In the congress of 1774 the leaders of Virginia were for the first time brought into face-to-face conference with the men of the other colonies. In 1765 Fauquier had dissolved the Burgesses with such sharp despatch, upon the passage of Mr. Henry’s resolutions, that they were all gone home before the call for a congress to act upon the stamp duties could reach them. But in 1774 they were not to be so cheated. They had themselves issued the call for a congress this time, and dissolution could not drive them home. Their leaders could at least linger at the Raleigh and concert means to have their way, House or no House. A convention took the place of the Assembly; and seven leading members of the House were sent to Philadelphia, with as full authority to speak and act for the colony as if the Burgesses themselves had commissioned them. Mr. Harrison declared in Philadelphia that “he would have come on foot rather than not come”; and quiet Richard Bland, that “he would have gone if it had been to Jericho.” Colonel Harrison struck his new colleagues from the North as a bit rough in his free Southern speech and manner; and Mr. Bland seemed to them “a plain, sensible man,” such as would be more given to study than to agitation. If such men, artless and steady as any downright country gentleman of old England, held so high a fancy for the business of the congress, it was easy to conclude what the hastier, younger men would be likely to plan and do; and the Massachusetts delegates found themselves greatly heartened.
John Adams, Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine were the representatives of Massachusetts. It was their people who had most provoked Parliament to be high-handed and aggressive. The struggle with the ministry at home had taken shape in Boston. It had come to actual riot there. All the continent and all England had seen how stubborn was the temper, how incorrigible the spirit of resistance, in that old seat of the Puritan power, always hard set and proud in its self-willed resolution to be independent; and all eyes were turned now upon Cushing and Paine and this “brace of Adamses,” who had come, it was thought, to hurry the congress into radical courses. Kindness, applause, hospitality, “studied and expensive respect,” had attended them at every stage of their long ride from Boston to Philadelphia. The country was much stirred by the prospect of a general “congress of committees” at Philadelphia; and the delegates from Massachusetts were greeted as they passed even more generously than the rest, because their people had been the first to suffer in this bad business; because their chief port at Boston was closed, and red-coated sentries were on their streets. It behooved the Massachusetts men, however, not to suffer themselves to be misled. Many looked upon them askance; some distrusted them heartily. Their own hot-headed mob had provoked the “massacre,” of which they made so much. They had wantonly destroyed private property when they threw the tea into their harbor to show the government their spirit. There had been more than a touch of violence, more than a little turbulence, and a vast deal of radical and revolutionary talk in all that they had done; and the colonies were full yet of men who had no tolerance for anything that transgressed, were it never so little, the moderate limits of constitutional agitation. “There is an opinion which does in some degree obtain in the other colonies that the Massachusetts gentlemen, and especially of the town of Boston, do affect to dictate and take the lead in continental measures; that we are apt, from an inward vanity and self-conceit, to assume big and haughty airs,” said Joseph Hawley, who, for all he had grown old as a quiet Massachusetts lawyer among his neighbors, had kept his shrewd eyes abroad. “It is highly probable,” he told John Adams, with a wholesome bluntness, “that you will meet gentlemen from several of the other colonies fully equal to yourselves or any of you in their knowledge of Great Britain, the colonies, law, history, government, commerce.... By what we from time to time see in the public papers, and what our Assembly and committees have received from the Assemblies and committees of the more southern colonies, we must be satisfied that they have men of as much sense and literature as any we can, or ever could, boast of.” It was mere counsel of prudence that they should play their part in the congress with modesty and discretion.
Not Cushing and Paine, but the Adamses, carried the strength of the Massachusetts delegation; and it was Samuel Adams, rather than John, who was just now the effective master in the great Bay Colony--“master of puppets,” his enemies called him. Hale, bluff, adroit, plain, a man of the people, he had grown old in the business of agitation. Fifty-two years he had lived, planning always for others, never for himself. He had “never looked forward in his life,” he frankly said; “never planned, laid a scheme, or framed a design of laying up anything for himself or others after him”; had let all his private business go neglected, and lived upon the petty salary of a small public office, the indulgence of fortune, and the good offices of the friends and neighbors who loved him. He was in Philadelphia now wearing the plain suit and spending the modest purse with which his friends and partisans had fitted him out--the very impersonation of the revolution men were beginning so to fear. No man had ever daunted him; neither could any corrupt him. He was possessed with the instinct of agitation: led the people, not the leaders; cared not for place, but only for power; showed a mastery of means, a self-containment, a capacity for timely and telling speech, that marked him a statesman, though he loved the rough ways of a people’s government, and preferred the fierce democracy of the town meeting to the sober dignity of senates. Like an eagle in his high building and strength of audacious flight, but in instinct and habit a bird of the storm. Not over-nice what he did, not too scrupulous what he devised, he was yet not selfish, loved the principles he had given his life to, and spent himself without limit to see them triumph.
