Washington and His Comrades in Arms Part 1

Was.h.i.+ngton and his Comrades in Arms.

by George Wrong.

CHAPTER I. THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

Moving among the members of the second Continental Congress, which met at Philadelphia in May, 1775, was one, and but one, military figure.

George Was.h.i.+ngton alone attended the sittings in uniform. This colonel from Virginia, now in his forty-fourth year, was a great landholder, an owner of slaves, an Anglican churchman, an aristocrat, everything that stands in contrast with the type of a revolutionary radical. Yet from the first he had been an outspoken and uncompromising champion of the colonial cause. When the tax was imposed on tea he had abolished the use of tea in his own household and when war was imminent he had talked of recruiting a thousand men at his own expense and marching to Boston. His steady wearing of the uniform seemed, indeed, to show that he regarded the issue as hardly less military than political.

The clash at Lexington, on the 19th of April, had made vivid the reality of war. Pa.s.sions ran high. For years there had been tension, long disputes about buying British stamps to put on American legal papers, about duties on gla.s.s and paint and paper and, above all, tea. Boston had shown turbulent defiance, and to hold Boston down British soldiers had been quartered on the inhabitants in the proportion of one soldier for five of the populace, a great and annoying burden. And now British soldiers had killed Americans who stood barring their way on Lexington Green. Even calm Benjamin Franklin spoke later of the hands of British ministers as "red, wet, and dropping with blood." Americans never forgot the fresh graves made on that day. There were, it is true, more British than American graves, but the British were regarded as the aggressors.

If the rest of the colonies were to join in the struggle, they must have a common leader. Who should he be?

In June, while the Continental Congress faced this question at Philadelphia, events at Boston made the need of a leader more urgent.

Boston was besieged by American volunteers under the command of General Artemas Ward. The siege had lasted for two months, each side watching the other at long range. General Gage, the British Commander, had the sea open to him and a finely tempered army upon which he could rely. The opposite was true of his opponents. They were a motley host rather than an army. They had few guns and almost no powder. Idle waiting since the fight at Lexington made untrained troops restless and anxious to go home. Nothing holds an army together like real war, and shrewd officers knew that they must give the men some hard task to keep up their fighting spirit. It was rumored that Gage was preparing an aggressive movement from Boston, which might mean pillage and ma.s.sacre in the surrounding country, and it was decided to draw in closer to Boston to give Gage a diversion and prove the mettle of the patriot army. So, on the evening of June 16, 1775, there was a stir of preparation in the American camp at Cambridge, and late at night the men fell in near Harvard College.

Across the Charles River north from Boston, on a peninsula, lay the village of Charlestown, and rising behind it was Breed's Hill, about seventy-four feet high, extending northeastward to the higher elevation of Bunker Hill. The peninsula could be reached from Cambridge only by a narrow neck of land easily swept by British floating batteries lying off the sh.o.r.e. In the dark the American force of twelve hundred men under Colonel Prescott marched to this neck of land and then advanced half a mile southward to Breed's Hill. Prescott was an old campaigner of the Seven Years' War; he had six cannon, and his troops were commanded by experienced officers. Israel Putnam was skillful in irregular frontier fighting, and Nathanael Greene, destined to prove himself the best man in the American army next to Was.h.i.+ngton himself, could furnish sage military counsel derived from much thought and reading.

Thus it happened that on the morning of the 17th of June General Gage in Boston awoke to a surprise. He had refused to believe that he was shut up in Boston. It suited his convenience to stay there until a plan of campaign should be evolved by his superiors in London, but he was certain that when he liked he could, with his disciplined battalions, brush away the besieging army. Now he saw the American force on Breed's Hill throwing up a defiant and menacing redoubt and entrenchments. Gage did not hesitate. The bold aggressors must be driven away at once. He detailed for the enterprise William Howe, the officer destined soon to be his successor in the command at Boston. Howe was a brave and experienced soldier. He had been a friend of Wolfe and had led the party of twenty-four men who had first climbed the cliff at Quebec on the great day when Wolfe fell victorious. He was the younger brother of that beloved Lord Howe who had fallen at Ticonderoga and to whose memory Ma.s.sachusetts had reared a monument in Westminster Abbey. Gage gave him in all some twenty-five hundred men, and, at about two in the afternoon, this force was landed at Charlestown.

The little town was soon aflame and the smoke helped to conceal Howe's movements. The day was boiling hot and the soldiers carried heavy packs with food for three days, for they intended to camp on Bunker Hill.

