YANKEE DOODLE.
[Sidenote: 1775--The Philadelphia Congress]
An English ministry and an English king were convinced that everything
necessary to do for the suppression of the mutinous spirit in a
turbulent but unwarlike people had been done. The existence of Boston
as a trading port had been abolished; Carthage had been blotted out;
there was an English army within the walls of Boston; there was an
English fleet in the Charles River. Who could doubt that the cowardly
farmers whom Sandwich derided, and their leaders, the voluble lawyers
whom Sandwich despised, would be cowed now into quiescence, only
thankful that things were no worse? The best and wisest in England
were among those who did doubt, but they were like Benedict in the
play--nobody marked them, or at least nobody responsible for any
control over the conduct of affairs. Official confidence was suddenly
and rudely shaken. The lawyers proved to be men of deeds as well as of
words. The disdained farmers showed that the descendants of the men
who had fought with beasts and with Indians after the manner of
Endicott and Standish had not degenerated in the course of a few
generations. Over the Atlantic came news which made the Boston
Massacre, the burning of the "Gaspee," and the Boston Tea-party, seem
trivial and insignificant events. An astounded Ministry learned that a
formal Congress of Representatives of the different colonies had been
convened and had met in Philadelphia, and had drawn up a Declaration of
Rights. Chatham admired and applauded their work. To the King and the
King's ministers it was meaningless when it was not offensive. But the
colonists showed that they could do more than meet in Congresses and
draw up {174} splendid State Papers. The next news was of acts of war.
Gage schemed a raid upon the stores of powder and arms accumulated by
the disaffected colonists in Concord. Warning of his plan was carried
at night by a patriotic engraver named Paul Revere to every hamlet
within reach of a horse's ride. There was a skirmish at Lexington on
the road to Concord between the King's troops and a body of minute-men,
which resulted in the killing and wounding of many of the latter and
the dispersal of their force. An expedition that began with what might
in irony be termed a victory for the British arms ended in a disaster
as tragic as it was complete. Concord forewarned had nothing to yield
to the English soldiers who invaded her quiet streets; but the
surrounding country, equally forewarned, answered the invasion by
sending bodies of armed farmers and minute-men from every point of the
compass to the common centre of Concord. There was a sharp, short
fight on Concord Bridge, which ended in the repulse of the royal troops
and the death of brave men on both sides. Then the British officer
decided to retreat from Concord. It proved one of the most memorable
retreats in history. From behind every tree, every bowlder, every
wall, every hedge, enemies trained in the warfare of the wilderness
poured their fire upon the retiring troops. It seemed to one of the
officers engaged in that memorable fight as if the skies rained down
foes upon them, unseen foes only made known by the accuracy of their
marksmanship and the pertinacity of their veiled pursuit. All the way
from Concord the retiring troops fought in vain with an enemy that was
seldom seen, but whose presence was everywhere manifested by the
precision of his aim and the tale of victims that followed each volley.
The retreat was becoming a rout when reinforcements sent out from
Boston under the command of Lord Percy stayed an actual stampede. But
it could not stay the retreat nor avert defeat. Lord Percy, who had
marched out with his bands playing "Yankee Doodle," in mockery of the
Americans, had to retreat in his turn with no mocking music, carrying
with him the remnant of the invaders of Concord. He {175} and his
force did not get within touch of Boston and the protection of the guns
of the fleet a moment too soon. Had a large body of insurgents, who
came hurrying in to help their brethren, arrived on the field a little
earlier, Lord Percy and his command must inevitably have been made
prisoners of war. As it was, this one day's business had given success
and the confidence that comes of success to the raw colonists, and had
inflicted a crushing defeat upon a body of soldiers who had been led to
believe that the sight of their scarlet coats would act like a charm to
tame their untutored opponents.
[Sidenote: 1776--Military success of the colonists]
Gage only recovered from the shock of this disaster to realize that
Boston was invested by an insurgent army. The victors of the fight and
flight from Concord were rapidly reinforced by bodies of men from all
parts of the country; their ranks were hourly swelled by levies roughly
armed but stubbornly resolved. Unpleasant facts forced themselves
thick and fast upon Gage's notice. But yesterday, as it were, he had
imagined that the mere presence of the forces under his command was
sufficient to overawe the colonists and settle any show of
insubordination forever; to-day he had to swallow in shame and anger a
staggering defeat. Still Gage did nothing and his enemies accumulated.
