Washington and his Comrades in Arms | Page 6

Washington 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.
Washington 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 Washington.
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.
Washington 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, Washington assumed the
command. He sat on horseback under an elm tree and an observer noted
that his appearance was "truly noble 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.
Washington, 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.
Washington, 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 Washington 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 Washington 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 ownership 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 passion 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 Washington offering to
exchange a negro