Straight up Breed's Hill they marched wading through long gra.s.s sometimes to their knees and throwing down the fences on the hillside.

The British knew that raw troops were likely to scatter their fire on a foe still out of range and they counted on a rapid bayonet charge against men helpless with empty rifles. This expectation was disappointed. The Americans had in front of them a barricade and Israel Putnam was there, threatening dire things to any one who should fire before he could see the whites of the eyes of the advancing soldiery. As the British came on there was a terrific discharge of musketry at twenty yards, repeated again and again as they either halted or drew back.

The slaughter was terrible. British officers hardened in war declared long afterward that they had never seen carnage like that of this fight.

The American riflemen had been told to aim especially at the British officers, easily known by their uniforms, and one rifleman is said to have shot twenty officers before he was himself killed. Lord Rawdon, who played a considerable part in the war and was later, as Marquis of Hastings, Viceroy of India, used to tell of his terror as he fought in the British line. Suddenly a soldier was shot dead by his side, and, when he saw the man quiet at his feet, he said, "Is Death nothing but this?" and henceforth had no fear. When the first attack by the British was checked they retired; but, with dogged resolve, they re-formed and again charged up the hill, only a second time to be repulsed. The third time they were more cautious. They began to work round to the weaker defenses of the American left, where were no redoubts and entrenchments like those on the right. By this time British s.h.i.+ps were throwing sh.e.l.ls among the Americans. Charlestown was burning. The great column of black smoke, the incessant roar of cannon, and the dreadful scenes of carnage had affected the defenders. They wavered; and on the third British charge, having exhausted their ammunition, they fled from the hill in confusion back to the narrow neck of land half a mile away, swept now by a British floating battery. General Burgoyne wrote that, in the third attack, the discipline and courage of the British private soldiers also broke down and that when the redoubt was carried the officers of some corps were almost alone. The British stood victorious at Bunker Hill. It was, however, a costly victory. More than a thousand men, nearly half of the attacking force, had fallen, with an undue proportion of officers.

Philadelphia, far away, did not know what was happening when, two days before the battle of Bunker Hill, the Continental Congress settled the question of a leader for a national army. On the 15th of June John Adams of Ma.s.sachusetts rose and moved that the Congress should adopt as its own the army before Boston and that it should name Was.h.i.+ngton as Commander-in-Chief. Adams had deeply pondered the problem. He was certain that New England would remain united and decided in the struggle, but he was not so sure of the other colonies. To have a leader from beyond New England would make for continental unity. Virginia, next to Ma.s.sachusetts, had stood in the forefront of the movement, and Virginia was fortunate in having in the Congress one whose fame as a soldier ran through all the colonies. There was something to be said for choosing a commander from the colony which began the struggle and Adams knew that his colleague from Ma.s.sachusetts, John Hanc.o.c.k, a man of wealth and importance, desired the post. He was conspicuous enough to be President of the Congress. Adams says that when he made his motion, naming a Virginian, he saw in Hanc.o.c.k's face "mortification and resentment." He saw, too, that Was.h.i.+ngton hurriedly left the room when his name was mentioned.

There could be no doubt as to what the Congress would do. Unquestionably Was.h.i.+ngton was the fittest man for the post. Twenty years earlier he had seen important service in the war with France. His position and character commanded universal aspect. The Congress adopted unanimously the motion of Adams and it only remained to be seen Whether Was.h.i.+ngton would accept. On the next day he came to the sitting with his mind made up. The members, he said, would bear witness to his declaration that he thought himself unfit for the task. Since, however, they called him, he would try to do his duty. He would take the command but he would accept no pay beyond his expenses. Thus it was that Was.h.i.+ngton became a great national figure. The man who had long worn the King's uniform was now his deadliest enemy; and it is probably true that after this step nothing could have restored the old relations and reunited the British Empire. The broken vessel could not be made whole.

Was.h.i.+ngton spent only a few days in getting ready to take over his new command. On the 21st of June, four days after Bunker Hill, he set out from Philadelphia. The colonies were in truth very remote from each other. The journey to Boston was tedious. In the previous year John Adams had traveled in the other direction to the Congress at Philadelphia and, in his journal, he notes, as if he were traveling in foreign lands, the strange manners and customs of the other colonies.

The journey, so momentous to Adams, was not new to Was.h.i.+ngton. Some twenty years earlier the young Virginian officer had traveled as far as Boston in the service of King George II. Now he was leader in the war against King George III. In New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut he was received impressively. In the warm summer weather the roads were good enough but many of the rivers were not bridged and could be crossed only by ferries or at fords. It took nearly a fortnight to reach Boston.