John Adams, his cousin, was of a very different mould: a younger man by thirteen years; no man of the people, but with a taste rather for the exclusive claims of education and breeding; self-regardful; a thought too calculating; too quick-witted to be patient with dull men, too self-conscious to be at ease with great ones; and yet public-spirited withal, and generous in action if not in judgment; of great powers, if only he could manage to use them without jealousy. Samuel Adams thought only of his end, not of himself; seldom spoke of himself, indeed; seemed a sort of subtle engine for the people’s business. John Adams thought of himself always, and yet mastered himself to play a great part with the nobility of a man of genius, if not with the grace of a man of modesty and self-forgetful devotion. For the time he could even hold back with his wily cousin, resign leadership in the congress to Virginia, and act in all things the wise part of those who follow.
It was a circumstance full of peril that the delegates of the several colonies should at such a juncture be strangers to one another, and provincials all, nowhere bred to continental affairs. Only since the passage of the Stamp Act had they taken any thought for each other. There was no assurance that even the best leaders of a colony could rise to the statesman’s view and concert measures to insure the peace of an empire. Rising lawyers like John Adams, brusque planters like Colonel Harrison, well-to-do merchants like Thomas Mifflin, might bring all honesty and good intention to the task and yet miserably fail. A provincial law practice, the easy ascendency of a provincial country gentleman, the narrow round of provincial trade, might afford capable men opportunity to become enlightened citizens, but hardly fitted them to be statesmen. The real first business of the delegates was to become acquainted, and to learn how to live in the foreign parts to which most of them had come. There was a continual round of entertainment in the hospitable town, therefore, a universal exchange of courtesies, a rush of visiting and dining, a flow of excellent wine, a rich abundance of good cheer, such as for a while made the occasion seem one of festivity rather than of anxious counsel. Many of the delegates had come to town a week or more before the date set for the congress, and had settled to an acquaintance before it was time to effect an organization; but the gentlemen from Maryland and Virginia, more familiar with the journey, arrived almost upon the day. They made an instant impression upon their new colleagues. John Adams promptly declared them “the most spirited and consistent of any,” and deemed Mr. Lee particularly “a masterly man.” Joseph Hawley’s prediction was fulfilled. “The Virginia and indeed all the Southern delegates appear like men of importance,” said Silas Deane; “I never met, nor scarcely had an idea of meeting, with men of such firmness, sensibility, spirit, and thorough knowledge of the interests of America.” Mr. Lynch of South Carolina, though he wore “the manufacture of this country,” and was in all things “plain, sensible, above ceremony,” seemed to Mr. Deane to carry with him “more force in his very appearance than most powdered folks in their conversation.”
The high bearing and capacity of the Southern delegates came upon the New England men like a great surprise: where they had expected to see rustic squires they found men of elegance and learning. But there was, in fact, no good reason to wonder at the natural leadership of these men. Their life had bred them more liberally than others. It required a much more various capacity and knowledge of the world to administer a great property and live the life of a local magnate in the South than sufficed to put a man at the front of trade or of legal practice in Boston or New York or Philadelphia.