Royal reinforcements arrived under Burgoyne, Clinton, and Howe, to do
nothing in their turn. But the peasants they despised were not idle
and would not allow them to be idle. The English general woke up one
morning to find that under cover of night an important point of vantage
overlooking the town of Boston had been occupied and roughly fortified
by the rebels. The citizen soldiers who had gathered together to
defend their liberties had stolen a march upon the English general.
They had occupied the rising ground of Breed Hill, below Bunker's Hill,
on the Charlestown side of the Charles River, and had hurriedly
intrenched themselves there behind rude but efficient earthworks. Gage
was resolved that the rebels should not remain long in their new
position. Chance might have allotted them a scratch victory over a
small body of men taken unawares in unfamiliar country {176} and by
unfamiliar methods of fighting. But here was a business familiar to
the British soldier; here was work that he did well and that he loved
to do. If the colonists really believed that they could hold Breed
Hill against troops with whom the taking by storm of strong positions
was a tradition, so much the worse for them. The order was given that
the rebels must be cleared away from Breed Hill at once, and the
welcome task was given to Lord Howe, in command of the flower of the
forces in Boston. It is probable that Howe felt some pity for the rash
and foolhardy men whose hopes it was his duty and his determination to
destroy. Confident that the enterprise would be as brief as it must be
decisive, Howe prepared to assault, and the battle of Breed Hill began.
[Sidenote: 1775--The Battle of Breed Hill]
The Breed Hill battle is one of the strangest and one of the bravest
fights ever fought by men. On the one side were some hundreds of
simple citizens, civilians, skilled as individuals in the use of the
gun, and accustomed as volunteers, militia, and minute-men to something
that might pass for drill and manoeuvre, officered and generalled by
men who, like Warren and Greene, knew warfare only by the bookish
theoric, or by men who, like Putnam and Pomeroy, had taken their
baptism of fire and blood in frontier struggles with wild beast and
wilder Indian. On the other side were some thousands of the finest
troops in the world, in whose ranks victory was a custom, on whose
banners the names of famous battles blazed. They were well trained,
well armed, well equipped. They moved at the word of command with the
monotonous precision and perfection of a machine. They were led by
officers whose temper had been tested again and again in the sharp
experiences of war, men to whom the thought of defeat was as unfamiliar
as the thought of fear. The contrast between the two opposing forces
was vividly striking in the very habiliments of the opponents. The men
who were massed behind the breastworks of Breed Hill were innocent of
uniform, of the bright attire that makes the soldier's life alluring,
innocent even of any distinction between officer and private, or, if
the words seem too formal {177} for so raw a force, between the men who
were in command and the men who were commanded. The soldiers who were
massed below, the force whose duty it was to march up the hill and
sweep away the handful in hodden gray and black broadcloth who held it,
glittered with all the bravery of color dear to the British army.
Splendid in scarlet and white and gold, every buckle shining, every
belt and bandolier as brightly clean as pipeclay could make it, the
little army under Howe's command would have done credit to a parade in
the Park or a field day at Windsor. The one side was as sad and sombre
as a Puritan prayer-meeting; the other glowed with all the color and
warmth of a military pageant. The holders of the hill had come from
their farms and their fields in the homely working clothes they wore as
they followed the plough or tended their cattle; the townsmen among
them came in the decent civic suits they wore behind their desks or
counters. Few men's weapons were fellows in that roughly armed array.
Each militant citizen carried his own gun, some favorite weapon,
familiar from long practice in fowling, or from frequent service
further afield against the bear, the panther, and the wolf. Some of
the flint-locks were enormously long; many of them would have seemed
extremely old-fashioned to an ordnance officer. But every gun was like
an additional limb to those practised marksmen, who knew little of
firing in platoons, but everything of the patient accuracy which gives
the backwoodsman his unerring aim. The assailants carried the latest
weapons approved of by the War Office, and manipulated them with the
faultless unison and unswerving harmony that would have compelled the
compliments of a commander-in-chief at a review. At the top of the
hill were some sixteen hundred men, a mob of undisciplined
sharpshooters, few of whom had ever fired a shot in organized warfare.
