad. 48 Georg-e Washing-ton A year before Jacques Cartier, creeping out of St. Malo in his tiny craft of thirty tons' burthen, had crossed the seas and sailed up the St. Lawrence to the sites of Quebec and Montreal, Virginia had pre- sented itself to the English navigators of James- town as a mighty stairway, up whose five-fold stair of Tidewater, Middle, Piedmont, Shenandoah, and Appalachian Virginia, crept an ever-increasing, often-defeated, never-discouraged, indefatigable tide of human beings as patient and implacable as the sea itself, having a choice eye for choice localities, full of the healthy human selfishness that takes the best it can get — where all is free — with the least possible effort, settling the rich river-valleys and game-haunted mountain gorges, and making them- selves generally comfortable wherever they went, despite Pamunkies, Chickahominies, Shawnees, Mingos, or Cherokees with which every covert at the time abounded. The few hundred immigrants at Old Point and Hampton Roads had expanded by this time up and down, all things considered, into a solid million of alert, keen-eyed, intelligent fron- tiersmen, whose " frontier," in five generations, had pushed back from the blue Atlantic to the Blue Ridge, the Alleghanies, and the Ohio. The novelty of this life and of these conditions in Virginia in the eighteenth century had not yet worn off ; the blue smoke curling: heavenward from a thousand wigwams showed still, in Washington's youth and early manhood, the power and plenitude of that slowly receding Indian barbarism which Washington's University 49 filled the sunset line with thrilling adventure, and sharpened men's eyes and ears and muscles to the presence of a numerous and dangerous foe. Less than a hundred miles from his native Westmoreland, in and about which his father's five thousand patri- monial acres were situated, Washington received much of his training, particularly at Greenway Court, on the outskirts of a remote wilder- ness which lost itself westward in immeasurable distances of territory, untrodden save by the feet of deer and bear and Red Man. The daring missionary, the lonely Jesuit voyageur, impelled by conscience and by zeal for the French king, alone had stolen through its measureless soli- tudes, and down its mighty rivers, and over its ocean-like lakes from Ontario and the St. Law- rence to St. Louis, Natchez, and New Orleans, far down into tropical Louisiana. The hunter, the trap- per, the seekers after gold and pearls, the romantic dreamer in search of the Fountain of Youth, tra- versed these appalling wastes, built their huts on river-bank and mountain height, staked out their claims here and there in regions vast as the sea itself, and lived and died as pioneers — often as martyrs — of the civilisation to come. This earnest, active life of intense physical unrest and energy was the school in which Washington be- came an apt and ready scholar, a student of men and of things, a man of affairs, alive in every nerve and muscle, cautious, resourceful, strong as a young Hercules to endure sickness and privation, crafty 50 George Washington as Odysseus himself in the exercise of a quick intel- Hgence, ripe for action, and wise in counsel far beyond his years, in many things a veritable sage of twenty; having "small Latin and less Greek" (like his brother Shakspere), but possessing a pro- found, almost a marvellous, knowledge of the world around him, rising to nigh supreme command in the West almost in his 'teens, and revealing in his Jour- nal to the Ohio (published by command of the Governor, in 1754), such insight, discretion, and powers of command as prophesied for him a brilliant future. When his '* loving brother " Lawrence fell ill, in 1752, George gave up the forest seclusion of the lovely Shenandoah Valley, with all its happy text- books of hill and dale and teeming trout-stream, and hurried back to Mount Vernon to accompany Law- rence to Barbadoes and the Bahamas, whither deli- cate lungs called him. But the radiant Caribbean proved only a Calypso's Isle whose gorgeous air had no healing in it. Washington himself was attacked by small-pox after accepting a *' conscience " invita- tion to dinner at a house where the scourge (about to be greatly alleviated by Jenner's famous dis- covery) was prevalent. Soon after this, Lawrence died, leaving his estates first to his little daughter and then to his brother George, should the daughter die without issue. She died almost immediately after her father, and thus to George, the youngest executor and special favourite of Lawrence, fell the noble acres of Mount I 2 CO o < -C ii CC b Ul > I- z o Washington's University 51 Vernon (called also Epsewasson or Hunting Lodge). And now begins that intense and strenuous '' cur- riculum " of Washington's education, which started with his forest matriculation as surveyor to Lord Fairfax in 1747-8, and continued through the storm and stress of the French and Indian Wars until his marriage in 1759, at the age of twenty-seven, to Martha Custis. The graphic metaphor of the mediaevalist likened such an education to the course of the chariot, as it wound its way to the goal over the mazy spaces of the Greek stadium or the Roman amphitheatre, where racers and athletes fixed their burning eyes on contending charioteers, and where the winners of the goal — the diploma of " graduation " in this gradus ad Parnassum — received universal acclaim from the bystanders. The bystanders in Washington's case were his neighbours, the planters of the stalwart young com- monwealth, the House of Burgesses, and the Colony of Virginia itself, all of whom, it seems, had eagerly watched the remarkable career of Mary Ball's eldest son, and felt that within it lay notable developments. The long-legged, lank, hollow-chested, awkward Wakefield boy had grown into a superb specimen of young Virginian manhood, " straight as an Indian arrow," wrote his adopted grandson, dignified, com- manding-looking, every inch a man and a gentle- man, powerful in physique, gracious though slightly cold in manner, reticent rather than rushing in 52 Georg-e Washington speech, infinitely cumulative of details, almost a martinet in matters of decorum, pedantically microscopic in his attention to minutiae, yet with an eye as keen as an Indian's for distant possibilities and opportunities to benefit King, crown, and colony. George Washington was at this time a '' King George's man," devotedly loyal, supremely subser- vient to the wishes of his royal master as reflected in the orders of Council and the direction of the Governor, a British subject who had never yet dreamt of severance from his sovereign, a Virginian Englishman, in whose loyal arteries swept a tide of English blood as hot for King and Parliament as ever coursed in the bodies of Pitt and Fox, Chatham and Burke, soon to be his face-to-face '' contem- poraries " — in debate at least — on the banks of the Thames. And it is a singular fact that the implacable foes of this " undergraduate " time were not the English who lay, as it were, still submerged beneath the Eastern horizon, but — the French, in a few short years to become his friends, admirers, almost wor- shippers. Says John Fiske : " Hitherto the struggle with the House of Bourbon had been confined to Canada, at one end of the line, and Carolina at the other, while the centre had not been directly implicated. In the first American Con- gress, convened by Jacob Leisler at New York, in 1690, for the purpose of concerting measures of de- fence against the common enemy, Virginia (as we Washing-ton's University 53 have seen) took no part. The seat of war was then remote, and her strength, exerted at such a distance, would have been of Httle avail. But in the sixty years since 1690, the white population of Virginia had in- creased fourfold, and her wealth had increased still more. Looking down the Monongahela River to the point where its union with the Alleghany makes the Ohio, she beheld there the gateway to the Great West, and felt a yearning to possess it; for the westward movement was giving rise to speculations in land, and a company was forming for the exploration and settle- ment of all that Ohio country. But French eyes were not blind to the situation, and it was their king's pawn, not the English, that opened the game on the mighty chessboard. French troops from Canada crossed Lake Erie, and built their first fort where the city of Erie now stands. Then they pushed forward down the wooded valley of the Alleghany, and built a second fortress and a third. Another stride would bring them to the gateway. Something must be done at once. " At such a crisis. Governor Dinwiddle had need of the ablest man Virginia could afford to undertake a journey of unwonted difficulty through the wilderness, to negotiate with Indian tribes, and to warn the ad- vancing Frenchmen to trespass no further upon Eng- lish territory. As the best person to entrust with this arduous enterprise, the shrewd old Scotchman selected a lad of one-and-twenty, Lord Fairfax's surveyor, George Washington. History does not record a more extraordinary choice, nor one more completely jus- tified." ^ Virginia needed, indeed, the presence of this ex- *Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, vol. ii, p. 378. 54 George Washing-ton traorclinary young man just at the time and place at which the shrewd " merchant governor "of the Colony, Dinwiddie, a canny and observant Scot, summoned him. He was one of those " climate- struck " Virginians who, though foreign -born, fell under the benign influence of the region and re- mained in the country as a " merchant adventurer," long after he had ceased to represent his Majesty as chief magistrate of the commonwealth. His keen Scotch eyes had watched the rise and progress of this yoimg Virginia cavalier, whom in a letter to Hamilton, Governor of Pennsylvania, he described as " a person of distinction," and had found in him such premonitions of strength and efficiency as to compel him, in a way, to choose Washington rather than another from the crowd of distinguished gentle- men, old as well as young, who might have served the King at this crisis. One catches glimpses of the looming form of the nascent diplomat and general, even then, when he had hardly entered upon the enjoyment of his Mount Vernon estates, and the de- lightful social life of the period, and when the charms of home life, the beauty of his plantations, the spell of horse and hound and angler's rod and the coquetry of winsome women would to most youths of one-and-twenty have proved most irre- sistible. The education of the forest, of the chain and theodolite, of the spacious geometries of heaven and earth in which his youth had been passed, the self-made, self-taught qualities of his manly and self-dependent nature, kindling with the unquenched Washing-ton's University 55 ambition to serve his colony and people, urged him to throw aside the enticing appeals of self-indulgent ease, and to present himself to the Governor as a willing instrument in endeavouring to make the dif- ficulties of the colony less insurmountable and less intolerable. He was, of all the Virginians of his day, the one best fitted for Dinwiddie's delicate and dangerous mission, the one best combining a pro- found knowledge of Indian craft and cunning with surest reliance upon himself, prudence, foresight. Stoic powers of endurance, and a boundless pride and conscientiousness that would drive him to the uttermost, and make him bate no jot or tittle of irksome detail to make the embassy a complete suc- cess. He set out on his task with an energy that bordered on fury, in a kind of Berserker rage, pos- sessed with an impelling desire to push into the wil- derness, carry through his negotiations, and return to quaint old Williamsburg, on the Middle Planta- tion, with full information of the machinations of the French in the far Ohio Valley. For here it was that the whole trouble hinged. The French had come flowing down from the North in a mighty tide of mission-work and con- quest, which threatened to swallow up the English frontier, unsettle boundaries, quicken and deepen Indian hostility, and make the border-lands, west- ward of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, unhabitable by men of Anglo-Saxon breed, and to kindle the flames of a perpetual feud. Washington's intimate knowledge of Indian ways 56 George Washington and wiles, his skill in woodcraft, his known courage and dauntless spirit, pointed him out as the one man born to plunge into the waste and bring thence to his people definite intelligence of the purpose of the French, and definite suggestions of what was now best to be done to foil them. No Laodicean was he, with lukewarm heart and limping intelligence, quak- ing in his shoes over imaginary difficulties, or quibbling over details of administration or rank; but straightforward, direct, absolutely devoid of self- ishness or vanity from the very start, a whole-souled Virginia gentleman and soldier, intent on duty per- fectly performed, and nothing else, neither expecting nor caring for any one's commendation except Din- widdie's and that of his own conscience. Hear his own account of the mission : " Advertisement " As it was thought advisable by his Honour the Governor to have the following Account of my Pro- ceedings to and from the FRENCH on OHIO, com- mitted to Print I think I can do no less than apologise, in some Measure^ for the numberless Imperfections of it. '' There intervened but one Day between my Arrival in Williamsburg, and the Time for the Council's Meet- ing, for me to prepare and transcribe, from the rough Minutes I had taken in my Travels, this Journal ; the writing of which only was sufficient to employ me closely the whole Time, consequently admitted of no leisure to consult of a new and proper Form of the old: Neither was I apprised, nor did in the least con- Washing-ton's University 57 ceive, when I wrote this for his Honour's Perusal, that it ever would be published, or even have more than a cursory Reading; till I was informed, at the Meeting of the present General Assembly, that it was already in the Press. '' There is nothing can recommend it to the Public, but this. Those Things which came under the Notice of my own Observation, I have been explicit and just in a Recital of: — Those which I have gathered from Report, I have been particularly cautious not to aug- ment, but collected the Opinions of the several Intel- ligencers, and selected from the whole, the most prob- able and consistent Account. " G. Washington." "Wednesday, October 31, 1753. " I was commissioned and appointed by the Hon- ourable Robert Dinwiddle, Esq., Governor, etc., of Virginia, to visit and deliver a letter to the Command- ant of the French forces on the Ohio, and set out on the intended Journey the same day : The next, I arrived at Fredericksburg^ and engaged Mr. Jacob Vanbraam, to be my French interpreter ; and proceeded with him to Alexandria, where we provided Necessaries. From thence we went to Winchester, and got Baggage, Horses, etc. ; and from thence we pursued the new Road to Wills-Creek, where we arrived the 14th of November. " Here I engaged Mr. Gist to pilot us out, and also hired four others as Servitors, Barnaby Ciirrin and John Mac-Quire, Indian Traders, Henry Steward, and William Jenkins; and in company with those per- sons, left the Inhabitants the Day following. 58 George Washing-ton " The excessive Rains and vast Quantity of Snow which had fallen, prevented our reaching Mr. Frazier's an Indian Trader, at the Mouth of Turtle Creek, on Monongahela [River], till Thursday, the 22d. We were informed here, that Expresses had been sent a few Days before to the Traders down the River, to acquaint them with the French General's death, and the Return of the major Part of the French Army into Winter Quarters. *' The Waters were quite impassable, without swim- ming our Horses ; which obliged us to get the Loan of a Canoe from Frazier, and to send Barnahy Currin and Henry Stezvard down the Monongahela, with our Baggage, to meet us at the Forks of Ohio, about lo miles, there to cross the Aligany." He winds up this remarkable document, which fills some twenty-five octavo pages, with the follow- ing expressions : " I hope what has been said will be sufficient to make your Honour satisfied with my Conduct; for that was my Aim in undertaking the Journey, and chief Study throughout the prosecution of it." ^ This Journal, filled as it is with homely yet minute and important facts, might well be called Washington's " graduation essay," a bit *' of orig- inal search and research " in the wilderness, of the highest significance to the interest of the common- wealth, based on the severest personal investigation. This study of aboriginal conditions and of French diplomacy lasted two months and a half, and con- * Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 39. Washing-ton's University 59 stitutes a striking story of Darkest America in the time just before the Revolution, when all the forces and energies on the continent were about to gather for the supreme struggle between Guelph and Bour- bon, between George II and Louis XV, between fleur-de-lis and rose, as they seemed to spring spon- taneously from the virgin soil of the West, lying be- fore them in immemorial calm. The successive grades of Washington's prelimi- nary education were thus being rapidly surmounted in the great University of the Wilderness, whose countless unknown creatures yielded up their knowl- edge to him, and spoke to, and taught him in tongues infinitely more efficient than those of the mere scholastic kind. Washington was always, in later years, regretting his ignorance of French, of the cultured training which his elder brothers Lawrence and Augustine had received at Appleby School in England, of the thousand and one polite accomplish- ments which the Virginians who matriculated in the Old World possessed in ample degree; but he need not have been ashamed of the real knowledge which he really and truly possessed, — not the knowl- edge which Master Hobby, the sexton convict, and Master Williams, the Wakefield schoolmaster, and the ex- Jesuit Marye (turned Huguenot), had im- parted : the knowledge possessed by the young major and lieutenant-colonel now to be, was of a far finer character : he who knows not men is igno- rant of the first principles of knowledge. It was possession of this masterful knowledge that made 6o George Washington the Virginia officer, from the first, master of the Convention, master of Congress, master of the com- bined armies of the United RepubHc, and master at last, and for as long as he would, of the supreme governmental forces of the nation. Washington's own explanation of his mission to the Indians and their " Half King " may be gath- ered from his address to them : *' Brothers, I have called you together in Council by order of your Brother, the Governor of Virginia, to acquaint you, that I am sent, with all possible Dispatch, to visit, and deliver a Letter to the French Command- ant, of very great Importance to your Brothers, the Ejiglish; and I dare say, to you, their Friends and allies. " I was desired, Brothers, by your Brother the Gov- ernor, to call upon you, the Sachems of the Nations, to inform you of it, and to ask your Advice and As- sistance to proceed the nearest and best Road to the French. You see, Brothers, I have gotten thus far on my Journey. " His Honour likewise desired me to apply to you for some of your young Men, to conduct and provide Provisions for us on our Way ; and be a safeguard against those French Indians who have taken up the hatchet against us. I have spoken this particularly to you Brothers, because his Honour our Governor treats you as good Friends and Allies ; and holds you in great Esteem. To confirm what I have said, I give you this String of Wampum." ^ All through the Journal and its matter-of-fact en- ^ Ford's Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 19. Washing-ton's University 6i tries, the reader catches vivid foreshadowings of the coming man, who was swiftly developing out of the dutiful son and the sturdy youth into a character tenacious of purpose, rugged in its relations with antagonistic forces, fond of battling with difficulties that seemed to others surpassing their strength, and Lacedemonian in its firmness and inflexibility. Over the frozen wilderness sped these young feet, unconscious of suffering, unwearied in the pursuit of their hopeful mission, through miry swamps, over unbeaten tracks and trackless mountains, '' shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace " indeed, but ready at a moment's notice to carry their owner into the thick of some savage fight, or into the dreaded shades where at any moment the flash of the tomahawk, the whizz of the deadly bone-arrow, or the crack of the clumsy flint-lock would startle the everlasting silence and make it articulate with hid- eous noises. For scores and scores of leagues the young traveller and his interpreters fought their way through bush and bramble, through wire-grass and rope-like vines, through harsh autumnal woods, crisp and sere in the clutch of frost, through copses where the dogwood glimmered milkwhite in May, now desolate and forlorn, and where the redbud and Indian pink burned like flame in springtime — now frozen to a crisp in the icy air of November; only stopping for meat and drink and rest; up with the birds, off with the startled deer, ceaselessly journey- ing till they reached the vicinity of the French Fort Duquesne, where now the great city of Pittsburg 62 George Washington stands, " interviewed " the French commandant and brought from him a specious message informing Dinwiddie of the French claims and aspirations. On this expedition, Washington reveals himself as the pioneer diplomat of his time, conducting thorny negotiations in languages which he did not understand, and yet managing to explain himself to, and to understand, the forest Talleyrands and Met- ternichs by whom he was beset. The guile of the Indian nature was as intelligible to him as its dis- trust and superstition. Since 1656, the Washington clan had been studying Indian methods, Indian war- fare, Indian customs and habits on the Northern Neck, and back in the picturesque Shenandoah wil- derness where now and in neighbouring Pennsyl- vania nearly five hundred thousand Scotch-Irish had arrived, fresh from Irish Ulster ; and this study, hereditary and personal, had not been lost on the impressionable soldier. It was in just such a school that the generals of the Civil War graduated — Lee and Grant and Jackson, Custer and Fitzhugh Lee, and, earlier, the soldier Presidents, Jackson and Taylor. American military history abounds in self- educated soldiers who, like Washington, got their training on the plains, in the backwoods, at the forks of rushing rivers where rude forts were built, and in the flying wigwam where the fugitive democracy of the woods held perennial council. The heroic annals of New England history are no less full of these striking figures than the annals Washington's University 63 of those softer climes which developed the Johns- ton, Marion, and Sumter. The painstaking youth, who had bent painfully over his legal forms and documents, bills of sale, forms for wills, surveyor's diagrams and mathemat- ical calculations, copying laboriously every mis- spelt word or misplaced capital, had not gone through that trial of patience, unaffected or inat- tentive. The patience, skill, practical knowledge, and useful information thus acquired in boyhood, now widened out into that deeper and finer knowl- edge which was to prove invaluable to his country- men. Hurrying back to Williamsburg, where the burgesses were in session, he hastily wrote out his journal in twenty-four hours, and informed the Gov- ernor of the plans and projects of the French at Fort Le Boeuf. CHAPTER V PROLOGUE TO A FOREST TRAGEDY ^^ I\ A Y inclinations," wrote the young Washing- i V 1 ton to Colonel William Fitzhugh, '' are strongly bent to arms "; and, in a letter to Dinwid- die, of about the same date, remarks : '' I have a con- stitution hardy enough to encounter and undergo the most severe trials, and I flatter myself, resolution to face what any man durst, as shall be proved when it comes to the test." The test was close at hand. The publication of Washington's Journal, now an exceedingly rare book, of almost priceless value, and its perusal by the governors of the neighbouring provinces, roused these sleepy commonwealths to the danger of a situation which threatened every mo- ment to become more critical. The aggressions of the French, their advance down into the Ohio Val- ley — La Belle Riviere as they called it — had to be stopped. How could Virginia do it? Washington had described an admirable site for a fort, at the forks where the Monongahela and the Alleghany rush together to form the Ohio, in western Pennsyl- vania. A fort built here, he recommended, would constitute the very gateway of the West, the key to the situation, commanding and unlocking the vast 64 Prologue to a Forest Tragedy 65 regions that no foot had yet trodden, except maybe that of the Jesuit, fur-trader, or Indian of the Miami or the Scioto. The French already held the other gateways to this Promised Land, at Fort Niagara, in western New York, and at Detroit and Green Bay; it was their evident intention to make the chain of exclusion complete, by establishing themselves at Fort Le Boeuf, or some stronghold not inferior in strength, that would shut the English out of this favoured territory, and confine them for ever to the ocean side of the continent, east of the AUeghanies. Governor Dinwiddie was quick to grasp the wis- dom of Washington's plan, and commissioned the immediate raising and equipment of two companies, of one hundred men each, one of which he was charged to command, while the other was entrusted to his lieutenant, William Trent (Benjamin Frank- lin's trading partner in west Pennsylvania). Trent was ordered to occupy and fortify the forks of the two rivers where Pittsburg now stands, and make the place impregnable against the roving bands of French, Canadians, and Indians, who had begun to infest the region, burying, wherever they went, leaden plates inscribed with the name and claims of his Most Christian Majesty, Louis XV, King of France. War had not yet openly broken out between the two great powers, for the ink of the signatories to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was scarcely dry on the vellums; but a feeling of intense suspicion and irritability began to show itself, and, in the absence 66 George Washing-ton of explicit information in these distant parts, no man knew at any given time what had happened across the ocean, or how Hon and Hly stood to each other. A universal covetousness possessed men's minds; greed of land, greed of gold, greed of every- thing within sight, held men's souls in its grip of steel ; the boundless '' desire of the eyes " and '' pride of life " cast its spell over the eighteenth century and bewitched its wits. Treaties crumbled at a touch, friable as inciner- ated paper; obligations were flung overboard like old shoes, worn-out and worthless; the smile of the diplomat supplanted the oath of the sovereign; and the cabinets of kings became subterranean labora- tories of intrigue, where the sunlight never pene- trated. The Watteau-ised civilisation of France, snickering and sneering behind its fans, had lost all vitality, and assumed the thousand affectations that smile at us out of the powder and paint and gal- lantries of the Pompadours, the sentimentalities of Rousseau, and a little later, the Sorrows of Werther. England was in the throes of that tedious Georgian age which almost drove men mad with its dulness, and ultimately provoked the cynic smile of Walpole and Hogarth. Pope had ceased to lash the dunces with his poetic scourge, while in Gray's soul were just beginning to gather — symbolically enough — the exquisite strains of his '' Elegy " — the tired, hlase, worn-out, senile courts of Europe, disgusted with themselves and their Thirty Years' War over mat- ters no more important than '' The Rape of a Lock," Prolog-ue to a Forest Trag-edy 67 seemed to look wistfully over the Atlantic for relief, for a new '' sensation," for something to shake them out of their stupor; and here, in this fresh, wild, unconventional, undiplomatic country, they found it, in a little while, in full measure. The formation of the Ohio Company, for the opening and exploitation of the regions between the Lakes and the Mississippi, was a pivotal point in the diplomacy of the West. A London charter granted the company five hundred thousand acres of land and immense immunities and privileges of various sorts, on condition that it would, within a certain period, settle one hundred immigrant fam- ilies within the region indicated, and thus fix the relations of the territory to Great Britain. This was, indeed, the incipiency of the " North-West Territory " claim, and was fraught with mighty consequences. If the French got there first and af- fixed their leaden plates, so to speak, to the face of this territory, warning others away as diplomatic or aggressive trespassers, this vast and opulent region would, treaty or no treaty, fall into the hands of the powerful family whose alliance covered all France, Spain, Southern Italy, Mexico, and South America. Though separated three thousand miles by the sinu- ous zigzag of river, lake, and mountain, Canada and Louisiana, the head and the heel of Latin posses- sions in America, would soon be joined, and the thin and scattered chain of settlements, which connected them, would rivet themselves together in links that could not be broken, and a Chinese Wall of exclu- 68 George Washing-ton sion be built up to dyke the inundation of English immigration, irresistibly flowing down the Alle- ghany slopes. Lawrence and Augustine Washing- ton, brothers of George, were deeply interested in the Ohio Company; and here perhaps we catch a selfish motive — family interest — behind the glow of mere military ardour, actuating this young officer in his almost exuberant ambition to do and to dare, at this critical moment, for his native State. He makes curious entries in his day-book as he succes- sively climbs the grades of captain, major, lieu- tenant-colonel, and colonel, indirectly showing that it could not have been the pay that attracted him to this service: as captain in 1754, 8 shillings per day; as major till March 20, 1754, 10 shillings per day; as lieutenant-colonel to June i, 1754, 12 shillings, 6 pence; as colonel to September i, 1754, 15 shil- lings per day; and, in 1755, as colonel of the Virginia regiment, 30 shillings a day. These rapid promotions show incidentally, too, the worth and value of his services. In a year, he ad- vanced through the entire gamut of subaltern posi- tions, and when Braddock arrived in February, 1755, he would have been second only to the com- manding general, had not his self-respect and natural pride caused him to resign his position, on an intimation from the Governor that a new Vir- ginia regiment of 10 companies, with 100 men each, was to be formed, no one captain of which should out-rank another. ^>^^L,.^/>Z.^^^^r? ^^- '^ ^ '^ ^^^ x^^^^/^^-^-^^f^ , .^X^^ :^ y^" c^^j^S^ .%^7^ i"^ o^/C^^>^/7^6 , '799 y^y^^^^r:^ fOUR DAYS BErOR£ MIS DCATN /^t6Y FACSIMILES OF WASHINGTON'S AUTOGRAPHS. Prologue to a Forest Tragedy 6q Washington's instructions from Dinwiddie read as follows: " Having all things in readiness, you are to use all expedition in proceeding to the Fork of the Ohio with the men under command, and there you are to finish and complete in the best manner and as soon as you possibly can, the Fort which I expect is there already begun by the Ohio Company. You are to act on the defensive, but in case any attempts are made to ob- struct the works or interrupt our settlements by any persons whatsoever, you are to restrain all such of- fenders and in case of resistance to make prisoners of, or kill and destroy them." Washington, however, was not put in supreme command of even this little band of 200 or 300 Spartans, whose Leonidas was Colonel Joshua Fry, an Oxford graduate described by Dinwiddie as " a man of good sense and one of our best mathe- maticians," a man who had been associated with Peter Jefferson, father of the President, in the preparation of an esteemed map of Virginia, and who became, in 1754, colonel of the Virginia regi- ment. Washington was second in command. The expedition failed ; Colonel Fry died at Win- chester in May, 1754; Trent's command was sur- rounded and captured by Contrecceur, the French commander, at the Forks (then called Duquesne, in honour of the Marquis Duquesne, Governor-General of Canada). The supreme command devolved upon the young Virginian, now twenty-two years old. The frightful difficulties of the situation — wan- 70 George Washing-ton dering around the woods almost without food and ammunition, through pathless forests, over track- less mountains, across rivers difficult to ford, hew- ing roads through the living trees, thick as an em- battled host on every side, the air filled with vague rumours of swarms of French and Indians, the ab- sence of authentic news of any kind in the dense, dumb, endless woods, about which both forces floundered as about some Hyrcanian Bog or Slough of Despond : these difficulties may be best gathered from Washington's and Dinwiddie's own words : " I set out with forty men before ten," reports Wash- ington, " and [it] was from that time till near sunrise before we reached the Indians' camp, having marched in [a] small path, through a heavy rain, and night as dark as it is possible to conceive. We were frequently tumbling one over another, and often so lost, that fifteen or twenty minutes' search would not find the path again. *' When we came to the Half-King, I counselled with him, and got his assent to go hand-in-hand and strike the French. Accordingly, himself, Monacatoo- cha, and a few other Indians set out with us ; and when we came to the place where the tracks were, the Half- King sent two Indians to follow their tracks, and dis- cover their lodgement, which they did about half a mile from the road, in a very obscure place surrounded with rocks. I, thereupon, in conjunction with the Half- King and Monacatoocha, formed a disposition to at- tack them on all sides, which we accordingly did, and, after an engagement of about fifteen minutes, we killed ten, wounded one, and took twenty-one prisoners. Prolog-ue to a Forest Trag^edy 71 Among those that were killed was Monsieur Jumon- ville, the commander ; principal officers taken is Mon- sieur Drouillon and Mons'r La Force, who your Hon- our has often heard me speak of as a bold enterprising man, and a person of great subtlety and cunning. With these are two cadets. These officers pretend they were coming on an embassy ; but the absurdity of this pretext is too glaring, as your Honour will see by the Instructions and Summons enclosed. These instructions were to reconnoitre the country, roads, creeks, etc., to Potomack, which they were about to do. These enterprising men were purposely choose out to get intelligence, which they were to send back by some brisk despatches, with mention of the day that they were to serve the summons ; which could be through no other view, than to get a sufficient reinforcement to fall upon us immediately after. This, with several other reasons, induced all the officers to believe firmly, that they were sent as spies, rather than any thing else, and has occasioned my sending them as prisoners, tho they expected or at least had some faint hope, of being continued as ambassadors. They, finding where we were encamped, instead of coming up in a publick manner, sought out one of the most secret retirements, fitter for a deserter than an ambassador to encamp in, stayed there two or 3 days, sent spies to reconnoitre our camp, as we are told, tho they deny it. Their whole body moved back near 2 miles, sent off two runners to acquaint Contrecceur with our strength, and where we were encamped, etc. Now 36 men would almost have been a retinue for a princely ambassador, instead of a petit. Why did they, if their designs were open, stay so long within 5 miles of us, without delivering 72 Georg-e Washington his ambassy, or acquainting me with it? His waiting could be with no other design, than to get [a] detach- ment to enforce the summons, as soon as it was given. They had no occasion to send out spies, for the name of ambassador is sacred among all nations ; but it was by the track of these spies, that they were discovered, and we got intelligence of them. They would not have retired two miles back without delivering the sum- mons, and sought a skulking-place (which, to do them justice, was done with great judgment), but for some special reason. Besides, the summons is so insolent, and savours so much of gascoigny, that if two men only had come openly to deliver it, it was too great indul- gence to have sent them back. " The sense of the Half-King on this subject is, that they have bad hearts, and that this is a mere pretence ; they never designed to have come to us but in a hostile manner, and if we were so foolish as let them go again, he never would assist us in taking another of them. Besides, loosing La Force, I really think, would lead more to our disservice, than 50 other men, as he is a person whose active spirit leads him into all parleys, and brought him acquainted with all parts, add to this a perfect use of the Indian tongue, and ye influence with the Indians. " He ingenuously enough confessed, that, as soon as he saw the commission and instructions, that he be- lieved, and then said he expected some such tendency, tho he pretends to say he does not believe the com- mander had any other but a good design. In this en- gagement we had only one man killed and two or three wounded, among which was Lieutenant Waggener slightly, — a most miraculous escape, as our right wing Prologue to a Forest Tragedy 73 was much exposed to their fire and received it all. The Half-King received your Honour's speech very kind, but desired me to inform you, that he could not leave his people at this time, thinking them in great danger. He is now gone to the Crossing for their families, to bring to our camp; and desired I would send some men and horses to assist them up, which I have accordingly done ; sent 30 men and upwards of twenty horses. He says, if your Honour has any thing to say, you may communicate by me, etc., and that, if you have a present for them, it may be kept to another occasion, after sending up some things for their immediate use. He has declared to [me he would] send these Frenchmen's scalps, with a hatchet, to all the nations of Indians in union with them, and did that very day give a hatchet, and a large belt of wampum, to a Delaware man to carry to Shingiss. He promised me to send down the river for all the Mingoes and Shawanese to our camp, where I expect him to-morrow with thirty or forty men, with their wives and children. To confirm what he has said here, he has sent your Honor a string of wampum. " As these runners went off to the fort on Sunday last, I shall expect every hour to be attacked, and by unequal numbers, which I must withstand if there are five to one ; or else I fear the consequence will be, that we shall lose the Indians, if we suffer ourselves to be drove back. I despatched an express immediately to Colonel Fry with this intelligence, desiring him to send reinforcements with all imaginable despatch. " Your Honor may depend I will not be surprised, let them come at what hour they will; and this is as much as I can promise. But my best endeavours shall 74 Georg-e Washing-ton not be wanting to deserve more. I doubt not, but if you hear I am beaten, but you will, at the same [time,] hear that we have done our duty, in fighting as long [as] there was a possibility of hope. " I have sent Lieutenant West, accompanied with Mr. Splitdorph and a guard of 20 men, to conduct the prisoners in, and I believe the officers have acquainted him what answer to return your Honour. Monsieur La Force and Monsieur Drouillon beg to be recom- mended to your Honor's notice, and I have prom- ised they will meet with all the favour due to impris- oned officers. I have show'd all the respect I could to them here, and have given some necessary cloathing, by which I have disfurnished myself ; for, having brought no more than two or three shirts from Will's Creek, that we might be light, I was ill provided to furnish them. I am, etc. " P. S. I have neither seen nor heard any particu- lar account of the Twigtwees since I came on these waters. We have already begun a palisadoed fort, and hope to have it up to-morrow. I must beg leave to acquaint your Honour, that Captain Vanbraam and Ensign Peyrouny has behaved extremely well since they came out, and I hope will meet with your Hon- or's favor." ^ This little skirmish was really the " cannon ball " whose discharge, as Voltaire said, " set Europe on fire," and was heard all over the world. The death of Jumonville led to Braddock, and Braddock led to Montcalm and Wolfe and the downfall of France in America in 1763, after seventy years of struggle. ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 82. Prolog-ue to a Forest Tragedy 75 Says Ford : '' Meantime the garrison at Duquesne had received additions, and Coulon de VilUers, a brother of Jumonville, had arrived from Montreal with a large force of Indians." It was at once de- termined to " avenge the murder of Jumonville " and to attack the English whether found on soil claimed by the French or on territory that was English beyond any doubt. The party, under the command of Villiers, reached Red Stone Creek on June 30th, and, on July 2d, the camp at Gist's so recently abandoned by Washington. From the In- dian scouts the position of the English was soon determined, and on the next day the two forces met. Washington had made a small trench for pro- tection, but it proved of little service, as his men were exposed to a cross-fire from the French and In- dians. What followed is best told in the language of Governor Dinwiddle : " Immediately they [the French] appeared in sight of our camp, and fired at our people at a great dis- tance, which did no harm. Our small forces were drawn up in good order to receive them before their entrenchments, but did not return their first fire, re- serving it till they came nigher. The enemy advanced irregularly within 60 yards of our forces, and then made a second discharge, and observing they did not intend to attack them in open field, they retired within their trenches, and reserved their fire, thinking from their numbers they would force their trenches, but finding they made no attempt of this kind, the Colonel gave orders to our people to fire on the enemy, which 76 George Washing-ton they did with great briskness, and the officers declare this engagement continued from ii o'clock till 8 o'clock at night, they being without shelter, rainy weather, and their trenches to the knee in water, where- as the French were sheltered all round our camp by trees ; from thence they galled our people all the time as above. About 8 o'clock at night the French called out to parley; our people mistrusting their sincerity, from their numbers and other advantages, refused. At last they desired [us] to send an officer that could speak French, and they gave their parole for his safe return to them, on which the Commander sent two offi- cers to whom they gave their proposals. . . . From our few numbers and our bad situation, they were glad to accept them ; otherways were determined to lose their lives rather than be taken prisoners. The next morning a party from the French came and took pos- session of our encampment, and our people marched off with colors flying and beat of drum ; but there ap- peared a fresh party of lOO Indians to join the French, who galled our people much, and with difficulty were restrained from attacking them ; however, they pil- fered our people's baggage, and at the beginning of the engagement the French killed all the horses, cattle and live creatures they saw, so that our forces were obliged to carry off the wounded men on their backs to some distance from the place of the engagement, where they left them with a guard ; the scarcity of provisions made them make quick marches to get among the inhabitants which was about 6o miles of bad road." ^ ^ Ford, Writings of George JVashington, vol. i, p. 119. Prologue to a Forest Tragedy 77 The capture of Colonel Washington and his little band by superior French forces at Fort Necessity, in midsummer of 1754, almost exactly a year before Braddock's defeat near the same place the following summer, so far from rousing the resentment of the burgesses, as one might have expected, drew from them the heartiest appreciation of Colonel Wash- ington's heroism in holding out so long, and a vote of thanks for his gallant conduct. In a famous postscript to a letter to his brother, describing Jumonville's death a few months before, Washington wrote: " P. S. I fortunately escaped without any wound, for the right wing, where I stood, was exposed to and received all the enemy's fire, and it was the part where the man was killed, and the rest wounded. I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound." From the London Magazine, August, 1754- " In the express, which Major Washington de- spatched on his preceding little victory (the skirmish with Jumonville), he concluded with these words, — *"/ heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.' On hearing of this the King said sensibly, — 'He would not say so, if he had been used to hear nmnyf However, this brave braggart learned to blush for his rhodomontade, and, desiring to serve General Braddock as aid-de- camp, acquitted himself nobly." It was seldom, indeed, that the reticent Virginian broke into such rare hyperbole as this over the 78 George Washing-ton charm of the whizzing bullet, whose music was to lie henceforth the chief companion of his military and administrative life. The absurd charge brought by the French, that Washington had '' assassi- nated " Jumonville in the skirmish preliminary to the surrender, was vigorously resented and abso- lutely refuted, by the Virginian in a detailed com- munication to the Governor. One good purpose this first humiliation of Wash- ington served : it rang through the colonies like an alarm-bell and aroused Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts to the need of im- mediate co-operation, combination, concentration of ways and means, and united resistance to the now overshadowing peril of the Western frontier. Boundary disputes were forgotten ; lagging legisla- tures awoke to the extremity of the danger; con- tentions over rank and pay ceased for a moment; abundant means were voted by the people's repre- sentatives at Williamsburg, Philadelphia, Albany, and Boston, and aroused public sentiment flamed forth, like a sudden conflagration, in favour of quick and concentrated effort in the West. France, at this time, had the reputation of being as irresistible on land as England was resistless at sea ; the navy of the one, with its two hundred war- ships, might prance over the seas, but not over the measureless forests of America, while the 180,000 veterans of France, lineal descendants of the heroes who had served under Turenne and Vendome, Prince Eugene and Marshal Saxe, might well in- Prolog-ue to a Forest Tragedy 79 spire a dread that had no bounds, should any con- siderable number of them board the hundred war- ships of the French navy, the " ocean greyhounds " of the day — and leap over bounding vv^aves from Brest and Rochefort to Quebec and Montreal. And this was precisely what happened. Eighteen French warships with three thousand regulars started out of these harbours and made for the mouth of the St. Lawrence as fast as wind and waves could carry them. Almost simultaneously, an English fleet under Vice-Admiral Boscawen set sail in pur- suit, to head off this formidable armada and destroy it off the coast of Newfoundland. Three French ships alone were captured, the rest escaping triumphantly out of the fog into the broad and hospitable jaws of the mighty river, which bore them easily up into the very heart of the continent. Even in those days of slow-travelling Rumour, it was not long before the bad news from Virginia reached the Downing Street of the day, and created consternation there. An officer who flits fitfully across the pages of Franklin's Autobiography and Horace Walpole's correspondence — General Ed- ward Braddock — attracted the attention of the Foreign Office, and was put in command of the 44th and 48th regiments, with orders to sail from Cork to Hampton Roads, without further loss of time. The regiments, accustomed to the ways of civilised European warfare with civilised foes, were loth enough to traverse the stormy seas in mid-winter, and march into the spectral forests of 8o George Washington the Alleghanies, to face the hideous Red Skins in their very dens. General Braddock himself left England with a heavy heart, weighed down with a strange presentiment. Braddock was a Perthshire Scotchman, a sin- gular mixture of rough honesty, insolence, igno- rance, personal valour, and brutality, — a Miles Gloriosns, of the type graphically portrayed by the Roman comedian, yet touched with traits that served to enhance the profound pathos and paradox of his career. He smiled derisively when Franklin, " the sub- lime of common sense," told him of the dangers of Indian warfare, the possibilities of ambuscades, and the wiliness of this aboriginal foe who, more like a bird of the air or a beast of the fields, flitted, wraithlike, among his forests as one of its beloved children, and appeared and disappeared with the swiftness of a dream. The choleric Scotchman, unimaginative as he was, and unskilled in any form of warfare except that in which he had figured at Gibraltar, in the gilded manoeuvres of the Coldstream Guards whom he joined as a lad of 15, in 17 10, or in dancing at- tendance on the mistress whom Walpole describes, pooh-poohed the statements of the wise American, then Postmaster-General of Pennsylvania, and set him down, doubtless, as a Quaker poltroon. He disclosed to Franklin a veritable milkmaid's dream, in the words of the sagacious autobiographer : Prolog-ue to a Forest Tragedy 8i *' In conversation with him one day, he was giving me some account of his intended progress. ' After taking Fort Duquesne,' said he, ' I am to proceed to Niagara; and, having taken that, to Frontenac, if the season will allow time, and I suppose it will ; for Du- quesne can hardly detain me above three or four days ; and then I see nothing that can obstruct my march to Niagara.' '' Having before revolved in my mind," continues Franklin, " the long line his army must make in their march by a very narrow road, to be cut for them through the woods and bushes, and also what I had read of a former defeat of fifteen hundred French, who invaded the Illinois country, I had conceived some doubts and some fears for the event of the campaign. But I ventured only to say, To be sure. Sir, if you arrive well before Duquesne, with these fine troops, so well-provided with artillery, the fort, though 'com- pletely fortified, and assisted with a very strong gar- rison, can probably make but a short resistance. The only danger I apprehend of obstruction to your march, is from the ambuscades of the Indians, who, by con- stant practice, are dexterous in laying and executing them ; and the slender line, near four miles long, which your army must make, may expose it to be attacked by surprise in its flanks, and to be cut like a thread into several pieces, which, from their distance, cannot come up in time to support each other. *' He smiled at my ignorance, and replied, ' These savages may indeed be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia ; but upon the King's regular and disciplined troops, Sir, it is impossible they should make any impression.' I was conscious of an impro- 82 George Washing-ton priety in my disputing with a military man in matters of his profession, and said no more. " This General was, I think, a brave man, and might probably have made a figure as a good officer in some European war. But he had too much self-confidence, too high an opinion of the validity of regular troops, and too mean a one of both Americans and Indians. George Croghan, our Indian interpreter, joined him on his march with one hundred of those people, who might have been of great use to his army as guides and scouts, if he had treated them kindly ; but he slighted and neglected them, and they gradually left him." ^ By February, 1755, " the cruel, crawling waves " had wafted the five hundred gallant Britishers from the soft, green pastures and shining Shannon of Ireland, to the beautiful silver expanse of Hamp- ton Roads and the Potomac, where their doom awaited them. All the elements of pity and terror, maintained by Aristotle to be the foundation of Tragedy, were here in abundance — reckless courage, personal gallantry, unquestioning confidence, high and in- vincible purpose to quell for ever the Gallic preten- sions, and pluck the Bourbon lily up by the roots from places immemorially sacred to the Saxon rose. Dinwiddie was charmed with the General, his fellow-countryman, and with his show of force- fulness and resource. A council of five governors — Sharpe of Maryland, Shirley of Massachusetts, * Sparks, Life of Franklin, vol. i, p. 189. Prologue to a Forest Tragedy 83 Delancy of New York, Morris of Pennsylvania, and Dinwiddie of Virginia, met at Alexandria to con- cert measures in harmony with the commander- in-chief, to crush the enemy in Acadia, at Crown Point, at Fort Niagara, and at Fort Duquesne. The wildest and least winsome of these opera- tions, those against Duquesne, fell naturally to the lot of Braddock, who now that they were about to begin, fell into a frame of furious petulance and impatience that* no proper preparations had been made for them by the colonial governments; no horses or waggons were to be had, food for the sol- diers was, so to speak, still growing in the green maize-fields around, or running wild in four-legged independence in the Virginia woods, while their six hundred pack-horses fed on the leaves of the trees. He abused all Americans, except the men of Massachusetts and of Virginia, and among the serenely stupid Friends, in their imperturbable ob- stinacy, found only Franklin to praise. And, but for Franklin's assistance in procuring a hundred and fifty waggons and their accoutrements from the stubborn and penurious Germans and Quakers of his province, he could not have moved a step. Here as elsewhere in this remarkable Revolution, Franklin and Washington emerge together, stand- ing in a blaze of light, even at this early period, as the right and left arm, the battle-axe and the cleaver of the Revolutionary movement. 