(From the portrait by Rembrandt Peale in the Vice-President’s Room at the Capitol, Washington)]
The Southern colonies, besides, had lived more in sympathy with the life of the empire than had their Northern neighbors. Their life had depended directly upon that of England hitherto, and had partaken of it with a constant zest. They had no rival trade; they had wanted no rival government. The general air of the wide empire had blown in all ordinary seasons through their affairs, and they had cultivated none of that shrewd antagonism towards the home government which had so sharpened the wits and narrowed the political interests of the best men in New England. They had read law because they were men of business, without caring too much about its niceties or meaning to practise it in litigation. They had read their English history without feeling that they were separate from it. Their passion for freedom was born not of local feeling so much as of personal pride and the spirit of those who love old practices and the just exemptions of an ancient constitution. It was the life they had lived, and the conceptions of personal dignity and immemorial privilege that had gone always with it, that gave them so striking an air of mastery. It was not simply because the Massachusetts delegates kept themselves prudently in the background and the rest yielded to her pretensions that Virginia was accorded primacy in the congress: it was also because her representatives were men to whom power naturally fell, and because she had won so honorable a place of leadership already in the common affairs of the continent.
Colonel Washington, striking and forceable man though he was, did not figure as a leader among the Virginian delegates. Peyton Randolph was elected president of the congress; Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry stood forth as the Virginian leaders on the floor. “If you speak of solid information and sound judgment, Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on that floor,” was Henry’s confident and generous verdict; but Washington was no politician, and did not stand in exactly the same class with the rest. He had headed committees and presided over popular meetings among his own neighbors in Fairfax, and had been prompt to join them in speaking with high spirit against the course of the ministry in England. He had been forward in urging and punctiliously careful in practising non-importation. He had declared Gage’s conduct in Boston “more becoming a Turkish bashaw than an English governor.” But he was a man of action rather than of parliaments. “I will raise one thousand men, enlist them at my own expense, and march myself at their head for the relief of Boston,” had been his impetuous utterance in the Virginian convention--“the most eloquent speech that ever was made,” Mr. Lynch declared. “I have heard he said,” reported an admiring Philadelphian--“I have heard he said he wished to God the liberties of America were to be determined by a single combat between himself and George!” But his fellow Virginians understood him better. They had chosen him for force and sobriety; not as an orator, but as the first soldier and one of the first characters of the commonwealth; and he had made the impression they expected. He had not been put upon their committee of correspondence, or been appointed with Nicholas and Pendleton and Lee and Henry to draw resolutions and remonstrances; but when it came to choosing those who should represent the Old Dominion in the congress, but two names stood before his in the vote. Peyton Randolph, 104; Richard Henry Lee, 100; George Washington, 98; Patrick Henry, 89; Richard Bland, 79; Benjamin Harrison, 66; Edmund Pendleton, 62--such had been the preference of the convention. The Northern delegates admired his “easy, soldier-like air and gesture” and his modest and “cool but determined” style and accent when he spoke; and wondered to see him look scarce forty, when they recalled how his name had gone through the colonies twenty years ago, when he had met the French so gallantly at Great Meadows, and with Braddock at the forks of the Ohio.
The Massachusetts delegates had reason to admire his manly openness, too, and straightforward candor. An old comrade in arms whom he esteemed--a Virginian now in regular commission, and stationed with the troops in Boston--had written him very damaging things about the “patriot” leaders of the beset town; of their “tyrannical oppression over one another,” and “their fixed aim at total independence,” and had charged them roundly with being no better than demagogues and rebels. Washington went at once to the men accused, to learn from their own lips their principles and intentions, taking Richard Henry Lee and discreet Dr. Shippen along with him as his sponsors and witnesses. “Spent the evening at home with Colonel Lee, Colonel Washington, and Dr. Shippen, who came in to consult us,” was John Adams’s entry in his diary for September 28th. No doubt Samuel Adams found the interview a trying one, and winced a little under the examination of the calm and steady soldier, going so straight to the point, for all his Virginian ceremony. There had been many outward signs of the demagogue in Adams’s career. He had been consciously and deliberately planning and scheming for independence ever since 1768, and had made public avowal of his purpose no longer ago than last year. It must have taxed even his adroit powers to convince these frank Virginians that his purpose was not rebellion, but liberty; that he venerated what they venerated, and wished only what they wished. But the truth somehow lay open before the evening was gone. There was frank cordiality in the parting: Washington was convinced of their genuineness and sobriety. “Though you are led to believe by venal men,” he replied to Captain Mackenzie, “that the people of Massachusetts are rebellious, setting up for independency, and what not, give me leave, my good friend, to tell you that you are abused, grossly abused. This I advance with a degree of confidence and boldness which may claim your belief, having better opportunities for knowing the real sentiments of the people you are among, from the leaders of them, in opposition to the present measures of the administration, than you have from those whose business it is not to disclose truths, but to misrepresent facts in order to justify as much as possible to the world their own conduct.”