Was.h.i.+ngton had ridden only twenty miles on his long journey when the news reached him of the fight at Bunker Hill. The question which he asked anxiously shows what was in his mind: "Did the militia fight?"

When the answer was "Yes," he said with relief, "The liberties of the country are safe." He reached Cambridge on the 2d of July and on the following day was the chief figure in a striking ceremony. In the presence of a vast crowd and of the motley army of volunteers, which was now to be called the American army, Was.h.i.+ngton a.s.sumed the command.

He sat on horseback under an elm tree and an observer noted that his appearance was "truly n.o.ble and majestic." This was milder praise than that given a little later by a London paper which said: "There is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side."

New England having seen him was henceforth wholly on his side. His traditions were not those of the Puritans, of the Ephraims and the Abijahs of the volunteer army, men whose Old Testament names tell something of the rigor of the Puritan view of life. Was.h.i.+ngton, a sharer in the free and often careless hospitality of his native Virginia, had a different outlook. In his personal discipline, however, he was not less Puritan than the strictest of New Englanders. The coming years were to show that a great leader had taken his fitting place.

Was.h.i.+ngton, born in 1732, had been trained in self-reliance, for he had been fatherless from childhood. At the age of sixteen he was working at the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor of land. At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a rich widow with children, though her marriage with Was.h.i.+ngton was childless. His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the family for nearly a hundred years.

There were twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of frontage on the tidal river. The Virginia planters were a landowning gentry; when Was.h.i.+ngton died he had more than sixty thousand acres. The growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the time, with its half million people, was connected with the owners.h.i.+p of land.

On their great estates the planters lived remote, with a mail perhaps every fortnight. There were no large towns, no great factories. Nearly half of the population consisted of negro slaves. It is one of the ironies of history that the chief leader in a war marked by a pa.s.sion for liberty was a member of a society in which, as another of its members, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, said, there was on the one hand the most insulting despotism and on the other the most degrading submission. The Virginian landowners were more absolute masters than the proudest lords of medieval England. These feudal lords had serfs on their land. The serfs were attached to the soil and were sold to a new master with the soil. They were not, however, property, without human rights. On the other hand, the slaves of the Virginian master were property like his horses. They could not even call wife and children their own, for these might be sold at will.

It arouses a strange emotion now when we find Was.h.i.+ngton offering to exchange a negro for hogsheads of mola.s.ses and rum and writing that the man would bring a good price, "if kept clean and trim'd up a little when offered for sale."

In early life Was.h.i.+ngton had had very little of formal education. He knew no language but English. When he became world famous and his friend La Fayette urged him to visit France he refused because he would seem uncouth if unable to speak the French tongue. Like another great soldier, the Duke of Wellington, he was always careful about his dress.

There was in him a silent pride which would brook nothing derogatory to his dignity. No one could be more methodical. He kept his accounts rigorously, entering even the cost of repairing a hairpin for a ward.

He was a keen farmer, and it is amusing to find him recording in his careful journal that there are 844,800 seeds of "New River Gra.s.s" to the pound Troy and so determining how many should be sown to the acre. Not many youths would write out as did Was.h.i.+ngton, apparently from French sources, and read and reread elaborate "Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation." In the fas.h.i.+on of the age of Chesterfield they portray the perfect gentleman. He is always to remember the presence of others and not to move, read, or speak without considering what may be due to them. In the true spirit of the time he is to learn to defer to persons of superior quality. Tactless laughter at his own wit, jests that have a sting of idle gossip, are to be avoided. Reproof is to be given not in anger but in a sweet and mild temper. The rules descend even to manners at table and are a revelation of care in self-discipline. We might imagine Oliver Cromwell drawing up such rules, but not Napoleon or Wellington.

The cla.s.s to which Was.h.i.+ngton belonged prided itself on good birth and good breeding. We picture him as austere, but, like Oliver Cromwell, whom in some respects he resembles, he was very human in his personal relations. He liked a gla.s.s of wine. He was fond of dancing and he went to the theater, even on Sunday. He was, too, something of a lady's man; "He can be downright impudent sometimes," wrote a Southern lady, "such impudence, f.a.n.n.y, as you and I like." In old age he loved to have the young and gay about him. He could break into furious oaths and no one was a better master of what we may call honorable guile in dealing with wily savages, in circulating falsehoods that would deceive the enemy in time of war, or in pursuing a business advantage. He played cards for money and carefully entered loss and gain in his accounts. He loved horseracing and horses, and nothing pleased him more than to talk of that n.o.ble animal. He kept hounds and until his burden of cares became too great was an eager devotee of hunting. His shooting was of a type more heroic than that of an English squire spending a day on a moor with guests and gamekeepers and returning to comfort in the evening.