84 George Washington There was twenty-six years difference in their ages; Franklin was the kind of man that always seems born old, between whom and common sense there was a pre-established harmony, who infallibly takes the right view of things from the start, and once taken, never deserts it for more plausible or more fallacious views. Beneath his smile of benig- nity lurked a world of shrewdness that had at its beck and call an epigrammatic felicity of phrase, an aptitude for coining itself into axioms that became proverbs, and proverbs that wrote themselves, almost automatically, into the head-lines of copy- books, to be endlessly repeated in the myriad school- boy handwritings of the time. He was his own Poor Richard's Almanac, incarnate. Massachusetts, quick, keen, humorous, full of dry wit and intel- lectual virility — Hosea Biglow in nascendo — tin- gled in every vein, shed humorous philosophy over every discussion, illuminated every conversation with point and epigram. Brilliantly original in scientific research, endlessly inventive in the appli- cation of his knowledge to the common conveniences of life, Franklin opened his wise old child's eye on things around him as naively at eighty as he did at twenty-six, while the wit and sense of the genera- tions before him seemed to concentrate themselves, and run down into a mould which was the incarna- tion of this new American man. How different was Washington, in whom Vir- ginia, with all its faults and nobilities, its high BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN 1779. From an oil-painting in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Prolog-ue to a Forest Trag-edy 85 seriousness and lofty sense of duty, its martial ardour and generous, chivalrous ways, was as truly typified, as was the clever New England spirit clarified and concentrated in the printer-electrician, diplomat, and philosopher. CHAPTER VI IN THE TRAGICAL WOOD BRADDOCK had heard of the fame of this fine, young colonel, not only at Williamsburg, but more probably in London drawing-rooms, where his gallantry had often been the subject of conversa- tion. He was the one figure in all Virginia then, that the Scotch Commander could not afford to overlook, though he was surrounded by an imposing retinue of captains, of high officials like Sir John Sinclair and Sir Peter Halket, and functionaries, half military, half civilian, who hoped to share in the glories of this new invincible Armada. He was immediately and most courteously in- vited to serve on General Braddock's staff, and to form one of his military family. The letters that passed between them are equally creditable to both sides : '' Williamsburg, 2 March, 1755. " Sir, " The General having been informed that you ex- pressed some desire to make the campaign, but that you declined it upon some disagreeableness that you thought might arise from the regulation of command, has ordered me to acquaint you, that he will be very glad of your company in his family, by which all in- conveniences of that kind will be obviated. 86 In the Tragical Wood 87 '' I shall think myself very happy to form an ac- quaintance with a person so universally esteemed, and shall use every opportunity of assuring you how much I am, Sir, your most obedient servant, '' Robert Orme, Aid-de-camp." " To Robert Orme "Mount Vernon, 15 March, 1755. " Sir, " I was not favored with your polite letter, of the 2d inst., until yesterday ; acquainting me with the no- tice his Excellency, General Braddock, is pleased to honor me with, by kindly inviting me to become one of his family the ensuing campaign. It is true, Sir, that I have, ever since I declined my late command, expressed an inclination to serve the ensuing cam- paign as a volunteer ; and this inclination is not a little increased, since it is likely to be conducted by a gentleman of the General's experience. " But, besides this, and the laudable desire I may have to serve, with my best abilities, my King and country, I must be ingenuous enough to confess, that I am not a little biassed by selfish considerations. To explain, Sir, I wish earnestly to attain some knowl- edge in the military profession, and believing a more favorable opportunity cannot offer, than to serve under a gentleman of General Braddock's abilities and experience, it does, as you may reasonably sup- pose, not a little contribute to influence my choice. But, Sir, as I have taken the liberty to express my sentiments so freely, I shall beg your indulgence while I add, that the only bar, which can check me in the pursuit of this object, is the inconveniences that must 88 Georg-e Washington necessarily result from some proceedings which hap- pened a little before the General's arrival, and which, in some measure, had abated the ardor of my desires, and determined me to lead a life of retirement, into which I was just entering, at no small expense, when your favour was presented to me. " But, as I shall do myself the honor of waiting upon his Excellency, as soon as I hear of his arrival at Alexandria, (and would sooner, were I certain where to find him,) I shall decline saying any thing further on this head till then; begging you will be pleased to assure him, that I shall always retain a grateful sense of the favour with which he is pleased to hon- or me, and that I should have embraced this oppor- tunity of writing to him, had I not recently addressed a congratulatory letter to him on his safe arrival in this country. I flatter myself you will favour me in making a communication of these sentiments. " You do me a singular favour, in proposing an ac- quaintance. It cannot but be attended with the most flattering prospects of intimacy on my part, as you may already perceive, by the familiarity and freedom with which I now enter upon this correspondence ; a freedom, which, even if it is disagreeable, you must ex- cuse, as I may lay the blame of it at your door, for encouraging me to throw off that restraint, which otherwise might have been more obvious in my de- portment on such an occasion. " The hope of shortly seeing you will be an excuse for my not adding more, than that I shall endeavour to approve myself worthy of your friendship, and that I beg to be esteemed your most obedient servant." ^ * Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 141. In the Tragical Wood 89 And so events moved on. Merrily had the leap- ing transport-ships sped over the crisping waves, in the keen January blasts, out of the picturesque river that flowed from the heart of Ireland, full of proud, gallant men, never dreaming of defeat, while nat- urally dreading an insidious foe. Merrily had they come to anchor in the spacious stretches of Hampton Water, which receives, as in a mighty bowl, the ample flood of the historic James, the very cor cordium of the ancient commonwealth; and many a famous talk had the two Scotchmen — Dinwiddie and Braddock — together, over the sunny Madeira and fuming Virginia posset-bowl, confidentially, concerning the details of the approaching campaign. March passed, however, — April — May ; the lovely Virginia spring came and went, mantled in bloom, filled with the exquisite scents and perfumes of a climate most perfectly mixed of heat and cold; the vivid vegetation of early summer had ripened into the matronly luxuriance of June, and still the army had not started from its place of assembly at Fort Cumberland, one hundred and forty miles from Fort Duquesne. In the primitive war-tactics of the day, no one, wrote Washington in a letter to Warner Lewis, knew anything of the strength of the French on the Ohio — '' On the Ohio " being an expression as void of definitiness then, as " on the Amazon," or " on the Congo " would be to us now. The country swept away to the West and South in one illimitable ocean of leaves and limbs, so dense that the stars almost ceased to twinkle through them go George Washing-ton at night, and the bewildered wanderer might try in vain, with rude astrolabe or magnetic needle, to fix his bearings. Fifty-two miles beyond Fort Cumberland lay Fort Necessity, fatally familiar to Washington, as the scene of his capitulation to the French only a few months before. No news, only the vast and appalling noises of the forest, crossed the forty leagues of distance that lay between the Monongahela and Will's Creek, where Braddock, infuriated at the delays and chafing like a chained lion, lay snorting with impatience; behind him, fair Virginia, wreathed in the peaceful smoke of endless calumet-pipes encircling the generous dinner-tables, full of fruits and fragrance and one hundred and fifty years of civilisation; before him, the savage wood that stretched apparently to infinity, peopled with dark forms and glittering eyes that watched every movement with the cunning and intensity of the hawk, the wolf, and the bear from which, half bird, half beast, they traced their fantastic descent. About June the 9th they started, cleaving their way into the forest with three hundred axes, which hacked furiously at the tough stems of oak and chestnut, pine, spruce, and maple, levelling a road twelve feet wide, through and over underbrush for the passage of parks of artillery, heavy waggons, pack-horses, stores, ammunition, accoutrements, and hospital provisions, vindictively attacking tree- trunks, and disrupting the beautiful architecture of the forest as they hewed into its living aisles, and cleared a sinuous course through its echoing arches. In the Tragfical Wood 91 Travellers through this lovely region of the Union, to-day, still admire the magnificent remnants of wood and forest that join Pittsburg to Cumberland, and that still exist, like the pages of some splendid vellum from which vandals have ruthlessly torn the finest illustrations. Bitterly did Washington, a few months later, complain of the slowness of this march. '' In four days," he remarks, '' we moved only twelve miles ;" in ten days they had hewn their way to Little Meadows, thirty miles from the starting point and only one fourth of the toilsome way to Duquesne. Parching midsummer was at hand when the snows of January (the month of their departure from Cork) had melted into a mere reminiscence. A little before, the mountains of this Alleghany region had been white with the wondrous, wild rho- dodendron which cleaves the crevices of every rock, and covers their nakedness with a mantle of floral loveliness, vying with the blush-pink masses of the mountain-laurel, to make every cool covert of these woods, not carved into altars of emerald by moss and fern, beautiful as the Vale of Tempe. Strategically, the critics now see that all this hew- ing and ploughing through the cruel wilderness was a monstrous blunder : Braddock, as Franklin ad- vised, should have landed at Philadelphia, advanced westward on Duquesne through the thickly-peopled, fertile country of Pennsylvania, where the roads were good and provisions abundant, and finished his campaign triumphantly in six easy weeks. 92 George Washing-ton Four whole months and half of another actually elapsed, however, before this dramatic game of hide-and-seek in the forest came to an end. An eminent historian describes the scene as fol- lows: ''Thus, foot by foot, they advanced into the waste of lonely mountains that divided the streams flowing to the Atlantic from those flowing to the Gulf of Mexico, — a realm of forests ancient as the world. The road was but twelve feet wide, and the line of march often extended four miles. It was like a thin, long, party-coloured snake, red, blue, and brown, trailing slowly through the depth of leaves, creeping round inaccessible heights, crawling over ridges, mov- ing always in dampness and shadow, by rivulets and waterfalls, crags and chasms, gorges and shaggy steeps. In glimpses only, through jagged boughs and flickering leaves, did this wild primeval world reveal itself, with its dark green mountains, flecked with the morning mist, and its distant summits pencilled in dreamy blue. The army passed the main Alleghany, Meadow Mountain, and Great Savage Mountain, and traversed the funereal pine-forest, afterwards called the Shades of Death. No attempt was made to inter- rupt their march, though the commandant of Fort Duquesne had sent out parties for that purpose." ^ In spite of the statement of this eminent writer, that Braddock did not rush headlong into an ambus- cade, we are forced to take Washington's own words, in his official report to Dinwiddie, that he did. Says Parkman : ^ Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. i, p. 205. In the Tragical Wood 93 '' Braddock has been charged with marching bhndly into an ambuscade ; but it was not so. There was no ambuscade; and had there been one, he would have found it. It is true that he did not reconnoitre the woods very far in advance of the head of the column ; yet, with this exception, he made elaborate dispositions to prevent surprise. Several guides, with six Vir- ginian light horsemen, led the way. Then, a musket- shot behind, came the vanguard; then three hundred soldiers under Gage ; then a large body of axe-men, under Sir John Sinclair, to open the road; then two cannon with tumbrils and tool-waggons; and lastly the rear-guard, closing the line, while flanking-par- ties ranged the woods on both sides. This was the advance-column. The main body followed with little or no interval. The artillery and waggons moved along the road, and the troops filed through the woods close on either hand. Numerous flanking-parties were thrown out a hundred yards and more to right and left; while, in the space between them and the march- ing column, the pack horses and cattle, with their drivers, made their way painfully among the trees and thickets ; since, had they been allowed to follow the road, the line of march would have been too long for mutual support. A body of regulars and provin- cials brought up the rear." ^ Washington had the best means of knowing what actually happened, being very near to Braddock, and he says explicitly to the Governor : "When we came to the place [Frazier's, 7 miles ^ Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. i, p. 214. 94 George Washington from Duquesne], we were attacked (very unexpected- ly) by about 300 French and Indians." In the number alone he was mistaken. There were 900 French, Canadians, Indians, and half-breeds — Braddock had started with 2200 men, among whom were nine companies of Virginians, of fifty or more men each, whose blue uniforms and provincial ways excited the derision of the scarlet-coated regulars, fresh from their European laurels. The number had somehow dwindled to 1300 (according to Wash- ington), and these, plunging ignorantly into the all-swallowing wilderness, blundered recklessly on without ever dreaming of sending out scouts or skir- mishers. The Virginians were fully aware of the dangers of the movement, for one hundred and fifty years of Indian warfare had accustomed them to the subtlety of this almost immaterial foe, who appeared and disappeared as by the wand of an en- chanter, taught from immemorial ages in the ways of the woods, finding in every spreading tree a for- tress, every tree-trunk a half-human, ever sympa- thising friend, using the prodigious fertility of the forest as their commissariat, sharpened in every sense to an almost superhuman acuteness of sight and hearing. The Redmen were near enough to the animal kingdom to partake of its finest qualities of sense, qualities acquired by thousands of years of friction and contact with the all-comprehending Mother Nature around, while their inclusion in the kingdom of men had, through the same thousands In the Tragical Wood 95 of years, wrought out a wondrous brightness of intellect, and intelligence of a kind so self-developed and original as to resemble that of elves and goblins, swarming out of the bowels of the earth, with un- natural knowledge. Braddock's mistreatment of these apparently sim- ple people, the Iroquois, the most highly gifted of all American Indians, — " he treated us like dogs," as explained one of their number, — wrought his ruin. The reverie of the undying forest was now broken by a deathless scene. '' I cannot describe the horrors of that scene," wrote Lieutenant Leslie of the 44th, three weeks later, " no pen could do it. The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and the terrific sound will haunt me to the hour of my dissolution." This yell came from 900 throats, multiplied to 9000 or perhaps 90,000, by the sinister reverbera- tion of the midsummer wildwood, whose gruesome recesses acted as sounding-boards, and shot forth a hundred variations of the harsh and thunderous nymph Echo, whose silent realm had been invaded. It seemed, indeed, as if the wrath of the great god Pan himself had been roused to fury, and all the powers of the raging underworld of myth and fairy had suddenly been let loose, to swarm upward in invisible wrath and might in defence of their forest children. The trees turned to pillars of flame; the depths of the sombre Alleghanies became livid with smoke. A thousand gallant Englishmen and Virginians 96 George Washington lay like stricken deer, pierced with bullets, toma- hawked, scalped, in every attitude that writhing agony could take, blanched, bloody, lifeless, strewn for miles in scarlet horror along the road which had been the magnet of their destruction, a road which for them had led straight into the jaws of death. Only twenty-three out of eighty-six officers escaped a scene which, in the energy of its mad despair, might beggar the powers of Edgar Allan Poe to describe in another '' Masque of the Red Death."' Platoon shot down platoon in the blind frenzy of panic, and the woods sang with the whirl- wind of flying bullets that murdered, indiscrimi- nately, friend and foe. Braddock, like Stonewall Jackson, was thought by some to have been shot by one of his own men. A wild rush backward through the fatal woods was made by the three hundred or four hundred survivors, while Washington, ill and weakened by disease, almost heart-broken in mind, lingered long enough to bury the misguided Brad- dock in the road, where fugitive feet and flying waggons obliterated every trace of the burial-place from the sight of the vindictive savages. But the craven cowards were pursued by phantom fears. No Indian followed. Impelled by resistless terror, the remnant fled on and on, the wretched Dunbar at their head, and hardly stopped till they had reached Philadelphia; while Franklin relates, in a most touching passage, how the dying Brad- dock praised the brave Virginians almost with his In the Tragical Wood 97 last breath, and expired murmuring : '' The next time we shall know how to meet them." Ages before, at the very beginning of the Chris- tian era, this same most memorable tragedy had been enacted on German soil, with Roman soldiers and imperial eagles and the grandiose might of the City of the Seven Hills behind it, and all the antique imperial world as spectators. A grey-haired Caesar, whose exquisite lineaments have come down in the chiselled beauty of the Young Augustus, stood in his Roman palace and, gazing wistfully towards Germany, wrung his hands and cried : " O Varus, Varus, give me back my legions ! " For the legionaries of Rome, advancing incau- tiously into the awful solitudes of the Teutoburger Forest, in the wildwoods of prehistoric Germany, were surrounded and annihilated by Arminius, the champion of the wild, young, fresh '' Germany " that had grown up, like the valiant Iroquois, almost unnoticed in the dense forests of Westphalia, and burst down on the Romans with the fury of a whirl- wind. " O Varus, Varus, give me back my legions ! " '' The sea washes away all human ills," sang Euripides, pathetically, ages ago, as he remembered what it had obliterated for Hellas. The Forest is also a Sea beneath which, not the navies but the armies of the world have sunk, en- tombed — obliterated — forgotten. Out of the agony of that time, four letters of q8 George Washington Washington have reached us, like leaves of that fateful wood blown to* us by the feeble breath of the dying. They give us the most authentic, first- hand story of the " Battle of the Monongahela " as he calls it, and deserve quoting in their fulness : To Governor Dinwiddie " Fort Cumberland, i8 July, 1755. *' HoNBL. Sir, "As I am favored with an opportunity, I should think myself inexcusable was I to omit giving you some account of our late Engagement with the French on the Monongahela, the 9th instant. " We continued our march from Fort Cumberland to Frazier's (which is within 7 miles of Duquesne) without meeting any extraordinary event, having only a straggler or two picked up by the French Indians. When we came to this place, we were attacked (very unexpectedly) by about three hundred French and Indians. Our numbers consisted of about Thirteen hundred well armed men, chiefly Regulars, who were immediately struck with such an inconceivable panick, that nothing but confusion and disobedience of orders prevailed among them. The officers, in general, be- haved with incomparable bravery, for which they greatly suffered, there being near 60 killed and wounded — a large proportion, out of the number we had! " The Virginia companies behaved like men and died like soldiers ; for I believe out of three companies that were on the ground that day scarce thirty were left alive. Capt. Peyroney and all his officers, down to a corporal, were killed; Captn. Poison had almost In the Tragical Wood 99 as hard a fate, for only one of his escaped. In short, the dastardly behaviour of the Regular troops (so- called) exposed those who were inclined to do their duty to almost certain death ; and, at length, in despite of every effort to the contrary, broke and ran as sheep before hounds, leaving the artillery, ammunition, pro- visions, baggage, and, in short, everything a prey to the enemy. And when we endeavoured to rally them, in hopes of regaining the ground and what we had left upon it, it was with as little success as if we had attempted to have stopped the wild bears of the moun- tains, or rivulets with our feet; for they would break by, in despite of every effort that could be made to prevent it. '' The General was wounded in the shoulder and breast, of which he died three days after ; his two aids-de-camp were both wounded, but are in a fair way of recovery ; Colo. Burton and Sir John St. Clair are also wounded, and I hope will get over it ; Sir Peter Halket, with many other brave officers, were killed in the field. It is supposed, that we had three hundred or more killed ; about that number we brought off wounded, and it is conjectured (I believe with much truth) that two thirds of both received their shot from our own cowardly Regulars, who gathered themselves into a body, contrary to orders, ten or twelve deep, would then level, fire and shoot down the men before them. " I tremble at the consequences that this defeat may have upon our back settlers, who, I suppose, will all leave their habitations unless there are proper meas- ures taken for their security. ** Colo. Dunbar, who commands at present, intends, lOO George Washing-ton as soon as his men are recruited at this place, to con- tinue his march to Philadelphia for winter quarters: consequently there will be no men left here, unless it is the shattered remains of the Virginia troops, who are totally inadequate to the protection of the fron- tiers." ^ "To John A. Washington " Fort Cumberland, i8 July, 1755. " Dear Brother, '' As I have heard, since my arrival at this place^ a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you, that I have not as yet composed the latter. But, by the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability and expectation ; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, altho' death was levelling my com- panions on every side of me! " We have been most scandalously beaten by a trifling body of men, but fatigue and want of time will prevent me from giving you any of the details, until I have the happiness of seeing you at Mount Vernon, which I now most ardently wish for, since we are drove in thus far. A weak and feeble state of health obliges me to halt here for two or three days, to recover a little strength, that I may thereby be enabled to proceed homewards with more ease. You may expect to see me there on Saturday or Sun- day se'-night, which is as soon as I can well be down, as I shall take my Bullskin Plantations in my way. ' * Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 173 In the Tragical Wood loi Pray give my compliments to all my friends. I am, dear Jack, your most affectionate brother." " To Robert Jackson " Mount Vernon, 2 August, 1755. " Dear Sir, " I must acknowledge you had great reason to be terrified with the first accounts, that were given of our unhappy defeat ; and, I must own, I was not a little surprised to find, that Governor Innes was the means of alarming the country with a report so ex- traordinary, without having better confirmation of the truth, than the story of an affrighted wagoner! " It is true, we have been beaten, shamefully beaten, by a handful of men, who only intended to molest and disturb our march. Victory was their smallest expec- tation. But see the wondrous works of Providence, the uncertainty of human things ! We, but a few mo- ments before, believed our numbers almost equal to the Canadian force ; they, only expected to annoy us. Yet, contrary to all expectation and human probabil- ity, and even to the common course of things, we were totally defeated, sustained the loss of every thing, which they have got, are enriched by it, and accommo- dated by them. This, as you observe, must be an affecting story to the colony, and will, no doubt, license the tongues of people to censure those, whom they think most blamable ; which, by the by, often falls very wrongfully. I join very heartily with you in believing, that when this story comes to be related in future annals, it will meet with unbelief and indigna- tion, for had I not been witness to the fact on that fatal day, I should scarce have given credit to it even now. I02 George Washing-ton " Whenever it suits you to come into Fairfax, I hope you will make your home at Mount Vernon. Please to give my compliments to all inquiring friends. I assure you, nothing could have added more to the satisfaction of my safe return, than hearing of the friendly concern that has been expressed on my sup- posed death. I am, etc." GENERAL ISRAEL PUTNAM. From the painting by H. I. Thompson, in the State House, Hartford, Conn. CHAPTER VII THE WIDOW CUSTIS " She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd ; And I loved her, that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used; Here comes the lady, let her witness it." Othello. NEVER had History indeed rung down the cur- tain on a more dismal tragedy, yet no histo- rian has failed to plant a requiem willow over the grave of the unfortunate Braddock. For a moment he appears jauntily on the edge of the Eastern horizon, in January, 1755, leaps lightly over the peccant Atlantic, as if scorning to touch it with loitering feet, gathers a brief and brilliant haze of glory about himself in garrulous Virginia, as he boastfully plans his campaign, stalks up and down the narrow colonial stage like a scarlet flamingo, then starts into the inexorable woods, never to return. Oblivion, the tireless swallower of mush- room reputations, has tried in vain to swallow his; it sticks in the throat of Time, a gigantic morsel of folly that cannot be swallowed. In this prelude to his life's work, Washington suffered a second shock of humiliation, which was to clothe his nerves in steel against all possible disaster, and invest him, as the " spirit-protected 10.^ I04 George Washing-ton man," in a breastplate which no after-misfortune could penetrate. Franklin sagaciously remarked, that Braddock's defeat dealt a deadly blow at the reputations of the British regulars for invincible prowess, and opened the eyes of the Americans to the weakness of the contention that they zvere invincible. The spot where Siegfried was vulnerable had been discovered ! Meanwhile, Washington had strong and appre- ciative friends among the burgesses, who soon un- derstood the situation, and secured for him the ap- pointment of colonel of the sixteen new companies to be raised, together with a grant of £40,000 for their maintenance, and a purse of remuneration for each officer and private in the late unfortunate ex- pedition. He himself received £300. Recruiting offices were opened at Fredericksburg, Alexandria, and Winchester, and the momentary stupor and amazement of the colony began to clear away. It would be a matter of almost infinite, yet triv- ial and distressing, detail, to follow Washington in his voluminous correspondence with Governor Dinwiddie, Speaker Robinson, and Lord Loudon during the next two or three years. The endless small vexations of frontier life — drunkenness of officers, desertions of troops, insufficiency of pay and of ammunition, passionate appeals to the Gov- ernor and burgesses for help, for redress of griev- ances, for even bread and meat and powder — fill these letters, which are written with a sustained The Widow Custis 105 clearness, cogency, and vigour, that reflect high credit on Washington as a master of direct and simple English. At this time, he had no secretary: all these letters are presumably autographic, and all show a circumstantial mastery of every detail of the service. He was, truly, fast becoming profi- cient in that forest - and - frontier university, in which other great Americans were to rival or to follow him — General Israel Putnam, Sir William Johnson, General Sam Houston, Lewis, Clark, Daniel Morgan, and a hundred frontier-bred heroes of the border " in the brave old days of '76." These letters read with a fluency and power, in which the heart-throbs of the young commander — now twenty- four — are still distinguishable. In May, 1756, war was formally declared against France, whose people Washington, in one of these letters — for once casting off his habitual reserve — denounces as " barbarians." Their barbarous scalping-parties turned the beautiful Vale of the Shenandoah, the upper reaches of the Potomac, the luxuriant mountains of western Pennsylvania, and the fern- and laurel-clad gorges of the Alleghanies into a pandemonium of blood, starvation, and murder. One decisive blow struck at Fort Du- quesne, now nearly deserted, in consequence of the withdrawal of its garrison for the defence of Fort Niagara and Crown Point, would have brought the frightful turmoil to an end. But a civilian agent of the Crown — one Atkin — had been put over Washington's head. Lord Loudon preferred io6 George Washing-ton to direct operations against the Indians from Phil- adelphia and New York, and things in Virginia were left abundantly to themselves. The paper on which Washington writes fairly burns with his supplications, prayers, entreaties, almost tears, to Dinwiddle for help, for substantial recognition of the services of the colonial militia, for the '' tools " to erect the chain of forts, now contemplated, along a frontier three hundred and fifty miles in length, almost daily punctuated with funeral pyres, murdering parties, conflagrations, pillaging, cruelties and tortures of every description. Even at this early period, Washington's abhor- rence of the common military vices of profanity and gambling crops out in letters like the following : '* This extract from his Orderly Book, issued in general orders by the Commander two days after he reached Fort Cumberland, will show that he enforced rigid rules of discipline : — " Col. Washington has observed, that the men of his regiment are very profane and reprobate. He takes this opportunity of informing them of his great displeasure at such practices, and assures them, if they do not leave them off, they shall be severely pun- ished. The officers are desired, if they hear any man swear, or make use of an oath or execration, to order the offender twenty-five lashes immediately, without a court-martial. For the second offence, they will be more severely punished." ^ ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 296, note. The Widow Custis 107 ** To THE Speaker of the House of Burgesses " December, 1756. " Dear Sir, " It gave me infinite concern to hear by several let- ters, that the Assembly are incensed against the Vir- ginia Regiment ; and think they have cause to accuse the officers of all inordinate vices ; but more espe- cially of drunkenness and profanity ! How far any one individual may have subjected himself to such re- flections, I will not pretend to determine, but this I am certain of ; and can with the highest safety call my conscience, my God! and (what I suppose will still be a more demonstrable proof, at least in the eye of the World) the Orders and Instructions which I have given, to evince the purity of my own intentions and to show on the one hand, that my incessant endeav- ours have been directed to discountenance Gaming, drinking, swearing, and other vices, with which all camps too much abound : while on the other, I have used every expedient to inspire a laudable emulation in the officers, and an unerring exercise of Duty in the Soldiers. How far I may have mistaken the means to attain so salutary an end behooves not me to determine: But this I presume to say, that a man's intentions should be allowed in some respects to plead for his actions. I have been more explicit Sir, on this head than I otherwise shou'd, because I find that my own character must of necessity be involved in the general censure, for which reason I can not help observing, that if the country think they have cause to condemn my conduct, and have a person in view that will act; that he may do. But who will endeav- our to act more for her Interests than I have done? io8 Georg-e Washing-ton It will give me the greatest pleasure to resign a com- mand which I solemnly declare I accepted against my will." 1 Out of the passion and terror of this broken time the following letter glows with a sullen fire : " To Governor Dinwiddie '' Winchester, 22 April, 1756. " HoNBLE. Sir, " This encloses several letters, and the minutes of a council of war, which was held upon the receipt of them. Your Honour may see to what unhappy straits the distressed inhabitants as well as I, am reduced. I am too little acquainted. Sir, with pathetic language, to attempt a description of the people's distresses, though I have a generous soul, sensible of wrongs, and swelling for redress. But what can I do? If bleeding, dying! would glut their insatiate revenge, I would be a willing offering to savage fury, and die by inches to save a people ! I see their situation, know their danger, and participate their sufferings, without having it in my power to give them further relief, than uncertain promises. In short, I see inevitable destruction in so clear a light, that, unless vigorous measures are taken by the Assembly, and speedy as- sistance sent from below, the poor inhabitants that are now in forts, must unavoidably fall, while the remainder of the country are flying before the barba- rous foe. In fine, the melancholy situation of the people, the little prospect of assistance, the gross and scandalous abuses cast upon the officers in general, ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, pp. 406-407. The Widow Custis 109 which is reflecting upon me in particular, for suffer- ing misconducts of such extraordinary kinds, and the distant prospects, if any, that I can see, of gaining honor and reputation in the service, are motives which cause me to lament the hour, that gave me a com- mission, and would induce me, at any other time than this of imminent danger, to resign without one hesi- tating moment, a command, which I never expect to reap either honor or benefit from ; but, on the con- trary, have almost an absolute certainty of incurring displeasure below, while the murder of poor innocent babes and helpless families may be laid to my account here! " The supplicating tears of the women, and moving petitions from the men, melt me into such deadly sorrow, that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would contribute to the people's ease." ^ '' The melancholy condition of our distressed frontier," is the burden of these mid-century letters, when Virginia on the w^est was girdled with fire, " the woods alive with Indians " writes the Colonel, '' prowling like wolves " ; '' Indians alone are a match for Indians " ; 500 of them enlisted by the Americans would be equal to 5000 regulars. The devilish atrocities of the hour forced the Virginia Assembly to offer from fifteen to thirty pounds for each tawny scalp sent in to a frontier camp. Human foxes, squirrels, panthers, these wood- land creatures, to parallel whom, one is thrown upon ^ ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 248. iio Georg-e Washing-ton the antique myth-world of Greece, had been sharp- ened by immemorial familiarity with the woods into almost superhuman intelligence, endowed with the profoundest knowledge of woodcraft, dusky Mer- curys of the forest with winged feet, web-footed when it came to crossing water, protectively coloured among the indistinguishable shades of glade and gorge, the crowning presence in a vast sylvan re- gion, boundless as the continent itself, in which they seemed to occupy the apex of a fantastic animal and vegetable world, and to rule over it supremely, by reason both of first possession and instinctive cunning. Fanciful as Undine, in the way in which they appeared and disappeared in the ocean of leaves, their combinations and dissolutions, alliances and disintegrations, dependent upon a changeful world of symbolisms, in which belts of wampum and calumets of peace, scalps and hatchets played a strange and solemn part, were hardly more binding than alliances of wasps, or clouds of birds, as they appear to us in the comedies of Aristophanes; and yet, so formidable were they even in their momen- tary harmonies, that the literature of early America is fairly resonant with their presence, and the white man was forced to confess that, here in the new world, he had come upon a new species, self -devel- oped, self-poised, owing little to the white man, bor- rowing less from him except his vices, armies of " brownies " who rose from their subterranean re- cesses without warning, inflicted a deadly blow, and The Widow Custis 1 1 1 then melted like the mist into the dark and danger- ous mountains. Washington clearly understood the nature of these antagonists, and his letters are full of refer- ences to their wily and treacherous ways. The Indians on their side faithfully appreciated his insight, by dubbing him in their tongue, '' Cono- tocarius," a " Destroyer of Cities," a name which had been given in earlier times to his ancestor, Colonel John Washington of the Northern Neck. " Washington," writes Colonel Fairfax at this time, " is the toast of every table " ; and Dinwiddie, corresponding with General Abercrombie in Eng- land, went into particulars : " As we are told the Earl of Loudon is to raise three regiments on this continent, on the British es- tablishment, I dearn't venture to trouble him imme- diately on his arrival with any recommendations; but, good Sir, give me leave to pray your interest with his Lordship in favor of Colonel George Washington, who, I will venture to say, is a very deserving gentle- man, and has from the beginning commanded the forces of this dominion. General Braddock had so high an esteem for his merit, that he made him one of his aid-de-camps, and, if he had survived, I believe he would have provided handsomely for him in the regulars. He is a person much beloved here, and he has gone through many hardships in the service, and I really think he has great merit, and believe he can raise more men here, than any one present that I know. If his Lordship will be so kind as to promote 1 1 2 George Washington him in the British establishment, I think he will answer my recommendation." ^ About the same time, Dinwiddie sent an interest- ing census of Virginia to the London Board of Trade, in which he stated that the population was about 300,000, including 120,000 blacks. Of this number, 35,000 were subject to militia duty, or a payment of ten pounds exemption tax; and yet so great was the dearth of men, or the antagonism to frontier service, that the one cry of Washington's letters now, piercing through his other cries for meat, money, bread, powder, is '' men," " men," " men." In January, 1758, to the relief of all apparently, Dinwiddie departed for London, pursued by the fol- lowing benediction of Speaker Robinson in a private letter to Washington : "We have not yet heard who is to succeed him [Din- widdie]. God grant it may be somebody better ac- quainted with the unhappy business we have in hand, and who, by his conduct and counsel, may dispel the cloud now hanging over this distressed country. Till that event, I beg, my dear friend, that you will bear, so far as a man of honor ought, the discouragements and slights you have too often met with, and continue to serve your country, as I am convinced you have always hitherto done, in the best manner you can with the small assistance afforded you." ^ ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 284, note. ^ Ibid., p. 510, note. The Widow Custis 113 Two years and a half had now passed since that mournful midsummer of 1755, when Braddock, with his 1300 noble fellows, had started for that '' hole of barbarians," Fort Duquesne, as Washing- ton called it, and, in the funereal wood, still lay, doubtless, relics of the 1000 carcases barbarously left there, after Washington had personally read the majestic burial service of the Book of Common Prayer over his dead chief; and still things wagged on in that endless, beguiling, inconsequent, colonial way, which never seemed to bring anything to an end, never ended in real peace or real war, a skir- mishing, scared, witless, toothless time, without teeth or talons to clutch any policy, hot or cold, absolutely inane in its linked listlessness and futility long drawn out. Washington, endowed originally with a splendid constitution, inured to hardships by innumerable fatigues and privations, nerve-proof against criti- cism, insinuation, even the scribbling fluency of Dinwiddie, — at last unnerved, Washington fell dan- gerously ill of dysentery and camp-fever, the seeds of which had sullenly lurked in his system since he had been borne in a litte-r, just before Braddock's defeat. For four months he hung between life and death at Mount Vernon, whither he had gone for con- valescence; and here, or not far from here, in a little while, he was to experience one of those great changes in fortune which come to men of his class and character only once in a lifetime. 