At the bottom of the hill were some four thousand of the finest troops
in the world, stiffened with all the strength that prestige and
practice could give them. It did not seem on the face of it a very
equal combat; it did not seem to the English generals that it ought to
take very long to {178} march from the bottom to the top of the hill
and make short work of the mutinous peasants on its summit. The best
indeed that the mutinous peasants could hope for when the British were
upon them was to be shot or bayoneted as quickly as possible, for the
terms of Gage's proclamation directly threatened with the gallows every
rebel taken with arms in his hands.
But at Breed Hill, as at Concord, the unexpected came to pass. The
British troops were unable to endure the destructive fire of the
colonists. Again and again they advanced over the incline as calmly as
if on parade; again and again they reeled backward with shattered
ranks, leaving grim piles of dead upon the fire-swept slope. The
execution was terrible; regiments that marched up the hill as if to
certain victory fell back from it a mere remnant of themselves, leaving
most of their men and almost all their officers behind. For awhile the
fight was a succession of catastrophes to the force under Howe's
command. It looked as if Breed Hill would never be taken. But there
came a time when the men who held it could hold it no longer. Their
supply of powder began to run out, and with their means of keeping up
their fire their power of holding their position came to an end. Then
came a last charge of Howe's rallied forces, this time in the lightest
of marching array, a last volley from behind the earth-works, and Breed
Hill was in the hands of the British. It was captured at the last
without much bloodshed, without much loss to its garrison. The smoke
hung so thick about the enclosure where the rebels had held their own
so long and so well that it was not easy for the bayonets of the
conquerors to do much execution, and the defenders of Breed Hill
slipped away for the most part under cover of the mist they themselves
had made. Indeed, there was little inclination for pursuit on the part
of the victors. They had done what they had been set to do, but they
had done it at a cost which for the time made it impossible for them to
attempt to pursue an advantage so dearly bought. They did not, could
not know the strength of their enemy; they were content to hold the
ground which had been won {179} with such a fearful waste of British
blood. Breed Hill was a nominal victory for the King; it was a real
victory for the rebels, who had shown what an undisciplined force,
composed of farmers, trappers, lawyers, shopkeepers, and divines, could
do against the finest troops in the world.
[Sidenote: 1775--The Continental Army]
Already insurgent America had an army, and an army of investment. The
rebels, whom Gage affected to despise almost as much as he was himself
despised by General Burgoyne, were massed in numbers unknown to the
loyalists before Boston, and the English soldiers were cooped up in the
city they had crossed the seas to command. The colonial army was rude
and rough, but earnest and resolute, and it had evolved generals of its
own making, rough and rude as itself, but able, daring, and fearless.
Israel Putnam, who killed a wolf once with his own hands in his wild
youth, gripping it by the throat till he had choked its life out, had
come to fight against the flag beneath which he had fought so well in
the French wars. Nathaniel Greene had flung down his military books
and caught up the sword, had abandoned the theory for the practice, and
was beginning to make a name. Benedict Arnold, after a life as varied,
as shady, and as adventurous as that of any picaroon in a Spanish
story, leaped into fame as a daring spirit by the way in which he and
Ethan Allen, at the head of a mixed force of Vermonters and New
Englanders, had taken Fort Ticonderoga, on the great lakes, by
surprise, and had endowed the dawning army with its captured cannon.
Prescott, the hero of Breed Hill, was now a veteran soldier; and the
names of Artemas Ward, of Schuyler, of Pomeroy, Heath and Thomas,
Sullivan and Montgomery, Wooster and Spencer were becoming more than
mere names to Englishmen in Boston and in London. Two Englishmen held
rank as generals in the crude colonial army--the adventurer Charles
Lee, whom some foolish people believed to be the real Junius, and
Horatio Gates. There were few thoroughly worthless men in the young
army, but it is painful to record that Lee and Gates were eminent among
them. These were the generals of what was now to be called the {180}
Continental Army. Happy in most of them, happy in much, it was
happiest of all in this: that it had for its commander-in-chief the
noblest man, who was to prove the greatest soldier, then living in the
world.