The Massachusetts men had come to a better understanding of the game--began to see how cautiously it must be played, how slowly and how wisely. It was a critical business, this of drawing all the colonies into a common congress, as if to create a directing body for the continent, without constitution or warrant. The establishment of committees of correspondence had seemed little short of seditious, for it was notorious the committees were formed to concert action against the government at home; but this “congress of committees” was an even more serious matter. Would the colonies venture a continental organization to defy Parliament? Dangerous differences of opinion were blown hot between neighbors by such measures. Some of the best men in America were opposed to the course which was now evidently to be taken. So long as it was merely a matter of protest by the colonies severally, they had no criticism to make--except perhaps that Mr. Otis and Mr. Henry had held unnecessarily high language, and had been bold and defiant beyond measure; but when they saw how the opposition gathered head, hastened from protest to concerted resistance, put popular conventions into the place of lawful legislative assemblies, and advanced at length to a continental organization, they deemed it high time to bestir themselves, vindicate their loyalty to his Majesty’s government, and avert a revolution. They were not men to be trifled with. Had they been able to unite upon active measures, had they advanced from defence to aggressive action, they might have rendered themselves formidable beyond possibility of defeat. Everywhere men of substance and of influence were to be found by the score who were opposed to a revolutionary agitation, such as this that now seemed to be gathering head. Even in Massachusetts men who bore the best and the oldest names of the commonwealth were of this number; in New York and Pennsylvania, at the very heart of the continent, they could, it was believed, boast a majority, as well as to the far southward, in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. No one, they declared, but designing politicians and men without property, those who had much to gain and nothing to lose by the upsetting of law and ordered government, wished to see this contest with the ministry pushed to extremes. They wished no less than others to see the colonies keep their lawful and chartered liberties, but the thing must be accomplished soberly, and without loss of things equally dear--of honor, and the maintenance of an unbroken English Empire.
The nice balance of parties was disclosed in the congress itself. The Pennsylvanian delegation was led by Joseph Galloway, a man in the prime of life, full of force and learning, who had been Speaker of the provincial House these eight years by the almost unanimous choice of his colleagues, and who now stood forth to utter the real voice of his colony in proposing measures of accommodation. He proposed that the home government be asked to sanction the establishment of a confederate parliament for America, composed of delegates to be chosen every third year by the legislatures of the several colonies, and acting under a governor-general to be appointed by the crown. Edward Rutledge, of South Carolina, hot orator for liberty though he was, declared it an “almost perfect plan,” and was eager to see it adopted; influential members from almost every quarter gave it their hearty support, Mr. John Jay, of New York, among the rest; and it was defeated only by the narrow majority of a single colony’s vote. Chatham might very justly commend the congress of 1774 as conspicuous among deliberative bodies for its “decency, firmness, and wisdom,” its “solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of circumstances,” for the complication of circumstances was such as even he did not fully comprehend. For seven weeks of almost continuous session did it hammer its stiff business into shape, never 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 complained should be repealed. Their only intimation of intention for the future was a resolution to meet again the next spring, should their prayers not meanwhile be heeded.
Washington turned homeward from the congress with thoughts and purposes every way deepened and matured. It had been a mere seven weeks’ conference; no one had deemed the congress a government, or had spoken of any object save peace and accommodation; but no one could foresee the issue of what had been done. A spirit had run through those deliberations which gave thoughtful men, as they pondered it, a new idea of the colonies. It needed no prophet to discern beyond all this sober and anxious business a vision of America united, armed, belligerent for her rights. There was no telling what form of scornful rejection awaited that declaration of rights or the grave pleading of that urgent memorial to the crown. It behooved every man to hold himself in readiness for the worst; and Washington saw as clearly as any man at how nice a hazard things stood. He had too frank a judgment upon affairs to cheat himself with false hopes. “An innate spirit of freedom first told me that the measures which administration hath for some time been and now are most violently pursuing are repugnant to every principle of natural justice,” had been his earnest language to Bryan Fairfax ere he set out for the congress; “whilst much abler heads than my own hath fully convinced me that it is not only repugnant to natural right, but subversive of the laws and constitution of Great Britain itself, in the establishment of which some of the best blood of the kingdom hath been spilt.... I could wish, I own,” he had added, “that this dispute had been left to posterity to determine”; but he knew more clearly than ever before, as he rode homeward from the congress through the autumn woods, that it had not been; that Lee and Henry and Mason were rightly of the same mind and purpose with the men from Massachusetts; that conference had only united and heartened those who stood for liberty in every colony; that there could be no compromise--perhaps no yielding either--and that every man must now take his soberest resolution for the times to come.