114 George Washington All of a sudden out of the gloom and anguish of these perturbed times, without previous warning, falls the following note, as delicately thrilling in its way as one of those musical notes that flow spon- taneously from the throat of Spring: "To Mrs. Martha Custis " July 20, 1758. " We have begun our march for the Ohio. A courier is starting for Williamsburg, and I embrace the opportunity to send a few words to one whose life is now inseparable from mine. Since that happy hour when we made our pledges to each other, my thoughts have been continually going to you as another Self. That an all-powerful Providence may keep us both in safety is the prayer of your ever faith- ful and affectionate friend." ^ The strong, controlled passion of a soul which strove in vain to spend itself on men and affairs, now, at twenty-six, turned its ardour towards a lovely woman who was, like the gallant colonel him- self, a " consummate flower " of the Virginia planter commonwealth. One cannot imagine this stately young warrior selecting for himself, out of that wealth of jewelled women around him, one ra- diantly beautiful, or markedly intellectual, or pun- gent, airy, witty — a Ninon, a Lady Mary, or a De Stael — but simply a lovely, Virginia woman of the eighteenth century, rich in the possession of all the homelike and housewifely charms, rich in the heart * Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol, ii, p. 53. The Widow Custis 115 and soul, rather than in the intellect and understand- ing, an ideal of the gentler womanhood that pre- ceded the era of the Amazon, and consecrated itself altogether to the sacred offices of friendship. Of such was Martha Dandridge. She was a perfect (or, if you will, an imperfect) type of that matronly Virginian woman, of whom suggestive images hung in every ripening fruit- orchard of the commonwealth ; there was no savour of the nymph or the milkmaid, of the Lady Godiva, or of the impassioned Chimene species about her. She had grown up in that old Virginia, gracious, charming, high-spirited, without the '' grand air " of the Evelyn Byrds, or the ladies that cast ineffable glances from the canvases of Lely or Sir Godfrey, yet mistress of far more than merely this : faithful to the daily task, tenacious as De Sevigne to a friendship once formed, it is perhaps fortunate that she, of all the scribbling women then living, scrib- bled least of what lay on her breast, and has floated on down to us a benign presence, a perfume, a per- fect memory, rather than an impassioned Heloise, over whom generations have wept. Just the wife for Washington, one cannot help thinking, for the strenuous young man of action, the hero absorbed by a thousand struggles, the dreamer of a thousand dreams for King and commonwealth, the incarna- tion of an energy that soon realised itself on a hun- dred fields, yet needed nothing so much as a beloved companion of his heart to share his glories and his ii6 George Washington dangers, his secret thoughts and his most sacred confidences. The union of George and Martha Washington was, indeed, like that marriage of perfect words to noble music, so melodiously sung by the laureate of a later generation. She was a sweet, sane, whole-souled, wholesome Virginia lady, skilled in the gracious household accomplishments of the time, fond of all the inno- cent gaieties and amusements fashionable in the eighteenth century, yet a slave to none, wise in the counsels of the household, conscious of her lofty position, yet never presuming upon it, an early riser, an indefatigable tricoteuse when the needs of the Revolutionary soldiers became known, no saint or St. Cecilia of the harpsichord, but a simple, loving, high-bred, faithful woman, who in her span of seventy-one years lived to be twice a widow. She was from May to February older than Washington, while Colonel Daniel Parke Custis, her first hus- band, was twenty years older than herself. Four children — Martha, Daniel, John Parke, and a girl dying in infancy — were the fruit of the Custis union, while, in an oft quoted epigram, " Providence denied Washington children that he might be the father of the whole country." This distant corner of the English dominions then suffered a dearth of teachers for women, yet Virginia was at this very time full of the women who became mothers of the famous statesmen, publicists, judges, generals, and governors of the The Widow Custis 117 commonwealth during the Revolution, women whose potential genius was as great as that of the women of Greece, in the age that preceded the golden cycle of Pericles. Ten years lay between Martha Dandridge's two marriages : at seventeen she had become the bride of Daniel Parke Custis, who was thirty-seven; at twenty-six when she had been but a few months a widow, George Washington claimed her as his bride. Her grandson, two generations later, wrote the following pretty story of the courtship: "It was in 1758, that an officer, attired in a mili- tary undress, and attended by a body-servant, tall and militaire as his chief, crossed the ferry called Wil- liams's, over the Pamunkey, a branch of the York River. On the boat touching the southern or New Kent side, the soldier's progress was arrested by one of those personages, who give the beau ideal of the Virginia gentleman of the old regime, the very soul of kindness and hospitality. It was in vain the sol- dier urged his business at Williamsburg, important communications to the Governor, etc. Mr. Chamber- layne, on whose domain the militaire had just landed, would hear of no excuse. Colonel Washington (for the soldier was he) was a name and character so dear to all the Virginians, that his passing by one of the old castles of the commonwealth, without calling and partaking of the hospitalities of the host, was en- tirely out of the question. The colonel, however, did not surrender at discretion, but stoutly maintained his ground, till Chamberlayne bringing up his reserve, 1 1 8 Georg-e Washington in the intimation that he would introduce his friend to a young and charming widow, then beneath his roof, the soldier capitulated, on condition that he should dine, ' only dine,' and then, by pressing his charger and borrowing of the night, he would reach Williamsburg before his excellency could shake off his morning slumbers. Orders were accordingly is- sued to Bishop, the Colonel's body-servant and faith- ful follower, who, together with the fine English charger, had been bequeathed by the dying Braddock to Major Washington, on the famed and fatal field of the Monongahela. Bishop, bred in the school of European discipline, raised his hand to his cap, as much as to say, ' Your honour's orders shall be obeyed.' '' The Colonel now proceeded to the mansion, and was introduced to various guests (for when was a Virginian domicile of the olden time without guests?), and above all, to the charming widow. Tradition re- lates that they were mutually pleased on this their first interview, nor is it remarkable; they were of an age when impressions are strongest. The lady was fair to behold, of fascinating manners, and splendidly en- dowed with wordly benefits. The hero, fresh from his early fields, redolent of fame, and with a form on which ' every god did seem to set his seal, to give the world assurance of a man.' '' The morning passed pleasantly away. Evening came, with Bishop, true to his orders and firm at his post, holding his favorite charger with one hand, while the other was waiting to offer the ready stirrup. The sun sank in the horizon, and yet the Colonel appeared not. And then the old soldier marvelled at his chief's The Widow Custis iig delay. ' Twas strange, 'twas passing strange ' — surely he was not wont to be a single moment behind his appointments, for he was the most punctual of all men. Meantime, the host enjoyed the scene of the veteran on duty at the gate, while the Colonel was so agreeably employed in the parlor; and proclaiming that no guest ever left his house after sunset, his mili- tary visitor was, without much difficulty, persuaded to order Bishop to put up the horses for the night. The sun rode high in the heavens the ensuing day, when the enamored soldier pressed with his spur his charger's side, and speeded on his way to the seat of government, where, having despatched his public business, he retraced his steps, and, at the White House, the engagement took place, with preparations for the marriage. '' And much hath the biographer heard of that mar- riage, from gray-haired domestics, who waited at the board where love made the feast and Washington was the guest. And rare and high was the revelry, at that palmy period of Virginia's festal age ; for many were gathered to that marriage, of the good, the great, the gifted, and the gay, while Virginia, with joyous ac- clamation hailed in her youthful hero a prosperous and happy bridegroom. " ' And so you remember when Colonel Washing- ton came a-courting of your mistress? ' said the biog- rapher to old Cully, in his hundreth year. * Ay, master, that / do,' replied this ancient family servant, who had lived to see five generations ; * great times, sir, great times ! Shall never see the like again ! ' — * And Washington looked something like a man, a proper man; hey, Cully?' — 'Never see'd the like, sir; 120 George Washing-ton never the likes of him, tho' I have seen many in my day ; so tall, so straight ! and then he sat a horse and rode with such an air ! Ah, sir ; he was Hke no one else! Many of the grandest gentlemen, in their gold lace, were at the wedding, but none looked like the man himself ! ' Strong, indeed, must have been the impressions which the person and manner of Wash- ington made upon the rude, ' untutored mind ' of this poor negro, since the lapse of three quarters of a century had not sufficed to efface them." ^ This poetic ceremony took place, in all probability, at old St. Peter's Church, near the " White House," residence of Mrs. Custis^ — possibly at the fine old colonial house itself (accounts vary). A little more than a century later, another noble Federal soldier, commander of a mighty host then slowly enveloping Richmond, knelt at the altar of this venerable old forest church, and prayed most fervently that he, like Washington a hundred years before, might become the saviour of his distracted country ! ^ It was a curious coincidence that the surrender of Fort Duquesne and of the fair and charming widow took place almost simultaneously. Of her personal characteristics her grandson writes : " In person, Mrs. Washington was well-formed, and somewhat below the middle size. To judge from * G. W. P. Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, p. 501. 'Gen. G. B. McClellan, Diary. The Widow Custis 121 her portrait at Arlington House, painted by Wool- aston, in 1757, when she was in the bloom of life, she must at that period have been eminently handsome. In her dress^ though plain, she was so scrupulously neat, that ladies have often wondered how Mrs. Wash- ington could wear a gown for a week, go through her kitchen and laundries, and all the varieties of places in the routine of domestic management, and yet the gown retained its snow-Hke whiteness, unsullied by even a single speck." ^ " Mrs. Washington was an uncommon early riser, leaving her pillow at day-dawn at all seasons of the year, and becoming at once actively engaged in her household duties. After breakfast she retired for an hour to her chamber, which hour was spent in prayer and reading the Holy Scriptures, a practice that she never omitted during half a century of her varied Hfe." 2 " Mrs. Carrington, wife of Colonel Edward Car- rington, who, with her husband, visited the family at Mount Vernon a little while before General Wash- ington's death, wrote to her sister as follows, concern- ing Mrs. Washington: ' Let us repair to the old lady's room, which is pre- cisely in the style of our good old aunt's — that is to say, nicely fixed for all sorts of work. On one side sits the chambermaid, with her knitting ; on the other, a little colored pet, learning to sew. An old decent woman is there, with her table and shears, cutting out the negroes' winter clothes, while the good old ^G. W. P. Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, p. 514. 122 Georg-e Washing-ton lady directs them all, incessantly knitting herself. She points out to me several pair of nice colored stockings and gloves she had just finished, and presents me with a pair half done, which she begs I will finish and wear for her sake.' '' Such is the picture of the wealthy and honored wife of Washington, in the privacy of her home. What an example of industry and economy for the wives and daughters of America ! Mrs. Washington always spoke of the days of her public life at New York and Philadelphia, as her * lost days.' " ^ We may well wind up this chapter with the views, in brief, of her two most recent biographers : *' Very little is really known of his wife, beyond the facts that she was petite, over-fond, hot-tempered, obstinate, and a poor speller. In 1778, she was de- scribed as ' a sociable, pretty kind of woman,' and she seems to have been but little more. One who knew her well described her as ' not possessing much sense, though a perfect lady and remarkably well calculated for her position/ and confirmatory of this is the opinion of an English traveller that * there was noth- ing remarkable in the person of the lady of the Pres- ident; she was matronly and kind, with perfect good breeding.' None the less she satisfied Washington ; even after the proverbial six months were over he re- fused to wander from Mount Vernon, writing that * I am now, I believe, fixed at this seat with an agreeable Consort for life,' and in 1783 he spoke of her as the * partner of all my Domestic enjoyments.' ^ Bishop Meade's Old Churches and Families of Virginia, vol. i, p. g8. The Widow Custis 123 '' John Adams, in one of his recurrent moods of bitterness and jealousy towards Washington, de- manded, ' Would Washington have ever been com- mander of the revolutionary army or president of the United States if he had not married the rich widow of Mr. Custis ? ' To ask such a question is to over- look the fact that Washington's colonial military fame was entirely achieved before his marriage." ^ '' To the charm of youth and beauty were added that touch of quiet sweetness and that winning grace of self-possession which come to a woman wived in her girlhood, and widowed before age or care has checked the first full tide of life. At seventeen she had married Daniel Parke Custis, a man more than twenty years her senior; but eight years of quiet love and duty as wife and mother had only made her youth the more gracious in that rural land of leisure and good neighbourhood ; and a year's widowhood had been but a suitable preparation for perceiving the charm of this stately young soldier who now came riding her way upon the public business. His age was her own ; all the land knew him and loved him for gallantry and brave capacity ; he carried himself like a prince — and he forgot his errand to linger in her company." ^ '' But when at last he was free again, there was no reason why Washington should wait longer to be happy, and he was married to Martha Custis on the 6th of January, 1759. The sun shone very bright that day, and there was the fine glitter of gold, the ^ Paul Leicester Ford, The True George Washington, p. 93. ^ Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, p. 99. 124 George Washington brave show of resplendent uniforms, in the Httle church where the marriage was solemnized. Officers of His Majesty's service crowded there, in their gold lace and scarlet coats, to see their comrade wedded ; the new Governor, Francis Fauquier, himself came, clad as befitted his rank ; and the bridegroom took the sun not less gallantly than the rest, as he rode, in blue and silver and scarlet, beside the coach and six that bore his bride homeward amidst the thronging friends of the countryside. The young soldier's love of a gallant array and a becoming ceremony was satis- fied to the full, and he must have rejoiced to be so brave a horseman on such a day. For three months of deep content he lived with his bride at her own residence, the White House, by York Riverside, where their troth had been plighted, forgetting the fatigues of the frontier, and learning gratefully the new life of quiet love and homely duty. '' These peaceful, healing months gone by, he turned once more to public business. Six months before his marriage he had been chosen a member of the House of Burgesses for Frederick County — the county which had been his scene of adventure in the old days of surveying in the wilderness, and in which ever since Braddock's fatal rout he had maintained his headquarters striving to keep the border against the savages." ^ Of the passages here quoted, let the reader select for himself the one best suited to his conception of Lady Washington, as she comes down to us on the white wings of unsullied tradition. ^ Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, p. 102. CHAPTER VIII ARCADY IN 1756-60, an English archdeacon was travelHng through Virginia on horseback, and in the course of his travels he comes to Mount Vernon, which he thus describes : *' From Colchester we went about twelve miles far- ther to Mount Vernon. This place is the property of Colonel Washington, and truly deserving of its owner. The house is most beautifully situated upon a high hill on the banks of the Potomac; and commands a noble prospect of water, of cliffs, of woods, and planta- tion. The river is nearly two miles broad, though two hundred from the mouth; and divides the dominions of Virginia from Maryland. We rested here one day, and proceeded up the river about twenty-six miles, to take a view of the Great Falls." ^ It was to this '' beautifully situated " place that the young colonel took his bride, in the spring of 1759, after a happy honeymoon of three months spent at the '' White House," part of the ancestral acres of the Dandridges. Of these acres, 15,000 belonged to the Custis estate, and came, with the fair widow's £45,000 in stocks, bonds, and money, under the care and charge of her energetic husband. * A. Burnaby, Travels Through North America, p. 67. 125 126 Georg-e Washington How energetic this young man was, and how lynx- eyed in his circumstantial consideration of all '' the ins and outs, ups and downs " of the connubial state, may be gathered from his first letter to his London agents, Robert Gary & Co., Merchants, London, and from the significant invoice that follows : " To Robert Gary and Gompany, Merchants, London " Williamsburg, i May, 1759. '' Gentln., " The inclosed is the minister's certificate of my marriage with Mrs. Martha Gustis, properly, as I am told, authenticated. You will, therefore, for the future please to address all your letters, which relate to the affairs of the late Daniel Parke Gustis, Esqr., to me, as by marriage I am entitled to a third part of that estate, and invested likewise with the care of the other two thirds by a decree of our General Gourt, which I obtained in order to strengthen the power I before had in consequence of my wife's administration. " I have many letters of yours in my possession unanswered; but at present this serves only to advise you of the above change, and at the same time to ac- quaint you, that I shall continue to make you the same consignments of tobacco as usual, and will endeavor to increase it in proportion as I find myself and the estate benefited thereby. " The scarcity of the last year's crop, and the high prices of tobacco, consequent thereupon, would, in any other case, have induced me to sell the estate's crop (which indeed is only 16 hhd.) in the country; but. Arcady 127 for a present, and I hope small advantage only, I did not care to break the chain of correspondence, that has so long subsisted, and therefore have, according to your desire, given Captn. Talman, an offer of the whole. '* On the other side is an invoice of some goods, which I beg of you to send me by the first ship, bound either to Potomack or Rappahannock, as I am in im- mediate want of them. Let them be insured, and, in case of accident re-shipped without delay. Direct for me at Mount Vernon, Potomack River, Virginia ; the former is the name of my seat, the other of the river on which 'tis situated. I am, etc. "May, 1759. " Invoice of Sundry Goods to be Ship'd by Robt. Gary, Esq., and Gompany for the use of George Wash- ington — viz : *' I Tester Bedstead 7}4 feet pitch with fashionable bleu or blue and white curtains to suit a Room laid w yl Ireld. paper. — " Window curtains of the same for two windows ; with either Papier Mache Gornish to them, or Gornish covered with the Gloth. '' I fine Bed Goverlid to match the Gurtains. 4 Ghair bottoms of the same ; that is, as much covering suited to the above furniture as will go over the seats of 4 Ghairs (which I have by me) in order to make the whole furniture of this Room uniformly handsome and genteel. " I. Fashionable Sett of Desert Glasses and Stands for Sweetmeats Jellys etc. — together with Wash Glasses and a proper Stand for these also. — '' 2 Setts of Ghamber, or Bed Garpets — Wilton. 128 George Washington " 4. Fashionable China Branches & Stands for Candles. " 2 Neat fire Screens — " 50 lbs. Spirma Citi Candles — " 6 Carving Knives and Forks — handles of Stained Ivory and bound with Silver. " A pretty large Assortment of Grass Seeds — among which let there be a good deal of Lucerne and St. Foi, especially the former, also a good deal of English bleu Grass Clover Seed I have — " I Large neat and Easy Couch for a Passage. '' 50 yards of best Floor Matting. — '' 2 pair of fashionable mixd. or Marble Cold. Silk Hose. '' 6 pr. of finest cotton Ditto. " 6 pr. of finest thread Ditto. " 6 pr. of midling Do. to cost abt 5/ " 6 pr worsted Do of yl best Sorted — 2 pr of wch to be white. " N. B. All the above Stockings to be long, and tolerably large. '' I piece of finest and most fashionable Stock Tape. " I Suit of Cloaths of the finest Cloth & fashionable colour made by the Inclos'd measure. — *' The newest and most approvd Treatise of Agri- culture — besides this, send me a Small piece in Octavo — called a New System of Agriculture, or a Speedy Way to grow Rich. " Longley's Book of Gardening. — " Gibson, upon Horses, the lattest Edition in Quarto — *' Half a dozn pair of Men's neatest shoes, and Pumps, to be made by one Didsbury on Colo. Baylor's Arcady 129 Last — but a little larger than his — & to have high heels — " 6 pr Mens riding Gloves — rather large than the middle size. " One neat Pocket Book, capable of receiving Mem- orandoms & Small Cash accts. to be made of Ivory, or any thing else that will admit of cleaning. — " Fine Soft Calf Skin for a pair of Boots — *' Ben leathr. for Soles. " Six Bottles of Greenhows Tincture. " Order from the best House in Madeira a Pipe of the best Old Wine, and let it be securd from Pil- ferers." ^ Having married a fashionable woman — a sen- sible '' nut-brov;^n maid," so brunette of complexion and brilliant of eye that tradition called her " the dark ladye " — Washington felt it necessary to be fashionable too, in all his dress and appointments; shoes, saddles, gloves, glass, table-ware, beds, dra- peries, silken hose, and daily habiliments must all be of fashionable type, cut, or kind ; the ancient hos- pitalities of the place must be kept up with a pipe of the best Madeira; ivory-handled knives, inlaid with silver, must grace the festal board, while papier- mache mouldings set off the windows whose flow- ing draperies must come from London. The Arcadian life, which was to last nearly fif- teen years, had begun. Agriculture, gardening, horses, tobacco : these are to fill the gallant Colo- nel's life for the next half-generation, and to occupy ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, pp. 126-129. 130 George Washington time and attention once wholly given to Indian warfare, expeditions into the wilderness, the settle- ment of the Ohio Company's affairs in the region of " The Beautiful River," to active and earnest correspondence with Dinwiddie about frontier dif- ficulties, building of forts, enrolment or desertion of troops, the thousand what-nots of responsible official life under Lord Albemarle, or the Earl of Loudon. The ten years of intense activity, between 1749 and 1759, were to be succeeded by fifteen years of halcyon calm — halcyon as compared with the unhal- lowed activities of the frontier — during which he was to pass through another and most honourable phase of his education for greater things, his fifteen years' service in the Virginia House of Burgesses. A premonition of this service crops out in the fol- lowing anecdote, preserved for us by William Wirt, to whom it was related by Edmund Randolph, an eye-witness of the scene : " Colonel Washington resided with his wife at the White House, for three months after marriage, for his duties as a member of the house of burgesses re- quired his presence at Williamsburg a considerable portion of that time. Soon after the meeting of that body, in January, it was resolved to return their thanks to Washington, in a public manner, for the distin- guished services which he had rendered to his country. His tried friend, Mr. Robinson, was yet the speaker, and upon him devolved the duty." The scene on the occasion, as related by Mr. Wirt, Arcady 131 on the authority of an eye-witness, was a memorable one. " As soon as Colonel Washington took his seat," says Wirt, *' Mr. Robinson, in obedience to this order, and following the impulse of his own generous and grateful heart, discharged the duty with great dignity, but with such warmth of coloring, and strength of expression, as entirely to confound the young hero. He rose to express his acknowledgments for the honor; but such was his trepidation and confusion, that he could not give distinct utterance to a single syllable. He blushed, stammered, and trembled for a second ; when the speaker relieved him, by a stroke of address that would have done honor to Louis the Fourteenth in his proudest and happiest moment. * Sit down, Mr. Washington/ said he, with a conciliatory smile, ' your modesty is equal to your valor, and that surpasses the power of any language that I possess.' " ^ We see the young officer poring over Longley's Book of Gardening, " the newest and most impor- tant Treatise of Agriculture," '' a small piece in Octavo — called A New System of Agriculture/' and Gibson upon Horses, " the latest Edition in Quarto," intent upon renewing his lands and gar- dens and grounds, delightful reminiscences of which still remain in the surroundings of Mount Vernon. His passion for fine breeds of horses is evidenced by his early order for Gibson's book on the subject, and many are the references, in the correspondence, ^ Lossing, Washington and the American Republic, vol. i, p. 288. 132 Georg-e Washington to the noble succession of blooded steeds that fol- lowed each other in his stables — Ajax, and Blue- skin, and Silver Eye, and Shakspere, Magnolia, and Prescott, and Jackson, and Nelson, the charger ridden at Cornwallis's surrender in 1781, but never again, thereafter, mounted. The young master of Mount Vernon was one of those buoyant and irrepressible personalities, who by the mere force of their buoyancy and irrepres- sibility must always rise to the top whether in peace or war. For a hundred miles around he was the envy and admiration of the colonial gentry, a stand- ing candidate when an election for burgesses was to be held, as constantly re-elected, a toast at planta- tion tables where he was Othello to many a Desdemona, a godfather in demand by the baby Vir- ginians, who took the opportunity of the mid-cen- tury to appear upon the scene, a welcome friend and adviser to those who claimed his scientific or prac- tical knowledge. The Rev. Andrew Burnaby alludes, in an ex- tended footnote, to the universal esteem in which Washington was ever thus held after his gallantry in the Braddock expedition, and, describing the political character of the Virginians of the time, remarks : '* The public or political character of the Virginians corresponds with their private one: they are haughty and jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can scarcely bear the thought of being controuled by any superior power. Many of them consider the Arcady 133 colonies as independent states, not connected with Great Britain, otherwise than by having the same com- mon king, and being bound to her by natural affection. There are but few of them that have a turn for busi- ness, and even those are by no means expert at it. I have known them, upon a very urgent occasion, vote the relief of a garrison, without once considering whether the thing was practicable, when it was most evidently and demonstrably otherwise. In matters of commerce they are ignorant of the necessary principles that must prevail between a colony and the mother country ; they think it a hardship not to have an un- limited trade to every part of the world. They consider the duties upon their staple as injurious only to them- selves ; and it is utterly impossible to persuade them that they affect the consumer also. However, to do them justice, the same spirit of generosity prevails here which does in their private character ; they never re- fuse any necessary supplies for the support of gov- ernment when called upon, and are a generous and loyal people. " The women are, generally speaking, handsome, though not to be compared with our fair country- women in England. They have but few advantages, and consequently are seldom accomplished ; this makes them reserved, and unequal to any interesting or re- fined conversation. They are immoderately fond of dancing, and indeed it is almost the only amusement they partake of: but even in this they discover want of taste and elegance, and seldom appear with that gracefulness and ease, which these movements are calculated to display." ^ * A. Burnaby, Travels Through North America, pp. 55-56. 134 Georg^e Washing^ton Virginia, indeed, was about to enter into that *' imminent deadly breach," which even now was widening fearfully between mother and daughter, and could only be bridged over by thousands of slain and millions of money. The venerable arch- deacon, fresh from his Greenwich vicarage, and full of his old-world sensitiveness to impressions, felt this growing independence of Virginia, and breathed it vigorously into the ear of his countrymen as soon as he returned to England. Washington's Journal of this period is filled with minute and interesting particulars of his life and occupations a year after his marriage. " Mrs. Wash- ington is taken down with Meazles," and ladies and gentlemen come and go in their '' chariots," which lumber from plantation to plantation in the slow manner of the time. Bishop Meade, in his Old Churches^ gives a quaint account of the fates and fortunes of one of the Washington chariots which fell into his possession: " There was, however, one object of interest belong- ing to General Washington, concerning which I have a special right to speak, — viz.: his old English coach, in which himself and Mrs. Washington not only rode in Fairfax county, but travelled through the length and breadth of our land. So faithfully was it executed that, at the conclusion of this long journey, its builder, who came over with it and settled in Alexandria, was proud to be told by the General that not a nail or screw had failed. It so happened, in a way I need not state, that this coach came into my hands about fifteen years Arcady 135 after the death of General Washington. In the course of time, from disuse, it being too heavy for these lat- ter days, it began to decay and give way. Becoming an object of desire to those who delight in relics, I caused it to be taken to pieces and distributed among the admiring friends of Washington who visited my house, and also among a number of female associations for benevolent and religious objects, which associa- tions, at their fairs and on other occasions, made a large profit by converting the fragments into walking- sticks, picture-frames, and snuff-boxes. About two- thirds of one of the wheels thus produced one hundred and forty dollars. There can be no doubt but that at its dissolution it yielded more to the cause of charity than it did to its builder at its first erection. Besides other mementos of it, I have in my study, in the form of a sofa, the hind-seat, on which the General and his lady were wont to sit." ^ '' I have always considered marriage," wrote Washington, '' as the most interesting event of one's life " ; '' you too," he wrote to Chastellux, " have caught that terrible contagion domestic felicity — which same, like the smallpox or the plague, a man can have only once in his life; because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America, — I don't know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole lifetime." Washington had indeed " caught the contagion " of which he whites, once for all. Always a favourite with women, who wrote to him off and on during * Bishop Meade, Old Churches and Families of Virginia, vol. ii, p. 237. 136 Georg-e Washington his entire life, and eagerly courted his notice both during the dark and the bright days of the Revolu- tion, he has left many charming references to them in his letters to Nellie Custis, Mrs. Fairfax, '' Jackie " Custis's widow, and others, and he ex- celled in all the polite accomplishments which the women of the eighteenth century were supposed most to desire. He rode well, was an accomplished dancer (keeping up the Terpsichorean grace till he was sixty-six), played loo, whist, and other games, though never with the feverish passion of Charles James Fox, and his other great contemporaries across the water; was a tried pedestrian, thinking nothing (as Burnaby says) of walking four hun- dred miles to the Ohio and back, on his mission to St. Pierre; and was an adept in swordmanship, learned from his old teacher. Van Braam. No apothecary's or mercer's clerk could be more minute than he, when he was ordering medicines for Mount Vernon or dress-goods for Mrs. Wash- ington; and Master John and Miss Patsy came in for their London orders on Gary & Co., for all sorts of haberdashery, trinkets, toys, dolls (" fash- ionable " at 10 shillings), children's books, pastes, powders, perfumes, '' trifles light as air," yet heavy enough to load a good ship, travelling Virginia- ward in the changeable frost-laden weather of 1760. Even a pair of stays is ordered for the tiny miss of four, and pumps and breast-knots, ribbons for the hair, and buckles for the shoes, ivory combs and " minikin " and corking pins, packs of playing cards, Arcady 137 bell-glasses, scarlet broadcloth, " Easter Hats at about 5 Shillings," and ct ceteras innumerable, pic- turesquely interspersed with orders for green tea, cheese, plantation utensils, jalap, and hogsheads of porter. Tobacco was at that time (Burnaby) selling at fifty shillings a hundredweight; and Washington is very solicitous about the great staple, 16,000 pounds of which was lawful salary for a " parson," of whom there were then between sixty and seventy, mostly praiseworthy persons, says the archdeacon, in the province. The broad Potomac stretched in shining silver at the door, and there on many a summer's day, or springtime morning, when the marvellous shoals of shad and herring began their ruil up the river, might be witnessed the tragedy chronicled in the archdeacon's pages: " A very curious sight is frequently exhibited upon this and the other great rivers in Virginia, which for its novelty is exceedingly diverting to strangers. Dur- ing the spring and summer months the fishing-hawk is often seen hovering over the rivers, or resting on the wing without the least visible change of place for some minutes, then suddenly darting down and plung- ing into the water, from whence it seldom rises again without a rock fish, or some other considerable fish, in its talons. It immediately shakes off the water like a mist, and makes the best of its way towards the woods. The bald eagle, which is generally upon the watch, instantly pursues, and if it can overtake^ en- 138 Georg-e Washing-ton deavours to soar above it. The hawk growing soli- citous for its own safety drops the fish, and the bald eagle immediately stoops, and seldom fails to catch it in its pounces before it reaches the water." ^ Many a time did Washington, doubtless, become a spectator of the airy battle, as he strode up and down the pillared portico of his residence, and looked out over the river to the soft, blue hills of the Dominion of Maryland, where ninety thousand loyal subjects of King George III. (but just proclaimed King) then dwelt in peace and plenty; times so peaceful and plenteous that diamond-back terrapin were fed to negroes, and wild-duck — teal, mallard, red-head, or what not — to him that fancied it. Visits to this delectable land varied with trips to Williamsburg, and trots to Alexandria, in chaise, chariot, or aback of one of the fine saddle-horses. Hardly a day passed without the round of the plan- tations being traversed over ten or fifteen miles of delightful woodland, or through fields where the bannered tobacco lifted its pale-green, mullein-like stalks, and flung to the breeze those wonderfully delicate leaves which, from the cradle to the grave, from burgeon to blossom and ripening sweetness, needed tireless vigilance against worm and blight and pest of every description, until they turned into the golden leaves that, literally, became leaves of gold in the warehouses of Robert Gary & Go., of the London market. * A. Burnaby, Travels Through North America, p. 68. Arcady 139 The vast leisure of Arcadian life lent Washington time for those huge invoices — all in his own auto- graph — which he from time to time despatched to London, invoices which give faithful glimpses of the luxury of the years antedating '76, as well as of the details of a well-ordered gentleman's household. As Washington re-wrote his " dear Patsy's " let- ters for her when occasion required, so, doubtless, the pair consulted together over these marvellous lists to be forwarded to London, including every- thing from '' white and brown sugar Candy " to " tester Bedsteads," emetics, purges, brimstone, " spermi Ceti " candles, and exact measurements for " shoes like Colonel Baylor's." Intense must have been the excitement and amuse- ment in the Mount Vernon household, when some agile little '' picaninny " came flying up to the " Great House," and announced that a white-sailed brig or bark had dropped anchor at the wharf below, while the browned and whiskered master, tawny with sea-salt and sunburn, asked for Colonel Wash- ington. And the unpacking of such an invoice as the four or five double-columned one, on page 134 of Ford's Writings of George Washington, must have been the opening of the realm of King Santa Claus him- self, when it reached Mount Vernon. Interesting accounts exist of the celebration of Christmas at this very time, in the Old Dominion, in the Journal kept by a Princeton divinity student, then tutor at Nomini Hall, seat of the Carters, not I40 George Washington far from Mount Vernon, and within convenient riding distance of Bushfield, where John Augustine Washington Hved, and of Mount Airy, the lovely and lordly seat of the Tayloes (still in existence). This w^orthy gentleman went down to Virginia, what the slang of the day called a " blue " Pres- byterian ; but after a year's residence at " Nomini Hall" became almost a "perverted" Episcopalian in point of reverence for dancing, horse-racing, cock- fighting, " stepping the minuet," toasting the ladies, and other genial amusements then prevalent in the " Northern Neck." The negroes (of whom there were six hundred on the sixty thousand Carter acres) expected liberal remembrances in the way of ''bits" and half-bits (parts of a divided pisterine, used as currency, and equivalent to a few pence, English), rum-and-water, '' pisimmon " extract (as Master Fithian writes it), and other potential spirit- uous agencies; the gentry rode from plantation to plantation forming house-parties or giving balls, ladies in the gorgeous quilted skirts, bodices, and brocades of the period, with creped hair, fantastic- ally wreathed with artificial flowers and strings of pearls, " tripped the light fantastic toe " through the mazes of the dance until dawn glistened over the rosy Potomac, and marches, jigs, reels, and '' coun- try dances " (cotillions) succeeded each other in swift profusion. Councillor Carter was a born musician, and his house resounded with the tinkling guitar, the silvery harmonicum (just invented by the all-accomplished Benjamin Franklin), the violin, WASHINGTON MEDAL (1776). Arcady 141 flute, harpsichord, and organ; each of the seven children played on something or other, and even the Presbyterian tutor beguiles one of the Carter boys to play the flute for him twenty minutes every night after he had retired to bed. Nellie Custis's harpsi- chord — on which " she played and cried and cried and played " when her inexorable grandmamma, Mrs. Washington, made her practice six hours a day — and Washington's flute were not yet part of the paraphernalia of Mount Vernon; but there can be no doubt of the Colonel's fondness for music, dancing, the whist-table (note the two dozen packs of playing cards ordered in one of his invoices), the back of a fine horse, and the soft swing and swoop of a luxurious chariot. It is on record that he danced three hours hand-running, without once sit- ting down, when Mrs. Nathaniel Greene, wife of the General, was his partner at a historic ball ; while his ever-conscientious expense-book records, in 1756 or '57, " 8 Shillings at Cards " and sundry sums for " treats " to the Philadelphia ladies, at the time when the fair eyes of Mary Philipse rested benev- olently for a moment on him. His fondness for theatres and theatricals was always a marked char- acteristic, and numerous are the allusions to them in his social correspondence and the gazettes of the time. Even Arcady, however, had to surrender to punc- tilio and punctuality : the timepieces of Mount Vernon — gilt French, or '' grandfather " chronom- eters as they might be — marked off the hours with 142 George Washing-ton a systematic regularity and even rigour, which startled more than one easy-going guest. The Arcadian couple rose at dawn, when the lady betook herself to her Bible and her housekeeping, and the lord (after building his own fire, shaving himself neatly, and tying his own cue) went forth to inspect stables and kennels, then back to his favourite breakfast of tea and corn-cakes. After breakfast, donning his drab riding-suit, high boots, and gauntlets, he rode one of his excel- lent horses over the plantation, visited the wheat and tobacco-fields, interviewed the overseer, in- spected the mills, fisheries, negro quarters, listened sympathetically to the complaints of the sick and aged, had them humanely attended to, and returned to the mansion to " post his accounts " (a favourite occupation), study his gardening or horse-breeding manuals, look over the Williamsburg Gazette, with its already perceptible mutterings of discontent and revolution, or converse with the guests, who were already beginning to make of Mount Vernon what he, later, described it to his mother as, '' a tavern." Dr. Burnaby was one of the countless host who en- joyed this unbroken hospitality, a hospitality dupli- cated in a slight degree, a hundred years later, at Craigie House, when every distinguished foreigner that visited America bore a letter to Longfellow. At three o'clock, dinner was served, Washington never allowing more than five minutes' difference in watches to delay the meal, and humorously throw- ing the blame for the inopportune punctuality on the Arcady 143 cook, " who could not wait." In about an hour the meal was over, and then, towards five or six, after the habitual nuts, raisins, and toasts — " to the fair," to the " Sons of Liberty," to " American trade and commerce" (as time wagged on towards 1776), came the ever-delightful tea and its deshabille talk. Washington took no supper. At nine o'clock, taking up a candle in its bright brass candlestick, the host mounted the staircase and lighted his more distinguished guests, person- ally, to bed. Of course, the routine varied when balls or entertainments or evening parties were formally given, and the neighbours at Gunston Hall, Belvoir, Nomini Hall, or Mount Airy assembled to do honour to the mistress of Mount Vernon in a set entertainment. Then, indeed, the musical chimes in the old clocks jingled out the midnight hour many a time and oft, and the flying hours (as in the ex- quisite fresco of Guido) saw the high-heeled dames, and powdered and ruffled cavaliers still entangled in the meshes of the latest dance from Versailles or St. James's. The worthy Fithian w.as rudely tempted by these gracious pleasantries, and often expressed his bitter regrets that he could not conscientiously enter into the innocent and harmless gaieties of the Virginians. One thing, however, he could not help doing: he would toast the absent " Laura," when it fell his turn — as it did to old Caedmon a thousand years before — " to play at the harp and sing a song," i.e., 144 Georg-e Washington to drink a toast; and Fithian gladly did so with the gallants of Nomini Hall. Indeed, his Diary (dated 1773-74) contains various and sundry en- tries of strong drinks and potations for a sick body, somewhat inconsistent with the contempt showered, occasionally, on the junketting Virginians, whose '' rings of beaux " stand outside the churches on Sundays, until the parson sends the clerk to hale them in to proper service, and dame and cavalier go around giving invitations to dinner after a fifteen minutes' sermon. Seeing that Councillor Carter successively went through the phases of the Estab- lished, the Baptist, and the Swedenborgian churches, and wound up by becoming a Papist, the young Presbyterian divine had ample opportunity at least to exercise his theological acumen. But he never swerved from the Westminster Catechism, and died a gallant soldier, sick of camp fever, at Fort Wash- ington in 1776, Virginia, to the last, abiding a pleas- ant memory in his soul. The old baronial style of living, between the par- allels of the original grant, was in this decade in its full glory: the Byrds of Westover, the Harrisons and Carters of Brandon and Shirley, the Lewises of Kenmore, the Fairfaxes of Greenway Court and Belvoir, the Masons of Gunston Hall, the Calverts over the Potomac, as it swept grandly from its cata- ract to the Chesapeake, the Pages and Nelsons of Rosewell, the Lees of Stratford and Chantilly — all kept up an easy-going, semi-feudal state, into which the Washingtons as easily fell by right of lineage. Arcady 1 45 as well as of wealth and influential position in colo- nial circles. The Parkes had distinguished them- selves in many a hard-fought campaign under Marlborough, and Queen Anne, herself, had be- stowed her jewelled likeness and a brace of silver candlesticks (still owned by the Lee family) on the ancestor of the line, who first brought to her tidings of the great victory of Blenheim ; and kindred over- sea were speedily to contend for the honour of even a remote connection with the stars, mullets, bars, and heraldic raven of the Washingtons. And thus the golden days — the Saturnia regna sung in enchanting measures by the Mantuan poet — went by, and Washington might well repeat to the Marquis de Chastellux that '' the married state was the most interesting in the world." He had reached the Golden Milestone. CHAPTER IX THE GOLDEN MILESTONE WASHINGTON was now eight-and-twenty, an age at which the younger Pitt was already prime minister of Great Britain, Burke had already written '' On the Sublime and Beautiful," the ora- tory of Charles James Fox had begun to assume a ripened effulgence, and a whole band of young im- mortals — Goethe, Burns, Lucan, Hugo, Byron — were already basking in the golden light which legend wreathed poetically about the summit of " twin-peaked Parnassus " ; yet nothing fantastic- ally precocious as yet appeared in the steadfast young American, settled at Mount Vernon as a model farmer, and pursuing the bucolic pleasures of agriculture as tranquilly as if he had just stepped out of the Ge orgies of Virgil. The restful years that followed the volcanic decade of 1750- 1760 were years of quiet preparation, unconscious maturing of the intellectual powers, unnoticed growth in political sagacity, and gathering of virile strength for use in the approaching struggle with the mother-country. The Rev. Samuel Davies, in a sermon preached in Pennsylvania, shortly after Braddock's defeat, had prophetically foreshadowed Washington's life when he said : 146 The Golden Milestone 147 " As a remarkable instance of this, I may point out to the pubHc that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto pre- served in so signal a manner for some important ser- vice to his country." ^ This " heroic lad " had steadily grown into the formidable and accomplished leader who, on resign- ing his colonelcy in 1759, after his arduous duties were consummated, was affectionately addressed by his associate officers in the following terms : " ' Judge, then, how sensibly we must be affected with the loss of such an excellent commander, such a sincere friend, and so affable a companion. How rare is it to find these amiable qualities blended in one man ! How great the loss of such a man ! ... It gives us additional sorrow,' they continued, ' when we reflect, to find our unhappy country will receive a loss no less irreparable than our own. Where will it meet a man, so experienced in military affairs — one so renowned for patriotism, conduct, and courage? Who has so great a knowledge of the enemy we have to deal with? who so well acquainted with their sit- uation and strength? who so much respected by the soldiery? who, in short, so able to support the military character of Virginia? ' " ^ Then requesting him to name a fit successor, they added in conclusion : ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. i, p. 176, note. ^ Lossing, Washington and the American Republic, vol. i, p. 286. 148 George Washing-ton " ' Frankness, sincerity, and certain openness of soul, are the true characteristics of an officer, and we flat- ter ourselves that you do not think us capable of say- ing anything contrary to the purest dictates of our minds. Fully persuaded of this, we beg leave to as- sure you that, as you have hitherto been the actuating soul of our whole corps, we shall at all times pay the most invariable regard to your will and pleasure, and will always be happy to demonstrate by our actions how much we respect and esteem you.' " ' This opinion,' says Marshall, ' was not confined to the officers of his regiment. It was common to Vir- ginia, and had been adopted by the British officers with whom he served. The duties he performed, though not splendid, were arduous ; and were executed with zeal and with judgment. The exact discipline he established in his regiment, when the temper of Virginia was extremely hostile to discipline, does credit to his military character ; and the gallantry his troops displayed, whenever called into action, mani- fests the spirit infused into them by their com- mander.' " ^ After the strenuous military experience of 1753- T758, it was most fitting that the next stage in this remarkable career should be pastoral, almost bucolic, the life of a quiet country gentleman who, having married a woman of wealth and refinement, settles down to a domestic felicity, which he playfully de- scribes to the Marquis de Chastellux as *' a con- tagion " that has at length caught the misanthrope ^ Lossing, Washington and the American Republic, vol. i, p. 286. The Golden Milestone 149 himself. Washington could not read French, and perhaps had never even heard of Moliere, and yet, in his humorous raillery of the marquis, he uncon- sciously reproduces the denoitment of Le Misan- thrope. A little over a hundred miles from Mount Vernon lay Williamsburg, the old colonial capital where a hundred and odd gentlemen, calling themselves bur- gesses, met as the people's representatives, discussed public questions affecting the commonwealth, voted supplies for the maintenance of the colonial gov- ernment, and constituted one of those marvellous playgrounds of politics and statesmanship, thirteen of which were soon to write in federal union, and produce the document which Gladstone called the most wonderful that ever emanated from the brain of man — the American Constitution. Some of these plain country gentlemen had been educated in England, at Oxford, or Lincoln's Inn, or had been classically trained in philosophy and the humanities under the six professors of William and Mary College, the Alma Mater of Jefferson, Mon- roe, Tyler, and Chief Justice Marshall, the college of which Washington became chancellor in 1777. This quaint old sprawling village — truly a " city of magnificent distances " as it stretched east and west into the primeval forest, and gathered into its skirts ample spaces of the Middle Plantation — was part of this time under the social sovereignty of Lord Botetourt, a man whose grace of manner and firmness of touch led Horace Walpole to charac- 150 Georg-e Washington terise him as " a bit of enamelled iron." The charm of his ostentatious courtesy and high spirits led Virginia to remember him with pleasure, and name one of her most beautiful counties after him, as she cherished the name and fame of Berkeley, Spots- wood, Fairfax, Loudon, Fauquier, and Dinwiddie. Many of the wealthier planter burgesses had homes at Williamsburg, where they kept open house in the fashion of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrimage, and where, at the ever-spread table, it fairly " snew " with abundance of good things for the delectation of the nomad legislator. Hither the Washingtons came during the fifteen years the Colonel was a member of the House; and it may readily be inferred, that the representative of Fairfax County stood easily among the first, in that company of a hundred gentlemen and schol- ars whom Virginia had assembled, at the Raleigh Tavern or in the palace of Lord Botetourt, to dis- cuss and decide subjects vital to her interests. It is a strange fact, that Washington's corre- spondence is almost bare of references to his legis- lative life at Williamsburg, the numerous letters and diaries that remain being absorbed almost wholly with domestic matters, the management of his estates, orders on London for household use, occasional sharp reproofs to his London agents for extortionate charges and mean quality of goods, and detailed communications to the Governor, Council, and others, relative to land surveys and the taking up of reservations on the Ohio and Great The Golden Milestone 151 Kanawha. Washington was what would now be called " land-hungry," and possessed a keen eye for the choice and appropriation of the rich black bot- tom lands along the rivers of the western country. His experience as a land-surveyor — a position to which he had in his youth been licensed by William and Mary College — had educated both eye and judgment in the discovery of soils and locations adapted to agriculture, while the generous scale on which the life at Mount Vernon was laid out com- pelled him to husband and enlarge his resources in every legitimate way possible. It is curious to read his responses to would-be borrowers who, presum- ing on the lavish hospitality that prevailed at Mount Vernon, wrote to ask sums ranging from twenty to five hundred pounds. Mrs. W^ashington's two hun- dred or three hundred negroes were hardly suffi- cient to run the various plantations, and there are occasional references to the purchase of skilled labourers, masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and the like — whose " likeliness " can be turned to the profit of the estate. Washington did not touch tobacco in any shape or form, but his farmer's instinct was much con- centrated on the cultivation of the weed, which, besides tlie fragrant leaf, turned out the crop of *' barons of the Potomac " who made this lordly river celebrated. As there were few towns in Virginia then worth speaking of, Washington's letters to his agents abound in directions to sail for the Potomac River, 152 George Washington " which flows past my seat," and not to the York or Rappahannock, where Mrs. Washington's relatives reside; the anchorage at Mount Vernon being par- ticularly good, free from wind, and sheltered from weather vicissitudes. The goods that came from London frequently arrived at the wrong landing, variously damaged or mutilated, in bad condition owing to hurried disem- barkation or careless packing. During this con- templative stage of his existence, the Colonel found time to order, from a London art dealer, plaster busts of Alexander, Julius Csesar, Prince Eugene, the Duke of Marlborough, and the King of Prussia ; adding to this formidable list of military heroes, gentler concessions to the fair sex in the shape of groups of Bacchus and Flora, " Lyons " rampant or otherwise for the chimneypiece, and a long list of literary celebrities, such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shak- spere, and certain Greek and Roman poets. Among these details a green silk " Saque " of Mrs. Wash- ington's finds lodgment, which is to be re-dyed and made over or " turned into a genteel night-gown." The sylvan chronicle moves quaintly on, and em- braces among much else the following : " Went a fox huntg. with Lord Fairfax and Colo. Fairfax, and my Br. Catchd. 