[Sidenote: 1775--George Washington]
When Braddock died, the hero of a hopeless fight and the martyr of his
own folly, the funeral service was read over his body by the young
Virginian soldier who had fought by his side and had warned him against
his rashness. To men in later years there seemed to be something
prophetic, with the blended irony and pathos of prophecy, in the
picture of that dead Englishman, his scarlet coat torn and bloody with
so many wounds, lying in his grave while his American lieutenant read
over him the words that committed so much wasted courage to the earth.
At the time and hour the thing signified no more than the price of a
petty victory of allied French and Indians, which the Virginian soldier
was soon to avenge. After planting the banner of King George on the
ruins of Fort Duquesne, Captain Washington sheathed his sword and
retired from military into civil life, with as little likelihood as
desire of ever carrying arms again. All he asked and all he
anticipated was to live the tranquil life of a comfortable colonial
gentleman. After a youth that had been vexed by many experiences of
the passion of love he had married happily and wisely, and had settled
down to a gracious rural life at Mount Vernon, on the banks of the
Potomac River. He wished no better than to be a country gentleman,
with a country gentleman's pleasures and pursuits--farming, hunting,
fishing--with a country gentleman's friendships for neighbors like
himself. He was a dutiful servant of his State; he was a member of the
Virginia Houses of Burgesses for fifteen years after the fall of Fort
Duquesne, and though he seldom played any part in debate he commanded
the confidence and the esteem of his colleagues and of his
fellow-citizens. He lived and enjoyed a peaceful, honorable, useful,
uneventful life, and might have lived it to its end in dignified
obscurity if a rash and headstrong sovereign over-seas had not found
ministers too servile or too foolish to say him nay.
{181}
The Continental Congress, conscious of Washington's ability, offered
him the command of its improvised army. Washington accepted the duty,
well aware of its gravity, its danger, its awful responsibility. He
refused any pay beyond his actual expenses, and he entered upon a
struggle whose difficulties were not all or nearly all due to the enemy
in the sternest and noblest sense of duty to his countrymen and to the
principles of liberty. At first, in his own words, he loathed the idea
of independence. He only took up arms to defend cherished rights; the
day was not yet, though the day was not far off, when the Virginian
soldier would renounce his allegiance to the King whose commission he
had carried and to the country from which his race stemmed.
Washington's military genius soon showed itself in the use he made of
the loose, incoherent, disorganized mass of men which was called the
Continental Army. It was fortunate for the Continental cause that the
English generals, penned up within the walls of Boston, had little idea
of the obstacles Washington had to overcome, the opposition he had to
encounter, the sore straits to which the want of everything essential
to a besieging army drove him. But his indomitable courage, his
unfailing coolness, his unconquerable resource overcame a sea of
troubles that might well have swept even a strong man and a brave
soldier off his feet. With regiment after regiment quietly disbanding
as their term of service expired; with a plentiful lack of powder, of
arms, of provisions, of uniforms; with a force that at moments
threatened to dissolve into nothingness and leave him with a handful of
generals alone beneath his insurgent flag, Washington never allowed the
enemy, and seldom allowed a friend, to guess how near at times he came
to despair. He raised troops somehow; he got provisions somehow;
somehow he managed to obtain powder; somehow he managed to obtain arms.
The want of weapons was so great that many bodies of men were only
provided with pikes, and that Franklin was driven to suggest, and
partly in a spirit of humanity, that American farmers fighting for
their liberty should be armed with the bows and arrows of the red {182}
men, and should strive to renew upon the fields of Massachusetts the
successes of their ancestors, the yeomen of Agincourt, with their
clothyard shafts.