He turned steadily to his private business for the winter, nevertheless, as was his wont--pushed forward the preparation and settlement of his western lands, and stood guard, as before, over the soldiers’ grants upon the Ohio, against official bad faith and negligence. “For a year or two past there has been scarce a moment that I could properly call my own,” he declared to a friend who solicited his promise to act as guardian to his son. “What with my own business, my present ward’s, my mother’s, which is wholly in my hands, Colonel Fairfax’s, Colonel Mercer’s, and the little assistance I have undertaken to give in the management of my brother Augustine’s concerns, together with the share I take in public affairs, I have been constantly
engaged in writing letters, settling accounts, and negotiating one piece of business or another; by which means I have really been deprived of every kind of enjoyment, and had almost fully resolved to engage in no fresh matter till I had entirely wound up the old.” He promised to undertake the new charge, nevertheless. It was stuff of his nature to spend himself thus, and keep his powers stretched always to a great compass.
With the new year (1775) public affairs loomed big again, and ominous. The petitions of the congress at Philadelphia had been received in England almost with contempt. Chatham, indeed, with that broad and noble sagacity which made him so great a statesman, had proposed that America’s demands should be met, to the utmost length of repeal and withdrawal of menace, and that she should be accorded to the full the self-government she demanded in respect of taxation and every domestic concern. “It is not cancelling a piece of parchment,” he cried, “that can win back America,” the old fire burning hot within him; “you must respect her fears and her resentments.” The merchants, too, in fear for their trade, urged very anxiously that there should be instant and ample concession. But the King’s stubborn anger, the Parliament’s indifference, the ministry’s incapacity, made it impossible anything wise or generous should be done. Instead of real concession there was fresh menace. The ministry did, indeed, offer to exempt from taxation every colony that would promise that by its own vote it would make proper contribution to the expenses of public defence and imperial administration--in the hope thereby to disengage the lukewarm middle colonies from the plot now thickening against the government. But Massachusetts was at once proclaimed in rebellion, every port in New England was declared closed against trade, New England fishermen were denied access to the Newfoundland fisheries, and ten thousand fresh troops were ordered to Boston. Neither the pleas of their friends nor the threats of their enemies reached the ears of the colonists promptly from over sea that portentous spring; but they were not slow to perceive that they must look for no concessions; and they did not wait upon Parliament in their preparation for a doubtful future. Upon the very day the “congress of committees” at Philadelphia adjourned, a “provincial congress” in Massachusetts, formed of its own authority in the stead of the House of Delegates the Governor had but just now dissolved, had voted to organize and equip the militia of the colony and to collect stores and arms. Virginia had been equally bold, and almost equally prompt, far away as she seemed from the King’s troops at Boston. By the end of January Charles Lee could write from Williamsburg: “The whole country is full of soldiers, all furnished, all in arms.... Never was such vigor and concord heard of, not a single traitor, scarcely a silent dissentient.”
“Every county is now arming a company of men for the avowed purpose of protecting their committees,” Dunmore had reported to the ministry before the year 1774 was out, “and to be employed against government if occasion require. As to the power of government which your lordship directs should be exerted to counteract the dangerous measures pursuing here, I can assure your lordship that it is entirely disregarded, if not wholly overturned. There is not a justice of peace in Virginia that acts except as a committeeman; the abolishing of courts of justice was the first step taken, in which the men of fortune and pre-eminence joined equally with the lowest and meanest.” Company after company, as it formed, asked Colonel Washington to assume command over it, not only in his own county of Fairfax, but in counties also at a distance--and he accepted the responsibility as often as it was offered to him. “It is my full intention,” he said, simply, “to devote my life and fortune to the cause we are engaged in, if needful”; and he had little doubt any longer what was to come. He found time, even that stirring year, to quicken his blood once and again, nevertheless, while winter held, by a run with the hounds: for he was not turned politician so sternly even yet as to throw away his leisure upon anything less wholesome than the hale sport he loved.