2 Foxes. Began to gather corn at the Mill. " 23. Went a huntg. again with Lord Fairfax and his Brother, and Col. Fairfax. Catchd. nothing that we knew of. A fox was started. The Golden Milestone 153 " 24. Mr. Robt. Alexander here ; Went into the Neck. " 25. Mr. Bryan Fairfax, as also Messrs. Grayson and Phil. Alexander, came here by sunrise. Hunted and catchd. a fox with these and my Lord his Bro. and Colo. Fairfax, all of whom with Mrs. Fx. and Mr. Wetson ( ?) of Engd dined here. " 26. Hunted again in the above Compa. but catchd nothing. " 2y. Went to Church. " 28. Went to the Vestry at Pohick Church. ''29. Went a Huntg. with Lord Fairfax etc. Catchd a Fox. " 30. At home all day. Colo. Mason and Mr. Cock- burne came in the evening. '' December " I. Went to the Election of Burgesses for this County and was there, with Colo. West chosen. Stayd all Night to a Ball wch. I had given. '' 2. Returnd home after dinner, accompanied by Colo. Mason, Mr. Cockburn and Messrs. Henderson Ross and Lawson. " 3. Went a fox huntg. in Company with Lord and Colo. Fairfax, Captn. McCarty and Messrs. Hender- son and Ross. Started nothing. My Br. came in ye afternoon." ^ In 1772, a famous portrait-painter comes along, and Charles Wilson Peale paints for us the well- known portrait of Washington as Colonel of the 22nd Virginia regiment, in blue coat faced with *Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 255. 154 Georg-e Washing-ton scarlet, " Wolfe " hat, sash, and gorget — a picture now hanging in the chapel of Washington and Lee University at Lexington, Virginia. Peak also painted charming portraits of Mrs. Washington and her daughter and son, still owned by descendants of the family. Washington writes humorously of the sittings : " To Dr. Boucher " Mount Vernon, 21st May, 1772. '' Inclination having yielded to Importunity, I am now contrary to all expectation under the hands of Mr. Peale ; but in so grave — so sullen a mood — and now and then under the influence of Morpheus, when some critical strokes are making, that I fancy the skill of this Gentleman's Pencil, will be put to it, in describing to the World what manner of man I am." ^ Thus in easy round of work, exercise, and enter- tainment, life on the Potomac in the sixties wagged along, filled with the busy nothings of rural exist- ence on a great plantation; the clatter of horse and hounds rang over the clear frosty hills, as the fox- hunting cavalcade, headed by Washington on *' Blueskin," and Billy Lee on " Chickling," thun- dered over hill and dale after the grey foxes that " Vulcan," " Music," or " Sweet Lips " had started from their woodland lairs. Frosty Januarys faded into flowering Mays, and the bright Virginian sum- mers ripened into those exquisite Octobers that sage meteorologists, like Burnaby, Fithian, Robert Bever- * Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 349. The Golden Milestone 155 ley, and Thomas Jefferson, set down in the weather tables or their diaries as the fairest in the world — " the season of sweet savours." Twice a year, the great ships from London dropped anchor in the river opposite the mansion, and unloaded the bales and boxes consigned to its owner. The rippling smoothness of the chronicle is occa- sionally interrupted by an entry of illness, a record of a fortnight's absence at the Warm Springs in Berkeley County, in search of health, an exchange of courtesies with Governor Eden, Lord Dunmore (who arrived from New York in 1772, an ominous forerunner of Revolution), or the Calverts, or deep solicitude about '' Jackie " Custis, the " son-in-law " as Washington quaintly calls him, who is wholly given to '' horses, dogs, and guns," and has pre- maturely taken it into his head to fall in love with pretty Miss Calvert, lineal descendant of the Lords Baltimore. Washington hastily rides to New York and enters the young scapegrace at King's College, in the hope of counteracting the fair Marylander's charms; but all to no avail. He explains to the young lady's father that Custis has an ample for- tune of £8,000 " upon bond," fifteen thousand acres at or near Williamsburg, and two or three hundred negroes, besides his ultimate interest in his mother'? dower; but to Dr. Boucher, that the boy at seven- teen is almost totally ignorant of arithmetic, knows no Latin or Greek, and should know French '' which is now deemed one of the indispensable polite accomplishments of the day." 156 Georg-e Washington It was during this period that he became deeply interested in a project to drain the Dismal Swamp, rode down thither on an exploring expedition, and examined the great morass almost as fully as Colonel Byrd of Westover had done in 1728, when establishing the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina. Later on in his life, he became profoundly interested in improving the navigation of the Potomac, and in the James River and Kana- wha Canal project, designed to connect the interior water-system of the continent with the ocean. Lord Dunmore sought his advice and companion- ship, in a proposed journey of inspection and ex- ploitation to the Ohio Valley where, in the vicinity of Louisville and Cincinnati, titles from his land- patents still exist. There is no evidence in Washington's letters, how he viewed the Mephistophelean character of this last royal Governor of Virginia; nor whether he credited the accounts of his arrogance and ava- rice. The letters from the Colonel to the Earl are couched in punctilious forms that seem to have been learned from some old-w^orld manual, almost obse- quious in their long-drawn-out circumlocutions of respect. When Sunday came, a great stillness and rev- erence fell over Mount Vernon. Washington never received visitors on Sunday at this time. Over in the noble old woods skirting his estates, six or seven miles distant, lay Pohick Church, where the Rev. Charles Green had officiated, as Rector of Truro The Golden Milestone 157 Parish, from 1738 to 1765. Of this fine old colo- nial church, Bishop Meade gives an interesting account : '' The Old Pohick Church was a frame building, and occupied a site on the south side of Pohick Run, and about two miles from the present, which is on the north side of the run. When it was no longer fit for use, it is said the parishioners were called together to determine on the locality of the new church, when George Mason, the compatriot of Washington, and senior vestryman, advocated the old site, pleading that it was the house in which their fathers wor- shipped, and that the graves of many were around it, while Washington and others advocated a more cen- tral and convenient one. The question was left unset- tled and another meeting for its decision appointed. Meanwhile Washington surveyed the neighbourhood, and marked the houses and distances on a well drawn map, and, when the day of decision arrived, met all the arguments of his opponent by presenting this paper, and thus carried his point. In place of any descrip- tion of this house in its past or present condition, I offer the following report of a visit made to it in 1837 : '' My next visit was to Pohick Church, in the vicinity of Mount Vernon, the seat of General Washington. I designed to perform service there on Saturday as well as Sunday, but through some mistake no notice was given for the former day. The weather indeed was such as to prevent the assembling of any but those who prize such occasions so much as to be deterred only by very strong considerations. It was still rain- ing when I approached the house, and found no one there. The wide-open doors invited me to enter, — 158 Georg-e Washing^ton as they do invite, day and night, through the year, not only the passing traveller, but every beast of the field and fowl of the air. These latter, however, seem to have reverenced the house of God, since few marks of their pollution are to be seen throughout it. The interior of the house, having been well built, is still good. The chancel. Communion-table, and tables of the law, etc., are still there and in good order. The roof only is decaying ; and at the time I was there the rain was dropping on these sacred places and on other parts of the house. On the doors of the pews, in gilt letters, are still to be seen the names of the principal families which once occupied them. How could I, while for at least an hour traversing those long aisles, entering the sacred chancel, ascending the lofty pulpit, forbear to ask, And is this the house of God which was built by the VVashingtons, the Masons, the Mc- Cartys, the Grahams, the Lewises, the Fairfaxes ? — the house in which they used to worship the God of our fathers according to the venerable forms of the Epis- copal Church, — and some of whose names are yet to be seen on the doors of those now deserted pews? Is this also destined to moulder piecemeal away, or, when some signal is given, to become the prey of spoilers, and to be carried hither and thither and applied to every purpose under heaven? '' Surely patriotism, or reverence for the greatest of patriots, if not religion, might be effectually ap- pealed to in behalf of this one temple of God. The particular location of it is to be ascribed to Washing- ton, who, being an active member of the vestry when it was under consideration and in dispute where it should be placed, carefully surveyed the whole parish, The Golden Milestone 159 and, drawing an accurate and handsome map of it with his own hand, showed clearly where the claims of justice and the interests of religion required its erection. " It was to this church that Washington for some years regularly repaired^ at a distance of six or seven miles, never permitting any company to prevent the regular observance of the Lord's day." ^ After the Revolution, from 1785, the family became regular attendants of Christ's Church, Alex- andria, where their pew is still shown. There can be no reasonable doubt that Washing- ton was, from the beginning, a devout believer in Christianity; his letters abound in evidences of this belief and are full of invocations to Divine Provi- dence. His public orders and commands to his soldiers, during the war, constantly reminded them of their dependence on God, the necessity of suppli- cating His mercy and help in the great struggle, and the duty of observing Sunday. For a long time he w^as a communicant of the Episcopal Church, a vestryman of Truro Parish, and diligent in the read- ing of sermons and good books at home when the weather w^as too inclement for church. He was, indeed, markedly punctilious in the observance of all his religious duties. He fasted when a day of public humiliation, prayer, and fasting was ordered by the burgesses on the eve of the Revolution : his entry in his diary is : '' Fasted all day." ^Bishop Meade, Old Churches and Families of Virginia, vol. ii, p. 227. i6o Georg-e Washing-ton Mrs. Washington lived and died a devout com- municant of the Church; and, while her husband did not take the learned interest in its theology and dogma that Jefferson took, there is every reason to believe that his life was continually ordered by its precepts, from the time he imbibed them from the teachings of his excellent mother. '' The fierce light that beats against a throne " has shone with implacable inquisitiveness into every nook and cranny of Washington's soul, but has searched in vain to find him anything but a plain, high-minded, reverential Christian gentleman. Jef- ferson may veil himself in verbal evasions, ingenu- ities, and ambiguities, due to over-much erudition and a morbid aversion to the methods of the Inqui- sition ; but the first President of the United States never juggled with words, never quibbled with his conscience, and everywhere and on all occasions showed himself a simple, plain-spoken, unostenta- tious believer in the Christian religion. During these idyllic days of plantation life, how- ever, chequered with their manifold vicissitudes of light and shade, fell one great shadow across the threshold of Mount Vernon : Patsy Custis, beloved namesake and daughter of Martha Washington, was seized with an attack of constitutional malady of the heart, and suddenly expired in the bloom of her fair young life. The grief caused by this be- reavement shows pathetically in a letter of Wash- ington, addressed to a friend : MARTHA WASHINGTON. From the portrait by Gilbert Stuart. The Golden Milestone i6i " To Colonel Bassett " Mount Vernon, 20th June, 1773. " Dear Sir, "It is an easier matter to conceive, than to describe the distress of this Family ; especially that of the un- happy Parent of our Dear Patsy Custis, when I in- form you that yesterday removed the Sweet Innocent Girl Entered [sic] into a more happy and peaceful abode than any she has met with in the afflicted Path she hitherto has trod/ '' She arose from Dinner about four o'clock in better health and spirits than she appeared to have been in for some time; soon after which she was seized with one of her usual Fits, and expired in it, in less than two minutes without uttering a word, a groan, or scarce a sigh. — This sudden, and unexpected blow, I scarce need add has almost reduced my poor Wife to the lowest ebb of Misery ; which is encreas'd by the absence of her son, (whom I have just fixed at the College in New York from whence I returned the 8th Inst) and want of the balmy consolation of her Rela- tions ; which leads me more than ever to wish she could see them, and that I was Master of Arguments pow- erful enough to prevail upon Mrs. Dandridge [her mother] to make this place her entire and absolute home. I should think as she lives a lonesome life (Betsey being married) it might suit her well, and be agreeable, both to herself and my Wife, to me most assuredly it would. *' I do not purpose to add more at present, the end ^ " 19. About five o'clock poor Patsy Custis died suddenly." — From an interleaved Almanac. 1 62 George Washing-ton of my writing being only to inform you of this un- happy change." ^ In the course of these halcyon years, Washington had several times written that " the grim King of Terrors " had come very near to him, but never be- fore had he actually entered the Mount Vernon household, much less snatched away its fairest blossom. Mrs. Washington was to survive both her hus- band and all her children. ^Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, pp. 384-385. CHAPTER X OLD WILLIAMSBURG ^^T^HE most ancient and loyal colony of Vir- 1 ginia " has had, in its day (of three hundred years), three different capitals, corresponding to its three periods of infancy, youth, and maturity. Of the first — historic Jamestown — only an ivied church tower and a garland of immortal memories remain to tell the noble tale of Virginia colonisation, historic tatters, tasselled with innumerable threads of incident that cling to Virginia's earliest history. The eager seas, that brought the merchant adven- turers to the New World, ate perpetually at the shores of the island city, and threatened to engulf it in absolute obliteration, when pious hands, in our day, rescued it from this ignoble end. For more than ninety years it was the heart and soul of Vir- ginia affairs, ravaged by fire and flood, encom- passed with bloody hostilities on all sides, from the beginning, the centre of a long and tangled history, the apparently indestructible old town crumbled and rose again, rose and crumbled though breathing in great breaths of air from the ocean that stretched almost to its feet, and refusing stubbornly to give up its semi-royal existence until, in 1698, the re- morseless Nicholson tore it up by the roots and 163 164 George Washing-ton transplanted the ancient shoot to WilHamsburg, a few miles inland. The Virginia of John Smith, of Sir Francis Wyatt, of the fiery Berkeley, the tragic Virginia of Powhatan, the Lady Pocahontas, and Nathaniel Ba- con, began and ended about the spacious bays and rivers amid which Jamestown sat enthroned, look- ing wistfully over its blue waters, seemingly per- plexed at its own turbulent existence. Then, as the advancing tide of settlement and immigration marched upward and inward, toward the rippling hills that outlined the western horizon in blue, a change was made, and a new capital, the capital to be for eighty years to come, sprang up among the splendid live-oaks and lindens (planted by Dunmore) between the York and the James, in the Middle Plantation. '' Williamsburg," says Burnaby, " is the capital of Virginia: it is situated between two creeks, one falling into James, the other into York river ; and is built nearly due east and west. The distance of each landing-place is something more than a mile from the town ; which, with the disadvantage of not being able to bring up large vessels, is the reason of its not having increased so fast as might have been expected. It consists of about two hundred houses, does not contain more than one thousand souls, whites and negroes; and is far from being a place of any consequence. It is regularly laid out in parallel streets, intersected by others at right angles; has a handsome square in the centre, Old Williamsburg- 165 through which runs the principal street, one of the most spacious in North America, three quarters of a mile in length, and above a hundred feet wide. At the opposite ends of this street are two public build- ings, the college and the capitol : and although the houses are of wood, covered with shingles, and but indifferently built, the whole makes a handsome appearance. There are few public edifices that de- serve to be taken notice of; those, which I have mentioned, are the principal ; and they are far from being magnificent. The governor's palace is toler- ably good, one of the best upon the continent; but the church, the prison, and the other buildings, are all of them extremely indifferent. The streets are not paved, and are consequently very dusty, the soil hereabout consisting chiefly of sand : however, the situation of Williamsburg has one advantage which few or no places in these lower parts have, that of being free from mosquitoes. Upon the whole, it is an agreeable residence; there are ten or twelve gentlemen's families constantly residing in it, besides merchants and tradesmen : and at the times of the assemblies, and general courts, it is crowded with the gentry of the country : on those occasions there are balls and other amusements ; but as soon as the business is finished, they return to their plantations; and the town is in a manner deserted." ^ " I arrived at Williamsburg at noon," says ^ A. Burnaby, Travels Through North America, p. ZZ- 1 66 George Washing-ton Lossing, " and proceeded immediately to search out the interesting locahties of that ancient and earUest incorporated town in Virginia. They are chiefly upon the main street, a broad avenue pleasantly shaded, and almost as quiet as a rural lane. I first took a hasty stroll upon the spacious green in front of William and Mary College, the oldest literary institution in America except Harvard University. The entrance to the green is flanked by stately live- oaks, cheering the visitor in winter with their ever- green foliage. In the centre of the green stands the mutilated statue of Lord Botetourt, the best beloved of the colonial governors. This statue was erected in the old capitol in 1774, and in 1797 it was re- moved to its present position. I did not make a sketch of it, because a student at the college prom- ised to hand me one made by his own pencil before I left the place. He neglected to do so, and there- fore I can give nothing pictorially of ' the good Governor Botetourt,' the predecessor of Dunmore. " I next visited the remains of the palace of Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia. It is situated at the head of a broad and beautiful court, ex- tending northward from the main street, in front of the City Hotel. The palace was constructed of brick. The centre building was accidentally destroyed by fire, while occupied by the French troops immediately after the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. It was seventy-four feet lons^ and sixty-eight feet wide, and occupied the site of the old palace of Governor Spots- wood, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. At- Old Williamsburg 167 tached to the palace were three hundred and sixty acres of land, beautifully laid out in gardens, parks, carriage- ways, and a bowling-green. Dunmore imported some fine linden-trees from Scotland, one of which, still in existence, is one of the finest specimens of that tree I have ever seen. In vice-regal pomp and pageantry Dunmore attempted to reign among the plain repub- licans of Virginia ; but his day of grandeur and power soon passed away, and the sun of his official glory set amid darkest clouds. All that remains of this spacious edifice are the two wings ; the one on the right was the office, the one on the left was the guard-house." " A little eastward of Palace Street or Court, is the public square, on which area are two relics of the olden time, B niton Church, a cruciform structure with a stee- ple, and the old Magadne, an octagon building, erected during the administration of Governor Spotswood. The sides of the latter are each twelve feet in horizon- tal extent. Surrounding it, also in octagon form, is a massive brick wall, which was constructed when the building was erected. This wall is somewhat dilapi- dated. The building was occupied as a Baptist meeting- house when I visited Williamsburg, and I trust it may never fall before the hand of improvement, for it has an historical value in the minds of all Americans. The events which hallow it will be noticed presently. '' On the square fronting the magazine is the court- house. It stands upon the site of the old capitol, in which occurred many interesting events connected with the history of our War for Independence. The present structure was erected over the ashes of the old one, which was burned in 1832. Around it are a few of the 1 68 Georg-e Washington old bricks, half buried in the green sward, and these compose the only remains of the Old Capitol." ^ Hugh Jones says : " The first Metropolis, James Town, was built in the most convenient Place for Trade and Security against the Indians, but often received much Damage, being twice burnt down ; after which it never recovered its Perfection, consisting at present of nothing but Abun- dance of Brick Rubbish, and three or four good in- habited Houses, tho' the Parish is of pretty large Ex- tent, but less than others. When the State House and Prison were burnt down, Governor Nicholson removed the Residence of the Governor, with the Meeting of General Courts and General Assemblies to Middle Plantation, seven Miles from James Town, in a health- ier and more convenient Place, and freer from the An- noyance of Muskettoes. " Here he laid out the City of Williamshurgh (in the Form of a Cypher, made of W. and M.) on a Ridge at the Head Springs of two great Creeks, one running into James, and the other into York River, which are each navigable for sloops, within a Mile of the Town ; at the Head of which Creeks are good Landings, and Lots laid out, and Dwelling Houses and Ware Houses built ; so that this Town is most conveniently situated, in the Middle of the lower Part of Virginia, command- ing two noble Rivers, not above four Miles from either, and is much more commodious and healthful, than if built upon a River. " Publick Buildings here of Note, are the College, the Capitol, Governor's House, and the Church. The *Lossing, Field Book of the Revolution, vol. ii, p. 262. Old Williamsburg- 169 Latitude of the College at IVilliamsburgh, to the best of my Observation, is 37°. 2i\ North. " The Front which looks due East is double, and is 136 Foot long. It is a lofty Pile of Brick Building adorn'd with a Cupola. At the North End runs back a large Wing, which is a handsome Hall, answerable to which the Chapel is to be built ; and there is a spa- cious Piazza on the West side, from one Wing to the other. It is approached by a good Walk, and a grand Entrance by Steps, with good Courts and Gardens about it, with a good House and Apartments for the Indian Master and his Scholars, and Out-Houses ; and a large Pasture enclosed like a Park with about 150 Acres of Land adjoining, for occasional Uses. " The Building is beautiful and commodious, being first modelled by Sir Christopher Wren, adapted to the Nature of the Country by the Gentlemen there; and since it was burnt down, it has been rebuilt, and nicely contrived, altered and adorned by the ingenious Direc- tion of Governor Spottswood; and is not altogether unlike Chelsea Hospital. " Fronting the College at near its whole Breadth, is extended a noble Street mathematically streight (for the first Design of the Town's Form is changed to a much better) just three Quarters of a Mile in Length ; At the other End of which stands the Capitol, a noble, beautiful, and commodious Pile as any of its Kind, built at the Cost of the late Queen, and by the Direction of the Governor. " The Building is in the Form of an H nearly ; the Secretary's Office, and the General Court taking up one Side below Stairs; the Middle being an handsom Portico leading to the Clerk of the Assembly's Office, I70 George Washington and the House of Burgesses on the other Side ; which last is not unhke the House of Commons. " In each Wing is a good Stair Case, one leading to the Council Chamber, where the Governor and Council sit in very great State, in Imitation of the King and Council, or the Lord Chancellor and House of Lords. *' The whole is surrounded with a neat Area, encom- passed with a good Wall, and near it is a strong sweet Prison for Criminals; " The Cause of my being so particular in describing the Capitol is, because it is the best and most commo- dious Pile of its Kind that I have seen or heard of. " Because the State House, James Tozvn, and the College have been burnt down, therefore is prohibited in the Capitol the Use of Fire, Candles, and Tobacco. ** At the Capitol, at publick Times, may be seen a great Number of handsome, well-dress'd, compleat Gentlemen. And at the Governor's House upon Birth- Nights, and at Balls and Assemblies, I have seen as fine an Appearance, as good Diversion, and as splendid Entertainments in Governor Spotzvood's Time, as I have seen any where else. " Here dwell several very good Families, and more reside here in their own Houses at publick Times. '' They live in the same neat Manner, dress after the same Modes, and behave themselves exactly as the Gentry in London; most Families of any Note having a Coach, Chariot, Berlin, or Chaise. " Thus they dwell comfortably, genteely, pleasantly, and plentifully in this delightful, healthful, and (I hope) thriving City of WilUamsburgh." ^ " The seat of our government had been originally * Hugh Jones, The Present State of Virginia, p. 25. Old Williamsburg- 171 fixed in the peninsula of Jamestown, the first settle- ment of the colonists ; and had been afterwards re- moved a few miles inland to Williamsburg. But this was at a time when our settlements had not extended beyond the tide water. Now they had crossed the Alleghany; and the centre of population was very far removed from what it had been. Yet Williamsburg was still the depository of our archives, the habitual residence of the Governor and many other of the public functionaries, the established place for the sessions of the legislature, and the magazine of our military stores : and it's situation was so exposed that it might be taken at any time in war, and, at this time particularly, an enemy might in the night run up either of the rivers between which it lies, land a force above, and take possession of the place, without the possibility of saving either persons or things. I had proposed it's removal so early as Octob. '76. but it did not prevail until the session of May. '79." ^ This was the year 1760, the year in which Patrick Henry — aged twenty-four — went to Wil- liamsburg to be examined in the law, and narrowly escaped being " plucked " by the board of examiners, who happened to be a famous group — Peyton and John Randolph (attorney-general), George Wythe, and Robert Carter Nicholas. Jefferson had only lately become a matriculate. His first letter in Ford's edition of his voluminous correspondence — probably the first of the twenty-five or thirty thousand letters still surviving — was devoted to this subject. ^ P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. i, p. 55. 172 Georg-e Washing^ton "To John Harvey " Shadwell, Jan. 14, 1760. " Sir, — I was at Colo. Peter Randolph's about a Fortnight ago, and my Schooling falling into Dis- course, he said he thought it would be to my Advantage to go to the College, and was desirous I should go, as indeed I am myself for several Reasons. In the first place as long as I stay at the Mountains The Loss of one fourth of my Time is inevitable, by Company's coming here and detaining me from School. And like- wise my Absence will in a great Measure put a Stop to so much Company, and by that Means lessen the Expences of the Estate in House-Keeping. And on the other Hand by going to the College, I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me ; and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics. I shall be glad of your opinion." ^ From the very beginning. Old Williamsburg had been wrapped in a literary and legal flavour — '' Devilsburg," Jefferson playfully calls it in his letters to John Page, in allusion to the ennui he suffered there, or to the tricksy pranks of the stu- dents, wishing *' Coke, the dull old scoundrel, at the devil " when the image of the fair '' Belinda " (Rebecca Burwell) dances teasingly before his imagination. The Orange and the Stuart were amicably wound together in the architectural cypher of W and M, in the shape of v/hich the elder town ^ P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. i, p. 340. Old Williamsburg- 173 had been originally laid out; its ancient library was full of books and MSS., presented by kings, arch- bishops, bishops, and scholars; the name of the famous Robert Boyle was inseparably connected with its Indian school, and generous donations were made to it by Government, in consideration of two copies of Latin verses annually prepared and pre- sented to it by the President and Fellows. Far back in the grey years of the seventeenth cen- tury — in 1693, when Voltaire was still unborn, and Racine was not far from his death-bed — the College cf William and Mary had been founded by a royal grant of twenty thousand acres of good Virginia land and £1985 in money, while an ample tax on to- bacco (the crowned weed, blazoned on the earliest colonial seal of Virginia), and abundant fees from the land-surveyor's office were added, in perpetuity, to maintain the president and six professors. The gifts and remembrances of the charitable, interested in Indian and colonial education, flowed into the cof- fers of the college, which, in 1776, had risen to be the richest in North America. Younger than Har- vard by a few months only, it soon grew to be a living and audacious refutation of the view of that choleric old *' Know Nothing," Sir William Berke- ley, who not long before its foundation had writ- ten home to London : " The same course is taken here, for instructing the people, as there is in England : Out of towns every man instructs his own children according to his own 174 George Washing-ton ability. We have forty-eight parishes, and our minis- ters are well paid, and by my consent should be better, if they would pray oftener, and preach less. But as of all commodities, so of this, the worst are sent to us, and we have few that we can boast of, since the persecution in Cromwell's tyranny drove divers worthy men thither. Yet, I thank God, there are no free schools nor print- ing ; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects, into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best governments ; God keep us from both ! " William Berkeley. "Virginia, 20 June, 1671." Gutenberg and Faust might turn in their graves for all the old Governor cared, if only " Virginia, earth's only Paradise," as Drayton sang in his fa- mous ode, remained free from their '' pesky" inven- tion. The pink-blossomed tobacco, that waved like an emerald sea in and around the Virginia planta- tions; the hogshead of generous liquors, imported from vine-clad tropic islands; the skins and furs that clothed in velvet the thousands of shy sylvan creatures that roamed the Virginian woods, were to coin themselves into golden pence and pounds, and still more golden brains of men to become for ever celebrated in the annals of the New World. Old William and Mary arose, a daring incarna- tion of the resentment felt at the bluster of this vice- regal tyrant who ruled Virginia with a rod of iron, and wrote testy communications to the officials at Old Williamsburg 175 St. James's on the "state" of the colony. Out of its portals, streamed in the course of time, no less than four hundred alumni who distinguished themselves in all the walks of life — three presidents of the United States, four signers of the Declaration, five Judges of the Supreme Court, sixteen United States senators, four speakers of the House of Representa- tives. The brilliant and speaking likenesses that graced the chapel and library walls, executed by the brushes of famous artists, were hardly more remark- able than the groups of illustrious men who, in silken hose and powdered hair, in cap and gown and velvet doublet, gathered in picture-like twos and threes about the shady promenades of the palace grounds, in the H-shaped precincts of the ancient House of Burgesses, or at the memorable fire- side conversazioni in the Apollo Room of the old Raleigh Tavern. From generation to generation old Virginia pre- sented herself at the Chancellor's office of William and Mary College, and became duly matriculated as the intellectual guest of " the Nestor of Ameri- can Colleges." Hither, George Washington came as a mere lad to get his land-surveyor's license, to be followed in a few years by Thomas Jefferson and Zachary Taylor (grandfather of the Presi- dent) on the same errand. Here, the intellect of John Marshall was refined to that wondrous judg- ment, which impelled an eminent historian ^ to *John Fiske. 176 George Washington include him with those other Virginians — Wash- ington, Jefferson, Madison — among the five men (Hamilton being the fifth) who were the soul of the Revolution. Peyton Randolph, president of the first Continental Congress in 1774, had, doubtless, presided over many a boyish debate in the college where Lord Botetourt had established gold medals for Latin oratory, and prizes for attendance on chapel, before he assumed the august role of pre- siding officer of this celebrated assembly. Many a venerable oak on the college green, or in the vicinity of the quaint '' Powder Horn," or at the corners of what was afterwards called Lord Dunmore's Palace (built in the year Washington was born) must have rustled sympathetically in Dodona fashion, as the young gallants walked to and fro beneath them after the gorgeous balls at the governor's and talked " treason " of the Patrick Henry type, discussed the *' Writs of Assistance " and the impending Stamp Act, composed epigrams in the style of Colonel William Byrd, or trans- lated bits of Ovid in the fluent fashion of George Sandys. The unpaved streets of the venerable burgh would become a veritable Campo Santo of colonial legend, if their dust could become articulate, and whisper the secrets buried in the yellow sand of the Middle Plantation — the secrets of the *' Virginia Comedians " who presented there, in the primitive playhouse, the latest '' thing " from Vauxhall — the secrets that now piled themselves mountain-high during the administrations of Nicholson, and Spots- Old Williamsburg^ 177 wood, " Knight of the Golden Horse Shoe," Gooch and Dinwiddie, and smiHng Botetourt and bitter- tongued Dunmore, who burnt himself into Vir- ginia's memory deeper than any other governor, through his devastation of Norfolk. This noble old Williamsburg, of high descent and lofty lineage, formed the jewelled clasp between the old and the new Virginia, between blood-stained Jamestown, the first capital, and civic Richmond, whither the capital was removed in 1779. Never, perhaps, in its palmiest days possessing a population of more than twenty-five hundred, the city of Wil- liam and Mary enjoys a political distinction unparal- leled in the history of the United States. For eighty years, moreover, its beaux and belles made of it the social " cynosure of all eyes," " the glass of fashion and the mould of form," a small woodland Ver- sailles, where a miniature court flitted hither and thither on its vice-regal nothings, a busybody world of gay triviality and harmless gossip where, between- whiles, Shawnees and Mingoes and Delawares are to be educated on Boyle's foundation (immediately to relapse into barbarism as soon as they returned to their native forests, remarks *' that merry old Vir- ginian," Colonel Byrd). Colonel and Mrs. Wash- ington and their charming children left the stately mansion of Mount Vernon many a time, between 1760 and 1774, to take part in the pomp and pag- eantry of the vice-regal court, " step the minuet " in company with Fauquier, courteous Botetourt, or the Earl and Countess of Dunmore, or prance on lyS Georg-e Washing-ton thoroughbred horses about the Wilhamsburg lanes and roads, fragrant, in season, with golden mantle of yellow jessamine, loops and ropes of flowering grape, or sheets of goldenrod flinging its yellow dust to the wind. The Colonel, doubtless, kept a watchful eye on the fashions of the Middle Plantation gentry, ap- peared in his " genteel suit of superfine broadcloth," made the sagacious observation to his London cor- respondent that, *' whatever might be the reason, his clothes had never fitted him," no doubt made mental comparisons between himself and the ele- gantly fitted preux chevaliers of the court, and then proceeded to order those curious and dainty things for the two " Patsys," in which his circumstantial invoices abound. All this aristocracy and education of the planters' commonwealth were thus held, socially and politi- cally, together by the " jewelled clasp," for here assembled the hundred or so fresh-cheeked, high- coloured representatives of the 150,000 white Vir- ginians, who had then spread themselves over the rural infinitude called '' Virginia " ; here, a never- ending succession of burgesses and their wives and daughters gathered in the seasons of assembly, and contributed a brilliant society of which one catches piquant glimpses in Fithian's Diary; incipient " Sons of Liberty " began to sound their alarum- bells of resistance and revolution as the decades moved swiftly along; and hither, one day, trotted on his forest-bred nag a young man from Hanover Old Williamsburg 179 County who, after one month's study of Coke on Littleton, and the Virginia Statutes, had the im- pudence to present himself for examination in the law. This was the kinsman of Lord Brougham, and Robertson the historian, Patrick Henry, an ill-clad, gawky, wild-eyed but genial son of the woods, of very definite kindred (as it seemed, afterward) but undefined ambition, by no means the *' Jamestown diamond " even his friends, at first, took him to be, yet unpromising in the extreme to look at. Four years younger than Washington, seven years younger than Jefferson, Henry was fre- quently in the latter's company, as Jefferson pur- sued his two years' course at the college, and, doubtless, often enough met Washington, when the Boanerges of Hanover County entered the House of Burgesses in 1765. A more illustrious triumvirate, America has never had to show — the Arm, the Pen, the Voice of the Revolution. The genius of a Plutarch would be required to characterise these three men in such lines of fire as they deserve. As they calmly walked the three quarters of a mile that covered the Duke of Glouces- ter Street, from the " beautiful and commodious " Capitol (as old Hugh Jones described it) to the spacious green in front of the college, discussing the Parson's case or Charles Townshend's Revenue Acts, or the constantly up-flaming Stamp Act, or the 20,000,000 of dollars the French and Indian i8o Georg-e Washington wars had already cost the colonies, no one could have predicted, that the tallest of the three young men would become the first man of his age, the second would write the document that was to be- come the creed and classic of all modern republics, and the third would incarnate the very voice of Revolution itself, and send it like a trail of fire from one end of the land to the other, never to be extin- guished. A vast potentiality lay latent in the three, for two of those unpretending burgesses were to sit in the presidential chair, two were to become gov- ernors of the commonwealth, and one was to be the first American Governor of Virginia elected by the suffrages of his fellow-citizens. The three summed up in themselves the essence of the whole " Ameri- can question," then germinating in subterranean ways all over the country : Jefferson the student, wondrously learned^ wise, discriminating, abso- lutely without the '' gift of gab " which his friend Henry possessed in such opulence, faltering and confused when he got up on his legs, yet even then in possession of that eloquence of diction, which made John Adams insist on his writing the Declara- tion of Independence; Washington, the man of action, strenuous, stern, falteringly modest in speech when he stood in legislature or congress, yet thrill- ing with vital force when he stood on the field of battle, and " swearing like an angel from Heaven " when things went wrong (so his friend General Charles Scott reported) — patient, silent, reserved, except when the inner volcanic flame burst through Old Williamsburg- i8i his flashing eyes in some stupendous conflict; Henry, the " forest-born Demosthenes," whose im- passioned nature had gathered up into itself all the sweet, wild strength of the woods and winds and wilderness, to break forth some day in marvellously musical words, and the play of a '' wonder-working fancy." And when one considers, that these were but three of the wonderful men who then frequented the goodly foundation of William and Mary, speci- mens of the splendid men whose souls Seymour, Attorney-general of Great Britain, had consigned to perdition, when worthy Master Blair had applied to him for a charter : meekly affirming that they too — the Virginians — had souls to save: '' Souls? souls? D their souls ! let them make tobacco ! " — when we consider that the old brick palace of Dunmore and the Raleigh Tavern rooms, the coun- cil-chamber and the college lecture-rooms, the very sanctuaries of old Bruton Church (built in 1700) and the " miniature Westminster Abbey " of the chapel, had resounded with the voices and presence of scores of such men, it is well to pause a moment, and remember that it was the Williamsburg spirit that largely ruled the Revolutionary conventions, that wrote the declaration of rights, that defied the fleets and armies of Great Britam, and that brought the mighty struggle to a glorious end. Yorktown and Williamsburg were never more than a few miles apart, yet in their spirit they were absolutely joined. It is no wonder, then, that the capitol at Williams- 1 82 George Washington burg where the burgesses met was stigmatised as '' the heart of rebelHon," and that the foe thought to tear out this heart in Tarleton's time when American, EngHsh, and French troops successively occupied the beautifully laid-out grounds of the palace. Then the migrant capital moved to Richmond, in 1779, when Jefferson was governor, and housed itself in the picturesque city near the falls of the James, which Colonel Byrd of Westover had founded more than forty years before. The James, bursting over the foaming rocks above the lovely site of the present Hollywood, fitly symbolised the agitation of the times, while its expansion below into a broad and noble river, where giant battleships were to shoot down the launchways at busy Hamp- ton Roads, prophetically suggested the broadening currents of Virginia history, and its expansion into a world-influence. Call it a chrism, call it a curse, fire was the element that stuck closer than a brother to Williamsburg, 1 from the first — fire of speech, fire of eloquence; fiery tongues actually seemed to hover, incandescent,^ over the hundred burgesses, and sting and quicken them into imprudent speech; and actual flames, crude, destructive, terrible, scourged the place from the year 1705 to the year 1861, when Federal troops burnt the venerable college buildings, and relic-hunters tore away the metal inscription from the pedestal of beloved Lord Botetourt's statue. It was conceived and born out of the great intellectual GEORGE WASHINGTON. From the painting by Rembrandt Peale. Reproduced by permission of C. Klackner, N. Y. Copyright, 1894. Old Williamsburg- 183 conflagration of 1688, and it continued to burn in one way or another, actually or metaphorically, all through its history, its very ashes possessing an in- candescent character that flamed up anew, as soon as some accident (like that of the French occupation in 1 781) or incendiary torch had laid this or that one of its monumental buildings in the dust. It stood for the Truth, which cannot be burned, for Liberty, which is indestructible, for Culture, which can never die; for here, in 1776, originated the Phi Beta Kappa Society in its parent chapter, and straight from Williamsburg went Thomas Jefferson, full of his idea of founding a great State University, realised in 1825, by the opening of the University of Virginia while he was yet alive. Generation after generation of scholars in their caps and gowns, since the first commencement in 1700, have for two hundred years streamed out of the portals of William and Mary College, illustrating every walk of life — science, law, history, literature, divinity, the arts; their lofty, independent spirit animated the debates of Congress, when a congress came to be; the law-books in the rich old library, where precious volumes shone resplendent with the coats-of-arms of royal governors and generous donors, — especially the volumes on English consti- tutional law, — became vitally incarnate, and were born to vivid resurrection in the form of Peyton and Edmund and John Randolph, George Wythe and Edmund Pendleton, Richard Bland, Robert 184 Georg-e Washing-ton Carter Nicholas, Jefferson, Henry, and scores of others. In these men, the types of the Revolution reached their most finished mould, and stand forth, a bril- liant gallery of faces, unexampled for strength, originality, genius, and energy, only paralleled by the group of gladiators who, almost at this mo- ment, stood on the other side of the sea, like some marble group of monumental sculpture, and de- fended the same constitutional principles for which the Americans fought — Burke, Chatham, and Fox. A mighty spirit of freedom was welling up from the very earth in North America, and finding lips and voices in Massachusetts, in New York, in Pennsylvania, and, above all, in Virginia, whose warm blood had always bubbled and battled for freedom, and at last poured itself out freely on a hundred battle-fields, in defence of constitutional rights. " I have never had a will of my own," wrote Washington to Colonel Bouquet, '' where a duty was demanded of me"; and this sublime sense of duty actuated Washington's contemporaries almost to a man. The ancient charters and privileges of the colonies breathed the same spirit of broad hu- manitarianism and brotherhood, and the obligation to help savage and civilised alike, as far as it was possible to help them; and the very foundation of William and Mary College, and the wealth that flowed to it, rooted themselves in the same lofty philanthropies, the same recognition of the primal Old Williamsburg 185 rights of man. The Indian queen, holding forth her twig of tobacco leaf and blossom, blazoned on the early colonial seal, typified not only a mighty gift of alleviation to mankind, but the right of a noble, uncivilised race to advance to the foot of the throne, and claim succour from an enlightened sovereign. When the gay cavalcade of the " Knights of the Golden Horse Shoe " trotted out of Old Williams- burg, under the gallant Spotswood, and climbed the Alleghanies, they peered over and out from their " peak of Darien," into the illimitable region where Washington later saw thousands and tens of thou- sands of buffalo, soon to be replaced by the millions of human beings, who had drawn their blood and culture from such institutions as this venerable college, and were soon to spread, like a sea, over the region which one of the famous trio before men- tioned was to gain for the United States, in 