Then, on the fifteenth of June, it was voted to appoint a general.
Thomas Johnson, of Maryland, nominated George Washington; and as he had
been brought forward "at the particular request of the people of New
England," he was elected by ballot unanimously.
Washington was then forty-three years of age. In stature he a little
exceeded six feet; his limbs were sinewy and well-proportioned; his
chest broad; his figure stately, blending dignity of presence with ease.
His robust constitution had been tried and invigorated by his early life
in the wilderness, the habit of occupation out of doors, and rigid
temperance; so that few equaled him in strength of arm, or power of
endurance, or noble horsemanship. His complexion was florid; his hair
dark brown; his head in its shape perfectly round. His broad nostrils
seemed formed to give expression and escape to scornful anger. His
eyebrows were rayed and finely arched. His dark-blue eyes, which were
deeply set, had an expression of resignation, and an earnestness that
was almost pensiveness. His forehead was sometimes marked with thought,
but never with inquietude; his countenance was mild and pleasing and
full of benignity.
At eleven years old left an orphan to the care of an excellent but
unlettered mother, he grew up without learning. Of arithmetic and
geometry he acquired just knowledge enough to be able to practice
measuring land; but all his instruction at school taught him not so
much as the orthography or rules of grammar of his own tongue. His
culture was altogether his own work, and he was in the strictest sense a
self-made man; yet from his early life he never seemed uneducated. At
sixteen, he went into the wilderness as a surveyor, and for three years
continued the pursuit, where the forests trained him, in meditative
solitude, to freedom and largeness of mind; and nature revealed to him
her obedience to serene and silent laws. In his intervals from toil, he
seemed always to be attracted to the best men, and to be cherished by
them. Fairfax, his employer, an Oxford scholar, already aged, became his
fast friend. He read little, but with close attention. Whatever he took
in hand he applied himself to with care; and his papers, which have been
preserved, show how he almost imperceptibly gained the power of writing
correctly; always expressing himself with clearness and directness,
often with felicity of language and grace.
When the frontiers on the west became disturbed, he at nineteen was
commissioned an adjutant-general with the rank of major. At twenty-one,
he went as the envoy of Virginia to the council of Indian chiefs on the
Ohio, and to the French officers near Lake Erie. Fame waited upon him
from his youth; and no one of his colony was so much spoken of. He
conducted the first military expedition from Virginia that crossed the
Alleghanies. Braddock selected him as an aid, and he was the only man
who came out of the disastrous defeat near the Monongahela, with
increased reputation, which extended to England. The next year, when he
was but four-and-twenty, "the great esteem" in which he was held in
Virginia, and his "real merit," led the lieutenant-governor of Maryland
to request that he might be "commissioned and appointed second in
command" of the army designed to march to the Ohio; and Shirley, the
commander-in-chief, heard the proposal "with great satisfaction and
pleasure," for "he knew no provincial officer upon the continent to whom
he would so readily give that rank as to Washington." In 1758 he acted
under Forbes as a brigadier, and but for him that general would never
have crossed the mountains.
Courage was so natural to him that it was hardly spoken of to his
praise; no one ever at any moment of his life discovered in him the
least shrinking in danger; and he had a hardihood of daring which
escaped notice, because it was so enveloped by superior calmness
and wisdom.
His address was most easy and agreeable; his step firm and graceful;
his air neither grave nor familiar. He was as cheerful as he was
spirited, frank and communicative in the society of friends, fond of the
fox-chase and the dance, often sportive in his letters, and liked a
hearty laugh. "His smile," writes Chastellux, "was always the smile of
benevolence." This joyousness of disposition remained to the last,
though the vastness of his responsibilities was soon to take from him
the right of displaying the impulsive qualities of his nature, and the
weight which he was to bear up was to overlay and repress his gayety
and openness.
His hand was liberal; giving quietly and without observation, as though
he was ashamed of nothing but being discovered in doing good. He was
kindly and compassionate, and of lively sensibility to the sorrows of
others; so that, if his country had only needed a victim for its relief,
he would have willingly offered himself as a sacrifice. But while he was
prodigal of himself, he was considerate for others; ever parsimonious of
the blood of his countrymen.
He was prudent in the management of his private affairs, purchased rich
lands from the Mohawk valley to the flats of the Kanawha, and improved
his fortune by the correctness of his judgment; but, as a public man, he
knew no other aim than the good of his country, and in the hour of his
country's poverty he refused personal emolument for his service.
His faculties were so well balanced and combined that his constitution,
free from excess, was tempered evenly with all the elements of activity,
and his mind resembled a well-ordered commonwealth; his passions, which
had the intensest vigor, owned allegiance to reason; and with all the
fiery quickness of his spirit, his impetuous and massive will was held
in check by consummate judgment. He had in his composition a calm, which
gave him in moments of highest excitement the power of self-control, and
enabled him to excel in patience, even when he had most cause for
disgust. Washington was offered a command when there was little to bring
out the unorganized resources of the continent but his own influence,
and authority was connected with the people by the most frail, most
attenuated, scarcely discernible threads; yet, vehement as was his
nature, impassioned as was his courage, he so retained his ardor that he
never failed continuously to exert the attractive power of that
influence, and never exerted it so sharply as to break its force.