On the 20th of May, 1775, the second Virginian convention met, not in Williamsburg, but at Richmond, and its chief business was the arming of the colony. Maryland had furnished the ironical formula with which to justify what was to be done: “Resolved, unanimously, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the gentlemen freeholders and other freemen, is the natural strength and only stable security of a free government; and that such militia will relieve our mother-country from any expense in our protection and defence, will obviate the pretence of a necessity for taxing us on that account, and render it unnecessary to keep any standing army--ever dangerous to liberty--in this province.” Mr. Henry accepted the formula with great relish, in the convention at Richmond, in his resolution “that the colony be immediately put into a posture of defence,” but he broke with it in the speech with which he supported his measures of preparation. In that there was no plan or pretence of peace, but, instead, a plain declaration of war. Once more did Edmund Pendleton, Richard Bland, Mr. Nicholas, and Colonel Harrison spring to their feet to check him, as in the old days of the Stamp Act. Once more, nevertheless, did he have his way, completely, triumphantly. What he had proposed was done, and his very opponents served upon the committee charged with its accomplishment. It was not doing more than other colonies had done; it was only saying more; it was only dealing more fearlessly and frankly with fortune. Even slow, conservative men like John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, shielded themselves behind only an “if.” “The first act of violence on the part of administration in America,” they knew, “or the attempt to reinforce General Gage this winter or next year, will put the whole continent in arms, from Nova Scotia to Georgia.”
What they feared very speedily came to pass. ’Twas hardly four weeks from the day Mr. Henry proclaimed a state of war in the convention at Richmond before the King’s regulars were set upon at Lexington and Concord and driven back in rout to their quarters by the swarming militia-men of Massachusetts. On the 19th of April they had set out across a peaceful country to seize the military stores placed at Concord. Before the day was out they had been fairly thrown back into Boston, close upon three hundred of their comrades gone to a last reckoning; and the next morning disclosed a rapidly growing provincial army drawn in threatened siege about them. In the darkness of that very night (April 20th), at the command of Dunmore, a force of marines was landed from an armed sloop that lay in James River, in Virginia, to seize the gunpowder stored at Williamsburg. The Virginians in their turn sprang to arms, and Dunmore was forced, ere he could rid himself of the business, to pay for the powder taken--pay Captain Patrick Henry, at the head of a body of militia under arms.
On the 10th of May the second Continental Congress met at Philadelphia, with business to transact vastly different from that to which the first “congress of committees” had addressed itself--not protests and resolves, but quick and efficient action. The very day it met, a body of daring provincials under Ethan Allen had walked into the open gates at Ticonderoga and taken possession of the stout fortress “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress”; and two days later a similar exploit secured Crown Point to the insurgents. Active war had begun; an army was set down before Boston--a rude army that had grown to be sixteen thousand strong within the first week of its rally; the country was united in a general resistance, and looked to the congress to give it organization and guidance. Colonel Washington had come to the congress in his provincial uniform, and found himself a great deal sought after in its committees. Not only the drawing of state papers which would once more justify their cause and their resort to arms in the eyes of the world, but the actual mustering and equipment of an army, quick fortification, the gathering of munitions and supplies, the raising of money and the organization of a commissariat, the restraint of the Indians upon the frontier, was the business in hand, and Washington’s advice was invaluable when such matters were afoot. He showed no hesitation as to what should be done. His own mind had long ago been made up; and the sessions of the congress were not ended before Virginia was committed beyond all possibility of drawing back. The 1st of June saw her last House of Burgesses convene; for by the 8th of the month Dunmore was a fugitive--had seen the anger of a Williamsburg mob blaze hot against him, and had taken refuge upon a man-of-war lying in the river. The province was in revolution, and Washington was ready to go with it.