1804, forty years from the period under consideration; and over all this the benign sun of mutual recogni- tion, sovereign personal right, and individual con- science was to shine. Graphically has John Esten Cooke pictured the force and influence of this one institution, when he gays : " Almost every Virginian of any eminence in the eighteenth century had been trained for his work in the world within its walls. It gave twenty-seven of its students to the army in the Revolution ; two Attorney- Generals to the United States ; it sent out nearly twenty 1 86 Georg-e Washing-ton members of Congress, fifteen United States Senators, seventeen Governors, thirty-seven Judges, a Lieutenant- General and other high officers to the army, two Com- modores to the navy, twelve Professors, four signers of the Declaration of Independence, seven Cabinet of- ficers, the chief draughtsman and author of the Con- stitution, Edmund Randolph, the most eminent of the Chief Justices, John Marshall, and three Presidents of the United States. And this list, honorable as it is, by no means exhausts the number of really eminent and in- fluential men who owed the formation and development of their intellects and characters to ' William and Mary.' In the long list of students, preserved from the year 1720 to the present time, will be found a great array of names holding a very high rank in the common- wealth of Virginia and the States of the South and West — in the pulpit, at the bar, and in the local legisla- tures. These, without attaining the eminence of those first mentioned, were the most prominent citizens of the communities in which they lived, and were chiefly in- strumental in giving character and direction to social and political affairs. One and all, they received from their education at the old ante-revolutionary college the stamp and mould of character which made them able and valuable citizens — leaders, indeed, in opinion and action, whenever intellect and virtue were needed for important public affairs." ^ Of the vanished life of the place, Bishop Meade wrote : " Williamsburg was once the miniature copy of the Court of St. James, somewhat aping the manners of ^ Scribner's Monthly, November, 1875, P- i- Old Williamsburg 187 that royal place, while the old church grave-yard and the college chapel were — si licet cum magnis componere parva — the Westminster Abbey and the St. Paul's of London, where the great ones were interred. The first person who came to sleep beneath the pavement of this American Westminster Abbey was Sir John Randolph, who had espoused the English side during the Revolu- tion and gone into exile ; and he was followed by his two sons, John Randolph, formerly the King's Attorney- General, and Peyton Randolph, President of the first Congress, and by Bishop Madison, first Bishop of Vir- ginia ; Chancellor Nelson, and it is believed Lord Bote- tourt, the royal governor, whose statue was in 1797 placed upon the college green. Botetourt had been a warm friend of the Virginians and the Virginia college ; and, as he had expressed a desire to be buried in the colony, his friend, the Duke of Beaufort, wrote, after his death, requesting that ' the president, etc., of the college will permit me to erect a monument near the place where he was buried.' This phrase is supposed to indicate that the old chapel of WiUiam and Mary con- tained the last remains of the most popular and beloved of the royal governors." ^ The associations of the old capitol grow more piquant and complicated as one advances into its story, tangled as the original cypher-monogram of the plan on which it was originally laid out. Says Cooke : " Old Bruton Church was for a long time the resort of the students on days of public worship. At the Old Capitol they witnessed the determined stand made by "■Scrihner's Monthly, November, 1875, p. 7- 1 88 George Washington the Burgesses against the encroachments of the Crown. At the Old Palace they appeared annually on the 5th of November to present their copies of Latin verses to the Governor, as the representative of the King of Eng- land, the head of the institution. At the old Raleigh Tavern they met to found the Phi Beta Kappa Society, or to join in the festivities of the fine assemblies held in the historic ' Apollo Room ' in the building. When the revolutionary outburst came, the great drama was played before them, and they mingled in their ' aca- demical dresses ' with the crowds which cheered the worthy Lord Botetourt as he rode in his fine chariot, drawn by six white horses, to the Capitol, or hooted the unpopular Lord Dunmore as he fled to his man-of-war in the river after rifling the Old Magazine of its powder. " Bruton Church, which is still standing, is one of the oldest of these historic buildings, and took its name from the parish — the college having been built, it will be remembered, on land ' lying and being in the parish of Bruton.' It was erected in 1678, and became a promi- nent feature of the colonial capital — a sort of miniature St. Paul's. The Royal Governor had his fine pew there under its canopy, and around him on Sunday were grouped the most distinguished citizens of the place, the Councilors, Judges, and Burgesses. The old Bruton Church Communion Service is still in existence. The cup and paten are of gold, and were presented to the church by Sir John Page. The flagon, chalice, and plate are of silver, and were presented by King George IIL, whose coat-of-arms is carved upon them." ^ The second capitol became famous after the de- ^ Scrihner's Monthly, November, 1875, p. 10. Old Williamsburg- 189 struction, by fire, of the first. Several of the scenes it witnessed are described by Cooke : " The second building soon took its place, and wit- nessed the tumultuous scenes of 1774 and the succeed- ing years. It had already echoed with the thunders of the great debate on the Stamp Act in 1765, when Pat- rick Henry, a raw countryman, startled the Burgesses with his grand outburst, ' Caesar had his Brutus,' etc., with which all are familiar. In the lobby, listening, was a young student of William and Mary College, named Thomas Jefferson, who afterward characterised the debate as most ' bloody,' and described the sudden appearance of Edmund Randolph, as he came out of the Chamber, declaring, with a violent oath, that he would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote, which it seems would have defeated the famous resolu- tions of Henry. The Old Capitol was the scene of all the grand official pageants of that time. The royal governors, always fond of imitating regal proceedings, had the habit of riding from the ' Palace ' to the Capitol in their coaches drawn by four or even six horses, aim- ing thus to dazzle the eyes of the ' provincials ' ; and, once enthroned in their Council Chamber, they seem to have felt that for the moment they were the real Kings of Virginia. The old chronicles leave no doubt of the lordly deportment of the royal governors on these oc- casions. * Yesterday, between three and four o'clock P.M.,' says the Virginia Gazette for May 2y, 177^, ' the Right Honourable the Earl of Dunmore sent a message to the Honourable the House of Burgesses, by the Clerk of the Council, requiring their immediate attendance in the Council Chamber, when his Excellency spoke to them as follows.' His address was that of Charles I. to I go George Washington his parliament, demanding the five members. The Burgesses had ' reflected ' on the King and Parliament, and were sternly declared to be ' dissolved.' And the men who were thus imperiously addressed, who were dismissed by his Lordship with marks of his cold dis- pleasure, as a schoolmaster dismisses his schoolboys, were Jefferson, Henry, Mason, and Pendleton — the greatest names, in a word, of the time." ^ Thus was old Williamsburg intertwined, like its own monogram, with every fibre of the ancient commonwealth's life, the focus and fountain of that life which now began to play in a dazzling stream of new forces, kindling, creative, illuminative, a measureless energy which, when turned into light, became a Niagara whose splendour and revelry were seen and heard to the ends of the earth. The era of the New Forces had dawned. ^ Scribner's Monthly, November, 1875, p. 11. CHAPTER XI THE NEW FORCES ON the 20th of September, 1765, Washington wrote to Francis Dandridge, his wife's uncle, in London : " At present few things are under notice of my ob- servation that can afford you any amusement in the recital. The Stamp Act, imposed on the colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain, engrosses the con- versation of the speculative part of the colonists, who look upon this unconstitutional method of taxation, as a direful attack upon their liberties, and loudly exclaim against the violation. What may be the result of this, and of some other (I think I may add) ill-judged measures, I will not undertake to determine; but this I may venture to affirm, that the advantage accruing to the mother country will fall greatly short of the ex- pectations of the ministry; for certain it is, that our whole substance does already in a manner flow to Great Britain and that whatsoever contributes to lessen our importations must be hurtful to their manufacturers. And the eyes of our people, already beginning to open, will perceive, that many luxuries, which we lavish our substance in Great Britain for, can well be dispensed with, whilst the necessaries of life are (mostly) to be had within ourselves. This, consequently, will intro- duce frugality, and be a necessary stimulation to in- dustry. If Great Britain, therefore, loads her manu- 191 192 George Washington facturies with heavy taxes, will it not facilitate these measures? They will not compel us, I think, to give our money for their exports, whether we will or not ; and certain I am, none of their traders will part from them without a valuable consideration. Where, then, is the utility of these restrictions? " As to the Stamp Act, taken in a single view, one and the first bad consequence attending it, I take to be this, our courts of judicature must inevitably be shut up; for it is impossible (or next of kin to it), under our present circumstances, that the act of Parliament can be complied with, were we ever so willing to en- force the execution ; for, not to say, which alone would be sufficient, that we have not money to pay the stamps, there are many other cogent reasons, to prevent it ; and if a stop be put to our judicial proceedings, I fancy the merchants of Great Britain, trading to the colonies, will not be among the last to wish for a repeal of it." ^ Two years later, in 1767, he wrote to Capel & Os- good Hanbury: " Unseasonable as it may be, to take any notice of the repeal of the Stamp Act at this time, yet I cannot help observing, that a contrary measure would have in- troduced very unhappy consequences. Those, there- fore, who wisely foresaw such an event, and were instrumental in procuring the repeal of the act, are, in my opinion, deservedly entitled to the thanks of the well-wishers to Britain and her colonies, and must re- flect with pleasure, that, through their means, many scenes of confusion and distress have been prevented. Mine they accordingly have, and always shall have, for * Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, pp. 209-210. The New Forces 193 their opposition to any act of oppression ; and that act could be looked upon in no other light by every person, who would view it in its proper colors. " I could wish it was in my power to congratulate you on the success in having the commercial system of these colonies put upon a more enlarged and extensive footing, than it is ; because I am well satisfied, that it would ultimately redound to the advantage of the mother country, so long as the colonies pursue trade and agriculture, and would be an effectual let to manu- facturing among them. The money, therefore which they raise, would centre in Great Britain, as certainly as the needle will settle to the pole." ^ Washington to Robert Gary, 21 July, 1767: " The repeal of the Stamp Act, to whatsoever cause owing, ought much to be rejoiced at, for had the Par- liament of Great Britain resolved upon enforcing it, the consequences, I conceive, would have been more direful than is generally apprehended, both to the mother country and her colonies. All, therefore, who were instrumental in procuring the repeal, are entitled to the thanks of every British subject, and have mine cordially." 2 Governor Fauquier to Earl of Halifax, June 14, 1765: *' Government is set at defiance, not having strength enough in her hands to enforce obedience to the laws of the community. The private distress which every ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 210, note. ^ Ibid., p. 211, note. 194 Georg-e Washington man feels, increases the general dissatisfaction at the duties laid by the stamp act, which breaks out, and shews itself upon every trifling occasion." ^ " This engrossing topic of conversation " had, indeed, '' engaged all the speculative minds in the colonies " with a preoccupation that was never again to leave it. '' This is the way," wrote John Hughes, in Ban- croft,^ " that the fire began." " Virginia rang the alarm-bell for the continent," cried Bernard to Hali- fax. " Virginians fired the hearts of patriots with an eloquence which defied royal prerogatives and patronage, and set the seal of lasting pre-eminence on William and Mary, the venerable Nestor of American colleges, in which they had imbibed the highest principles of liberty, both of thought and of actions." " Virginia has the glory," said John Adams, " with posterity of beginning with the resolutions against the stamp act, and ending, with the acts of the convention of May, 1786, the great American Revolution." The Stamp Act, indeed, was but the topmost crest of that ocean of unrest that was now sweeping over the colonies. These infant commonwealths had grown from shiploads to plantations or settlement- groups, crowned and accentuated by a church spire ; from these to " hundreds," counties, parishes, pre- ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 210, note. * Bancroft, History of the United States, vol. v, p. 278. The New Forces 195 cincts over which vestries or selectmen ruled in ancient English wise by free elective franchise; and there ensued the swift growth and amalgamation of disunited and ever warring units, heterogeneous be- yond compare, into united and harmonious wholes, wdiose integrity was every day becoming more dense and indivisible. Whatever differences of creed, of culture, of race, or of religion might have existed when the Pilgrim pioneers first set foot on American soil, fast obliterated themselves in the new condi- tions, and became as indistinguishable in the new life as the track of tossing and floating gulls on the water. Left by their careless mother sternly to themselves, these luckless children struck out for themselves, and like strong swimmers reached what- ever land lay next before them, in their own indi- vidual way. Even so the beehives of ancient Greece had sent out their swarms of bees over the busy Mediterra- nean, and built up thriving commonwealths, con- nected by the thin thread of the " metropolis " city, among the beautiful isles or palm-fringed shores of Ionia, Sicily, Corcyra, or Iberia. The thousands that slipped from English ports into the unknown seas seemed at first to have slipped into an under-world, unimaginably great, and dark, whence never again would they rise to the yearning eyes of the mother on the English shore. Here again the charming story of Alpheus and Arethusa was repeated; what disappeared under sea as sluggish Alpheus, in far-off Peloponnesus, 196 George Washington reappeared in sunny Sicily as Arethusa, the spark- ling fountain of crystal water that suggested the Fountain of Perpetual Youth. The outcast children, self-exiled, or independent rovers as they might be, came to themselves on the other side of the Atlantic in a new and original light, and developed a type of which one, singling out a group of them, said : '' They are men, and they are noble spirits, those Virginians ! " Equally '' noble " were the men of Massachusetts, one of whom had uttered this honourable phrase, when he heard of the part played by Patrick Henry before the burgesses in 1765. This part, indeed, was merely the part now being played by the whole American people, by the three millions of American freemen who found their mouthpiece in the eloquent Virginian; and the true key-note of the situation rang out in clear tones, when this incarnation of spontaneous civil and in- tellectual freedom exclaimed, a few years later, on the floor of Congress : " I am not a Virginian — I am an American ! " an utterance as striking in its way as the celebrated humanitarian Homo sum of Terence. And the finest commentary on this sentiment is found in the almost contemporary saying of Fred- erick the Great : '' Kings are nothing but men, and all men are equal," a saying which constituted one drop — and that the most vital — of the com- plex ink out of which flowed Jefferson's master- piece. The New Forces 197 The Age of Doubt, of scepticism in Church and State, of tolerance of intolerance was at hand, and it was strange that its gigantic forces should begin first to play on the sensitive organisations of the children of the West, those youth of the world, at play and at work in the huge wilderness of Canada and the Ohio, where the ring of the axe, not of the epigram, was most to be heard, and when men were, supposedly, busy rather in sheltering their heads than saving their souls. And yet what is more conducive to contemplative reverie, to the inflowing '' crafts and assaults " of the spirit of Mephistopheles, to the universal " spirit that says No!" than the limitless stretches of the woods, the silence and solitude of the primeval sa- vannah, the noiseless march of majestic rivers that never give an articulate answer to any question, but flow on for ever in monstrous fatalism, dumb, im- placable, silent! And this spirit of Mephistopheles, quickly recog- nised, and indelibly sculptured by Goethe into the massive structure of his matchless poem, was the actuating spirit of the century in which the United States were born. The mocking, scoffing, question- ing interrogation that trickled from the pen of Vol- taire, D'Alembert, Diderot, and the Encyclopedists was delicately etherealised by wit and humour and sarcasm now reflected in every face, as in the thou- sand bits of a shivered mirror, spread over Europe like a subtle atmosphere, crossed the ocean, and pen- etrated to the very citadel of Protestantism and the iq8 Georg-e Washing-ton Roman faith alike, in Canada and the Saxon colo- nies. The woodman, as his axe flashed through the heart of the falling oak ; the voyageur, as he shot down the lonely river and sang the pathetic chan- sons of France ; the selectman, hurrying to meeting- house or primitive council-hall ; the piazza politician, sipping his toddy, spreading his legs, and discussing constitutional questions on the spacious verandahs of open-air Virginia; even the stubborn peasant of Pennsylvania and the Quaker, intrenched in his stronghold of impregnable peace, felt the stress of the time and thrilled unequivocally with the sensa- tion of foreshadowing change. " Vincit qui patitur'' reads the motto of one of the most illustrious of the old James River families,^ core and centre of the English civilisation in Vir- ginia : '' He conquers who is patient " : a motto al- most ironical in its application to America at this date. Impatience had been from the very start the key- note of life in the colonies — impatience of restraint, impatience of royal governors and administrative councils, impatience of this or that impost-tax whether native or foreign, impatience of the slow and intolerable delays of leisurely legislatures, pro- longing or postponing salutary measures of pressing importance, impatience generated by the endless nuisances of the slowly-dragging Indian wars. Al- ready a noticeable feature of American life had be- come its quicker heart-beat, the swift and powerful ^William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison, presi- dents of the United States. The New Forces igg flow of its blood in lungs and arteries, oxygenated by the new and pungent air of a new hemisphere. Up to the time of incipient Revolution — the period we have now reached — this impatience had taken a physical turn : the " Colossus of the West " was exercising its babyhood in muscular activities, in huge sprawling through the wood, in uncouth cries and antics of pure physical exhilaration, in battling defiantly against the giant forces of nature with which it had to contend : in marrying wives and getting children, — '' Go home and get children ! " wrote Franklin from London a little later, — build- ing homes, and clearing settlements. The joy of possession had become the supreme joy : every man was, so to speak, a King's tenant, paying a quit-rent for his land to the Crown, and ruling his log-cabin, his palisadoed enclosure, his farm, or his plantation as proudly as the barons of England ruled their cas- tles, or the Lords of the Loire their battlemented chateaux. The very abundance of the liberties they enjoyed had swollen the spirit of independence in these people of the wood to an imperious pride, pre- sumptuous in its attitude of fearless criticism, ready at a moment's notice to take offence at innovation or injustice, unequal in the extreme to the main- tenance of a mental equilibrium, in which older or more philosophic nations had long since settled down. The whole country, it might be asserted, had been born in a time of high temper and religious im- patience; and this birthmark, once stamped upon 200 George Washington the intellectual features of the land, became its motto, crest, and coat-of-arms. The moment had now come when this physical restlessness was, by some subtle alchemy, to trans- mute itself into an intellectual inquisitiveness, petu- lance, almost intolerance, which incarnated itself in committees of correspondence, political clubs, legis- lative bodies, and revolutionary assemblies. Little connected discourse had, so to speak, written itself down in America up to this time. The beginnings of a promising literature had, indeed, begun to sparkle casually in the writings of Franklin, Colonel Wil- liam Byrd, Governor Hutchinson, and Jonathan Ed- wards. But, on the whole, the inner spiritual forces at work, in the fashion of undertow drifting hither and thither, had not yet sufficiently saturated the subtle intelligence of the West to impel them irre- sistibly to speak. In pamphlets alone, — in broad- sides, sheets of flame, and leaflets buoyant as thistle- down floating here and there, intangible yet incan- descent, in newspaper paragraphs or cutting couplets — did the anger, the discontent, or the buffoonery of the hour, find a fitful vent. The year 1763 became the crucial year, the year of concentration, for all the flotsam and jetsam of new forces that had risen to the top, between the parallels of 31 and 45 degrees north. In this mem- orable year, the Treaty of Paris between England and France — between the third George and the fif- teenth Louis — had thrown open the gates of almost the entire North American Continent, east of the The New Forces 201 Mississippi, to the Anglo-Saxon race. Scarcely a rag of French influence hung on the mighty parallel of longitude that swept from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico; scarcely a petal of the lovely fleur- de-lis was left to bloom and to star the soil between Quebec and New Orleans, the memorial plant of those cultured Bourbons who saw, in its spread and growth, suggestions of their symbolic sovereignty. Almost all was now English in the mighty world over which both had battled so long and so stoutly, decided, once for all, by the tragic conflict that had for ever ennobled and ensanguined the Heights of Abraham. In Montcalm, the fleur-de-lis exhaled its supreme sigh; in Wolfe, the rose, watered with the blood of heroes, burned with a fiercer crimson than ever, and struck root, deep and inviolable, in a soil from which it was never to be eradicated. Joyous as might be the hymns of thanksgiving which saluted, with their acclaim, the lifting up of the everlasting gates that the King of England might enter in, the deed was fraught with direful consequences to the Crown. The single act of far- spreading sovereignty over the New World, consti- tuting the essence of the treaty, had, in its heart of hearts, seeds of disaster and dissolution for the Brit- ish Empire in America, never suspected by the dip- lomats who drew it up. It threw into the power of England realms of such vastness, responsibilities so searching, breadth and variety of interests so great, that the assembled wisdom of the five hundred and fifty-eight members of the House of Commons, and 202 Georg-e Washing-ton the collective dignity of the historic House of Lords, were called upon at once to devise ways and means of governing this world-empire, whose edges alone, quivering with intelligence, already engaged the most earnest efforts of ministry and premier, tact- fully to manage. The enormous budgets of the twentieth century, in which hundreds of millions of dollars produce only the stereotyped annual stare, might well laugh to scorn the bagatelle of $70,000,000 then required to " run the government " ; but this for the time was a colossal sum, and how was it to be raised ? '' France," cried Walpole in one of his animated let- ters, '' has allowed us to undo ourselves " ; her su- preme generosity in the " affair of 1763 " was the historic exemplification of the coarse proverb, '' O give her rope enough and she will hang herself." For a hundred years and more, the twenty differ- ent kinds of governments in America had been un- tiringly working, consciously or unconsciously, on the problem of enlarging the empire, extending the boundaries of colonial rule, planting the cross of St. George, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick over every blade of grass that sprang from Plymouth and Jamestown, to the great river that cleft the continent in twain. But so gradually had the terms of this problem worked themselves out, so imperceptibly had pos- session, conquest, settlement, organisation grown, that the colonies had had time to take breath, to find themselves amid their new wealth, to raise revenues for the support of the Government, and generally, The New Forces 203 to accommodate themselves easily to the increasing pomp and circumstance of territorial expansion. But, all of a sudden, the scratch of a pen had made England responsible for half a continent filled with warring hordes of savages " dressed like sorcerers," as Chateaubriand complained, hordes kept in con- tinual ferment by the machinations of French and Spanish Jesuits, a fringe of human beings clinging with barbarous purpose to the rights of the forest, and defending these rights valiantly in the person of the Pontiacs, the '' Cornstalks," the Logans, who fitfully rose among them. The concessions of France turned out to be a stroke of misunderstood but disconcerting diplo- macy. Through the haze of a century and a half, one can see the smile of bewitching grace with which the " viper's tgg " (in Walpole's words) was handed over to the representatives of Downing Street, quickly to hatch out its brood of Stamp Acts, Navi- gation Acts, tea tyrannies, and, arbitrary legislation, directly traceable to the heroic blood spilt on the Heights of Abraham. For, infallibly as the effect flows out of the cause, was the American Revolution one of the greater births that emerged from the Treaty of Paris. How guard all this immense territory? How defend the measureless frontier from the fierce and ever-multi- plying Indian tomahawks? How must the expense of a colonial system, continually flowing outward like the rings of effluent water into which one has thrown a gigantic stone, be met? Where was all 204 George Washington this extravagance of cession, of conquest, of posses- sion to stop ? Revenue acts for America must be planned ; stand- ing armies must be instituted for the transatlantic provinces, and these armies must be supported by the people whom they protected; the sacredness of American homes, hitherto free from domiciliary or any other kind of unwelcome visitor, must reveal its inmost secrets to a foreign soldiery billeted upon them; the Navigation Law must be enforced, and this, that, and the other obsolete statute revived, and every goose be squeezed to yield its golden egg. The most stinging of all these propositions was perhaps the enforcement of the Navigation Act ; the most maddening, the proposition to rivet a standing army on the colonies of free men accustomed to do their own soldiering. " I always," said John Adams, " consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth." Advancing into the wilderness with Bible, Book of Common Prayer, Catechism, and Charter, the four corner-stones of the quadrangle of common- wealth life, they had founded there numerous estab- lishments which, in their way, were models of free and noble institutions, based upon a constitution running straight to Runnymede. " Emancipation " had been the dominant chord of the whole movement from island to continent, the The New Forces 205 secret of the plunge into the great deep, the mystery of embarcation for unknown lands in crazy caravels that scarce held bottom, till old-world nostrils sniffed the fragrances floating off-shore from the " Summer Isles." It was as if the ancient Mother held between her lips a magic pipe and blew from it, from time to time, painted bubbles that wafted themselves over sea in obedience to her command : " Go my children : make homes for yourselves " ; and there settling, transformed themselves from bubbles into substan- tial commonwealths, with more or less of the ra- diancy of their origin hanging about them. And now the proposition to catch all these way- ward children in the drag-net of iron dependence again, and subject them, willy-nilly, to post-duties and internal taxes, to prohibitions on free trade and commerce with the outside world, even to restric- tions on food, clothing, the printing press, and the things that make life joyous and tolerable — the mad purpose of the mother, to make the full-grown boy a babe again, raised first eyebrows of incredulity, then inflated nostrils with indignation, curled lips with contempt, and, finally, lifted the parricidal hand which was to sever, once and for ever, the umbilical cord that bound infant and parent vitally together. " American independence, like the great rivers of the country, had many sources ; but the head-spring which colored all the stream was the Navigation Act. " Reverence for the colonial mercantile system was branded into Grenville's mind as deeply and inef- faceably as ever the superstition of witchcraft into a 2o6 George Washing-ton credulous and child-like nature. It was his ' idol ' ; and he adored it as ' sacred.' He held that ' Colonies are only settlements made in distant parts of the world for the improvement of trade ; that they would be in- tolerable except on the conditions contained in the Act of Navigation ; that those who, from the increase of contraband, had apprehensions that they may break off their connection with the mother country, saw not half the evil ; that wherever the Acts of Navigation are dis- regarded, the connection is actually broken already.' Nor did this monopoly seem to him a wrong; he claimed for England the exclusive trade with its colonies as the exercise of an indisputable right which every state, in exclusion of all others, has to the ser- vices of its own subjects. His indefatigable zeal could never be satisfied. '' All officers of the customs in the colonies were ordered to their posts ; their numbers were increased ; they were provided with ' new and ample instructions enforcing in the strongest manner the strictest atten- tion to their duty ' ; every officer that failed or faltered was instantly to be dismissed. '' Nor did Grenville fail to perceive that ' the re- straint and suppression of practices which had long prevailed, would certainly encountei* great difficulties in such distant parts of the king's dominions ' ; the whole force of the royal authority was therefore in- voked in aid. The Governors were to make the suppression of the forbidden trade with foreign nations the constant and immediate object of their care. All officers, both civil, and military, and naval, in America and the West Indies, were to give their co-operation. ' We depend,' said a memorial from the treasury, ' upon The New Forces 207 the sea-guard as the Hkeliest means for accomplishing these great purposes/ and that sea-guard was to be extended and strengthened as far as the naval estab- lishments would allow. To complete the whole, and this was a favorite part of Grenville's scheme, a new and uniform system of Courts of Admiralty was to be established. On the very next day after this mjemorial was presented, the king himself in council gave his sanction to the whole system. '' Forthwith orders were issued directly to the Com- mander-in-chief in America that the troops under his command should give their assistance to the officers of the revenue for the effectual suppression of contra- band trade. " Nor was there delay in following up the new law to employ the navy to enforce the Navigation Acts. To this end Admiral Colville, the naval Commander- in-chief on the coasts of North America, from the river St. Lawrence to Cape Florida and the Bahama Islands, became the head of a new corps of revenue officers. Each captain of his squadron had custom-house com- missions and a set of instructions from the Lords Com- missioners of the Admiralty for his guidance ; and other instructions were given them by the Admiral to enter the harbors or lie off the coasts of America ; to qualify themselves by taking the usual custom-house oaths to do the office of custom-house officers ; to seize such persons as were suspected by them to be engaged in illicit trade. '* The promise of large emoluments in case of for- feitures stimulated their natural and irregular vivacity to enforce laws which had become obsolete, and they pounced upon American property as they would have 2o8 George Washington gone in war in quest of prize-money. Even at first their acts were equivocal, and they soon came to be as illegal as they were oppressive. There was no redress. An appeal to the Privy Council was costly and difficult, and besides, when as happened before the end of the year, an officer had to defend himself on an appeal, the suffering colonists were exhausted by the delay and expenses, while the treasury took care to indemnify their agent." ^ The enforcement of this act, which was designed to prevent the colonies from trading with any other country than England, at once changed the entire British Navy, stationed in American waters, into an armed police scouring the seas for smugglers, and seizing everything but iron, rice, lumber, and a few other articles as a kind of contraband. The Navigation Acts were already more or less definitely in operation, — an effective styptic to the expansion of American trade except with Britain; and Yankee wits had for generations been won- drously quickened to circumvent them, converting the Gulf Stream, so to speak, into a battle-ground of smuggling and buccaneering where endless dramas of romance and adventure were played. But these oppressive Acts, repugnant to every dictate of common sense and reason, even of com- mon justice and decency, were now to be reinforced by another act of oppression, symbolically repre- sented by a thin piece of blue paper blazoned with lions rampant of Great Britain. This image of the ^ Bancroft, History of the United States, vol. v, pp. 159-162. o Q id < >, CO p. i 2 The New Forces 209 battling lions — ruefully symbolic as the issue turned out — was to be attached to every important legal paper — marriage contracts were not exempt — that concerned itself with the main issues of trade and commerce, of life and death in the colonies. It was an unhappy measure, devised by the ingenuity of statesmen at their wits' ends to meet the enormous consequences of colonial expansion imbedded in the splendid victory of Quebec. The mimic parliaments that had sprung up on the James, in Massachusetts Bay, at Charleston, Annapolis, Philadelphia, and Al- bany, were close and truthful imitations of the great legislative body that met at St. Stephen's, West- minster, and transacted business in which every free man delighted to take part. Free speech, free press, the right of free discussion, the right of appeal to the supreme tribunal, above all, the right to tax them- selves, had been from time immemorial the govern- ing principles of these legislative bodies, parent and children alike. It had been the pride and the joy of the younger commonwealths to copy, not only the ancient forms, but the fresh and immortal spirit of English legis- lation, whose history and decisions were as familiar on the James as on the Thames. At one fell stroke — in February, 1765 — all this was changed by one of those acts of concentrated folly with which parliaments and congresses alike occasionally startle the world. " From the days of King William there was a steady line of precedents of opinion that America should, like 2IO Georg-e Washington Ireland, provide in whole, or at least in part, for the support of its military establishment. It was one of the first subjects of consideration on the organization of the Board of Trade. It again employed the attention of the servants of Queen Anne. It was still more seriously considered in the days of George the First; and when, in the reign of George the Second, the Duke of Cumberland was at the head of American military affairs, it was laid down as a principle, that a revenue sufficient for the purpose must be provided. The min- istry of Bute resolved to provide such a revenue ; for which Charles Townshend pledged the government. Parliament wished it. The king wished it. Almost all sorts and conditions of men repeatedly wished it. '' How America was to be compelled to contribute this revenue remained a question. For half a century or more, the king had sent executive orders or requisi- tions. But if requisitions were made, the colonial legis- lature claimed a right of freely deliberating upon them ; and as the colonies were divided into nearly twenty different governments, it was held that they never would come to a common result. The need of some principle of union, of some central power was asserted. To give the military chief a dictatorial authority to re- quire subsistence for the army, was suggested by the Board of Trade in 1696, in the days of King William and of Locke; was more deliberately planned in 1721 ; was apparently favored by Cumberland, and was one of the arbitrary proposals put aside by Pitt. To claim the revenue through a congress of the colonies, was at one time the plan of Halifax ; but if the congress was of governors, their decision would be only con- sultatory, and have no more weight than royal instruc- The New Forces 211 tions ; and if the congress was a representative body, it would claim and exercise the right of free discussion. To demand a revenue by instruction from the king, and to enforce them by stringent coercive measures, was beyond the power of the prerogative, under the system established at the revolution. When New York had failed to make appropriations for the civil service, a bill was prepared to be laid before Parliament, giving the usual revenue ; and this bill having received the appro- bation of the great whig lawyers, Northey and Ray- mond, was the precedent which overcame Grenville's scruples about taxing the colonies without first allow- ing them representatives. It was settled then that there must be a military establishment in America of twenty regiments ; that after the first year its expenses must be defrayed by America ; that the American colonies themselves, with their various charters, never would agree to vote such a revenue, and that Parliament must do it. " It remained to consider what tax Parliament should impose. And here all agreed that the first object of taxation was foreign and intercolonial com- merce. But that, under the navigation acts, would not produce enough. A poll tax was common in America ; but, applied by Parliament, would fall unequally upon the colonies holding slaves. The difficulty in collecting quit-rents, proved that a land tax would meet with formidable obstacles. An excise was thought of, but kept in reserve. An issue of exchequer bills to be kept in circulation as the currency of the continent, was urged on the ministry, but conflicted with the policy of acts of parliament against the use of paper money in the colonies. Everybody who reasoned on the subject, 212 Georg-e Washing-ton decided for a stamp act, as certain of collection ; and in America, where lawsuits were frequent, as likely to be very productive. A stamp act had been proposed to Sir Robert Walpole ; it had been thought of by Pelham ; it had been almost resolved upon in 1755 ; it had been pressed upon Pitt; it seems beyond a doubt to have been a part of the system adopted in the ministry of Bute, and was sure of the support of Charles Townshend. " Knox, the agent of Georgia, stood ready to defend the stamp act, as least liable to objection. The agent of Massachusetts, through his brother, Israel Mauduit, who had Jenkinson for his fast friend and often saw Grenville, favored raising the wanted money in that way, because it would occasion less expense of officers, and would include the West India Islands ; and speak- ing for his constituents, he made a merit of cheerful ' submission ' to the ministerial policy. " One man in Grenville's office, and one man only, did indeed give him sound advice ; Richard Jackson, his Secretary as Chancellor of the Exchequer, advised him to lay the project aside, and refused to take any part in preparing or supporting it. But Jenkinson, his Secretary of the Treasury, was ready to render every assistance, and weighed more than the honest and in- dependent Jackson. " Grenville therefore adopted the measure which was ' devolved upon him,' and his memory must consent, as he himself consented, that it should be ' christened by his name.' It was certainly Grenville, * who first brought this scheme into form.' He doubted the pro- priety of taxing colonies, without allowing them repre- sentatives ; but he loved power, and placed his chief The New Forces 213 hopes on the favour of parliament ; and the parHament of that day contemplated the increased debt of England with terror, knew not that the resources of the country were increasing in a still greater proportion, and insisted on throwing a part of the public burdens upon America." ^ Thus the cockatrice's Qgg was hatched. ^ Bancroft, History of the United States, vol. v, pp. 152-156. CHAPTER XII THE cockatrice's EGG NINETEEN years before the eighteenth century expired, an accomplished old man, half dandy, half diplomat, sat at his exquisitely carved secretary in the famous house at Strawberry Hill, and penned the following retrospective lines to Sir Horace Mann: " From the hour that fatal tgg, the Stamp Act, was laid, I disliked it and all the vipers hatched from it. I now hear many curse it, who fed the vermin with poisonous weeds. Yet the guilty and the innocent rue it equally hitherto ! I would not answer for what is to come ! Seven years of miscarriages may sour the sweetest tempers, and the most sweetened. Oh ! where is the Dove with the olive-branch? Long ago I told you that you and I might not live to see an end of the American war. It is very near its end indeed now — its consequences are far from a conclusion. In some respects, they are commencing a new date, which will reach far beyond us. I desire not to pry into that book of futurity. Could I finish my course in peace — but one must take the chequered scenes of life as they come. What signifies whether the elements are serene or turbulent, when a private old man slips away? What has he and the world's concerns to do with one another? He may sigh for his country, and babble about it ; but 214 The Cockatrice's Eg-g 215 he might as well sit quiet and read or tell old stories ; the past is as important to him as the future." ^ It required just ten years — 1765- 1775 — to hatch out the viper's egg, and among the myriad of lively young consequences that crept out of it were a seven years' war, a debt of £70,000,000 (according to Edmund Burke), the extinction of 100,000 precious lives, and the loss of what ultimately proved to be 3,000,000 square miles of territory. Again Virginia was in that beautiful May time (so dear to Chaucer and to all true Englishmen), during which the Jamestown Fathers had first looked out and beheld the enchanted shores of Hampton Roads; the rich summer was advancing; the bur- gesses at old Williamsburg, having been in session some time, were about to adjourn, and soon the midsummer calm of halcyon silence from their wordy presence would fall like a benediction over capitol and palace, when a young man (it was his birthday) rose in place, and, taking out of his pocket a sheet of paper torn from an old law-book, read the following preamble and " resolves " : " Whereas, the honorable house of commons in Eng- land have of late drawn into question how far the general assembly of this colony hath power to enact laws for laying of taxes and imposing duties, payable by the people of this, his majesty's most ancient colony : for settling and ascertaining the same to all future times, the house of burgesses of this present general assembly have come to the following resolves : — ^Letters of Horace Walpole, vol. ii, p. 247. 2i6 Georg-e Washington " I. Resolved, That the first adventurers and set- tlers of this, his majesty's colony and dominion, brought with them and transmitted to their posterity, and all other his majesty's subjects, since inhabiting in this, his majesty's said colony, all the privileges, franchises, and immunities that have at any time been held, enjoyed, and possessed, by the people of Great Britain. " 2. Resolved, That by two royal charters, granted by king James the First, the colonists aforesaid are declared entitled to all the privileges, liberties, and im- munities of denizens and natural born subjects, to all intents and purposes, as if they had been abiding and born within the realm of England. " 3, Resolved, That the taxation of the people by themselves or by persons chosen by themselves to repre- sent them, who can only know what taxes the people are able to bear, and the easiest mode of raising them, and are equally affected by such taxes themselves, is the distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, and without which the ancient constitution cannot subsist. " 4. Resolved, That his majesty's liege people of this most ancient colony have uninterruptedly enjoyed the right of being thus governed by their own assembly in the article of their taxes, and internal police, and that the same hath never been forfeited, or any other way given up, but hath been constantly recognised by the kings and people of Great Britain. '' 5. Resolved, therefore. That the general assembly of this colony have the only and sole exclusive right and power to lay taxes and impositions upon the in- habitants of this colony ; and that every attempt to vest The Cockatrice's Eg-g- 217 such power in any person or persons whatsoever, other than the general assembly aforesaid, has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom. "6. Resolved, That his majesty's liege people, the inhabitants of this colony, are not bound to yield obe- dience to any law or ordinance whatever, designed to impose any taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the laws or ordinances of the general assembly afore- said. " 7. Resolved, That any person who shall, by speak- ing or writing, assert or maintain that any person or persons, other than the general assembly of this colony, have any right or power to impose or lay any taxation on the people here, shall be deemed an enemy to his majesty's colony." " No reader will find it hard to accept Jefferson's statement that the debate on these resolutions was ' most bloody.' ' They were opposed by Randolph, Bland, Pendleton, Nicholas, Wythe, and all the old members, whose influence in the house had till then been unbroken.' There was every reason, whether of public policy or of private feeling, why the old party leaders in the House should now bestir themselves, and combine, and put forth all their powers in debate, to check, and if possible to rout and extinguish this self- conceited but most dangerous young man. ' Many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on him,' said Patrick himself, long afterward. Logic, learning, eloquence, denunciation, derision, intimidation, were poured from all sides of the House upon the head of the presumptuous intruder ; but alone, or almost alone, he confronted, and defeated all his assailants. 