Was.h.i.+ngton went off on expeditions into the forest lasting many days and shared the life in the woods of rough men, sleeping often in the open air. "Happy," he wrote, "is he who gets the berth nearest the fire." He could spend a happy day in admiring the trees and the richness of the land on a neighbor's estate. Always his thoughts were turning to the soil. There was poetry in him. It was said of Napoleon that the one approach to poetry in all his writings is the phrase: "The spring is at last appearing and the leaves are beginning to sprout." Was.h.i.+ngton, on the other hand, brooded over the mysteries of life. He pictured to himself the serenity of a calm old age and always dared to look death squarely in the face. He was sensitive to human pa.s.sion and he felt the wonder of nature in all her ways, her bounteous response in growth to the skill of man, the delight of improving the earth in contrast with the vain glory gained by ravaging it in war. His most striking characteristics were energy and decision united often with strong likes and dislikes. His clever secretary, Alexander Hamilton, found, as he said, that his chief was not remarkable for good temper and resigned his post because of an impatient rebuke. When a young man serving in the army of Virginia, Was.h.i.+ngton had many a tussle with the obstinate Scottish Governor, Dinwiddie, who thought his vehemence unmannerly and ungrateful. Gilbert Stuart, who painted several of his portraits, said that his features showed strong pa.s.sions and that, had he not learned self-restraint, his temper would have been savage. This discipline he acquired. The task was not easy, but in time he was able to say with truth, "I have no resentments," and his self-control became so perfect as to be almost uncanny.

The a.s.sumption that Was.h.i.+ngton fought against an England grown decadent is not justified. To admit this would be to make his task seem lighter than it really was. No doubt many of the rich aristocracy spent idle days of pleasure-seeking with the comfortable conviction that they could discharge their duties to society by merely existing, since their luxury made work and the more they indulged themselves the more happy and profitable employment would their many dependents enjoy. The eighteenth century was, however, a wonderful epoch in England. Agriculture became a new thing under the leaders.h.i.+p of great landowners like Lord Townshend and c.o.ke of Norfolk. Already was abroad in society a divine discontent at existing abuses. It brought Warren Hastings to trial on the charge of plundering India. It attacked slavery, the cruelty of the criminal law, which sent children to execution for the theft of a few pennies, the brutality of the prisons, the torpid indifference of the church to the needs of the ma.s.ses. New inventions were beginning the age of machinery.

The reform of Parliament, votes for the toiling ma.s.ses, and a thousand other improvements were being urged. It was a vigorous, rich, and arrogant England which Was.h.i.+ngton confronted.

It is sometimes said of Was.h.i.+ngton that he was an English country gentleman. A gentleman he was, but with an experience and training quite unlike that of a gentleman in England. The young heir to an English estate might or might not go to a university. He could, like the young Charles James Fox, become a scholar, but like Fox, who knew some of the virtues and all the supposed gentlemanly vices, he might dissipate his energies in hunting, gambling, and c.o.c.kfighting. He would almost certainly make the grand tour of Europe, and, if he had little Latin and less Greek, he was pretty certain to have some familiarity with Paris and a smattering of French. The eighteenth century was a period of magnificent living in England. The great landowner, then, as now, the magnate of his neighborhood, was likely to rear, if he did not inherit, one of those vast palaces which are today burdens so costly to the heirs of their builders. At the beginning of the century the nation to honor Marlborough for his victories could think of nothing better than to give him half a million pounds to build a palace. Even with the colossal wealth produced by modern industry we should be staggered at a residence costing millions of dollars. Yet the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re rivaled at Chatsworth, and Lord Leicester at Holkham, Marlborough's building at Blenheim, and many other costly palaces were erected during the following half century. Their owners sometimes built in order to surpa.s.s a neighbor in grandeur, and to this day great estates are enc.u.mbered by the debts thus incurred in vain show. The heir to such a property was reared in a pomp and luxury undreamed of by the frugal young planter of Virginia. Of working for a livelihood, in the sense in which Was.h.i.+ngton knew it, the young Englishman of great estate would never dream.