It meant more than he thought that he had come to Philadelphia habited like a soldier. It had not been his purpose to draw all eyes upon him: it was merely his instinctive expression of his own personal feeling with regard to the crisis that had come. But it was in its way a fulfilment of prophecy. When the first Virginian convention chose delegates to attend the congress of 1774, “some of the tickets on the ballot assigned reasons for the choice expressed in them. Randolph should preside in congress; Lee and Henry should display the different kinds of eloquence for which they were renowned; Washington should command the army, if an army should be raised; Bland should open the treasures of ancient colonial learning; Harrison should utter plain truths; and Pendleton should be the penman for business.” No wonder the gentlemen from Virginia, coming with such confidence to the congress, made the instant impression they did for mastery and self-poise! “There are some fine fellows come from Virginia,” Joseph Reed had reported, “but they are very high. We understand they are the capital men of the colony.” Washington alone awaited his cue. Now he was to get it, without expecting it. The irregular army swarming before Boston was without standing or government. It had run hastily together out of four colonies; was subject to no common authority; hardly knew what allegiance it bore; might fall to pieces unless it were adequately commanded. The congress in Philadelphia was called upon to recognize and adopt it, give it leave and authority to act for all the colonies, give it a commander, and summon the whole country to recruit it. There was an obvious political necessity that the thing should be done, and done promptly. Massachusetts did not wish to stand alone; New England wanted the active assistance of the other colonies; something must be attempted to secure common action. The first thing to do was to choose an acceptable and efficient leader, and to choose him outside New England. To John Adams the choice seemed simple enough. There was no soldier in America, outside New England--nor inside either--to be compared, whether in experience or distinction, with Washington, the gallant, straightforward, earnest Virginian he had learned so to esteem and trust there in Philadelphia. He accordingly moved that congress “adopt the army at Cambridge,” and declared that he had “but one gentleman in mind” for its command--“a gentleman from Virginia, who was among us,” he said, “and very well known to all of us; a gentleman whose skill and experience as an officer, whose independent fortune, great talents, and excellent universal character, would command the approbation of all America, and unite the cordial exertions of all the colonies better than any other person in the union.” Washington, taken unawares, rose and slipped in confusion from the room. Some of his own friends doubted the expediency of putting a Virginian at the head of a New England army, but the more clear-sighted among the New-Englanders did not, and the selection was made, after a little hesitation, unanimously.
Washington accepted his commission with that mixture of modesty and pride that made men love and honor him. “You may believe me, my dear Patsy,” were his simple words to his wife, “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.... 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.... It was 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.” He spoke in the same tone to the congress. “I beg it may be remembered,” he said, “by every gentleman in this room, that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” His commission was signed on the 19th of June; on the 21st he was on the road to the north--the road he had travelled twenty years ago to consult with Governor Shirley in Boston upon questions of rank, and to fall into Mary Phillipse’s snare by the way; the road he had ridden after the races, but three years ago, to put Jacky Custis at college in New York. “There is something charming to me in the conduct of Washington,” exclaimed John Adams; and it was wholesome for the whole country that such a man should be put at the head of affairs. Many ignoble things were being done in the name of liberty, and an ugly tyranny had been brought to every man’s door--“the tyranny of his next-door neighbor.” There were men by the score in the colonies who had no taste or sympathy for the rebellion they now saw afoot--common men who knew little or nothing of the mother-country, as well as gentlemen of culture who loved her traditions and revered her crown; farmers and village lawyers, as well as merchants at the ports who saw their living gone and ruin staring them in the face. But the local committees and the “Sons of Liberty” everywhere saw to it that such men should know and dread and fearfully submit to the views of the majority. Government was suspended: there was nowhere so much as a justice of the peace acting under the authority of the crown. There might have been universal license had the rabble not seen their leaders so noble, so bent upon high and honorable purposes. It was an object-lesson in the character of the revolution to see Washington ride through the colonies to take charge of an insurgent army. And no man or woman, or child even, was likely to miss the lesson. That noble figure drew all eyes to it; that mien as if the man were a prince; that sincere and open countenance, which every man could see was lighted by a good conscience; that cordial ease in salute, as of a man who felt himself brother to his friends. There was something about Washington that quickened the pulses of a crowd at the same time that it awed them, that drew cheers which were a sort of voice of worship. Children desired sight of him, and men felt lifted after he had passed. It was good to have such a man ride all the open way from Philadelphia to Cambridge in sight of the people to assume command of the people’s army. It gave character to the thoughts of all who saw him.
GENERAL WASHINGTON