2i8 Georg-e Washing-ton ' Torrents of sublime eloquence from Mr. Henry, backed by the solid reasoning of Johnston, prevailed.' " It was sometime in the course of this tremendous fight, extending through the 29th and 30th of May, that the incident occurred which has long been familiar among the anecdotes of the Revolution, and which may be here recalled as a reminiscence, not only of his own consummate mastery of the situation, but of a most dramatic scene in an epoch-making debate. Reaching the climax of a passage of fearful invective, on the injustice and the impolicy of the Stamp Act, he said in tones of thrilling solemnity, ' Caesar had his Brutus ; Charles the First, his Cromwell ; and George the Third [' Treason,' shouted the speaker. ' Treason,' ' treason,' rose from all sides of the room. The orator paused in stately defiance till these rude exclamations were ended, and then, rearing himself with a look and bear- ing of still prouder and fiercer determination, he so closed the sentence as to baffle his accusers, without in the least flinching from his position,] — and George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.' " ^ The young man's voice was wonderfully sweet and flexible and grew in majesty and power as he read on, occasionally lifting an eye full of expression, then kindling with '* a great flame of dauntless pur- pose " as he pursued his reading to the end. Agitation betrayed itself on every countenance, as the young upstart from Louisa wound his way, at first with embarrassment, then with incompa- rable ease and power, through the weighty labyrinth ^ Tyler, Patrick Henry, pp. 61-64. A BOOK of .PURVEYS "'^^^^ e>/v SURVEYOR'S MANUSCRIPT. From Washington's "Book of Surveys." The Cockatrice's Egg 219 of principles and statements slowly unfolding itself from the paper in his hand. Men looked at each other in amazement; annoyance, indignation, wrath flashed out of eyes long accustomed to rule in that historic assembly, answered by smiles of jubilant surprise, ecstasy, delight from others on whom " the day Star of the Revolution " now rose for the first time. There were grey-haired constitutional law- yers — Randolph, the Attorney-general, John Robin- son, Speaker of the House, four of the incipient signers of the Declaration, the president of the first Continental Congress (to be), Wythe, the eminent Chancellor (afterwards poisoned by his nephew). Bland, Nicholas, Johnston, Fleming (to whom the '' Resolves " were afterwards strangely attrib- uted by Jefferson), possibly Colonel Washington himself; a throng of distinguished men skilled in debate, grown grey in the service of their country, not one of whom had as yet publicly spoken on the great question burning in the hearts of all. Attention riveted itself on the member from Louisa : imperceptibly, memory began to work here and there, members began to recall a certain " to- bacco question " which had agitated the whole colony three years before, in which this very man (aged twenty-seven) had taken central part. This was the famous Parsons' Case, and the man was — Patrick Henry. In this case, remarkable for the turn things had taken, the young advocate, hardly familiar with the forms of law itself, had been on the wrong side, on 220 Georg-e Washington the side of repudiation of a solemn obligation entered into by the vestries to pay their rectors in pounds of tobacco, not in pennies of depreciated paper; yet such was the power of his oratory, his thrilling de- nunciations of interference by the Crown in local legislation, his gift of persuasion and of quick and fluent imagination, that judge and jury alike were overwhelmed, the decision in favour of the parsons (virtually all the ghostly advisers in Virginia) was instantly reversed, twenty of the most learned clergy of the commonwealth present fled pell-mell from their seats, and a verdict of one penny damages against the Rev. James Maury et al. was brought in without delay. It was in this speech that the audacious orator had first used the word " tyrant " as applicable to a ruler who would trample under foot ancient char- ters and constitutional guarantees, and that the alliterative response " treason " darted from the lips of bystanders still loyal to the House of Han- over. As this tide of memories and associations flowed into the consciousness of the burgesses, as they sat around, from Mr. Speaker to the humblest repre- sentative of forest and mountain, the situation cleared : men stared, at first aghast, then with gesture of antagonism or assent ; at last things came to a crisis : men voted. " Ayes 20; noes 19," rang out in clear tones from the clerk's desk. The celebrated " Virginia Reso- lutions " were a part of history. Th€ Cockatrice's Egg 221 " Upon this final discomfiture of the old leaders, one of their number, Peyton Randolph, swept angrily out of the House, and brushing past young Thomas Jefferson, who was standing in the door of the lobby, he swore, with a great oath, that he ' would have given five hundred guineas for a single vote.' " ^ When he was a very old man, almost at the close of his career, Henry gave the following authentic account of this celebrated transaction : '* The within resolutions passed the house of bur- gesses in May, 1765. They formed the first opposition to the Stamp Act, and the scheme of taxing America by the British parliament. All the colonies, either through fear, or want of opportunity to form an opposi- tion, or from influence of some kind or other, had re- mained silent. I had been for the first time elected a burgess a few days before ; was young, inexperienced, unacquainted with the forms of the house, and the members that composed it. Finding the men of weight averse to opposition, and the commencement of the tax at hand, and that no person was likely to step forth, I determined to venture ; and alone, unadvised, and unassisted, on a blank leaf of an old law book, wrote the within. Upon offering them to the house, violent debates ensued. Many threats were uttered, and much abuse cast on me by the party for submission. After a long and warm contest, the resolutions passed by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two only. The alarm spread throughout America with astonishing quickness, and the ministerial party were overwhelmed. The great point of resistance to British taxation was * Tyler, Patrick Henry, p. 66. 222 Georg-e Washington universally established in the colonies. This brought on the war, which finally separated the two countries, and gave independence to ours. " Whether this will prove a blessing or a curse, will depend upon the use our people make of the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed on us. If they are wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable. Right- eousness alone can exalt them as a nation. " Reader ! whoever thou art, remember this ; and in thy sphere practise virtue thyself, and encourage it in others. " P. Henry." ^ " As the historic importance of the Virginia resolu- tions became more and more apparent, a disposition was manifested to deny to Patrick Henry the honour of having written them. As early as 1790, Madison, between whom and Henry there was nearly always a sharp hostility, significantly asked Edmund Pendleton to tell him * where the resolutions proposed by Mr. Henry really originated.' " ^ Edmund Randolph is said to have asserted that they were written by William Fleming; a statement of which Jefferson remarked, '' It is to me incom- prehensible." But to Jefferson's own testimony on the same subject, I would apply the same remark. In his Memorandum, he says without hesitation that the resolutions ** were drawn up by George Johns- ton, a lawyer of the Northern Neck, a very able, * Tyler, Patrick Henry, p. 75. ^Letters and Other Writings of Madison, vol. i, p. 515. The Cockatrice's Eg-g- 223 logical, and correct speaker." ^ But in another paper, written at about the same time, Jefferson said: '' I can readily enough believe these resolutions were written by Mr. Henry himself. They bear the stamp of his mind, strong without precision. That they were written by Johnston, who seconded them, was only the rumor of the day, and very possibly unfounded." In the face of all this tissue of rumour, guesswork, and self-contradiction, the deliberate statement of Patrick Henry himself, that he wrote the seven resolutions referred to by him, and that he wrote them '' alone, unadvised, and un- assisted," must close the discussion. ^ This places in an undoubted light not only the authorship of the " Resolves " but certain accom- panying details picturesquely clinging to these passages. Of extreme importance for our immediate pur- pose is a small group of Washington letters, running from 1767 to the beginning of the Revolu- tion, showing the growth of opinion on this taxa- tion question in the mind of the most illustrious figure and actor in it. Incidentally, too, these letters show vividly the kind of correspondence then pass- ing from week to week among Virginia gentlemen of the ruling class, alive to the needs of the day, the situation of matters in England, the trend of public opinion on subjects vitally affecting the ^ Hist. Mag. for 1867, p. 91. ^ Tyler, Patrick Henry, p. 75, note. 224 Georg-e Washing-ton colonies. Washington was never passionate nor partisan; the ardour of his mind usually expressed itself in acts, not in words; but one cannot read this striking group of opinions and reflections on the drift of things in America, in the decade under dis- cussion, without feeling the increasing purpose, the deep and concentrated feeling, the surge and swell of an anger which at last, repressed with admirable self-control for ten years, burst all bounds and con- verted this man and thousands of his countrymen from rank royalists to rank republicans, from Eng- lishmen bred in the bone, to rebels, revolutionists, Americans. Autobiographically remodelled, these letters might well be entitled : " How I Became a Rebel." " To George Mason " Mount Vernon, 5 April, 1769. " Dear Sir, " Herewith you will receive a letter and sundry papers, which were forwarded to me a day or two ago by Dr. Ross of Bladensburg. I transmit them with the greater pleasure, as my own desire of knowing your sentiments upon a matter of this importance exactly coincides with the Doctor's inclinations. *' At a time, when our lordly masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of American freedom, it seems highly necessary that something should be done to avert the stroke, and maintain the liberty, which we have de- rived from our ancestors. But the manner of doing The Cockatrice's Egg 225 it, to answer the purpose effectually, is the point in question. '' That no man should scruple, or hesitate a moment, to use a — ms in defence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good and evil of life depends, is clearly my opinion. Yet a — ms I would beg leave to add, should be the last resource, the dernier resort. Ad- dresses to the throne, and remonstrances to Parliament, we have already, it is said, proved the inefficacy of. How far, then, their attention to our rights and privi- liges is to be awakened or alarmed, by starving their trade and manufactures, remains to be tried. " The northern colonies, it appears, are endeavoring to adopt this scheme. In my opinion it is a good one, and must be attended with salutary effects, provided it can be carried pretty generally into execution. But to what extent it is practicable to do so, I will not take upon me to determine. That there will be difficulties attending the execution of it every where, from clash- ing interests, and selfish, designing men, (ever atten- tive to their own gain, and watchful of every turn, that can assist their lucrative views, in preference to every other consideration) cannot be denied; but in the tobacco colonies, where the trade is so diffused, and in a manner wholly conducted by factors for their prin- cipals at home, these difficulties are certainly enhanced, but I think not insurmountably increased, if the gentle- men in their several counties will be at some pains to explain matters to the people, and stimulate them to a cordial agreement to purchase none but certain enu- merated articles out of anv of the stores after such a period, nor import nor purchase any themselves. This, if it did not effectuallv withdraw the factors from their 226 George Washington importations, would at least make them extremely cau- tious in doing it, as the prohibited goods could be vended to none but the non-associators, or those who would pav no regard to their association ; both of whom ought to be stigmatized, and made the objects of public reproach. ** The more I consider a scheme of this sort, the more ardently I wish success to it, because I think there are private as well as public advantages to result from it, — the former certain, however precarious the other may prove. For in respect to the latter, I have always thought, that by virtue of the same power, (for here alone the authority derives) which assumes the right of taxation, they may attempt at least to restrain our manufactories, especially those of a public nature, the same equity and justice prevailing in the one case as the other, it being no greater hardship to forbid my manufacturing, than it is to order me to buy goods of them loaded with duties, for the express purpose of raising a revenue. But as a measure of this sort would be an additional exertion of arbitrary power, we can- not be worsted, I think, by putting it to the test. '' On the other hand, that the colonies are consider- ably indebted to Great Britain, is a truth universally acknowledged. That many families are reduced al- most, if not quite, to penury and want from the low ebb of their fortunes, and estates daily selling for the discharge of debts, the public papers furnish but too many melancholy proofs of, and that a scheme of this sort will contribute more effectually than any other I can devise to emerge the country from the distress it at present labors under, I do most firmly believe, if it can be generally adopted. And I can see but one set >- c ^ 'bJj O 5 z < ^ The Cockatrice's Egg 227 of people (the merchants excepted,) who will not, or ought not, to wish well to the scheme, and that is those who live genteelly and hospitably on clear estates. Such as these, were they not to consider the valuable object in view, and the good of others, might think it hard to be curtailed in their living and enjoyments. For as to the penurious man, he saves his money, and saves his credit, having the best plea for doing that, which before, perhaps, he had the most violent strug- gles to refrain from doing. The extravagant and expensive man has the same good plea to retrench his expenses. He is thereby furnished with a pretext to live within bounds, and embraces it. Prudence dictated economy to him before, but his resolution was too weak to put it in practice ; For how can I, says he, who have lived in such and such a manner, change my method? I am ashamed to do it, and, besides, such an alteration in the system of my living will create suspicions of the decay in my fortune, and such a thought the world must not harbour. I will e'en continue my course, till at last the course discontinues the estate, a sale of it being the consequence of his perseverance in error. This I am satisfied is the way, that many, who have set out in the wrong track, have reasoned, till ruin stares them in the face. And in respect to the poor and needy man, he is only left in the same situation that he was found, — better, I might say, because, as he judges from comparison, his condition is amended in proportion as it approaches nearer to those above him. '' Upon the whole, therefore, I think the scheme a good one, and that it ought to be tried here, with such alterations as the exigency of our circumstances ren- ders absolutely necessary. But how, and in what 228 Georg-e Washington manner to begin the work, is a matter worthy of con- sideration, and whether it can be attempted with propriety or efficacy (further than a communication of sentiments to one another,) before May, when the Court and Assembly will meet in Williamsburg, and a uniform plan can be concerted, and sent into the dif- ferent counties to operate at the same time and in the same manner everywhere, is a thing I am somewhat in doubt upon, and should be glad to know your opinion of." ^ The following is an extract from Mr. Mason's reply to this letter, dated the same day : " I entirely agree with you, that no regular plan of the sort proposed can be entered into here, before the meeting of the General Court at least, if not of the Assembly. In the mean time it may be necessary to publish something preparatory to it in our gazettes, to warn the people of the impending danger, and induce them the more readily and cheerfully to concur in the proper measures to avert it ; and something of this sort I had begun, but am unluckily stopped by a disorder, which affects my head and eyes. As soon as I am able, I shall resume it, and then write you more fully, or endeavor to see you. In the mean time pray commit to writing such hints as may occur. '' Our all is at stake, and the little conveniences and comforts of life, when set in competition with our liberty, ought to be rejected, not with reluctance, but with pleasure. Yet it is plain, that in the tobacco colo- nies we cannot at present confine our importations within such narrow bounds, as the northern colonies. ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 263. The Cockatrice's Egg 229 A plan of this kind, to be practicable, must be adapted to our circumstances ; for if not steadily executed, it had better have remained unattempted. We may retrench all manner of superfluities, finery of all descriptions, and confine ourselves to linens, woollens, &c. not ex- ceeding a certain price. It is amazing how much this practice, if adopted in all the colonies, would lessen the American imports, and distress the various traders and manufacturers in Great Britain. " This would awaken their attention. They would see, they would feel, the oppressions we groan under, and exert themselves to procure us redress. This once obtained, we should no longer discontinue our impor- tations, confining ourselves still not to import any article, that should hereafter be taxed by act of Par- liament for raising a revenue in America ; for, how- ever singular I may be in my opinion, I am thoroughly convinced, that, justice and harmony happily restored, it is not the interest of these colonies to refuse British manufactures. Our supplying our mother country with gross materials, and taking her manufactures in return, is the true chain of connexion between us. These are the bands, which, if not broken by op- pression, must long hold us together, by maintaining a constant reciprocation of interest. Proper caution should, therefore, be used in drawing up the proposed plan of association. It may not be amiss to let the ministry understand, that, until we obtain a redress of grievances, we will withhold from them our commod- ities, and particularly refrain from making tobacco, by which the revenue would lose fifty times more than all their oppressions could raise here. " Had the hint, which I have given with regard to 230 Georg-e Washington taxation of goods imported into America, been thought of by our merchants before the repeal of the Stamp Act, the late American revenue acts would probably never have been attempted." ^ '' To Bryan Fairfax *' Mount Vernon, 4 July, 1774. ''. . .As to your political sentiments, I would heart- ily join you in them, so far as relates to a humble and dutiful petition to the throne, provided there was the most distant hope of success. But have we not tried this already ? Have we not addressed the Lords, and remonstrated to the Commons ? And to what end ? Did they deign to look at our petitions? Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us? Does not the uniform conduct of Parliament for some years past confirm this? Do not all the debates, especially those just brought to us, in the House of Commons on the side of government, expressly declare that America must be taxed in aid of the British funds, and that she has no longer resources within herself? Is there any thing to be expected from petitioning after this? Is not the attack upon the liberty and property of the people of Boston, before restitution of the loss to the India Company was demanded, a plain and self-evident proof of what they are aiming at? Do not the sub- sequent bills (now I dare say acts), for depriving the Massachusetts Bay of its charter, and for transporting * Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 267, note. For letters to Capel Hanbury and Robert Gary, see p. 199. The Cockatrice's Egg 231 offenders into other colonies or to Great Britain for trial, where it is impossible from the nature of the thing that justice can be obtained, convince us that the administration is determined to stick at nothing to carry its point ? Ought we not, then, to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test? '' With you I think it a folly to attempt more than we can execute, as that will not only bring disgrace upon us, but weaken our cause ; yet I think we may do more than is generally believed, in respect to the non-importation scheme. As to the withholding of our remittances, that is another point, in which I own I have my doubts on several accounts, but principally on that of justice; for I think, whilst we are accusing others of injustice, we should be just ourselves; and how this can be, whilst we owe a considerable debt, and refuse payment of it to Great Britain, is to me in- conceivable. Nothing but the last extremity, I think, can justify it. Whether this is now come, is the ques- tion." ^ " The inhabitants of Fairfax County had assembled, and appointed a committee for drawing up resolutions expressive of their sentiments on the great topics, which agitated the country. Washington was chairman of this committee, and moderator of the meetings held by the people. An able report was prepared by the committee, containing a series of resolutions, which were presented at a general meeting of the inhabitants at the court-house in Fairfax County on the i8th of July. ''Mr. Bryan Fairfax, who had been present on ' Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 4I7- 232 Georg-e Washing-ton former occasions, not approving all the resolutions, absented himself from this meeting, and wrote a long letter to the chairman, stating his views and objections, with the request that it should be publicly read." 2 *' To Bryan Fairfax " Mount Vernon, 20 July, 1774. " Dear Sir, " Your letter of the 17th was not presented to me till after the resolutions, (which were adjudged ad- visable for this county to come to), had been revised, altered, and corrected in the committee ; nor till we had gone into a general meeting in the court-house, and my attention necessarily called every moment to the business that was before it. I did, however, upon receipt of it (in that hurry and bustle,) hastily run it over, and handed it round to the gentlemen on the bench of which there were many ; but, as no person present seemed in the least disposed to adopt your sentiments, as there appeared a perfect satisfaction and acquiescence in the measures proposed (except from a Mr. Williamson, who was for adopting your advice literally, without obtaining a second voice on his side), and as the gentlemen, to whom the letter was shown, advised me not to have it read, as it was not like to make a convert, and repugnant, (some of them thought,) to the very principle we were contending for, I forbore to offer it otherwise than in the manner above mentioned ; which I shall be sorry for, if it gives you any dissatisfaction in not having your sentiments read to the county at large, instead of communicating 'Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 420, note. The Cockatrice's Egg- 233 them to the first people in it, by offering them the letter in the manner I did. " That I differ very widely from you, in respect to the mode of obtaining a definite repeal of the acts so much and so justly complained of, I shall not hesitate to acknowledge ; and that this difference in opinion may probably proceed from the different constructions we put upon the conduct and intention of the ministry may also be true ; but, as I see nothing, on the one hand, to induce a belief that the Parliament would em- brace a favorable opportunity of repealing acts, which they go on with great rapidity to pass, and in order to enforce their tyrannical system ; and, on the other, I observe, or think I observe, that government is pur- suing a regular plan at the expense of law and justice to overthrow our constitutional rights and liberties, how can I expect any redress from a measure, which has been ineffectually tried already? For, Sir, what is it we are contending against? Is it against paying the duty of three pence per pound on tea because burthensome? No, it is the right only, we have all along disputed, and to this end we have already petitioned his Majesty in as humble and dutiful man- ner as subjects could do. Nay, more, we applied to the House of Lords and House of Commons in their different legislative capacities, setting forth, that, as Englishmen, we could not be deprived of this essential and valuable part of a constitution. If, then, as the fact really is, it is against the right of taxation that we now do, and, (as I before said,) all along have con- tended, why should they suppose an exertion of this power would be less obnoxious now than formerly? And what reasons have we to believe, that they would 234 George Washing-ton make a second attempt, while the same sentiments filled the breast of every American, if they did not in- tend to enforce it if possible? '' The conduct of the Boston people could not justify the rigor of their measures, unless there had been a requisition of payment and refusal of it; nor did that measure require an act to deprive the government of Massachusetts Bay of their charter, or to exempt of- fenders from trial in the place where offences were committed, as there was not, nor could not be, a single instance produced to manifest the necessity of it. Are not all these things self evident proofs of a fixed and uniform plan to tax us? If we want further proofs, do not all the debates in the House of Commons serve to confirm this ? And has not General Gage's conduct since his arrival, (in stopping the address of his Coun- cil, and publishing a proclamation more becoming a Turkish bashaw, than an English governor, declaring it treason to associate in any manner by which the commerce of Great Britain is to be affected,) exhibited an unexampled testimony of the most despotic system of tyranny, that ever was practised in a free govern- ment? In short, what further proofs are wanted to satisfy one of the designs of the ministry, than their own acts, which are uniform and plainly tending to the same point, nay, if I mistake not, avowedly to fix the right of taxation? What hope then from petitioning, when they tell us, that now or never is the time to fix the matter? Shall we, after this, whine and cry for relief, when we have already tried it in vain ? Or shall we supinely sit and see one province after another fall a prey to despotism? If I was in any doubt, as to the right which the Parliament of Great Britain had to The Cockatrice's Egg 235 tax us without our consent, I should most heartily co- incide with you in opinion, that to petition, and petition only, is the proper method to apply for relief; because we should then be asking a favor, and not claiming a right, which, by the law of nature and our constitution, we are, in my opinion, indubitably entitled to. I should even think it criminal to go further than this, under such an idea ; but none such I have. I think the Par- liament of Great Britain hath no more right to put their hands into my pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into yours for money ; and this being already urged to them in a firm, but decent manner, by all the colonies, what reason is there to ex- pect any thing from their justice? '' As to the resolution for addressing the throne, I own to you. Sir, I think the whole might as well have been expunged. I expect nothing from the measure, nor should my voice have accompanied it, if the non- importation scheme was intended to be retarded by it; for I am convinced, as much as I am of my existence, that there is no relief but in their distress ; and I think, at least I hope, that there is public virtue enough left among us to deny ourselves every thing but the bare necessaries of life to accomplish this end. This we have a right to do, and no power upon earth can compel us to do otherwise, till they have first reduced us to the most abject state of slavery that ever was designed for mankind. The stopping our exports would, no doubt, be a shorter cut than the other to effect this purpose ; but if we owe money to Great Britain, nothing but the last necessity can justify the non-payment of it ; and, therefore, I have great doubts upon this head, 236 Georg^e Washington and wish to see the other method first tried, which is legal and will facilitate these payments, " I cannot conclude without expressing some con- cern, that I should differ so widely in sentiment from you, in a matter of such great moment and general import ; and should much distrust my own judgment upon the occasion, if my nature did not recoil at the thought of submitting to measures, which I think sub- versive of every thing that I ought to hold dear and valuable, and did I not find, at the same time, that the voice of mankind is with me." ^ " To Bryan Fairfax " Mount Vernon, 24 August, 1774. " Dear Sir, " Your letter of the 5th instant came to this place, forwarded by Mr. Ramsay, a few days after my return from Williamsburg, and I delayed acknowledging it sooner, in the hopes that I should find time, before I began my other journey to Philadelphia, to answer it fully, if not satisfactorily ; but, as much of my time has been engrossed since I came home by company, by your brother's sale and the business consequent there- upon, in writing letters to England and now in attend- ing to my own domestic affairs previous to my de- parture as above, I find it impossible to bestow so much time and attention to the subject matter of your letter as I could wish to do, and therefore, must rely upon your good nature and candor in excuse for not reply- ing attempting it. " In truth, persuaded as I am, that you have read ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 420. The Cockatrice's Eg-g 237 all the political pieces, which compose a large share of the Gazette at this time, I should think it, but for your request, a piece of inexcusable arrogance in me, to make the least essay towards a change in your political opinions ; for I am sure I have no new lights to throw upon the subject, or any other arguments to offer in support of my own doctrine, than what you have seen ; and could only in general add, that an innate spirit of freedom first told me, that the measures, which ad- ministration hath for some time been, and now are most violently pursuing, are repugnant to every prin- ciple of natural justice; whilst much abler heads than my own hath fully convinced me, that it is not only re- pugnant to natural right, but subversive of the laws and constitution of Great Britain itself, in the establish- ment of which some of the best blood in the Kingdom hath been spilt. Satisfied, then, that the acts of a British Parliament are no longer governed by the prin- ciples of justice, that it is trampling upon the valuable rights of Americans, confirmed to them by charter and the constitution they themselves boast of, and convinced beyond the smallest doubt that these measures are the result of deliberation, and attempted to be carried into execution by the hand of power, is it a time to trifle, or risk our cause upon petitions, which with difficulty ob- tain access, and afterwards are thrown by with the ut- most contempt? Or should we, because heretofore unsuspicious of design, and then unwilling to enter into disputes with the mother country, go on to bear more, and forbear to enumerate our just causes of com- plaint ? For my own part, I shall not undertake to say where the line between Great Britain and the colonies should be drawn ; but I am clearly of opinion, that one 238 George Washing-ton ought to be drawn, and our rights clearly ascertained. I could wish, I own, that the dispute had been left to posterity to determine, but the crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every im- position, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway. '' I intended to have wrote no more than an apology for not writing ; but I find I am insensibly running into a length I did not expect, and therefore shall conclude with remarking, that if you disavow the right of Par- liament to tax us, (unrepresented as we are,) we only differ in respect to the mode of opposition, and this difference principally arises from your belief, that they — the Parliament, I mean, — want a decent opportunity to repeal the acts ; whilst I am as fully convinced, as I am of my own existence, that there has been a regular, systematic plan formed to enforce them, and that nothing but unanimity in the colonies (a stroke they did not expect) and firmness, can prevent it. It seems from the best advices from Boston, that General Gage is exceedingly disconcerted at the quiet and steady con- duct of the people of the Massachusetts Bay, and at the measures pursuing by the other governments ; as I dare say he expected to have forced those oppressed people into compliances, or irritated them to acts of violence before this, for a more colorable pretense of ruling that and the other colonies with a high hand. But I am done." ^ In these letters Washington simply shows a high degree of common-sense intelligence — no genius ^ Ford, Writings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 429. The Cockatrice's Egg 239 for oratory, rhetoric, or expression, except in the lucid presentation of plain facts such as they ap- peared to the average country gentleman of the day. " When the people meddle with reasoning," said Voltaire almost at this very time, " all is lost." Washington was one of this thinking mob. The calm, contemplative life at Mount Vernon left him leisure to think. CHAPTER XIII REVOLUTIONS frequently concentrate them- selves in the nutshell of a popular cry : even ecclesiastical revolutions have thus stamped them- selves with the ineffaceable stigma of revolt. At the Reformation, '' the just shall live by faith " be- came the watchword of the reformers. At the period of the French Revolution, '' liberie, egalite, fraternite '' rang on all the air of the time. In the Revolution of 1688, chartered rights and institutions were the dominant thought of statesmen and popu- lace alike, and the thought coined itself into pithy and golden phrases pregnant with historic meaning; occasionally, as in Egmont's time, some simple object, like the beggar's scrip, was snatched up and became the visible tabernacle of the indwelling rev- olutionary spirit. In America, between 1765 and 1775, ''Liberty, Property, No Stamps ! " rang from New Hampshire to Georgia; and even when the odious Act — all except the tax on tea — was repealed, the fury of the popular imagination fixed on tea as the symbol of an infernal sovereignty, which popular patience w^ould no longer brook. Tea — tea, the tiny monosyllable of three letters. 240 ■^ 1 ' ' HBI^HH •:% i; J i 1 H^^^^^^^hI B"'^ E^ H ^^mSM^^HH^^^^^^^^^^^^^HH I^^K. HE^kl^B '~~. H i^^l^^^B^^^^^^^I^^^^H^^^HB ■HI '^^-T* 1 j 1 ^. '^v^l^^^lfS^^^^^^^HUH fl ETi H ' o^Hb^^I^^^^^hH ^P;U B« M ■3 HI '^i. ...J tm- . ' V'J:^i d'ltfi^^^H :i ! -J. 1 » ■ - ^ i<.- «. * . . ■ ." J WASHINGTON ARCH, NEW YORK CITY, **The Deadly Tea-Chest" 241 embodied in its small self, to the mind of that day, the whole creed of tyranny. From the first whiff of this delightful beverage, wafted to us in old Pepys's Diary of 28th September, 1660, " I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I had never drank before." Two years later he writes : " Home, and there find my wife making of tea, a drink which Mr. Felling the Fothicary tells her is good for her cold and defluxions " : from this time, the tea-kettles of England multiplied its con- sumption to more than five millions of pounds; in every household of the United Kingdom, Camellia theifera, whether of the Thea sinensis variety of Linnaeus, or of other varieties and graftings, had become indispensable to a well-ordered household. Millions of tea-kettles steamed merrily over millions of hearths, waiting for the cunningly rolled leaves or fragrant powders to be steeped, for the delecta- tion of lonely fireside or literary gathering. His- toric tea-bibbers like Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale have been handed down to posterity, on an equal footing with tobaccophiles like Lord Tennyson or coffee-drinkers like Napoleon. Tea-houses had sprung up like magic all over the kingdom. Of the 5,000,000 pounds imported, at least 1,500,000 sent up clouds of fragrant steam from American caddies. Washington w^as passionately fond of tea, and rivalled the great lexicographer in his devotion to this fluid, enthusiastically joining his contempora- ries in the institution of the afternoon tea. Tea, in short, represented a harmless luxury in- 242 George Washington dulged in by thousands who, surmounting the stiff prices, contrived to get it for the alleviation of the long evenings, or for a mild and agreeable medicine described by Pepys. Yet tea — tea, the most harmless and delectable of drinks, bubbling peacefully in its kettle, or steep- ing demurely in the exquisite pots prepared es- pecially for it — now became the sign and symbol of Revolution, red, ruthless, infuriate! '' So for the next three years tea was the symbol with which the hostile spirits conjured. It stood for everything that true freemen loathe. In the deadly tea-chest lurked the complete surrender of self-gov- ernment, the payment of governors and judges by the crown, the arbitrary suppression of legislatures, the denial of the principle that freemen can be taxed only by their own representatives. So long as they were threatened with tea, the colonists would not break the non-intercourse agreement. Once the merchants of New York undertook to order from England various other articles than tea, and the news was greeted all over the country with such fury, that nothing more of the sort was attempted openly. As for tea itself shipped from England, one would as soon have thought of trying to introduce the Black Death." ^ The tea drunk by 2,500,000 people did not weigh an atom in this balance in comparison with the principle at stake. At first it had been stamps, whose heraldic device of the royal arms — two lions rampant upholding a much-quartered shield — ^ Fiske, Essays Historical and Literary, vol. ii, p. 186. "The Deadly Tea-Chest" 243 seemed, to the humorous imagination of the day, to dance on the Hberties of the colonies ; now it was tea, which after the impost on glass, painter's colours, red and white lead, still remained proud and defiant, a revolutionary plant on the ministry's tax- list, as the symbol of British power and sovereignty never to be yielded or removed. And so the childish contention — infinitely child- ish it would seem to us now, had not great funda- mental principles of self-taxation underlaid it — went on, until seventeen millions of pounds of this insidious vegetable had heaped themselves up in the East India Company's warehouses. The American nation was young then, and apolo- gists might attribute this abnormal excitement to over-strained nerves and juvenility in general; the very passion for tea might have turned its brain into a passion against tea, as the fetish of an over-excited fancy. But the ever-increasing note of indignation, traceable in the letters of Washington in our last chapter, now swelled to a great diapason of discon- tent. It was like the breath of one of those cyclonic storms far in the West: beginning as a whisper, almost as a lullaby of feverish unrest at its birth in the mountains, it rolls eastward, swift and irre- sistible, gathering volume and vindictiveness as it sweeps on, until the hurricane-point is reached. Washington's admirable presentation of the calm, common-sense side of the troubles, as viewed by the typical Virginia gentleman of 1765, was no less 244 George Washington effective, though much more dignified, than the wild turmoil of speech that prevailed in some of the other colonies. The north-eastern colonies were indeed strenuous examples of precocious political development, a de- velopment which unlike the radiant adolescence of the South, had been stimulated less by suns than snows, less by soft open-air exercises and luxurious plantation life, than by granite hills, grim icicles and cutting blasts: Boreas rather than Zephyr presided over the New England household. And it was pre- cisely these ill-favoured surroundings, which might be called lovely and majestic only when they melted into the emerald curves of the Green Mountains, or the opaline crests of Mount Washington, or gathered into exquisite lakes that tremble like quicksilver in the " pockets " of the Maine forests — it was these very ill-favoured surroundings that evoked one of the most remarkable little political societies which the world has seen, since Athenian democracy met in the agora and discussed the policy of Xerxes or of Sparta. " Massachusetts," like " Virginia," was originally one of those vague geographic terms, whose inclu- siveness stretched over the hemisphere like the streamers of the zodiacal light, touching nothing but embracing everything. The generous autocrats of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave away lands by parallels of latitude, continents, worlds, without even questioning the right to give. Massa- chusetts, at the time of which we are speaking, em- * ' The Deadly Tea-Chest " 245 braced the vast and picturesque territory of Maine, whose French name recalled its Gallic antecedents. On its granite foundations, hidden out of sight by deep cushions of luxuriant grass and interminable stretches of spice-breathing conifem, had planted themselves two hundred lively little towns, whose triple glories were the grammar-school, the town- meeting, or ancient folk-moot of the Germanic race, and the Puritan meeting-house. From the begin- ning, all New England believed in this trmity, whatever the later cavilling of its Unitarian eccle- siastics might be. Education, free discussion, village politics grew to be the " fad," the infatuation of the two hundred thousand white people who had made this wilderness blossom like a rose, and planted a fruit-tree where a prickly thistle had grown before. The country lanes were full of decent httle villages whose tapering church-spires were, at once, monu- ments of the new life, and reminiscences of the far- away English homes from which the villagers had come Everything buzzed and hummed with hearty activities; the rudely shaped dwellings were often the handiwork of the indwellers, built to last, and furnished with every reasonable convenience. In some cases, the nails and wrought-iron work and simple furnishings were the direct offspring of the toil of men who attached their vigorous hiero- glyphic to the Declaration, or founded a hne punctuated to the present time with distinguished names. In time, the Mayflower budded into a won- derful world of leaf, and blossom and fruit— a 246 Georg^e Washington floating garden which had brought the Old World to the New — and infinitely more, for here even the new-born children of the Newest Testament be- queathed by the Old to the New, along with a world of new-born possibilities, hopes, ambitions — new eyes to look at things, new brains to think of them, new mouths to speak and, after a while — to sing of them in strains sung the world over. At first all seemed '' granulation," disintegration, Congrega- tionalism of an independent touch-me-not kind, most unpromising for future union and harmony, discordant notes scattered on the hills without one thought of those high federal harmonies one day to flow from these. It had required just one hundred and fifty years from the first step on Plymouth Rock to the begin- ning of the Revolution, when Boston, now a town of eighteen thousand folk enthroned on its penin- sula, seemed to push forth its tongue of flame into the blue bay, and speak wrath and defiance to the venerable mother on the other side of the water. For in the century and a half just elapsed the com- monwealth of Massachusetts Bay had become grizzled in the Indian wars, wonderfully wise in its own conceit, a trifle supercilious in its intellectual arrogance, petulant in the extreme to outside med- dling, jealous of its own privileges and of the pre- rogatives of others, afflicted with beginnings of that intellectual insomnia which has been its character- istic from that day to this, perpetually peeping over its neighbour's fences to see what people over there *'The Deadly Tea-Chest" 247 are doing, yet scouring and scourging its own pots and kettles to the ultimate degree of brightness. A curious, inquiring prying and peeping into corners of grandmother's cupboard marked this infant com- monwealth : not to meddle with religion was a sin, not to meddle w^ith politics was a shame, not to go to town-meeting, not to go to something when you were duly elected, was a crime. The highest sense of public duty grew in these people as weeds grew in others : civic pride, municipal virtue, vast concern in the doings of legislatures and assemblies, endless patience in listening to endless debate, provided the subject was improvement, reform, education, libra- ries, schools, beneficence ; the ears of the New Eng- landers would gloat for ever over these magnetic topics, and listen far into the night to the proposi- tions of Selectman This or Assemblyman That, designed to introduce the Golden Age at once, w^ith- out a moment's delay, on the banks of the Charles, the Merrimac, or the Penobscot. John Harvard, himself, had been born not far from Shakspere's town, and had founded an institu- tion just outside of Boston, which had given a cer- tain Shaksperian turn and versatility to the culture of New England, as the sister institution at Wil- liamsburg had imprinted a kind of Miltonic elo- quence and intonation on the early culture of Virginia. Every year, the whitest fleece, the most unblemished lambs of Harvard went forth into the ecclesiastical fold, and shepherded the souls of New England along the paths at first of rigid Puritanism, 248 George Washington then of orthodoxy less cold, clear, passionless, final- ly, into the by-paths of a heterdoxy which insisted only on the blameless life and the lofty ideal. Har- vard, indeed, was the one institution to which New England might point with absolute pride, as abso- lutely typical both of its life and of its ideal. It was the noble child of a young man just one-and-thirty, whose gift of three hundred volumes has grown to more than as many hundred thousands, and whose few hundred pounds have multiplied, like the Bib- lical ten talents put out at interest, almost exclusively from the splendid munificence of private individuals. William and Mary College was the offspring of a King and a Queen, and from the moment of its birth was hampered by its royal birthmark. A spiritual promenade among the galleries of New England worthies reveals long lines of clear- cut faces marked with the insignia of high thought, — pale, intellectual, often fierce with the struggles of inward passion and inward suffering, highly spiritualised masks burnt translucent by the fires of a soul, prophetic of the Edwardses and Hutchinsons and Adamses yet to come, high-born men and women whose cold eyes flash steel or Stoic on occa- sion, portraits all nerve and muscle, as the wrinkling centuries move on and stamp their infinite crow's- feet into the gelatine mould of the soul, slightly starchy, ministerial, clerical here and there, flakes of clear quartz with veins of gold in it ; a wondrous collection of human beings whom Copley or Trum- bull or Peale or Stuart have singled out from the JOHN ADAMS, From a steei engraving. *'The Deadly Tea-Chest" 249 passing crowd, and fixed for ever on the canvas in speaking lineaments. It was out of this New England that that monu- mental group of men (not yet large enough to be called heroes) sprang, who turn and gaze at us for a moment out of their golden frames and pass on : Samuel Adams, John Adams, Thomas Hutchinson, Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, Josiah Quincy, Joseph Warren, even Paul Revere, " the patriot Mercury " on his eternal Valkyrie-ride of news- telling to the remoter colonies. How these figures flame as we gaze at them, filling with an invisible life, quivering with an unseen intelligence, longing to tell us the story of their lives, eager to communi- cate the secrets of the year, 1764, 1768; of Feb. 22 and March 5, 1770; of Hutchinson's " spy " letters; of the "Indians," of Dec. 16, 1773; of tea-party and tea-ships as they sailed gaily into Boston Bay, not knowing it was the open mouth of the dragon ! For these dates and events stand out in bead-like distinctness among the linked anniversaries of the decade, incising their notches deep into the living marble of the time. In 1765, the Virginia Resolutions of Patrick Henry, against the Stamp Act, had been the drop of rennet that ran the colonies together in massive coagulation. Three years later, owing to the enor- mous pressure of opinion at home and abroad, the odious Act was repealed, and another cockatrice's ^g^, still more odious, — import tax on tea, glass, and painter's material, — began to hatch out its 250 Georg^e Washing^ton '' vermin." Troops arrive to enforce the Revenue Acts, and the curious Httle episode, dignified as '' The Boston Massacre," stains the 5th of March, 1770, with a red more indehble than Rizzio's blood. The Committees of Correspondence and the Circular Letters of legislatures travel their planetary way from province to province during this decade, informing the people what was being done, and sending a glare of illumination into wildernesses unreached as yet by the Boston newspapers, or the Virginia Gazette. Exact historians, scrupulous of their dotted i's and crossed f s, still battle over the question whether Massachusetts or Virginia origi- nated the Circular Letter and the Committee of Correspondence, those all-powerful agencies in the spread of the Revolution ; whoever be the originator, they were in virulent activity at this time and earlier, and were the honeycombs in which the honey of the deflowered fields w^as stored up for future use, — honey often of the sardonic kind, turning into bitter- ness on the tongue of the consumer. At last, we reach that moonlight night of icy December of the expiring year 1773, when, as by one giant exhalation, all the pent-up fiery energy of the ten years gone by, concentrated to fury and becoming ungovernable, wrenched itself loose and poured forth in a stream of rebellion. Ludicrous as '' the Boston Tea Party " may ap- pear to some historians commenting with exagger- ated hyperbole on the revolutionary days, the event was kindred in spirit to the mutilation of the HermcB "The Deadly Tea-Chest" 251 which influenced Athens in the Peloponnesian war. Samuel Adams and Alcibiades were far apart in most particulars, but there are points enough of resemblance between them. If Massachusetts was the tongue of the Revolu- tion, Samuel Adams, '' the chief incendiary," was its chosen mouthpiece. This man, by pure intellectual ability, shrewdness, sharpness, " Yankee wit," or whatever one may call it, became everything that it was possible for a man of that day to become, ex- cept President of the United States — selectman, clerk of the assembly, assemblyman, speaker, delegate to the first Continental Congress, lieutenant-governor, governor, and senator of the United States, rising like Washington with the buoyant irrepressible force of which we have previously spoken. As the hero of all the events that led straight up to the " tea- party," Samuel Adams, the incarnation of Massa- chusetts, deserves abundant attention. He is the chief propulsive force of his time, a born leader, standing behind every forward movement, shoulder to shoulder with every difficulty, not a passive Caryatid merely supporting measures, but a glow- ing sculptor, rending the figure out of the mountain and dragging it with infinite toil over the sands of the desert. Hardly a resolution of the town-meeting or the as- sembly that he did not draft or pen or edit or emend. His finger was in every pie : he lived at town-meet- ing rather than at home, and when he slept, doubt- less, dreamt