Washington and His Comrades in Arms By George M. Wrong A Chronicle of
the War of Independence
Volume 12 of the Chronicles of America Series
Allen Johnson, Editor Assistant Editors Gerhard R. Lomer Charles W.
Jefferys
Abraham Lincoln Edition
New Haven: Yale University Press Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. London:
Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press 1921
Copyright, 1921 by Yale University Press
PREFATORY NOTE
The author is aware of a certain audacity in undertaking, himself a
Briton, to appear in a company of American writers on American history
and above all to write on the subject of Washington. If excuse is needed
it is to be found in the special interest of the career of Washington to
a citizen of the British Commonwealth of Nations at the present time and
in the urgency with which the editor and publishers declared that such
an interpretation would not be unwelcome to Americans and pressed upon
the author a task for which he doubted his own qualifications. To the
editor he owes thanks for wise criticism. He is also indebted to Mr.
Worthington Chauncey Ford, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a
great authority on Washington, who has kindly read the proofs and given
helpful comments. Needless to say the author alone is responsible for
opinions in the book. University of Toronto, June 15, 1920.
Contents
Washington and his Comrades in Arms
Chapter Chapter Title Page
Prefatory Note vii
I. The Commander-In-Chief 1
II. Boston and Quebec 27
III. Independence 54
IV. The Loss of New York 81
V. The Loss of Philadelphia 108
VI. The First Great British Disaster 123
VII. Washington and his Comrades at Valley Forge 148
VIII. The Alliance with France and its Results 182
IX. The War in the South 211
X. France to the Rescue 230
XI. Yorktown 247
Bibliographical Note 277
Index 283
WASHINGTON AND HIS COMRADES IN ARMS
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 Washington 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. Passions ran high. For years there had been tension, long
disputes about buying British stamps to put on American legal papers,
about duties on glass 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 massacre 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 shore. 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 Washington 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
Massachusetts 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 grass
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 ships were throwing shells
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 Massachusetts rose and moved that the Congress should adopt as
its own the army before Boston and that it should name Washington
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 Massachusetts, 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 Massachusetts, John Hancock, 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 Hancock's face "mortification and
resentment." He saw, too, that Washington hurriedly left the room when
his name was mentioned.
There could be no doubt as to what the Congress would do. Unquestionably
Washington 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 Washington
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 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 for hogsheads of molasses 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 Washington 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 Grass" to the
pound Troy and so determining how many should be sown to the acre. Not
many youths would write out as did Washington, apparently from French
sources, and read and reread elaborate "Rules of Civility and Decent
Behaviour in Company and Conversation." In the fashion 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 class to which Washington 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 glass 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, Fanny, 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 noble 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.
Washington 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." Washington,
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 passion 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, Washington 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 passions 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 assumption that Washington 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 leadership of great landowners like Lord Townshend
and Coke 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 masses. New inventions were beginning the age of machinery.
The reform of Parliament, votes for the toiling masses, and a thousand
other improvements were being urged. It was a vigorous, rich, and
arrogant England which Washington confronted.
It is sometimes said of Washington 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 cockfighting. 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 Devonshire 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 surpass
a neighbor in grandeur, and to this day great estates are encumbered 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 Washington
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 shore to shore 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. Spaces 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 Coke
of Norfolk died worth £150,000, and Coke himself had the income of a
prince. When Washington died he was reputed one of the richest men in
America and yet his estate was hardly equal to that of Coke's tenant.
Washington 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 Washington 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. Washington's
losses of cattle, horses, and sheep from this cause were enormous. The
neglected cattle gave so little milk that at one time Washington, with a
hundred cows, had to buy his butter. Negroes feigned sickness for weeks
at a time. A visitor noted that Washington spoke to his slaves with
a stern harshness. No doubt it was necessary. The management of this
intractable material brought training in command. If Washington 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. Washington 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 Washington 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 Washington first brooded
over the contrasts between the Englishman and the Virginian. With
obstinate complacency Braddock had disregarded Washington's counsels
of prudence. He showed arrogant confidence in his veteran troops and
contempt for the amateur soldiers of whom Washington was one. In a wild
country where rapid movement was the condition of success Braddock would
halt, as Washington said, "to level every mole hill and to erect bridges
over every brook." His transport was poor and Washington, 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," Washington 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.
Washington 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 Washington 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.
Washington 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 Washington; 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, Washington could say later
that "there never existed a more miserable set of beings than these
wretched creatures."
The age of Washington 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 passions 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
bloody and insatiable malice and wickedness. To Washington 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 passing 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 passion 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.