The Atlantic is a broad sea and even in our own day, when instant messages flash across it and man himself can fly from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e in less than a score of hours, it is not easy for those on one strand to understand the thought of those on the other. Every community evolves its own spirit not easily to be apprehended by the onlooker. The state of society in America was vitally different from that in England. The plain living of Virginia was in sharp contrast with the magnificence and ease of England. It is true that we hear of plate and elaborate furniture, of servants in livery, and much drinking of Port and Madeira, among the Virginians: They had good horses. Driving, as often they did, with six in a carriage, they seemed to keep up regal style. s.p.a.ces were wide in a country where one great landowner, Lord Fairfax, held no less than five million acres. Houses lay isolated and remote and a gentleman dining out would sometimes drive his elaborate equipage from twenty to fifty miles. There was a tradition of lavish hospitality, of gallant men and fair women, and sometimes of hard and riotous living. Many of the houses were, however, in a state of decay, with leaking roofs, battered doors and windows and shabby furniture. To own land in Virginia did not mean to live in luxurious ease. Land brought in truth no very large income. It was easier to break new land than to fertilize that long in use. An acre yielded only eight or ten bushels of wheat. In England the land was more fruitful. One who was only a tenant on the estate of c.o.ke of Norfolk died worth 150,000 pounds, and c.o.ke himself had the income of a prince. When Was.h.i.+ngton died he was reputed one of the richest men in America and yet his estate was hardly equal to that of c.o.ke's tenant.

Was.h.i.+ngton was a good farmer, inventive and enterprising, but he had difficulties which ruined many of his neighbors. Today much of his infertile estate of Mount Vernon would hardly grow enough to pay the taxes. When Was.h.i.+ngton desired a gardener, or a bricklayer, or a carpenter, he usually had to buy him in the form of a convict, or of a negro slave, or of a white man indentured for a term of years. Such labor required eternal vigilance. The negro, himself property, had no respect for it in others. He stole when he could and worked only when the eyes of a master were upon him. If left in charge of plants or of stock he was likely to let them perish for lack of water. Was.h.i.+ngton's losses of cattle, horses, and sheep from this cause were enormous. The neglected cattle gave so little milk that at one time Was.h.i.+ngton, with a hundred cows, had to buy his b.u.t.ter. Negroes feigned sickness for weeks at a time. A visitor noted that Was.h.i.+ngton spoke to his slaves with a stern harshness. No doubt it was necessary. The management of this intractable material brought training in command. If Was.h.i.+ngton could make negroes efficient and farming pay in Virginia, he need hardly be afraid to meet any other type of difficulty.

From the first he was satisfied that the colonies had before them a difficult struggle. Many still refused to believe that there was really a state of war. Lexington and Bunker Hill might be regarded as unfortunate accidents to be explained away in an era of good feeling when each side should acknowledge the merits of the other and apologize for its own faults. Was.h.i.+ngton had few illusions of this kind. He took the issue in a serious and even bitter spirit. He knew nothing of the Englishman at home for he had never set foot outside of the colonies except to visit Barbados with an invalid half-brother. Even then he noted that the "gentleman inhabitants" whose "hospitality and genteel behaviour" he admired were discontented with the tone of the officials sent out from England. From early life Was.h.i.+ngton had seen much of British officers in America. Some of them had been men of high birth and station who treated the young colonial officer with due courtesy. When, however, he had served on the staff of the unfortunate General Braddock in the calamitous campaign of 1755, he had been offended by the tone of that leader. Probably it was in these days that Was.h.i.+ngton first brooded over the contrasts between the Englishman and the Virginian. With obstinate complacency Braddock had disregarded Was.h.i.+ngton's counsels of prudence. He showed arrogant confidence in his veteran troops and contempt for the amateur soldiers of whom Was.h.i.+ngton was one. In a wild country where rapid movement was the condition of success Braddock would halt, as Was.h.i.+ngton said, "to level every mole hill and to erect bridges over every brook." His transport was poor and Was.h.i.+ngton, a lover of horses, chafed at what he called "vile management" of the horses by the British soldier. When anything went wrong Braddock blamed, not the ineffective work of his own men, but the supineness of Virginia. "He looks upon the country," Was.h.i.+ngton wrote in wrath, "I believe, as void of honour and honesty." The hour of trial came in the fight of July, 1755, when Braddock was defeated and killed on the march to the Ohio.

Was.h.i.+ngton told his mother that in the fight the Virginian troops stood their ground and were nearly all killed but the boasted regulars "were struck with such a panic that they behaved with more cowardice than it is possible to conceive." In the anger and resentment of this comment is found the spirit which made Was.h.i.+ngton a champion of the colonial cause from the first hour of disagreement.