resolutions, amendments, remonstrances 252 Georg-e Washington to King and Parliament. He was, in short, one of those subHme busybodies (in the best sense) who meddle with everybody else's business, and with superlative unselfishness forget their own. On one of the currencies of 1776 stood the following legend : Fugio: a sun-dial: mind your business a device which never could have occurred to Samuel Adams, for " minding his own business " was his last thought when he could mind the public's. This endless attention to other people's affairs was what made Adams a thorn in the side of Mas- sachusetts, and Massachusetts a crown of thorns on the brow of the British Parliament. The highest compliment which his second cousin, John Adams, could pay Charles Thompson, first and most famous clerk of the first Continental Congress of 1774, was that " he was the Sam Adams of Philadelphia." The acute, high-voiced, soprano civilisation of the New England of this period was, indeed, a curious mixture of femininity and intense masculine strength. Its marked characteristic was the utter lack of self-control, inability to hold its tongue, ex- citability of temper more usually found in tropic latitudes, and a " gift of gab " perilous in the ex- treme to a good understanding with the mother- country. The east wind had entered into its coun- sels and constitution, and given a sharpness to the unruly member that amounted to acerbity. As the magnificent curves of the New World swept north-eastward in graceful zigzag toward the ^*The Deadly Tea-Chest" 253 Arctic Circle, it seemed as if the little cluster of battling commonwealhs, on the north-eastern tip, were being purposely pushed out into the tem- pestuous seas to steel their nerves, as tools of glitter- ing steel are given edge in ice. Indeed, the threshold of the Revolution was the laboratory, in which the edge-tools of New England speech began to sharpen to that fineness which, only fifty years later, was to come to artistic consciousness on the fastidious lips of Emerson and Hawthorne, of Longfellow and Poe. The deep Puritan nature, introverted upon itself, speculating for ever upon the high themes of Provi- dence and Fate, sunk in contemplation of the Biblical narratives, and their symbolic application to the Puritan world, Hebraic in the very flash of the eye and the utterance of the circumcised heart, enveloped in the metaphors of the Hebrew Commonwealth, as well as surrounded by the conditions of the Israelite wilderness, awfully smitten of conscience, awfully conscious of sin and guilt,— the deep Puritan nature began to develop that subtlety and eloquence, which the tinker of Bedford jail had somehow communi- cated to his followers by a kind of mystic chrism ; the germs of mysticism and transcendentalism, al- ways latent in the New England mind, began to stir uneasily in their sleep, and point towards germina- tion on the lips of the Alcotts and Thoreaus, Fullers and Frothinghams, Ripleys and Brook Farm folk of a generation or two later. It was with hundreds of thousands of people of this tried and clever kind, that the British Empire, 254 George Washing^ton through its constitution, that curious compound of law, precedent, tradition, and atmosphere, was about to engage in deadly combat. " I rejoice," said Robertson the historian, kins- man of Patrick Henry, in language which this Vir- ginia statesman might himself have used, " I rejoice that a million free men in America will now be allowed to run the career which other free people have held before." When the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, therefore, laden with 342 chests of tea, sailed into Boston harbour with bellying shrouds and streaming pennants, the situation looked blue indeed. This was the electric shock that thrilled instantaneously through the loosely-membered colonies, and welded the links together, for the same tea that saturated Boston salt water with its myriads of fragrant granules rotted in damp cellars in Charleston, South Carolina, or mouldered and blackened in the tea- caddies of New York and Philadelphia. Tea, the abhorred stimulant, once typical of entrancing even- ings at Mrs. Thrale's and Miss Burney's, floating in our brains from out the leaves of Johnson's Dic- tionary and the tea-scented Spectators — tea, inter- lined with '' Dunciads " and *' Elegies," ascending delightfully (with stronger aromas) from the manuscripts of Fielding, De Foe and Smollett, and floating hazily over the whole Georgian era, — tea now stood for Tyranny, for Taxation without Representation, for thousandfold forms of antago- nism never imagined before, for the machinations of **The Deadly Tea-Chest" 255 the British cabinet whose fluctuations, " many as the waves, one as the sea," concentrated their insistence upon the one central conception that Parliament was supreme to tax the colonies, representation or no, representation. Anti-tea clubs filled the land : spinsters and sedate married people alike eschewed the poisonous drink. Tea meant Toryism; no tea meant "independency" as the quaint word (soon terrible in its encyclopaedic significance) began to be written in Washington's and Franklin's corres- pondence. All over the land, busy activities began to spring up : looms and spindles whizzed and hummed merrily in the chimney corner; home in- dustries of all sorts started into being; plantation life in Virginia received a vast stimulus from the non-importation agreements ; men began to re- member after a while where the lead mines were, and old recipes for making gunpowder were hunted up. It was an ominous sign that frigates began to take the place of merchant-vessels, generals began to succeed civilians as governors of Massachusetts and the other colonies, scarlet coats instead of tie-wigs and black gowns spangled the entrance-steps to court-houses and judicial buildings; the civilian era was over: "Sam Adams's regiments" (as Lord North called them) had come and were now snugly ensconced in Boston town for better or for worse. The momentous struggle w^as at hand. CHAPTER XIV THE STRUGGLE BEGINS DROP by drop the cup of excitement had been fining up until at last, in 1774, the brim was reached and it seemed about to run over. Our pre- ceding chapters rehearsed the grievances of the decade, the vacillating character of the British policy and administration, the views held in England it- self as to the impolicy and unrighteousness of the course pursued by Grenville, Townshend, and Lord North, the perils of the standing army question, and the unwisdom of the Island Parliament in at- tempting to impose revenue and taxation laws on a whole continent, thousands of miles away, absolutely without representation in the assembly of Great Britain. " England has long arms," threatened one of those who favoured this policy, " but three thousand miles is a long way to extend them," was the quick retort. And this was precisely the difficulty. To be three thousand miles from headquarters, the stormy and treacherous sea between, with the old-fashioned frigates and store-ships lumbering heavily over the distances ; to land a few thousand regulars at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, behind which a popu- 256 The Struggle Begins 257 lation of three millions was in arms — undisciplined it may be — to tease, torment, nag, destroy them force by force; to engage in a hopeless contest, contrary to all the dictates of reason, justice, and common sense, with their own flesh and blood, while France and Spain, bursting with recent hostility and spleen, looked on, waiting the chance to spring : the epic folly of such a course was apparent to Burke, Chatham, and Lord Camden from the beginning; and a far-sighted child might have foreseen the end. *' The spirit which resists your taxation in Amer- ica," said Chatham, " is the same that formerly op- posed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in Eng- land. . . . This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence, and who will die in defence of their rights as freemen. . . . For myself, I must declare that in all my reading and observation — and history has been my favorite study — I have read Thucydides, and I have studied and admired the master states of the world — that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. . . . All attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must ! " ^ ^ Lecky, England in the i8th Century, vol. iii, p. 577. 258 Georg-e Washington This noble outburst spoke the plainest common sense to the assembled wisdom of Great Britain, yet it was not heeded. It seems, indeed, as if at certain periods madness seized a whole people, as it seized the French in 1870-71 and ran riot through the popular brain. There is a madness of just indigna- tion and a madness of pure folly. Undoubtedly, says Thackeray in his Four Georges, the American war was very popular in England : great majorities supported it in Parliament. George III. even en- joyed the title of the " patriot King," and intrenched in the hereditary stubbornness which was character- istic of the Brunswick line, his feeble mind, already flickering on the verge of insanity, fixed itself on the one idea of chastising a rebellious people and bringing them back to their allegiance. Amiable and charming as the monarch appears in the fas- cinating pages of Fanny Burney, where he appears completely en deshabille, — in dressing-gown and slippers as it were, — he possessed an inflexibility of nature that could not be turned, once an idea affect- ing the royal prerogative had fixed itself there. Of this end of the actuating causes of the great struggle, Jefferson gave a clear conception when he wrote : '' The following is an epitome of the first fifteen years of his [George III.] reign. The colonies were taxed internally and externally ; their essential in- terests sacrificed to individuals in Great Britain, their lec^islatures suspended ; charters annulled ; trials by juries taken away; their persons subjected to trans- The Strug-g-le Begins 259 portation across the Atlantic, and to trial before foreign judicatories ; their supplications for redress thought beneath answer ; themselves published as cowards in the councils of their mother-country and courts of Europe ; armed troops sent amongst them to enforce submission. Between these could be no hesitation. They closed in the appeal to arms. They declared themselves independent states. They con- federated together into one great republic ; thus se- curing to every state the benefit of an union of their whole force. In each state separately a new form of government was established." ^ Meantime, events were hurrying on in America with frightful rapidity. England was so far away, and the means of communication so slow and un- certain, that historic happenings of great magnitude and far-reaching consequences had been conceived, born, and realised, before an intimation of their existence reached the shores of Albion. In March, 1774, while Boston Bay was still flavoured with the Bohea that had been thrown into it, the Boston Port Bill was passed in retaliation for the East India Company's tea, the port was sealed up hermetically against outside trade, and Parliament undertook to remove the capital to Salem, a word which with bitter irony meant " Peace." News of what was going on flew, in some incredible manner, through the length and breadth of the land. The excitement grew tense. There must have been enormous horse- back travel in those days, to carry the news-budgets ^Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, p. 158. 26o Georg^e Washington from town to town and from colony to colony, until New Hampshire and Georgia (loyally named from the Brunswick line) were talking about the same things almost simultaneously — the insults put on Franklin in London, the scandal of the Hutchinson letters, the ridicule and abuse hurled by old Sam Johnson on the Americans as '' a race of convicts — a pack of rascals. Sir ! " the quartering of troops every- where, and the blind obstinacy of Parliament in in- sisting on asserting its unconditional supremacy over everything American. Even the coolest natures kindled and caught heat from the wide-spread dis- cussions. We find Washington presiding over pro- testing bodies of neighbours and friends in Fairfax County (where his autograph will and the old county record-books, filled with references to him, are still to be seen), and at last see the patriot en route for Williamsburg as a delegate, bearing to the burgesses the admirable " Fairfax Resolves " on the situation, in the handwriting of George Mason. About the middle of May he reached Williamsburg, and kept up courteous relations with Lord Dunmore all the time that his very soul must have burned with in- dignation against him. It is almost pathetic to read of the balls and dinner-parties at the " Palace," to which Washington and the more influential bur- gesses were invited, when the hearts of all were unstrung, and gloom reigned supreme over the little city. As soon as the news of the Boston Port Bill reached Williamsburg, the burgesses met in solemn The Struggle Begins 261 conclave to remonstrate, and appointed June ist as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer to sup- plicate the Almighty to avert the horrors of a war. Lord Dunmore with incisive speech dissolved the burgesses. But the burgesses were not thus to be punished like unruly children : they re-assembled immediately in the famous Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern, and called a convention to assemble August ist for the purpose of further action on the parliamentary measures, and the selection of delegates to a pro- posed Continental Congress at Philadelphia, Sep- tember 5, 1774. Massachusetts almost simultane- ously proposed the same measure and chose dele- gates. Virginia chose Washington, Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry (the great orators), Richard Bland, Peyton Randolph, Edmund Pendleton, and Benjamin Harrison (ancestor of the two presidents). " Went to church and fasted all day," is the single graphic entry in Washington's Diary, June i, 1774. The other colonies and provinces now went to work to choose their most distinguished and public- spirited men as delegates to the Congress, and soon the highways were dotted with horsemen or old- fashioned chariots, bearing the patriots to the banks of the Schuylkill. On August 31st, Washington, Patrick Henry, and Edmund Pendleton set out from Mount Vernon, and turned their horses' heads to- wards Philadelphia. Four days later they arrived and soon the rooms of Carpenters' Hall (where they assembled) echoed with the passionate and majestic 262 Georg-e Washington words and written resolutions, which aroused the in- tense sympathy and admiration of Lord Chatham. Peyton Randolph of Virginia was chosen president, and the moulding of the celebrated bill of grievances and remonstrances to the Crown was left largely in the hands of Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry. Each colony had sent its shrewdest and best men. Illustrious names were there from South Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and the smaller colonies were not behind. For eloquence, Rutledge of South Carolina took the palm, but for solid in- formation and efficiency, Colonel Washington stood head and shoulders above every one else, in Henry's opinion. Silas Deane and John Adams were de- lighted with the bearing of the Southerners. " There are some fine fellows come from Virginia," said Joseph Reed, " but they are very high. We under- stand that they are the capital men of the colony." " It is related that the Earl of Dartmouth inquired of an American, in London, of how many members the Congress consisted ? the reply was, ' Fifty-two.' — ' Why that is the number of cards in a pack,' said his lordship ; ' how many knaves are there ? ' — ' Not one,' answered the American, * your lordship will please to recollect that knaves are court cards.' " ^ For fifty-one days the Congress wrestled with its mighty problems, now of life and death to all. " For seven weeks of almost continuous session did it hammer its stiff business into shape, never ^ Lossing, Washington and the American Repithlic, vol. i, P- 441. The Strug-g-le Begins 263 wearying of deliberation or debate, till it could put forth papers to the world — an address to the King, memorials to the people of Great Britain and to the people of British America, their fellow-subjects, and a solemn Declaration of Rights — which should mark it no revolutionary body, but a congress of just and thoughtful Englishmen, in love, not with license or rebellion, but with right and wholesome liberty. Their only act of aggression was the formation of an 'American Association,' pledged against trade with Great Britain till the legislation of which they com- plained should be repealed. Their only intimation of intentions for the future was a resolution to meet again the next spring, should their prayers not mean- while be heeded. " Washington turned homeward from the congress with thoughts and purposes every way deepened and matured. It had been a mere seven weeks' confer- ence; no one had deemed the congress a government, or had spoken of any object save peace and accom- modation ; but no one could foresee the issue of what had been done." ^ This Congress indeed was nothing more than a Solemn League and Covenant of Committees of Correspondence, Committees of Safety, delegations from now outlawed provincial assemblies, Sons of Liberty working on the desperate task of the birth of a new nation. Through these agencies, infor- mation flew^ from town to tow^n. ''To Arms!" rang like a battle-cry all over America. The months succeeding October, 1774, to March, ^ Woodrow Wilson, George Washington, p. 164. 264 George Washington 1775, were months not of words but of deeds: men met, assemblies convened, only to arm themselves, to drill, to elect officers, to secure ammunition, to prepare for civil war. The vernal equinox of March, 1775, saw the second great revolutionary convention of Virginia meet at Richmond, for the purpose of making mili- tary preparations of defence. It was at this con- vention that Patrick Henry, who dominated it with his tongue of fire, introduced his memorable reso- lutions of resistance, and ended them with a speech in which the ever-famous words occur : " It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentle- men may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. The war is actually begun. The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Our brethren are already in the field. Why stand we here idle? What is it that gen- tlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death ! " ^ Jefferson, a member of the body, truly pronounced Henry '' the leader of the Revolution," '' far in ad- vance of the rest of us." A few weeks later, on the 19th of April, a clash between the '' minute men " of Massachusetts and General Gage's British soldiers occurred at the little town of Lexington, while the regulars w^re on their way to Concord (strange 'Tyler, Patrick Henry, p. 128. CARPENTERS' HALL, PHILADELPHIA. Wherein met the first Continental Congress, 1774. The Strug-g-le Begins 265 name for the times!) to seize the military stores there accumulated, and soon three hundred of the poor fellows bit the dust in their foolish pride of subjugation. The rest retreated hastily to Boston, and Paul Revere began another of his celebrated rides (in ancient Grecian wise) to scatter the news far South. Two days later, '' the rape of the Gunpowder " by Lord Dunmore brought affairs in Virginia to an acute crisis. He landed marines in the night at Williamsburg, and spirited away from the old '* Powder Horn " magazine all the powder stowed there for the defence of the colony. This excited intense indignation, and five thou- sand men, virtually led by Patrick Henry (really captain only of his own company), rushed toward Williamsburg demanding restitution of the powder or its value in money. The terrified Earl chose the latter course, and the money was handed over to Henry. Lady Dunmore and her daughters fled to a place of safety. Twenty days later Philadelphia saw the second solemn re- volutionary Congress convene. May loth. The Virginia delegates were the same as before. John Hancock, a patriotic citizen and wealthy " grandee " from Massachusetts, a friend and fa- vourite of Samuel Adams, was president of the Con- gress. Its master stroke was the election of Colonel Washington Commander-in-chief of the forces of the United Colonies. The Virginian had first been proposed by John Adams, but no formal action was 266 Georg^e Washing-ton taken until he was, later, nominated to the position by Thomas Johnson of Maryland. '' To Mrs. Martha Washington ''Philadelphia, i8 June, 1775. " My Dearest, " I am now set down to write to you on a subject, which fills me with inexpressible concern, and this concern is greatly aggravated and increased, when I reflect upon the uneasiness I know it will give you. It has been determined in Congress, that the whole army raised for the defence of the American cause shall be put under my care, and that it is necessary for me to proceed immediately to Boston to take upon me the command of it. " You may believe me, my dear Patsy, when I assure you, in the most solemn manner, that, so far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity, and that I should enjoy more real happiness in one month with you at home, than I have the most distant prospect of finding abroad, if my stay were to be seven times seven years. But as it has been a kind of destiny, that has thrown me upon this service, I shall hope that my undertaking it is designed to answer some good purpose. You might, and I suppose did perceive, from the tenor of my letters, that I was apprehensive I could not avoid this appointment, as I did not pretend to intimate when I should return. That was the case. It was The Strug-g-le Beg-ins 267 utterly out of my power to refuse this appointment, without exposing my character to such censures, as would have reflected dishonor upon myself, and given pain to my friends. This, I am sure, could not, and ought not, to be pleasing to you, and must have less- ened me considerably in my own esteem. I shall rely, therefore, confidently on that Providence, which has heretofore preserved and been bountiful to me, not doubting but that I shall return safe to you in the fall. I shall feel no pain from the toil or the danger of the campaign ; my unhappiness will flow from the uneasiness I know you will feel from being left alone. I therefore beg, that you will summon your whole fortitude, and pass your time as agreeably as possible. Nothing will give me so much sincere satisfaction as to hear this, and to hear it from your own pen. My earnest and ardent desire is, that you would pursue any plan that is most likely to produce content, and a tolerable degree of tranquillity, as it must add greatly to my uneasy feelings to hear, that you are dissatis- fied or complaining at what I really could not avoid. " As life is always uncertain, and common pru- dence dictates to every man the necessity of settling his temporal concerns, while it is in his power, and while the mind is calm and undisturbed, I have, since I came to this place (for I had not time to do it before I left home) got Colonel Pendleton to draft a will for me, by the directions I gave him, which will I now enclose. The provision made for you in case of my death will, I hope, be agreeable. '* I shall add nothing more, as I have several let- ters to write, but to desire that you will remember me to your friends, and to assure you that I am, with 268 Georgfe Washington the most unfeigned regard, my dear Patsy, your af- fectionate, etc." ^ The modesty of this letter is only paralleled by that of the Duke of Wellington, of almost the same date, though forty years later, giving the tidings of the battle of Waterloo. The two dates mark eras in the history of modern times. The fires of rebellion were now burning brightly all along the coast line. At Boston, the centre of the turbulence, sixteen thousand provincials had assembled from all sides, and threatened the ten thousand regulars gathered there to protect British interests. The inactivity of these soldiers was nobly vindicated by Lord Chatham that same year in the words of Lord Brougham : *' In 1775, he made a most brilliant speech on the war. Speaking of General Gage's inactivity, he said he could not be blamed ; it was inevitable. ' But what a miserable condition,' he exclaimed, ' is ours, where disgrace is prudence, and where it is necessary to be contemptible! You must repeal these acts,' (he said, alluding to the Boston Port and Massachusetts Bay Bills,) 'and you will repeal them. I pledged myself for it, that you will repeal them. I stake my reputa- tion on it. I will consent to be taken for an idiot if they are not finally repealed.' Every one knows how true this prophesy proved. The concluding sen- tence of the speech has been often cited : ' If the ministers persevere in misleading the King, I will ^ Ford, W?-itings of George Washington, vol. ii, p. 483. The Struggle Begins 269 not say that they can ahenate the affections of his subjects from his crown; but I will affirm that they will make the crown not worth his wearing. I will not say that the King is betrayed; but I will pro- nounce that the Kingdom is undone.' " Again, in 1777, after describing the cause of the war and ' the traffic and barter driven with every little pitiful German Prince that sells his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country/ he adds : ' The mercenary aid on which you rely irritates to an in- curable resentment the minds of your enemies, whom you overrun with the sordid sons of rapine and of plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty ! If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never ! never ! never ! ' " Undoubtedly, this kind of inactivity and hesitancy proved in the end fatal to the British cause : they never could persuade themselves that the Americans would persevere in so hopeless-looking a case; they always believed they would go down before the in- vincible valour of the regulars, and sue for peace and pardon on short notice. In this they were wofully mistaken. Months be- fore, Patrick Henry (soon to be appointed com- mander of all the Virginia forces and, a little later, chosen first republican Governor of the State) had lifted up a warning voice and proclaimed the impos- sibility of success for the English. The assemblages of armed men everywhere gathering were not mere rnobs, undisciplined, lawless, and independent as 270 Georg^e Washington they might seem. Thousands of the 231,000 who served in the Revolution were trained Indian fight- ers, frontiersmen, hunters, trappers, expert with gun and hatchet, resourceful, hardened to every kind of toil, a yeomanry such as perhaps the world had not up to that date seen. As marksmen many of the 67,000 men furnished by the gallant little colony of Massachusetts to the Revolutionary forces were fa- mous. The following anecdote throws light on the subject : ''Among the incidents of the British possession of the town, Andrews relates two, which indicate that the dry humor and dialect of the Yankee are not of recent discovery. " It's common for the soldiers to fire at a target fixed in the stream at the bottom of the Common. A countryman stood by a few days ago, and laughed very heartily at a whole regiment's firing, and not being able to hit it. The officer observed him, and asked why he laughed. ' Perhaps you'll be affronted if I tell you,' replied the countryman. No, he would not, he said. ' JVhy then,' says he, ' I laugh to see how awkward they fire, why, I'll be bound I hit it ten times running.' — 'Ah! will you?' replied the officer. ' Come try. — Soldiers, go and bring five of the best guns, and load 'em for this honest man.' — ' Why, you need not bring so many : let me have any one that comes to hand,' replied the other. But I chuse to load myself.' He accordingly loaded, and asked the officer where he should fire. He replied, ' To the right,' when he pulled tricker, and drove the ball as near the right as possible. The officer was amazed, The Strug-gle Beg-ins 271 and said he could not do it again, as that was only by chance. He loaded again. ' Where shall I fire ? ' — ' To the left,' when he performed as well as before. ' Come, once more ! ' says the officer. He prepared the third time. ' Where shall I fire naowf ' — ' In the centre.' He took aim, and the ball went as exact in the middle as possible. The officers as well as sol- diers stared, and thought the devil was in the man. ' Why' says the countryman, ' I'll tell you naow. I have got a boy at home that will toss up an apple, and shoot out all the seeds as it's coming down.' " ^ It was a '' mob "of this sort that greeted Wash- ington when he arrived at Boston, shortly after the battle of Bunker Hill, June, 1775 : men who had an intelligent comprehension of what they fought for, and why they fought : volunteers who, by their own volition, had enlisted for longer or shorter terms, to defend sacred rights of home and fireside, and great constitutional principles on which their very existence depended. In the battle on and around Bunker Hill, a thousand splendid redcoats and many a gallant offi- cer gave bloody tribute to the marksmanship and valour and power to stand of the " backwoodsmen." The sharp rattle of musketry from the independents proved, in this first conflict, almost a match for the platoon firing and massed advance of historic regi- ments, whose laurels had been gained on European battle-fields. It was a trial of strength which boded ^ H. E. Scudder, Men and Manners in America One Hun- dred Years Ago, p. 21. 272 Georg-e Washing-ton well for the Americans. The flying engagement of Lexington, and the determined though undisciplined resistance of Bunker Hill, were to be types of the whole six years and a half of war. Until Baron von Steuben came to Washington at Valley Forge, in 1778, the Americans knew little — one might better say, absolutely nothing — of regular discipline. The camp-fire, the Indian trail, the lonely bivouac in the wood, the log-cabin pierced with holes for flint-locks, the solitary vigil against war-whoop and scalping- knife, the drift down the winding river, the plunge into the untrodden wilderness : these had been their '' Jomini," their manuals of drill and exercise, their text-books in arms. News of the Bunker Hill engagement had indeed reached Washington as he journeyed on horseback to Cambridge, to assume command of the army, and the way seemed wonderfully — to some Providential- ly — cleared for the new commander to enter upon his novel responsibilities, before the severe season set in. For though in this engagement the Ameri- cans suffered a check, their spirit came out brilliant- ly and showed a mettle that augured ill to their foes in the future. The invincible spirit of General Put- nam, Colonels Prescott, Stark, Gardner, Gridley, Dr. Warren, and the other American commanders, the valour of the ill-fed and disorganised militiamen be- hind their amateur redoubts on Breed's and Bunker Hills, opposite Boston, the stout resistance offered by fifteen hundred men to the whole British army and fleet under General Howe and Sir Henry Clin- The Struggle Begins 273 ton, then in Boston, instantly predicted to all thoughtful men the stubborn and sanguinary nature of the conflict just begun. The 17th of June, 1775, was thus a memorable date in American history, afterwards commemorated by the obelisk raised on Bunker Hill, the corner- stone of which was laid by LaFayette. The slaughter of nearly 1500 men of the same flesh and blood — 450 on the American, 1054 on the British side, — the death of the noble Warren and Major Pitcairn, the wounding of Lord Howe him- self, the tenacity and fury shown on both sides, were omens terrible indeed to the lovers of peace, and sent thrills of pride and horror over the whole world of that day. When Washington reached Cambridge, July 3, 1775, Boston was already in a state of siege, and the new Commander-in-chief had his hands full. Settling first in the house of the president of Harvard College, Washington transferred his head- quarters, later, to Craigie House, afterwards well- known as the Cambridge residence of the poet, Long- fellow. From now on, begins an absolutely busy and preoccupied life for Washington, such as he had never lived before. His magnanimous conduct in declining to receive a salary as General, in return for his services, had excited universal applause : all he claimed was a bare reimbursement for his private expenses, which from this time appear scrupulously recorded in pounds, shillings, and pence in his day- books. The letters and newspapers of this time re- 274 George Washington cord his progress from town to town, from Phila- delphia to New York, through Connecticut and Rhode Island to Cambridge. Of his personal ap- pearance at the time, so distinguished by gravity, dignity, and intelligence, we have the following tes- timony : '' July 2nd, 1775. — I have been much gratified this day with a view of General Washington. His Excel- lency was on horseback in company with several mil- itary gentlemen. It was not difficult to distinguish him from all others ; his personal appearance is truly noble and majestic; being tall and well proportioned. His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulette on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword ; a black cockade in his hat." ^ General Greene in writing to Samuel Ward, July 14th, says : " His Excellency, General Washington, has arrived amongst us, universally admired. Joy was visible in every countenance, and it seemed as if the spirit of conquest breathed through the whole army. I hope we shall be taught, to copy his example, and to pre- fer the love of liberty, in this time of public danger to all the soft pleasures of domestic life, and support ourselves with manly fortitude amidst all the dangers and hardships that attend a state of war. And I doubt not, under the General's wise direction, we shall establish such excellent order and strictness of discipline as to invite victory to attend him wherever he goes." ^ Baker, Itinerary of General Washington, 1775-1783, p. 12. The Strug-g-le Begins 275 He at once established that remarkable system of dispatches to Congress — long, detailed, explicit — from which he never swerved during the entire war, and which kept this body circumstantially informed of every minutest need, hope, and aspiration. They form a kind of Caesar's Commentaries on the War of the Revolution. The first and ever-increasing need was ammu- nition : only nine rounds per man remained after the battle of Bunker Hill. The next w^as a military chest — no money was forthcoming; a commissary- general; quartermaster-general; ten thousand hunt- ing-shirts for the ill-clad troops; hospital-stores for the sick ; a military staff : in short, a thousand things never dreamt of by the citizen Congress, unfamiliar with the organisation of armies. Letters proffering help poured in from General Schuyler, Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, Generals Putnam and Gates, Richard Henry Lee and other members of Congress, all proclaiming Washington's appoint- ment Providential and destined to save the empire. For even yet — July, 1775 — the Congress at Phila- delphia was, through the pen of John Dickinson, breathing timid hopes of reconciliation with the mother-country. It was the year of Burke's magnif- icent speech on " Conciliation with the Colonies," now one of the classics of British oratory. It is on abundant record that Franklin, Jefferson, and Wash- ington never conceived a final separation possible until, a year later, the immortal Declaration had shaped itself distinctly — after a thousand remon- 276 George Washington strances, petitions, expostulations in vain — in the minds of the Committee of Five who drafted it. The invading troops were deUcately called " minis- terial," not royal troops, so that the whole respon- sibility for the war might be thrown upon Parlia- ment and the Ministry, not upon the King. The Commander-in-chief, on his white Arabian charger, soon became a well-known figure as he journeyed to and fro through the camps, on his tire- less mission of inspection, reconnaissance, redoubt- building, and military engineering, for the benefit of all and for the strengthening of his position. He had judiciously divided his army into three corps, the left commanded by Charles Lee (afterwards known as "the soldier of fortune"), the centre at Cambridge under General Putnam, and the right at Roxbury under General Ward. The siege of Boston, as it was soon called, was now actively begun. Generals Howe, Clinton, Gage, and Burgoyne (son-in-law of the Earl of Derby) commanded the British forces. Monster petitions were meanwhile being handed around by John Wilkes (Lord Mayor of London) and eleven hundred of the wealthiest citizens of the metropolis, imploring the King to stop in his ruin- ous policy to his loyal subjects; even Congress thanked their British fellow-citizens for their earn- est endeavours to avert war ; but all was in vain. The middle and end of the year were marked 15y brilliant successes for the Americans under Benedict Arnold, Ethan Allen, General Schuyler, and the he- MAJOR-GENERAL CHARLES LEE. From an English engraving published in 1776. The Struggle Begins 277 roic Montgomery, in the Canadian campaign against Sir Guy Carleton on Lake Champlain, Montreal, and Quebec. Ticonderoga and Crown Point, Chambly, and St. John, fell, loaded with stores of ammunition, cannon, and provisions, into the hands of the patriots and gave infinite encourage- ment to the cause. In the course of the campaign, appeared numerous figures afterwards celebrated in the annals of the war: Major Andre, Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr (the wayward grandson of Jonathan Edwards, later Vice-President of the United States), and William Pitt, secretary to Sir Guy Carleton, son of the great Earl, afterwards prime minister of Great Britain. Washington and Gage, the rival commanders at Boston, had been in- timately associated together with Braddock in his tragic expedition against Fort Du Quesne. The year, however, was to end in disaster, for December 31st saw the crushing defeat and death of Montgomery at Quebec, Arnold with a bullet through his leg, Captain Daniel Morgan and his heroic riflemen surrounded and captured, and the high hopes of the Americans annihilated. The glory of the whole campaign seemed dark- ened by this disaster ; yet countervailing distinctions awaited the Americans. On January i, 1776, the first flag of the Continental Army w^as unfurled at Cambridge, for the first time. It consisted of thir- teen stripes of alternate red and white, with a '' union Jack " of the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew in the upper corner, later to be substituted by 278 Georg-e Washington a blue field sprinkled with white stars, a new star for every new State. Two months and a half later, on the ever-memorable 20th of March, 1776, the American army entered Boston, after the hurried retreat of Lord Howe with nine thousand regulars and nine hundred loyalists. The patriot army had seized and fortified Dorchester Heights, which com- pletely commanded the British positions and ren- dered their immediate evacuation imperative. The town was humanely allowed to stand as it was without being burned, a policy imitated by Wash- ington a few months later when he evacuated New York. At this very time, the obnoxious manifesto of Lord North against the rebellion in the name of the King was under discussion in Parliament, and the hiring of 17,500 '' Hessians " at thirty-six dol- lars a head for service in America roused the ridicule and indignation of Frederick the Great and all Europe. A large number of these stupid mercenaries, on their arrival in America, became enamoured of their new surroundings, deserted or were " captured " or married, and settled down in comfortable homes far from the petty German tyrants who had sold them to infamy and death in a foreign land. Great was the joy over the fall of Boston ; the thanks of Congress and of many provincial assem- blies poured in upon Washington and his troops. Harvard conferred the degree of LL. D. on the chief, and admiration rose almost to adoration. The Strug-g-le Begins 279 Leaving five regiments under General Ward to garrison Boston, Washington swiftly turned to New York, selected and fortified commanding spots in its neighbourhood, and rode to Philadelphia to re- ceive the orders and felicitations of Congress. At first with only nine or ten thousand men he hastened to occupy and put up defensive works on Long Island, at Harlem Heights, King's Bridge, and Fort Washington. The vast strategic importance of New York to both sides was incalculable. Opening like great jaws into the heart of the land, the harbour was spacious enough to float the navies of the world, and draw up into the interior the frigates and flo- tillas of a sea power that was regarded as invincible. Whoever first occupied this impregnable position might well seem to be master of the continent. On the 3rd of July, the Bay suddenly became white with over a hundred sail, and Lord Howe proceeded to land on Staten Island some of the twenty-five regiments deemed sufficient by the min- istry for the conquest of the New World. The day after, July 4th, 1776, proclaimed to the civilised world that the United States had come into existence, that all allegiance to Great Britain had been absolutely thrown off, and that a free anc sovereign people now ruled over the Western Hem- isphere. Written at the most solemn moment of the Revolution, when all hope of reconciliation had ab- solutely died out, the sentences of the Declaration of Independence rang with an eloquence which startled all mankind and asserted truths so univer- 28o Georg-e Washing-ton sally held to be beyond question, that it became at once the text-book of the newer constitutions in all modern constitutional movements. The writer of this celebrated document was Thomas Jefferson, afterwards Governor of Virginia, Secretary of State, and third President of the United States. His associates on the committee were John Adams (second President of the United States), Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. Adams and Jefferson both lived until the 4th of July, 1826, when, singularly enough, both expired on the same day within a few hours of each other. The opening paragraphs are as follows : ''A Declaration By The Representatives Of The United States Of America, In General Congress Assembled. '' When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to ac- sume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of na- ture's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opin- ions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. " We hold these truths to be self-evident : that all men are created equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap- piness ; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ; that whenever any MAJOR-GENERAL NATHANAEL GREENE. From the painting by Col. John Trumbull. The Struggle Begins 281 form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its founda- tion on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes ; and accord- ingly all experience hath shovvn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies ; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former system of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, etc., etc., etc. ... " We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly pukish and declare that these United Col- onies are, and of right ought to be, free and inde- pendent states; that they are absolved from all alle- 282 George Washington giance to the British crown, and that all political con- nection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved ; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish com- merce, and to do all other acts and things which inde- pendent states may of right do. " And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our for- tunes, and our sacred honor." CHAPTER XV THE HEART OF THE REVOLUTION NOT many clays elapsed before Washington had the Declaration of Independence publicly read, from the balcony of the old City Hall in Wall Street, to the assembled commands. All doubt and hesitation were now, once and for ever, cast away : the United Colonies were in full revolution: men cast in their lot either for or against it; and neu- trality was no longer possible. The large and im- portant body of loyalists were in acute distress. Business interests, ties of blood and of association bound them strongly to England; yet the patriot armies were full of their kinspeople, and, whichever way they turned, they were searched by the " fires of civil discord," levied upon by both sides, insulted and detested by both Monarchists and Republicans, and in a fair way to be ground to pieces between the two. Large numbers of Quakers, Canadians, Anglicised French, Dutch, and even numbers of influential colonial families of Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, sided with the British, and entangled Washington and the Congress in infinite perplexities and difficulties. Plots to kid- nap or murder Washington began to hatch during the next few months ; cabals and intrigues arose, in 283 284 George Washington and out of the army ; and the launching of the Revo- lution was beset with dangers. Just one year had passed away, since Washington had mounted his horse and ridden proudly away to Cambridge to assume the position of Commander-in- chief. The siege and fall of Boston had signalised the beginning of the struggle as a brilliant success. Without training in the regular army, destitute of technical knowledge as a soldier, educated indeed in the woods purely as an Indian fighter, or against wandering bodies of nomad French and Canadians, Washington began now, in the face of endless dif- ficulties, to develop that genius for command and for the utilisation of scant resources, which excited the admiration of Frederick the Great, and, later, of Cornwallis and Napoleon. " The finger of God was in it," remarked Bonaparte, and when, five years later, the English commander handed over his sword at Yorktown, he could not repress his admiration for the manner in which his captor had conducted the Jersey campaign, now about to open. Strategic- ally weak as was the American's position at any given point on the enormously entended line — Bos- ton, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Cape Fear, Charleston — yet so full of resource was Washington, assisted by Generals Gates and Mifflin and the Con- gressional Board of War, that the invaders were successively baffled, checked, circumvented, sur- rounded at every point, and confessed themselves absolutely worn to pieces by the '' Fabian policy " of the Americans. No other policy was practicable The Heart of the Revolution 285 at a time when the Articles of Confederation were hardly signed, centralised government did not exist, Congress, itself, was full of lukewarm adherents of the Declaration, and jealousies, deep-seated and alarming, between different sections of the country began to manifest themselves in and out of Phila- delphia, the temporary continental capital. The alertness, resourcefulness, vigilance, and in- domitable spirit of Washington and his noble corps of frontier-bred generals — Putnam, Arnold, An- drew Lewis, Montgomery, Schuyler, Sullivan, Greene, Moultrie, Marion, and Ward— rose equal to the occasion, and buoyed up the faltering steps of the patriots in a fashion w^hich ultimately rendered them as steadfast as the rock. " In Washington," says John Fiske, " were combined all the highest qualities of a general— dogged tenacity of purpose, endless fertility in resource, sleepless vig- ilance, and unfailing courage. No enemy ever caught him unawares and he never let slip an opportunity for striking back. He had a rare geographical instinct, alwavs knew where the strongest position was and how to reach it. He was a master of the art of con- cealing his own plan and detecting his adversary's. He knew better than to hazard everything on the result of a single contest; because of the enemy's su- perior force he was so often obliged to refuse battle that some of his impatient critics called him slow ; but no general was ever quicker in dealing heavy blows when the proper moment arrived. He was neither unduly elated by victory nor discouraged by defeat. When all others lost heart, he was bravest ; and at the 286 George Washington very moment when ruin seemed to stare him in the face, he was craftily preparing disaster and confusion for the enemy. To the highest quaHties of a mihtary commander there were united in Washington those of a political leader. From early youth he possessed the art of winning men's confidence. He was simple without awkwardness, honest without bluntness, and endowed with rare discretion and tact. His temper was fiery and on occasions he could use pretty strong language, but anger or disappointment was never al- lowed to disturb the justice and kindness of his judg- ment. Men felt themselves safe in putting entire trust in his head and his heart, and they were never deceived. Thus he soon obtained such a hold upon the people as few statesmen ever possessed. It was this grand character that with his clear intelligence and unflagging industry enabled him to lead the na- tion triumphantly though the perils of the Revolu- tionary War. He had almost every imaginable hard- ship to contend with — envious rivals, treachery and mutiny in the camp, interference on the part of Con- gress, jealousies between the states, want of men and money ; yet all these difficulties he vanquished. Whether victorious or defeated in the field, he baf- fled the enemy in the first year's great campaign, and in the second year's ; and then for four years more upheld the cause, until heart - sickening delay was ended in glorious triumph. It is very doubtful if without Washington the struggle for independence would have succeeded. Other men were important — he was indispensable." Add to this fine tribute the words of the eminent historian, John Richard Green : The Heart of the Revolution 287 " No nobler figure, ever stood in the fore front of a nation's life. Washington was grave and courteous in address ; his manners were simple and unpretend- ing; his silence and the serene calmness of his temper spoke of a perfect self-mastery. But there was little in his outer bearing to reveal the grandeur of soul, which lifts his figure, with all the simple majesty of an ancient statue, out of the smaller passions, the meaner impulses of the world around him. What recommended him for command was simply his weight among his fellow-land-owners of Virginia, and the experience of war, which he had gained by services in border contests with the French and Indians, as well as in Braddock's luckless expedition against Fort Duquesne. It was only as the weary fight went on that the colonists discovered, however slowly and imperfectly, the greatness of their leader, his clear judgment, his heroic endurance, his silence under difficulties, his calmness in the hour of danger or defeat ; the patience with which he waited, the quickness and hardness with which he struck, the lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved from its task through resentment or jealousy, that never through war or peace felt the touch of a meaner ambition, that knew no aim save that of guiding the freedom of his fellow-countrymen, and no personal longing save that of returning to his own fireside when their freedom was secured." Washington's '' centurie of praise " would be in- complete without the words of another great Englishman, whose superlative insight into char- acter w^as never blinded by insular prejudice. 