The generals shut up in Boston knew nothing of the cares that harassed
the mind of Washington. All they knew was that they were closely
beleaguered; that they were cooped up in Boston by a large if irregular
army, and that they could not get out. They affected, of course, to
despise their enemy. At the private theatricals which were given to
divert the enforced leisure of Lord Howe an actor who came on as a
caricature of Washington, attired like a military scarecrow, never
failed to please. Burgoyne was confident that sooner or later he could
find that "elbow-room" the ungratified desire for which has served to
immortalize his name. But neither Howe nor Burgoyne nor any one else
could dissipate the ragged regiments that invested Boston, nor baffle
the plans of the great soldier who commanded them. For nearly a year
the world saw with wonder the spectacle of an English army confined in
Boston, and an English fleet riding idly in the Charles River. Then
the end came. Washington, closing in, offered Lord Howe, the English
general then in command, the choice of evacuation or bombardment. The
English general chose the former. The royal troops withdrew from
Boston, taking with them the loyalist families who had thrown in their
lot with the King's cause. The English ships that sailed from Boston
were terribly overcrowded with the number of refugees who preferred
flight, with all its attendant sorrows, to remaining in a rebellious
country. The English fleet sailed away from Boston and the Continental
Army marched in. So far the cause of King George was going very badly
indeed; so far the rebellious colonists had failed to justify the
confident prophecies of Lord Sandwich. With any other king and with
any other ministers one such year's work would have been enough at
least to induce them to reconsider their position. But the King was
George the Third, and his ministers were what they were, and it was
resolved that the war must go on.
{183}
[Sidenote: 1775-81--The Declaration of Independence]
The war did go on. It lasted for five years more, in spite of the
protests of every truly patriotic Englishman, in spite of proof after
proof that nothing could break the spirit or crush the courage of the
colonists. While in England Fox arrayed himself in the blue and buff
that composed the uniform of the Continental Army, while the Duke of
Richmond made it a point to speak, and with excellent reason, of the
Continental Army as "our army," while the eloquence of Chatham and the
eloquence of Burke were launched in vain against campaigns as idle as
they were infamous, the war went stubbornly on. The King and his
ministers proposed new measures of repression and expended vast sums in
the purchase of Hessian regiments to dragoon the defiant colonists.
Soon all pretence of loyalty had to be abandoned by the Americans. The
statue of King George was dragged from its place of honor in Bowling
Green, New York, and run into bullets to be used against his German
levies. In the summer that followed the evacuation of Boston the
rebellious colonies proclaimed their independence in the most memorable
declaration of a people's right ever made by men. This was in 1776.
The disastrous war had still five years to run.
The fortunes of the war varied. The early victories of the Americans
were followed by a series of defeats which left Philadelphia in the
hands of the British, and which would have broken the heart of any man
of less heroic mould than Washington. Hope revived with a series of
Continental victories. Aid came to America from abroad. France,
Germany, Poland sent stout soldiers to fight for freedom--Lafayette,
Von Steuben, Kosciusko. The English general Burgoyne surrendered with
all his army at Saratoga. After the winter of 1777, when Washington
and his army suffered all the rigors of Valley Forge, France
acknowledged the independence of America, the British evacuated
Philadelphia, and Paul Jones made himself forever famous by the way in
which he and his ship "Le Bonhomme Richard," carried the American war
to the coast of England. Again came colonial reverses. A {184} steady
succession of English successes scarcely struck so hard a blow at the
Continental cause as the treason of Benedict Arnold, who entered into
negotiations with the British to betray his command. Washington had
trusted and loved Arnold like a brother. "Whom can I trust now?" he
asked in momentary despair when the capture of an English officer.
Major André, and the flight of Benedict Arnold to the British lines
revealed to him an undreamed-of treason which had threatened to
undermine the colonial cause. But Benedict Arnold's crime had for its
only result the death of a better man than himself, of Major André, who
had by the laws of war to suffer death as a spy. There were other
traitors and semi-traitors in the American army: Lee was certainly the
first; Gates was almost, if not quite, the second. But Lee and Gates
failed to do the mischief to which their base jealousy of Washington
prompted them. The right cause triumphed. In 1781 another British
army surrendered, the army of Cornwallis, at Yorktown. Even North was
forced to recognize that this crushing disaster to the royal hopes and
the royal arms practically ended the war. It was suspended in the
following year, and in 1783, after much negotiation, which at times
threatened to come to nothing, a treaty of peace was signed in France,
and the American Republic took its place among the nations of the
earth. It was for these negotiations that Franklin, as we have said,
brought out from its obscurity that gala suit which he had worn for the
last time when he stood at the bar of the House of Commons and listened
to the brutal and foolish assaults of Wedderburn. Many days had passed
since that day.