That was a fatal day in March, 1765, when the British Parliament voted that it was just and necessary that a revenue be raised in America.

Was.h.i.+ngton was uncompromising. After the tax on tea he derided "our lordly masters in Great Britain." No man, he said, should scruple for a moment to take up arms against the threatened tyranny. He and his neighbors of Fairfax County, Virginia, took the trouble to tell the world by formal resolution on July 18, 1774, that they were descended not from a conquered but from a conquering people, that they claimed full equality with the people of Great Britain, and like them would make their own laws and impose their own taxes. They were not democrats; they had no theories of equality; but as "gentlemen and men of fortune" they would show to others the right path in the crisis which had arisen. In this resolution spoke the proud spirit of Was.h.i.+ngton; and, as he brooded over what was happening, anger fortified his pride. Of the Tories in Boston, some of them highly educated men, who with sorrow were walking in what was to them the hard path of duty, Was.h.i.+ngton could say later that "there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these wretched creatures."

The age of Was.h.i.+ngton was one of bitter vehemence in political thought.

In England the good Whig was taught that to deny Whig doctrine was blasphemy, that there was no truth or honesty on the other side, and that no one should trust a Tory; and usually the good Whig was true to the teaching he had received. In America there had hitherto been no national politics. Issues had been local and pa.s.sions thus confined exploded all the more fiercely. Franklin spoke of George III as drinking long draughts of American blood and of the British people as so depraved and barbarous as to be the wickedest nation upon earth, inspired by b.l.o.o.d.y and insatiable malice and wickedness. To Was.h.i.+ngton George III was a tyrant, his ministers were scoundrels, and the British people were lost to every sense of virtue. The evil of it is that, for a posterity which listened to no other comment on the issues of the Revolution, such utterances, instead of being understood as pa.s.sing expressions of party bitterness, were taken as the calm judgments of men held in reverence and awe. Posterity has agreed that there is nothing to be said for the coercing of the colonies so resolutely pressed by George III and his ministers. Posterity can also, however, understand that the struggle was not between undiluted virtue on the one side and undiluted vice on the other. Some eighty years after the American Revolution the Republic created by the Revolution endured the horrors of civil war rather than accept its own disruption. In 1776 even the most liberal Englishmen felt a similar pa.s.sion for the continued unity of the British Empire. Time has reconciled all schools of thought to the unity lost in the case of the Empire and to the unity preserved in the case of the Republic, but on the losing side in each case good men fought with deep conviction.

CHAPTER II. BOSTON AND QUEBEC

Was.h.i.+ngton was not a professional soldier, though he had seen the realities of war and had moved in military society. Perhaps it was an advantage that he had not received the rigid training of a regular, for he faced conditions which required an elastic mind. The force besieging Boston consisted at first chiefly of New England militia, with companies of minute-men, so called because of their supposed readiness to fight at a minute's notice. Was.h.i.+ngton had been told that he should find 20,000 men under his command; he found, in fact, a nominal army of 17,000, with probably not more than 14,000 effective, and the number tended to decline as the men went away to their homes after the first vivid interest gave way to the humdrum of military life.

The extensive camp before Boston, as Was.h.i.+ngton now saw it, expressed the varied character of his strange command. Cambridge, the seat of Harvard College, was still only a village with a few large houses and park-like grounds set among fields of grain, now trodden down by the soldiers. Here was placed in haphazard style the motley housing of a military camp. The occupants had followed their own taste in building.

One could see structures covered with turf, looking like lumps of mother earth, tents made of sail cloth, huts of bare boards, huts of brick and stone, some having doors and windows of wattled basketwork. There were not enough huts to house the army nor camp-kettles for cooking. Blankets were so few that many of the men were without covering at night. In the warm summer weather this did not much matter but bleak autumn and harsh winter would bring bitter privation. The sick in particular suffered severely, for the hospitals were badly equipped.

A deep conviction inspired many of the volunteers. They regarded as brutal tyranny the tax on tea, considered in England as a mild expedient for raising needed revenue for defense in the colonies. The men of Suffolk County, Ma.s.sachusetts, meeting in September, 1774, had declared in high-flown terms that the proposed tax came from a parricide who held a dagger at their bosoms and that those who resisted him would earn praises to eternity. From nearly every colony came similar utterances, and flaming resentment at injustice filled the volunteer army. Many a soldier would not touch a cup of tea because tea had been the ruin of his country. Some wore pinned to their hats or coats the words "Liberty or Death" and talked of resisting tyranny until "time shall be no more."