288 George Washington " He had the glory," wrote Thackeray, '' of facing and overcoming not only veterans amply provided and inured to war, but wretchedness, cold, hunger, dissen- sions, treason within his own camp, where all must have gone to rack but for the pure unquenchable flame of patriotism that was for ever burning in the bosom of the heroic leader. What a constancy, what magnanimity, what a surprising persistency against fortune ! Washington before the enemy was no bet- ter nor braver than hundreds that fought with him or against him. But Washington, the chief of a na- tion in arms ; doing battle with distracted parties ; calm in the midst of conspiracy ; serene against the open foe before him and the darker enemies at his back ; Washington inspiring order and spirit into troops hungry and in rags ; stung by ingratitude, but betraying no anger, — and never so sublime as on that day when he laid down his victorious sword and sought his noble retirement — here indeed is a char- acter to admire and revere, a life without a stain, a fame without a flaw.'* If Washington was in any sense " Fabius," he was a Fabius to whose name the not ignoble epithet '' Maximus " must be attached. '' The die is cast," cried George III., '' and the colonies must either triumph or submit." And what was the character of the King whom fate or fortune had pitted against the American, in whose veins ran the strength, the coolness, the courage, the unconquerable will of an ancestry far more perfectly English than the King's ? An Amer- The Heart of the Revolution 289 ican would hesitate to write the words : let them, therefore, fall from the pen of an English historian : '' During the first ten years of his reign," says Green, *' he managed to reduce government to a shadow, and to turn the loyalty of his subjects at home into disaffection. Before twenty years were over he had forced the American colonies into revolt and independence and brought England to what then seemed the brink of ruin. Work such as this has sometimes been done by very great men, and often by very wicked and profligate men ; but George was neither profligate nor great. He had a smaller mind than any English King before him since James 11. He was wretchedly educated and his natural powers were of the meanest sort. Nor had he the capacity for using greater minds than his own, by which some sovereigns have concealed their natural littleness. On the contrary his only feeling toward great men was one of jealousy and hate. But dull and petty as his temper was, he was clear as to his purpose and obstinate in the pursuit of it; and his purpose was to rule. . . . '* The blow which shattered the attempt of England to wield an autocratic power over her colonies, shat- tered the attempt of the King to establish an auto- cratic power over England itself. The ministry, which bore the name of Lord North, had been a mere screen for the administration of George HI., and its ruin was the ruin of the system he had striven to build up. Never again was the crown to possess such power as he had wielded. . . . '' The irony of fate doomed him to take the first 2QO Georg-e Washing-ton step in an organic change which has converted that aristocratic monarchy into a democratic repubhc, ruled under monarchical forms." In the pages of Miss Burney's Diary this " little " King appears as a gentle, harmless, gay, fascinating person, eaten through and through with unconscious selfishness, surrounded by six lovely princesses, his daughters, worshipped by " the most sweet queen " Charlotte, flitting in and out of the palace rooms, through which he is soon to wander in desolate and irreparable madness, haranguing imaginary parlia- ments and addressing imaginary armies. History does not present a more pitiable or more tragic figure. The preceding eulogies on Washington's abili- ties as a soldier, engineer, and tactician were rapidly realised in the following months. While he could not of course be everywhere, his far-seeing eye and indefatigable pen swept to every part of the long line, saw and met difficulties, swept away obstacles, pro- vided for every emergency, anticipated as far as possible every movement of the enemy. The first year of the Revolution had come and gone, the experimental stage had passed; great movements in Canada and the Carolinas had taken place, vacillating between success and failure. In Canada, Arnold and Montgomery after heroic marches, splendid attacks, and daring enterprises on the St. Lawrence, at Quebec and Montreal, had at last succumbed to Carleton and the regulars; Mont- gomery was killed, Arnold wounded; Canada had The Heart of the Revolution 291 to be evacuated, and the Americans retreated to Crown Point and Ticonderoga. Generals Schuyler and Gates were left in ambiguous relations as to the supreme command of the Northern army, and jeal- ousies flamed forth anew. In the South, on the other hand, fortune had attended General Lee, Colonel Moultrie, and Colonel Thompson in the defence of Charleston, when Sir Peter Parker, Sir Henry Clinton, and the English fleet had been gallantly repulsed, the fleet driven off to New York, and peace and quiet secured for the Carolinas for three years to come. By the middle of August, 1776, the vicinity of New York swarmed with from twenty-five to thirty thousand British regulars and Hessians under the Howes, Earls Cornwallis and Percy, Clinton, Parker, De Heister (commander of the Hessians), and Grant, while the lower Bay and Hudson River presented a menacing picture of scores of great battle-ships, transports, sloops of war, floating bat- teries for the destruction of the city and its sur- roundings. Had the British had one commander of striking ability at this stage of the war— one-tenth of a Marlborough, one-fiftieth of a Wellington— how different might have been the tale to tell ! But run, for a moment, over the list of starred and gartered incompetence — Gage, the Howes, Burgoyne, Clin- ton, Parker, Carleton, Tarleton, Cornwallis, many of these men " parlour knights " armed with mani- festoes, proclamations, honeyed words, rather than 292 George Washing-ton with the sense of true right and justice; what else could be expected than — Yorktown ? The same blundering shortsightedness, which had characterised the Howes at Boston, now pursued them at New York. Thousands of splendid troops trained in the British regular army were at their command, — one might add, at their mercy; yet no effective steps were taken to sever the confederacy in twain, cut off New England from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and thus force the belligerents to sue for peace. The same gross inertia seized and pos- sessed the foreigners at Philadelphia, when that city fell into their hands some months later ; and though their approaching occupation of New York was to last more than seven long years, until the Revolution had been two years an accomplished fact, they never even handled the acquisition like intelligent beings, much less as the most significant conquest of the war. They held it indeed, but with what exhibitions of folly, with what ceaseless inactivity, what dis- regard of its strategic importance, what weakness and instability of purpose! The operations around New York, in the autumn of 1776, were a signal illustration of Washington's ability, under the most harassing circumstances, in keeping the enemy at bay. in defending heroically a line huge, sinuous, indefensible at many points, in holding his own on the whole, and in wearing out a foe skilled in attack and overflowing with resources. New York and its environs were much too vast for him, with his slender resources, famished militia- The Heart of the Revolution 293 men, and rebellious soldiery, to retain or to defend; yet for months together he kept up the unequal struggle, with Howe's and Parker's and Dunmore's combined fleets anchored in the bay, thousands of regulars whitening Staten Island and Long Island with their tents and martial glitter, and every advan- tage of arms and accoutrements, known at this time, in possession of his antagonists. His irregular and undisciplined troops were overmastered in an en- gagement called the battle of Brooklyn Heights, in August; but he escaped with marvellous alertness — '' the old fox " as they called him — across the deep river with his nine thousand men to New York, and there remained till he was in danger of being sur- rounded and entrapped by Howe's powerful forces. Then, mercifully abstaining from burning the city, he left it without confusion or disaster or over- whelming loss, and retired to King's Bridge, Har- lem Plains, Fort Washington, and Fort Lee. The results for the Americans were negative in one sense, and positive in another. The Highlands of the Hudson w^ere seized and fortified; the battle of Harlem Plains favoured the Continental side, yet Fort Washington with its garrison of three thou- sand men fell into the hands of the enemy, and caused the evacuation of the surrounding country. One disaster seemed momentarily linked to another ; hundreds deserted or went home on the American side : '' they are a set of tatterdemalions," wrote a British officer ; " there is hardly a whole pair of breeches in an entire regiment." Famine, small- 294 George Washing-ton pox, camp fever, bleeding feet, hunger-bitten coun- tenances, wild desire for plunder, uncontrollable homesickness were familiar spectacles in all the pa- triot camps. Towards the end of the year. General Lee, second in command to Washington, was dis- gracefully captured and carried off in slippers and dressing-gowai — some think by premeditation — by a handful of regulars. The army dwindled at one time to three or four thousand men, and Cornwallis, thinking the war was over, prepared to return to England. But just at this point, Fortune turned her wheel, and the Jersey campaign with its brilliant successes changed despair to bright expectation, and made the battles of Princeton and Trenton red-letter anniver- saries in the history of American independence. These engagements, with Washington's crossings of the ice-laden Delaware in December of this year, exemplified the quick and ceaseless watchfulness of the commander, whose activity was only matched by the inactivity of the foe. Finding it impossible, with his wretched little bands of hungering and often disaffected yeomanry, to pursue any but a defensive policy, he dealt many a sudden and dis- astrous blow at the invaders, decimated their ranks by capture, and so disheartened the Howes, that new offers of peace, and proclamations of pardon, and holding out of the now withered olive branch en- sued. Franklin, John Adams, and Rutledge even met the British Commission, and much mild palaver about returning to their allegiance, unconditional The Heart of the Revolution 295 surrender, etc., passed ineffectually between the combatants. No peace on such terms was practicable. The year 1777 was memorable for many things, but for none more than for the humane and eloquent utterance of Lord Chatham who, when it was pro- posed to use the savages against America, spoke the words quoted below. It was upon this memorable occasion that he made the famous reply to Lord Suffolk, who had said, in reference to employing the Indians, that, " we were justified in using all the means which God and nature had put into our hands." The circumstance of Lord Chatham having himself revised this speech is an inducement to insert it here in full : " I am ashamed," exclaimed Lord Chatham, as he rose, " shocked to hear such principles confessed, to hear them avowed in this House or in this country; principles equally unconstitutional, inhuman, and un- christian. '* My Lords, I did not intend to have trespassed again on your attention, but I cannot repress my in- dignation. I feel myself impelled by every duty. My Lords, we are called upon as members of this House, as men, as Christian men, to protest against such notions, standing near the throne, polluting the ear of majesty. That God and nature put into our hands! — I know not what idea that Lord may entertain of God and nature, but I know that such abominable prin- ciples are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What ! attribute the sacred sanction of God and nature 2q6 George Washington to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife, to the cannibal savage, torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating ; Hterally, my Lords, eating the mangled victims of his barbarous battles ! Such horrible notions shock every precept of religion, divine and natural, and every generous feeling of humanity ; and, my Lords, they shock every sentiment of honor ; they shock me as a lover of honorable war, and a detester of murderous barbarity. " These abominable principles, and this more abomi- nable avowal of them, demand most decisive indigna- tion." ^ Washington was earnestly in favour of a standing army of forty thousand men who should steadily train for battle, and take the place of the vacillating mob whose terms of enlistments were continually expiring, and whose insubordination, sectional jeal- ousies, and disobedience kept him a continual prey to anxiety. So high an opinion did Congress have of his virtues and patriotism, that they appointed him military Dictator for six months, with full powers to do as he pleased in the conduct of the cam- paign. And never was confidence better placed, or in the end better justified. The day after the battle of Trenton (Dec. 25th), in which a thousand Hessians were captured, their leader. Colonel Rales, mortally wounded, and the rest sent flying and frightened to Princeton, this honour was conferred without any knowledge of the victory just gained, at the very time, too, when * Lord Brougham, Essay on Chatham, 1777, p. 38. The Heart of the Revolution 297 Horatio Gates and others were planning underhand assaults on the reputation of the commander. It is pathetically recorded that, at this time, as if frozen to insensibility by sufferings and a profound sense of responsibility, Washington was never seen to smile. Day and night he was pursued by the phan- tom of his dissolving army, sorrow over the evacua- tion of New York and the surrender of Fort Washington, apprehensions for the safety of Phila- delphia, which the Congress had already abandoned for Baltimore, and intense sympathy with his naked and barefooted troops, barely six thousand of whom still clung feebly to him. His letters at this time are passionate and powerful outcries against the delays of Congress, the lack of patriotism in the provinces, the insufficiency of men and money ; the thousand questions of camp-fire and bivouac, tossed irresist- ibly to and fro by his martyred soldiers as they froze in the icy December weather, unprotected by tents or blankets, shoeless, in rags, rise to the sur- face of these plain-spoken epistles, and reveal a state of things which amply explains this unsmiling time. Delightful, therefore, was the radiant little gleam of happiness that came with Trenton, soon to broaden into beaming joy over the twin victory of Princeton, another of those sudden, Napoleonic moves which occasionally varied the compulsory " Fabian policy " of the Americans. To watch, to wait, to hold his own, to lose no gained advantage, to be ever on the qui vive, to pounce suddenly upon the dreaming foe, asleep at his Christmas revels, to 298 George Washing-ton inflict a deadly blow and then retire unharmed to his leafy lair : such was the only safe course at this juncture for the American panther, fighting against fearful odds. To risk any more, to risk simply for the sake of risking, or to placate a civilian Congress a hundred miles away, yet continually interfering, would have brought infinite disaster, and soon closed the war. The true Continental policy, therefore, was the one pursued — to wear the British out, to cripple their fleet by swarms of swift privateers, flying in and out every cove and inlet, to capture big and little bands of marauders in detail, to hem in, cut off, starve out if possible, to hang like wasps on flank and rear and sting to death man by man. And the event, four years from now, proved the wisdom of this policy which, under the circum- stances, was the only one practicable. Small successes like these — small in one sense, large in another — filled the land with enthusiasm, checked the contagion of desertion, and again called forth the public thanks of Congress. With every advantage of men, money, artillery, and mercenaries, the invaders accomplished nothing; and Washing- ton, profiting by their lethargy, went into winter quarters at Morristown, preparing to rest and re- cruit his forces for the summer campaign. The swiftness of his down-rush on Trenton and Prince- ton, the celerity and secrecy of his movements everywhere in upper Jersey, and his personal per- suasiveness and popularity among the troops, The Heart of the Revolution 2qq bespoke him a dangerous foe and vexed the very soul of Cornwalhs and Lord Howe. Incredible as it may seem, nothing was done by either army until May, a most welcome rest for Washington, a most inexcusable loss of time for Howe. Washington lay vigilant in the hills, watching every movement of the enemy, cheered by the presence of his devoted wife, studying with his aides the new plan of cam- paign, writing volumes of dispatches to Congress, to the governors of the different States, to General Schuyler at Albany, to Benjamin Harrison, Richard Henry Lee, and other influential personal friends at Philadelphia, to friends and kinspeople in his be- loved Virginia, letters frankly full of his hopes and fears. The American Commission abroad had at length aroused the interest of France, and five thousand muskets and stores of ammunition arrived to cheer the Americans. Foreign officers began to flock to the shores of the New World, and entangle Con- gress in curious and annoying questions of rank, pay, appointments, and commissions. Many of these were noble and magnanimous souls — Kos- ciuszko, Pulaski, LaFayette, De Kalb, and, a little later, Steuben, De Grasse, and Rochambeau, are noble names for any nation to enroll in its legion of honour, but particularly so for America at this forlorn and often hopeless time. Seeds of freedom had been scattered broadcast all over Europe by Locke and '' Junius," Bolingbroke and Voltaire, John Wilkes and Jean Jacques Rousseau, and these 300 Georg^e Washing-ton seeds had germinated plentifully in Poland, in Prussia, in France, and in England, bearing as their noble fruit the band of devoted patriots just enu- merated. '' Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell," wrote the poet Campbell in a memorable line which has enbalmed the gallant Lithuanian who came over to help Washington, and survived the Revolution many years. Innumerable streets, public squares, towns, counties, and monuments perpetuate, in the United States, the name of the gentle and gracious marquis who, at twenty, leaves his beautiful wife and vast possessions to serve, to starve, finally to triumph, with Washington. Steuben, amid the hor- rors of Valley Forge and the rest of that nightmare winter, first taught the Americans what regular dis- cipline was. To Americans, Poland is not only the land of great novelists and exquisite musicians, it is the land of Pulaski, who fell nobly fighting for American freedom; and, but for the timely aid of the countrymen of D'Estaing, De Grasse, and Ro- chambeau, American independence would probably never have been achieved. As the long months of 1777 uncoiled themselves from the *' loom of Time," they gradually wove their substance into a fabric of mingled light and shade, of gloom and gladness, that soon became characteristic of the whole w^ar. The beginning of the year was all light for the Americans. Then the long and much-needed hibernation at Morristown and Middlebrook ensued. Mid-summer revealed The Heart of the Revolution 301 alarming activity of Burgoyne, Riedesel, Breymann, and Carleton in the vicinity of Lake Champlain, where St. Clair was forced to abandon Ticonderoga, Arnold with his little fleet was swept from the water, and seven or eight thousand regulars, Hessians, Canadians, and Indians, with a huge train of artillery and abundant stores, were creeping cautiously towards Albany, to form if possible a junction with Howe and Clinton, and sweep the Hudson with a '' besom of destruction." The scheme was well planned, but it did not take into proper consideration two all-important factors : the treachery of the Indian allies, and the high spirit of the New York and New England yeo- manry. The Indians were the wind in human form : one moment here, the next there ; fickle, inconstant, destitute of patriotism or principle, vindictive as treacherous, a people of moods, all smiles or frowns according to circumstances, actuated by no govern- ing thought save need or greed, or vengeance on the paleface, be he friend or foe, creatures of impulse and impression, totally unreliable in the great issues of life. The credulous Burgoyne had hundreds of these uncertain allies in his pay, and, at the critical mo- ment, they deserted him in the dark wood, and con- tributed to a catastrophe more fearful than that which, in far Virginia, had linked the name of the ill-fated Braddock inseparably with the first great American tragedy. If the Indians were the wind incarnate, the yeo- 302 George Washing-ton manry of this beautifully picturesque region of the Adirondacks, the Vermont and Berkshire Hills, and the Hudson and Mohawk valleys were a wall, but a moving wall here, there, and everywhere where danger or honour called, men actuated by the purest patriotism, the highest motives, the most unselfish devotion, living exemplifications of the fury that lies latent in the plough-boy, the hunter, the dweller in the lonely forest, the denizen of the river and the mountain, when his sweetness is turned to gall, his honey to vinegar, and his gay laugh to a sardonic grin under the nitric acid of just indignation. The strategic blunder of Burgoyne was precisely in putting himself superciliously, in an unguarded moment, at the mercy of these twin elements. All seemed as beautiful as a summer dream to this fan- tastic captain — more skilled in scribbling tasteless plays than in commanding armies — as he started gaily forth down the lovely shores of Champlain, drums beating, banners flying, his flotilla cleaving the silver waters of the lake, all as bright and fan- ciful as a Venetian festa. Travellers know the delightful beauty of this region in midsummer — the shadowy woods, the crystal lakes sunk deep in the primeval forests, the dashing mountain streams, the lordly mountains themselves, with their splendid verdure of fir and beech and birch and exuberant fern, — each with its musical Indian name hanging like a tassel to it : now all peace and rich landscape beauty. But then — Into this realm of elves and fairies, of goblins and The Heart of the Revolution 303 Indians, where every tree would soon change to a flame of cannon or a flash of flint-lock — into this region, dragging his heavy brass cannon, his long train of baggage waggons, his sappc'-s and miners and pickets, the cavalcade even accompanied by la- dies of rank, advanced the incautious invader, until as the months from July to October moved on, with now and then a brilliant small success, such as the re- capture of this much-captured Ticonderoga, he reached the neighbourhood of Saratoga. A Congressional cabal meanwhile had placed General Gates over the head of the gallant Schuyler, just as the fruits of Schuyler's long and patient toil were about to be gathered. Eleven thousand men had now assembled in the various American camps around Lake George, Stillwater, Saratoga, and Bemis's Heights. In August, a brigade of these led by the sturdy Stark fell on the British at Bennington, Vermont, and defeated them, crippling Burgoyne and causing a panic in his camp. It was one of those scares that cause people to " realise " things — a smart sense of danger, the perils of advancing too far from one's base into an enemy's country, the inadequacy of one's resources, the valour and deter- mination of the foe. Bennington was an object- lesson just two months ahead of Saratoga, but it seems to have taught Burgoyne nothing. One thing especially he never '' realised " : that New England was not Pennsylvania or lower New York ; loyalists were few and far between; every man was as true as steel, and the woods swarmed with keen-eyed 304 Georg-e Washington marksmen — men born to the gun, inured to hard- ship, full of zeal for the cause, whose hearts, once soft for the old country, had hardened into rock and were possessed with the fixed idea to be free. En- trapped, so to speak, in his own meshes, caught in a cordon of foes that could not bend or be broken, boastfully proclaiming that he would eat his Christ- mas dinner at Albany, this second Miles Gloriosus actually fulfilled his threat, and really ate the Christmas turkey among the " Mynheers " but as — a captive ! On the 17th of October, 1777, — almost the iden- tical date to assume, four years hence, a world-wide celebrity at Yorktown, — the conqueror, distressed, bewildered, haggard with disappointed ambition, and, doubtless, heartily ashamed of himself for the part he had played, ingloriously capitulated — he, his officers and army of six thousand men, seven thou- sand stand of arms, great store of artillery and provisions, Hessians, Indians, and all, wiped at one fell blow from the face of the earth. This splendid achievement was largely due to the heroic temper and exertions of Benedict Arnold and General Schuyler, two men grossly slighted by Con- gress, but distinguished by Washington with every mark of respect and consideration. Arnold began his career as a true patriot, filled with zeal for the cause, naturally gifted as a leader, imperious, high- strung, and indomitable: Montreal, Quebec, Lake Champlain were strewn with his achievements. He thirsted for glory but he also thirsted for official The Heart of the Revolution 305 recognition. This was systematically denied him, and his ardent nature, soured by repeated disap- pointments, by continual snubs, by the elevation of meaner men over his head, soured, darkened, grew embittered, at last drank of the poison cup of over- powering temptation — and fell. The crown of his humiliation was complete when Gates deprived him of his commission, and ordered him off the field of Bemis's Heights, omitting his name entirely in the account of Burgoyne's sur- render. " Burgoyne and some of his principal officers met with a reception in the American camp which they little dreamed of. Gates behaved toward them with the ut- most courtesy ; but the generosity of Schuyler, who was present at the surrender, and whose property had been wickedly destroyed, equalled anything to be found in the annals of chivalry. The Baroness Riedesel, who has left, in her Memoirs, a most charming and graphic picture of the scenes in which she participated in this country, and particularly in this campaign, describes the treatment she received at his hands with great pathos. She says, that when she drew near the American tents, a good-looking man came towards her, helped her children from the caleche in which she rode, and kissed and caressed them, at the same time telling her not to be the least alarmed. Afterward, when all the generals were about to dine with Gates, the same gentleman, who she then heard was General Schuyler, came to her, and invited her to his own tent, that she might not be embarrassed in so large a company, she being the only lady among them. He entertained her 3o6 George Washing^ton with many delicacies, and then gave her a cordial invitation to visit him at his house in Albany, where he expected Burgoyne would be his guest. She describes her reception there by Mrs. Schuyler and her daughters, as being like that of a friend instead of an enemy. ' They treated us,' she said, ' with the most marked attention and politeness, as they did General Burgoyne, who had caused General Schuyler's beauti- fully finished house to be burned. In fact, they be- haved like persons of exalted minds, who determined to bury all recollections of their own injuries in the contemplation of our misfortunes.' General Burgoyne was struck with General Schuyler's generosity, and said to him : ' You show me great kindness, though I have done you much injury.' — * That was the fate of war,' replied the brave man, ' let us say no more about it.' *' General Schuyler was detained at Saratoga when Burgoyne and his suite departed for Albany. He wrote to his wife, requesting her to give the British general the best reception in her power. ' He sent an aid-de-camp to conduct me to Albany,' said Burgoyne, in a speech in the British House of Commons, ' in order, as he expressed it, to procure better quarters than a stranger might be able to find. That gentleman (Colonel Richard Varick) conducted me to a very elegant house, and, to my great surprise, presented me to Mrs. Schuyler and her family. In that house I re- mained during my whole stay in Albany, with a table of more than twenty covers for me and my friends, and every other demonstration of hospitality.' " ^ ^ Lossing, Washington and the American Republic, vol. ii, P- 537. The Heart of the Revolution 307 While the pendulum swung thus high in the North, and began to mark October as the " most im- memorial month " of American independence, it swung wofully low in the South where the Com- mander-m-chief, himself, found the army '' a great chaos," as he wrote, from which he was trying to evolve some order. The hot months had started Burgoyne and Howe from their lairs almost simul- taneously, and, like swarms of bees, their forces fastened on the extremities of the confederacy and threatened to extinguish it. Sir William Howe, baffling spies and scouts, appeared suddenly with two hundred sail off the Delaware capes. By September ist, he had penetrated two hundred miles up Chesapeake Bay, and landed eighteen thousand troops near the Elk River. As this army headed towards Philadelphia, it was hung upon flank and rear by '' Light Horse " Harry Lee, Generals Sul- livan, Wayne, and Greene, and such few thousands of troops as were present from day to day. " Today I have a full army, tomorrow none," complained Washington. In little more than three weeks after landing at Elk River, Howe marched victoriously into Philadelphia (Sept. 26th), though momentarily checked at Brandywine, thirteen days before. Brandywine, like Germantown, was one of those victorious defeats which taught the Americans so much, which evoked medals and thanks from Con- gress, lifted the Fabian policy into a science of nega- tive possibilities, inspired in the British respect for their antagonists, and showed the folly of attempt- 3o8 Georg-e Washing-ton ing to subdue millions of free people with twenty- five thousand regulars and a few thousand hireling Hessians. " There are 60,000 babes born every year in America and our commerce is. worth 25,000,000 dollars annually," exclaimed Franklin, always seizing the practical side of things. And the same philosopher, on hearing of Howe's entry into Philadelphia, wrote, '' Philadelphia has taken Howe, not Howe Philadelphia." Hannibal at Capua could not, indeed, have been more effectively taken than Howe in the peaceful Quaker City. The British now had two costly bases a hundred miles apart, two vast military camps to guard and fortify, two fleets to maintain, a divided force and plan of campaign to carry out, the two most popu- lous cities in the country to defend against a wily and untiring foe. The character of this foe was well described by LaFayette : " Eleven thousand men but tolerably armed, and still worse clad, presented a singular spectacle ; in this parti-colored and often naked state, the best dresses were hunting-shirts of brown linen. Their tactics were equally irregular. They were arranged without regard to size, excepting that the smallest men were in the front rank. With all this, these were good-looking soldiers, conducted by zealous officers." Scarcely had the invaders settled down in the Tory city, for Philadelphia was substantially Tory at that time, and in the very act of drinking toasts The Heart of the Revolution 309 to King George and confusion to the Continental Congress over their brilUant success, when the loving-cup of congratulation was embittered by the news from Burgoyne. Thus the pendulum righted itself and swung up heavily in favour of the Ameri- cans. The capture of Philadelphia seemed a great suc- cess, but the effect was as nothing compared with the capture of Burgoyne. " The surrender of Burgoyne and his army was an event of infinite importance to the republican cause beyond its immediate results. Hitherto, during the war, the preponderance of successes had been on the side of the British ; and there were doubtful minds and trembling hearts everywhere among the true friends of the cause, to whom the idea of deliverance of the colonists appeared almost chimerical. " The events on the Brandywine were not calculated to inspire hope, even in the most hopeful ; and all eyes were turned anxiously to the army of the North. Every breath of rumor from Saratoga was listened to with eagerness ; and when the victory was certified, a shout of triumph went up all over the land — from the fur- row, and workshops, and marts of commerce, from the pulpit, from provincial halls of legislation, from partisan camps, and from the shattered ranks of the commander-in-chief of the American armies, at White- marsh. The bills of Congress rose twenty per cent in value ; capital came forth from its hiding-places ; the militia of the country were inspirited, and more hope- ful hearts everywhere prevailed. " The Congress, overjoyed by the event, forgot their 31 o George Washington own dignity; and when Major Wilkinson, Gates' bearer of despatches to that body, appeared at their door, he was admitted to the legislative floor, and allowed verbally to proclaim in the ear of that august assembly : ' The whole British army have laid down their arms at Saratoga ; our own, full of vigor and courage, expect your orders ; it is for your wisdom to decide where the country may still have need of their services.' In the ecstacy of the hour the commander- in-chief was overlooked and almost forgotten ; and the insult of the elated Gates, in omitting to send his despatches to his chief, was allowed to pass unrebuked. *' Beyond the Atlantic the effect of this victory was also very important. In the British Parliament it gave strength to the opposition, and struck the ministerial party with dismay. ' You may swell every expense and every effort, still more extravagantly,' thundered Chatham, as he leaned upon his crutches and poured forth a torrent of eloquent invective and denunciation. ' You may pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow ; traffic and barter with every little piti- ful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign power ; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent ; doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely, for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies. To overrun with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty ! ' . . . " By this victory, unaided as the republicans were by any foreign help or encouragement of much impor- tance, their prowess was placed in the most favorable light before the eyes of continental Europe. France The Heart of the Revolution 311 now listened with respect to the overtures for aid made by the American commissioners. Spain, the states- general of Holland, the prince of Orange, Catharine of Russia, and even Ganganelli (Pope Clement the Four- teenth), all of whom feared and hated England be- cause of her increasing puissance in arms, commerce, and diplomacy, thought and spoke kindly of the struggling Americans. And on the sixth of February following, France acknowledged the independence of the United States, and entered into a treaty of friend- ship and commerce, and an alliance offensive and de- fensive, with them." ^ ^Lossing, Washington and the American Republic, vol. ii, p. 539. CHAPTER XVI ON TO YORKTOWN TWENTY-TWO miles northwest of Philadel- phia lies a lovely and peaceful little valley, over which now the very spirit of tranquillity broods. The green hills on either side are embowered in luxuriant verdure; wreaths of delicate blue smoke curl heavenward from many an old-fashioned stone chimney; rich farms, ploughed and cultivated by a sturdy *' Dutch " yeomanry, spread their orchards and their fields of grain in every direction; dairies and vegetable gardens vary the landscape with their quaint architecture and many-coloured expanses of green in every shade; picturesque country roads wind in and out the curves of the hills ; rivulets and springs gladden the verdure with their presence, and the wild wood, full of birds and butterflies in the summer season, everywhere gives evidence of a civ- ilisation two centuries and a half old. This is one of the most memorable spots in the United States, the spot where, in the awful winter of 1778, the patriot army, eleven thousand strong, huddled together in winter quarters, and strove to keep soul and body together until spring should open and deliver them from a Dante's Inferno of ice and snow. Here they froze and starved, suffered and 312 On to Yorktown 313 died, martyred by alternate hopes and fears, almost within sound of the bells of Philadelphia where plenty reigned, bells which to them were more like death-bells than the symbols of God's mercy and loving-kindness to men. Acres and acres of the slopes and hillsides, now so beautiful and calm with the peace of more than a hundred years, then lay thickly strewn with log cabins roofed with leaves and branches, cabins 12 by 14 feet, pointed with clay or mud, holding twelve soldiers each. Washington himself, lynx-eyed in everything that concerned the comfort of his army, issued the most minute directions for the construc- tion of the huts, offered bounties for the best and speediest built, and on every occasion, wherever there was the least reason for it, composed and pro- claimed encouraging bulletins to the soldiers, bid- ding them be of good cheer, acquit themselves like men, and cling tenaciously to their rights as mem- bers of free and independent States. It seemed like the very Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the winter closed in over the American Army, sombre, ominous, and despairing. '' I am now convinced beyond a doubt," wrote Washington, " that, unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that line [the commis- sary's department], this army must inevitably be re- duced to one or other of these three things: starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can." Two foreign observers, the Marquis de LaFayette 314 Georg-e Washington and Baron von Steuben, testify as follows of the army: " The unfortunate soldiers were in want of every- thing; they had neither coats, hats, shirts, nor shoes; their feet and legs froze till they became black, and it was often necessary to amputate them. From want of money, they could neither obtain provisions nor any means of transport; the colonels were often reduced to two rations, and sometimes even to one. The army frequently remained whole days without provisions, and the patient endurance of both soldiers and officers was a miracle which each moment served to renew. But the sight of their misery prevented new engage- ments : it was almost impossible to levy recruits ; it was easy to desert into the interior of the country." ^ Steuben says: " The arms at Valley Forge were in a horrible condi- tion, covered with rust, half of them without bayonets, many from which a single shot could not be fired. The pouches were quite as bad as the arms. A great many of the carbines, fowling-pieces, and rifles were to be seen in the same company. The description of the dress is most easily given. The men were literally naked, some of them in the fullest extent of the word. The officers who had coats, had them of every color and make. I saw officers, at a grand parade at Valley Forge, mounting guard in a sort of dressing-gown, made of an old blanket or woollen bed-cover. With regard to their military discipline, I may safely say no such thing existed." ^Memoirs of LaFayette. On to Yorktown 315 It is these men, whose " incomparable patience " the Commander praises in warmest words, hearts of gold, able, each man, to reply as Joseph Reed when approached by the foreign Peace Commission with a bribe : '' I am not worth purchasing, but such as I am King George has not money enough to buy me!" Yet this inflexible patriotism was set in a sur- rounding of treachery, lukewarmness, and intrigue. '' Ah these detestable Tories ! " exclaims Elkanah Watson in his diary; and these were the molluscs rather than men who, in a land literally flowing with milk and honey, sat and smiled while the heroic camp at Valley Forge sat and starved. '' Starve, dissolve or disperse," wrote Washington to Con- gress, must be the inevitable fate of the army, often destitute of food for days together, if a proper com- missariat were not organised. A burst of cheery radiance interrupted the gloom when, in May, with heartiest thanksgiving, the army celebrated the news of the treaty of alliance and commerce with France signed the February previous. The adventurer Lee, with his heart even then hatch- ing treason, was exchanged for the captive British General Prescott, who, a few months before, had been captured and carried off in his night clothes from his Rhode Island quarters, in a manner almost identical with the capture of Lee. Received with the most affectionate warmth by Washington, Lee was put in command of the right wing of the army. 3i6 George Washington Of Washington at this time, a foreigner in the camp wrote : ''General Washington received the Baron [Steuben] with great cordiahty, and to me he showed much con- descending attention. I cannot describe the impression that the first sight of that great man made upon me. I could not keep my eyes from that imposing counte- nance — grave, yet not severe; affable, without famil- iarity. Its predominant expression was calm dignity, through which you could trace the strong feelings of the patriot, and discern the father as well as the com- mander of his soldiers. I have never seen a picture that represents him to me as I saw him at Valley Forge, and during the campaigns in which I had the honor to follow him. Perhaps that expression was beyond the skill of the painter ; but while I live it will remain impressed on my memory. I had frequent op- portunities of seeing him, as it was my duty to ac- company the Baron when he dined with him, which was sometimes twice or thrice in the same week. We visited him also in the evening, when Mrs. Washington was at headquarters. We were in a manner domesti- cated in the family." The terrors of that winter were increased, for Washington, by the publication of spurious letters attributing treasonable sentiments to him, and by the machinations of the Conway Cabal to remove him from his high position. Washington repudiated the letters, attributed to John Randolph, last royal Attorney-general of Vir- ginia, with scorn, and the shameless intrigues of z o I- O s Q « Z pi S £ CO i On to Yorktown 317 Gates, Conway and the gang of adventurers about them, fell to the ground. The Capuan luxury of Philadelphia indeed — or the monumental folly of a civilian ministry, three thousand miles away, in attempting to direct mili- tary movements in a land totally unfamiliar to them — proved too much for the British, and caused a dramatic turn of events on the i8th of June, 1778. On that day, the news first burst on the astonished camp at Valley Forge, that Sir Henry Clinton with ten thousand troops had slipped anchor, so to speak, crossed the Delaware with a huge train of waggons and artillery, and was scudding away in hot haste over the plains of Jersey in full retreat for New York. Now, the happy traveller skims over the ninety odd miles between the two great cities in ninety minutes. Then, marching with all possible speed, it took the invaders from June 18th to June 30th to reach Sandy Hook and find themselves under the protection of the fleet in New York Harbour. On the way, ten days after they started, the British suf- fered a disastrous defeat at Monmouth Court House, where they were fiercely attacked by the Americans, and where the ambiguous conduct of Lee, in order- ing the Americans without reason to retreat, strengthened the prevailing opinion that he was a traitor. The day was saved by the vigilance of Washington and his Generals Greene, Lord Stir- ling, LaFayette, and Cadwallader, who, perceiving the confusion, rallied the troops, flung them power- 31 8 Georg-e Washington fully against the enemy, and, by twilight of this famous Sunday, had the foe in swift retreat towards New York. It was on this occasion that the Marquis La- Fayette reports the historic scene between Washing- ton and Lee : " The conviction that Lee was a TRAITOR, and that this retreat was the first bitter fruit of his treason, now flashed upon the mind of Washington. Already the belief that he was untrue, and a dangerous man in the army, had been forced upon the consideration of many officers ; but, until the previous evening, the generous heart of the commander-in-chief would not harbor such a suspicion. Late at night, the Reverend David Griffiths, a Welshman, and chaplain of the third Virginia regiment, had repaired to headquarters, and warned the chief, in presence of Hamilton, Harrison, and Fitzgerald, not to employ General Lee in com- manding the advance on the ensuing morning. Wash- ington received the warning doubtingly; when the reverend gentleman, on retiring, observed, * I am not permitted to say more at present, but your excellency will remember my warning voice to-morrow, in the battle.' '' Now that warning voice, Lee's opposition to attacking Clinton at all, and his changefulness respect- ing the command of the advance, all combined to make Washington feel that Lee had ordered this retreat for the purpose of marring his plans, and disgracing him by the loss of a battle, so as to fulfil the traitor's own predictions of its failure. It was under this impression, acting upon a most intense nature, that Washington, On to Yorktown 319 as he was pushing forward, after ordering the flying officers to form their corps in his rear, met Lee. The chief was terribly exasperated, and, riding up to Lee, he exclaimed, in a tone of absolute fierceness, ' What is the meaning of all this, sir ? ' Lee hesitated for a moment; when Washington, with furious aspect and more furious words, again demanded, ' Sir, I desire to know what is the reason of all this disorder and con- fusion ? ' " The fiery Lee, stung more by Washington's man- ner than his words, made an angry reply; when the enraged chief, no longer able to control his feelings, called him a * damned poltroon.' Other bitter words passed quickly between the two generals ; and, during that brief interview, the ardent Hamilton, who also remembered the chaplain's warning, drew his sword, and exclaimed : ' Your excellency and this army are betrayed ; and the moment has arrived when every true friend of America and her cause must be ready to die in their defence ! ' ** But there was no time for altercation. The enemy, in pursuit of the fugitives, were advancing in full force. Wheeling his horse, Washington hastened to the rear, rallied a large portion of the broken regiments, and, by the well-directed fire of some fieldpieces which he had ordered to be placed in battery upon an eminence, the British were checked. Washington's presence inspired the troops with courage, and order was soon brought out of confusion. " Having made all arrangements with great pre- cision and despatch, the commander-in-chief rode back to Lee in a calmer state of mind, and, pointing to the rallied troops, inquired, ' Will you, sir, command in 320 George Washington that place ? ' 'I will ! ' eagerly exclaimed Lee. ' Then/ said Washington, ' I expect you to check the enemy immediately.' 'Your command shall be obeyed,' responded Lee, ' and I will not be the first to leave the field.' " Back to the main army Washington now hurried, and with wonderful despatch formed the battalions in order for action, upon the eminences westward of a small morass which lay between them and the enemy. Lord Stirling was placed in command of the left wing, and General Greene took position on his right. Sharp fighting soon occurred. Lee's troops, exhausted by fatigue and the intense heat, were ordered to take position in the rear, near Englishtown, and their com- mander was directed to assemble the scattered fugi- tives there. ** The battle soon became general, and the British sustained a great loss in the death of Colonel Monck- ton. He was killed while leading his grenadiers against Wayne, who, with some artillery, had taken a strong position. His columns, terribly shattered at the same time, recoiled. The entire British line soon gave way, and the conflict ceased." ^ Later, Lee was court-martialed and sentenced to suspension from the army for one year. General Arnold entered Philadelphia with a force of Americans, and once again the cause loomed up into light and cheerfulness, " obfuscated," as Lee expressed it, by the fall of Savannah in the South towards the end of December. *Lossing, Washington and the American Republic, vol. ii, p. 623. On to Yorktown 321 Congress at once moved back to the wealthy Quaker City, where immediately the busy pens of the idlers begin to ply, diaries are kept, and pen- pictures of the men and times are abundantly painted. Here is Thacher's portrait of Washington : *' The personal appearance of our Commander in Chief, is that of the perfect gentleman and accom- plished warrior. He is remarkably tall, full six feet, erect and well proportioned. The strength and pro- portion of his joints and muscles, appear to be com- mensurate with the pre-eminent powers of his mind. The serenity of his countenance, and majestic grace- fulness of his deportment, impart a strong impres- sion of tha