In secrecy he was unsurpassed; but his secrecy had the character of
prudent reserve, not of cunning or concealment. His great natural power
of vigilance had been developed by his life in the wilderness.
His understanding was lucid, and his judgment accurate; so that his
conduct never betrayed hurry or confusion. No detail was too minute for
his personal inquiry and continued supervision; and at the same time he
comprehended events in their widest aspects and relations. He never
seemed above the object that engaged his attention, and he was always
equal, without an effort, to the solution of the highest questions, even
when there existed no precedents to guide his decision. In the
perfection of the reflective powers, which he used habitually, he had
no peer.
In this way he never drew to himself admiration for the possession of
any one quality in excess, never made in council any one suggestion that
was sublime but impracticable, never in action took to himself the
praise or the blame of undertakings astonishing in conception, but
beyond his means of execution. It was the most wonderful accomplishment
of this man that, placed upon the largest theatre of events, at the head
of the greatest revolution in human affairs, he never failed to observe
all that was possible, and at the same time to bound his aspirations by
that which was possible.
A slight tinge in his character, perceptible only to the close observer,
revealed the region from which he sprung, and he might be described as
the best specimen of manhood as developed in the South; but his
qualities were so faultlessly proportioned that his whole country rather
claimed him as its choicest representative, the most complete expression
of all its attainments and aspirations. He studied his country and
conformed to it. His countrymen felt that he was the best type of
America, and rejoiced in it, and were proud of it. They lived in his
life, and made his success and his praise their own.
Profoundly impressed with confidence in God's providence, and exemplary
in his respect for the forms of public worship, no philosopher of the
eighteenth century was more firm in the support of freedom of religious
opinion, none more remote from bigotry; but belief in God, and trust in
his overruling power, formed the essence of his character. Divine wisdom
not only illumines the spirit, it inspires the will. Washington was a
man of action, and not of theory or words; his creed appears in his
life, not in his professions, which burst from him very rarely, and
only at those great moments of crisis in the fortunes of his country,
when earth and heaven seemed actually to meet, and his emotions became
too intense for suppression; but his whole being was one continued act
of faith in the eternal, intelligent, moral order of the universe.
Integrity was so completely the law of his nature, that a planet would
sooner have shot from its sphere than he have departed from his
uprightness, which was so constant that it often seemed to be almost
impersonal. "His integrity was the most pure, his justice the most
inflexible I have ever known," writes Jefferson; "no motives of interest
or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his
decision."
They say of Giotto that he introduced goodness into the art of painting;
Washington carried it with him to the camp and the Cabinet, and
established a new criterion of human greatness. The purity of his will
confirmed his fortitude: and as he never faltered in his faith in
virtue, he stood fast by that which he knew to be just; free from
illusions; never dejected by the apprehension of the difficulties and
perils that went before him, and drawing the promise of success from the
justice of his cause. Hence he was persevering, leaving nothing
unfinished; devoid of all taint of obstinacy in his firmness; seeking
and gladly receiving advice, but immovable in his devotedness to right.
Of a "retiring modesty and habitual reserve," his ambition was no more
than the consciousness of his power, and was subordinate to his sense of
duty; he took the foremost place, for he knew from inborn magnanimity
that it belonged to him, and he dared not withhold the service required
of him; so that, with all his humility, he was by necessity the first,
though never for himself or for private ends. He loved fame, the
approval of coming generations, the good opinion of his fellow-men of
his own time, and he desired to make his conduct coincide with his
wishes; but not fear of censure, not the prospect of applause could
tempt him to swerve from rectitude, and the praise which he coveted was
the sympathy of that moral sentiment which exists in every human breast,
and goes forth only to the welcome of virtue.
There have been soldiers who have achieved mightier victories in the
field, and made conquests more nearly corresponding to the boundlessness
of selfish ambition; statesmen who have been connected with more
startling upheavals of society: but it is the greatness of Washington
that in public trusts he used power solely for the public good; that he
was the life and moderator and stay of the most momentous revolution in
human affairs; its moving impulse and its restraining power....
This also is the praise of Washington: that never in the tide of time
has any man lived who had in so great a degree the almost divine faculty
to command the confidence of his fellow-men and rule the willing.
Wherever he became known, in his family, his neighborhood, his county,
his native State, the continent, the camp, civil life, among the common
people, in foreign courts, throughout the civilized world, and even
among the savages, he, beyond all other men, had the confidence of
his kind.
Copyrighted by D. Appleton and Company, New York.