It was a dark day for the motherland when so many of her sons believed that she was the enemy of liberty. The iron of this conviction entered into the soul of the American nation; at Gettysburg, nearly a century later, Abraham Lincoln, in a n.o.ble utterance which touched the heart of humanity, could appeal to the days of the Revolution, when "our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty." The colonists believed that they were fighting for something of import to all mankind, and the nation which they created believes it still.

An age of war furnishes, however, occasion for the exercise of baser impulses. The New Englander was a trader by instinct. An army had come suddenly together and there was golden promise of contracts for supplies at fat profits. The leader from Virginia, untutored in such things, was astounded at the greedy scramble. Before the year 1775 ended Was.h.i.+ngton wrote to his friend Lee that he prayed G.o.d he might never again have to witness such lack of public spirit, such jobbing and self-seeking, such "fertility in all the low arts," as now he found at Cambridge.

He declared that if he could have foreseen all this nothing would have induced him to take the command. Later, the young La Fayette, who had left behind him in France wealth and luxury in order to fight a hard fight in America, was shocked at the slackness and indifference among the supposed patriots for whose cause he was making sacrifices so heavy. In the backward parts of the colonies the population was densely ignorant and had little grasp of the deeper meaning of the patriot cause.

The army was, as Was.h.i.+ngton himself said, "a mixed mult.i.tude." There was every variety of dress. Old uniforms, treasured from the days of the last French wars, had been dug out. A military coat or a c.o.c.ked hat was the only semblance of uniform possessed by some of the officers. Rank was often indicated by ribbons of different colors tied on the arm. Lads from the farms had come in their usual dress; a good many of these were hunters from the frontier wearing the buckskin of the deer they had slain. Sometimes there was clothing of grimmer material. Later in the war in American officer recorded that his men had skinned two dead Indians "from their hips down, for bootlegs, one pair for the Major, the other for myself." The volunteers varied greatly in age. There were bearded veterans of sixty and a sprinkling of lads of sixteen.

An observer laughed at the boys and the "great great grandfathers" who marched side by side in the army before Boston. Occasionally a black face was seen in the ranks. One of Was.h.i.+ngton's tasks was to reduce the disparity of years and especially to secure men who could shoot. In the first enthusiasm of 1775 so many men volunteered in Virginia that a selection was made on the basis of accuracy in shooting. The men fired at a range of one hundred and fifty yards at an outline of a man's nose in chalk on a board. Each man had a single shot and the first men shot the nose entirely away.

Undoubtedly there was the finest material among the men lounging about their quarters at Cambridge in fas.h.i.+on so unmilitary. In physique they were larger than the British soldier, a result due to abundant food and free life in the open air from childhood. Most of the men supplied their own uniform and rifles and much barter went on in the hours after drill. The men made and sold shoes, clothes, and even arms. They were accustomed to farm life and good at digging and throwing up entrenchments. The colonial mode of waging war was, however, not that of Europe. To the regular soldier of the time even earth entrenchments seemed a sign of cowardice. The brave man would come out on the open to face his foe. Earl Percy, who rescued the hara.s.sed British on the day of Lexington, had the poorest possible opinion of those on what he called the rebel side. To him they were intriguing rascals, hypocrites, cowards, with sinister designs to ruin the Empire. But he was forced to admit that they fought well and faced death willingly.

In time Was.h.i.+ngton gathered about him a fine body of officers, brave, steady, and efficient. On the great issue they, like himself, had unchanging conviction, and they and he saved the revolution. But a good many of his difficulties were due to bad officers. He had himself the reverence for gentility, the belief in an ordered grading of society, characteristic of his cla.s.s in that age. In Virginia the relation of master and servant was well understood and the tone of authority was readily accepted. In New England conceptions of equality were more advanced. The extent to which the people would brook the despotism of military command was uncertain. From the first some of the volunteers had elected their officers. The result was that intriguing demagogues were sometimes chosen. The Ma.s.sachusetts troops, wrote a Connecticut captain, not free, perhaps, from local jealousy, were "commanded by a most despicable set of officers." At Bunker Hill officers of this type s.h.i.+rked the fight and their men, left without leaders, joined in the panicky retreat of that day. Other officers sent away soldiers to work on their farms while at the same time they drew for them public pay. At a later time Was.h.i.+ngton wrote to a friend wise counsel about the choice of officers. "Take none but gentlemen; let no local attachment influence you; do not suffer your good nature to say Yes when you ought to say No.