So ended one of the most unjust and one of the most foolish wars ever
waged by England. It must never be forgotten that the war was in no
sense an English war. The English people as a whole had then no voice
to express itself one way or the other. Of those Englishmen whose
voices had to be heard, the best and the wisest were as angry in their
denunciations of the crime of the King and the King's ministers, and as
cordial in their {185} admiration of Washington and his companions, as
if they had been members of that Continental Congress which first in
Philadelphia proclaimed the existence of a new nation.
[Sidenote: 1778--Death of the Earl of Chatham]
The fatal war which had cost the English King the loss of his greatest
colonies, which had spilt a vast amount of blood and wasted a vast
amount of treasure in order to call into being a strong and naturally
resentful rival to the power of England, must be said also to have cost
the life of the greatest English statesman of the century. The genius
of Chatham had never been more nobly employed than in protesting with
all the splendor of its eloquence against the unjust war upon the
Americans and the unjust deeds which had heralded the war. But time,
that had only swelled the ranks of the wise and sane who thought as
Chatham had thought and found their own utterance from the fire of his
words, had wrought a change in the attitude of a great statesman.
Harassed by the disease that racked his body, the mind of Chatham had
altered. The noble views that he had maintained in defiance of a
headstrong king and a corrupt ministry had changed in the face of the
succession of calamities that had fallen upon his country. The success
that he had desired for the insurgent arms had been accorded, and he
came to despair at the consequence of that success. He had been
granted his heart's desire in full measure, and the gratification
choked him. When it came to be a question of conceding to the
colonists that formal recognition of an independence which they had
already won, the intellect of Chatham revolted against the policy
himself had fostered. He forgot or he forswore the principles which
animated Burke, which animated Fox, which guided the course of
Rockingham and inspired the utterances of Richmond. All he could see
was an England humiliated by many defeats, an England threatened by
many terrible alliances, and in the face of humiliation and of menace
he forgot that both alike were the inevitable, the well-deserved fruit
of injustice. Remembering that he had helped to make England great, he
refused to remember that England would have been still greater if she
had {186} followed the honorable course his wisdom had made plain to
her. His proud, unhappy spirit could not consent to her dismemberment,
a dismemberment which seemed to his fading intellect to be the
equivalent to her ruin. He came from his sick bed, a ghastly image of
decay, to offer the desperate protest of a dying man against surrender
to the mutiny his own eloquence had fanned. "Come the four quarters of
the world in arms and we will shock them." The spirit of Faulconbridge
was strong in the ruined body of the statesman who was carried to his
seat in the House of Lords by the son who bore his name and by the Lord
Mahon who had married his daughter. His eagle face was turned against
the men who had been his colleagues. His trembling hand pointed at
them in condemnation. He gasped out a few sentences, almost
inarticulate, almost inaudible, before he reeled in a fit upon the arms
of those about him. He was carried from the House; he was carried to
Hayes, and at Hayes a few weeks later the great career came to an end.
His last battle was at least heroic. If his stroke was struck on the
wrong side and for a cause his prime had done so much to baffle, it is
not necessary to attribute his perversion entirely to the insidious
ravages of the malady that had clouded his whole life. He could not
bear to see the country that was in so eminent and so intimate a sense
his country yield even to claims that were conspicuously right and just
at the command of a league between England's rebellious children and
England's enemy, France. There broke his mighty heart. In Chatham
England lost one of the greatest of her statesmen, one of the most
splendid of her sons. His life was passionately devoted to his
country, his career one long struggle against a peculiarly bigoted,
stubborn, and unwise King. Always hated by his enemies, often
misunderstood by his friends, he showed while he lived a steadfast
front alike against the enemies of England abroad and those worse
enemies of England at home who filled the throne and the places about
the throne. He was buried with great pomp and honor at Westminster,
leaving behind him not merely the memory of an illustrious name, {187}
but a name that the second generation was still to make illustrious.