Remember that it is a public, not a private cause." What he desired was the gentleman's chivalry of refinement, sense of honor, dignity of character, and freedom from mere self-seeking. The prime qualities of a good officer, as he often said, were authority and decision. It is probably true of democracies that they prefer and will follow the man who will take with them a strong tone. Little men, however, cannot see this and think to gain support by s.h.i.+fty changes of opinion to please the mult.i.tude. What authority and decision could be expected from an officer of the peasant type, elected by his own men? How could he dominate men whose short term of service was expiring and who had to be coaxed to renew it? Some elected officers had to promise to pool their pay with that of their men. In one company an officer fulfilled the double position of captain and barber. In time, however, the authority of military rank came to be respected throughout the whole army. An amusing contrast with earlier conditions is found in 1779 when a captain was tried by a brigade court-martial and dismissed from the service for intimate a.s.sociation with the wagon-maker of the brigade.

The first thing to do at Cambridge was to get rid of the inefficient and the corrupt. Was.h.i.+ngton had never any belief in a militia army. From his earliest days as a soldier he had favored conscription, even in free Virginia. He had then found quite ineffective the "whooping, holloing gentlemen soldiers" of the volunteer force of the colony among whom "every individual has his own crude notion of things and must undertake to direct. If his advice is neglected he thinks himself slighted, abused, and injured and, to redress his wrongs, will depart for his home." Was.h.i.+ngton found at Cambridge too many officers. Then as later in the American army there were swarms of colonels. The officers from Ma.s.sachusetts, conscious that they had seen the first fighting in the great cause, expected special consideration from a stranger serving on their own soil. Soon they had a rude awakening. Was.h.i.+ngton broke a Ma.s.sachusetts colonel and two captains because they had proved cowards at Bunker Hill, two more captains for fraud in drawing pay and provisions for men who did not exist, and still another for absence from his post when he was needed. He put in jail a colonel, a major, and three or four other officers. "New lords, new laws," wrote in his diary Mr. Emerson, the chaplain: "the Generals Was.h.i.+ngton and Lee are upon the lines every day... great distinction is made between officers and soldiers."

The term of all the volunteers in Was.h.i.+ngton's any expired by the end of 1775, so that he had to create a new army during the siege of Boston. He spoke scornfully of an enemy so little enterprising as to remain supine during the process. But probably the British were wise to avoid a venture inland and to remain in touch with their fleet. Was.h.i.+ngton made them uneasy when he drove away the cattle from the neighborhood. Soon beef was selling in Boston for as much as eighteen pence a pound. Food might reach Boston in s.h.i.+ps but supplies even by sea were insecure, for the Americans soon had privateers manned by seamen familiar with New England waters and happy in expected gains from prize money. The British were anxious about the elementary problem of food. They might have made Was.h.i.+ngton more uncomfortable by forays and alarms. Only reluctantly, however, did Howe, who took over the command on October 10, 1775, admit to himself that this was a real war. He still hoped for settlement without further bloodshed. Was.h.i.+ngton was glad to learn that the British were laying in supplies of coal for the winter. It meant that they intended to stay in Boston, where, more than in any other place, he could make trouble for them.

Was.h.i.+ngton had more on his mind than the creation of an army and the siege of Boston. He had also to decide the strategy of the war. On the long American sea front Boston alone remained in British hands. New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and other ports farther south were all, for the time, on the side of the Revolution. Boston was not a good naval base for the British, since it commanded no great waterway leading inland. The sprawling colonies, from the rock-bound coast of New England to the swamps and forests of Georgia, were strong in their incoherent vastness. There were a thousand miles of seacoast. Only rarely were considerable settlements to be found more than a hundred miles distant from salt water. An army marching to the interior would have increasing difficulties from transport and supplies. Wherever water routes could be used the naval power of the British gave them an advantage. One such route was the Hudson, less a river than a navigable arm of the sea, leading to the heart of the colony of New York, its upper waters almost touching Lake George and Lake Champlain, which in turn led to the St. Lawrence in Canada and thence to the sea. Canada was held by the British; and it was clear that, if they should take the city of New York, they might command the whole line from the mouth of the Hudson to the St. Lawrence, and so cut off New England from the other colonies and overcome a divided enemy. To foil this policy Was.h.i.+ngton planned to hold New York and to capture Canada. With Canada in line the union of the colonies would be indeed continental, and, if the British were driven from Boston, they would have no secure foothold in North America.