[Sidenote: 1781--England and her lost colonies]
The folly of the King and the servility of his ministers resulted in
what seemed to be almost an irredeemable catastrophe for England. Even
those Englishmen who most sympathized with the struggle for American
independence could not but feel a regret that men who might have been
among the most glorious citizens of a great and united empire should be
thus recklessly forced into an enmity that had deprived England of its
most splendid possessions. The enemies of England, many and eager,
believed her day was done, that her sun was setting, that neither her
power nor her prestige would ever recover from the succession of
disasters that began at Lexington and that ended in Paris. But the
vitality of the country was too great to be seriously impaired even by
the loss of the American colonies. From a blow that might well have
been little less than fatal the country recovered with a readiness and
a rapidity that was amazing. Men who in their youth heard their elders
speak with despair of the calamity that had befallen their country
lived to old age to learn that the wound was not incurable, and that
England was greater, richer, prouder, and more powerful than she had
ever been before. If she had lost the American colonies she had
learned a lesson in the loss. The blow that might have stunned only
served to rouse her to a greater sense of her danger and a livelier
consciousness of her duty. If she had suffered much from rashness she
was not going to suffer more from inaction, and it seemed as if every
source of strength in the kingdom knit itself together in the common
purpose of showing to the world that England still was England,
although a part of her empire had passed away from her forever. There
was no glory to be got for England out of the American war; it was
wrong from first to last, wrong, unjust, and foolish, but when it ended
it did not find her crippled, nor did it leave her permanently
enfeebled in temper or in strength.
We may gather some idea of what risk wise men felt they were running
from a famous speech of Edmund {188} Burke. He was striving to stay
the determination of the Ministry to declare war upon the American
colonies. He wished his hearers to appreciate the progress that
America had made within living memory. He called imagination to his
aid. He spoke of a statesman then living in the late evening of an
honorable life. He pictured that statesman in the promise of his early
dawn, saluted by the angel of his auspicious youth, and given the power
to see into the future, so far as to the hour when Burke was speaking.
"What," said Burke, "if while he was gazing with admiration on the then
commercial grandeur of England the genius should point out to him a
little speck, scarce visible in the mass of the nation's interest, and
should tell him, 'Young man, there is America, which at this day serves
for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and
uncouth manners, yet before you taste of death will show itself equal
to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of
improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of
civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of
seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America
in the course of a single life!' If this state of his country had been
foretold to him, would it not require all the sanguine credulity of
youth and all the fervid glow of enthusiasm to make him believe it?
Fortunate man, he has lived to see it." If the genius of prophecy
could have stood by Burke's shoulder then, and illuminated his noble
soul with the knowledge that is the common possession of mankind
to-day, would it not have required all the sanguine credulity, all the
divine enthusiasm of genius to make him believe it?
[Sidenote: 1732-99--The death of Washington]
The war that gave the world a new nation and a republic greater than
Rome added one of the greatest names, and perhaps the noblest name, to
the roll-call of the great captains of the earth. No soldier of all
those that the eyes of Dante discerned in the first circle, not even
"Caesar, all armored with gerfalcon eyes," adorns the annals of
antiquity more than George Washington illuminates the {189} last
quarter of the eighteenth century. His splendid strength, his sweet
austerity, his proud patience are hardly to be rivalled in the previous
history of humanity, and have perhaps only been rivalled since his day
by children of the same continent and of the same southern soil, who
sacrificed qualities much akin to his own on a cause that, unlike his,
was not the cause of freedom. "First in peace, first in war, and first
in the hearts of his country-men." The phrase of Lee has been worn
threadbare with iteration since it was first uttered, but it always
rings true of the high-minded, unfaltering soldier and honorable,
simple gentleman whose genius in war and whose modesty in peace made
the republic of America an enduring fact in history. Long after the
great soldier and good man had been laid to rest an English poet did
him justice, and no more than justice, by writing that "the first, the
last, the best, the Cincinnatus of the West, whom envy dared not hate,
bequeathed the name of Washington to make man blush there was but one."
Washington was made the first President of the American Republic in
1789, after resolutely resisting all suggestions to make himself king
of the new commonwealth. He served for two terms of four years each,
and then retired into private life, unembittered by the cruel and
stupid ingratitude of the few and unspoiled by the reasoned and
grateful homage of the many. He died in 1799 in his quiet home in
Mount Vernon, while the King who still regarded him as a rebel had many
years of his unquiet reign to live.
{190}