training school for the future heroes of the Revolution. For in what
did Colonel Washington need training more than in the art of
manoeuvring a handful of ill-equipped, discouraged men? What lesson
did that youth need more than the lesson that Right becomes Might in
God’s own good time? And here in these Allegheny glades we catch the
most precious pictures of the lithe, keen-eyed, sober lad, who, taking
his lessons of truth and uprightness from his widowed mother’s knee,
his strength hardened by the power of the mountain rivers, his heart,
now thrilled by the songs of the mountain birds, now tempered by a St.
Piere’s hauteur, a Braddock’s blind insolence, or the prejudiced
over-rulings of a Forbes, became the hero of Valley Forge and
Yorktown, the immeasurable superior of Piere, Braddock, Forbes,
Kaunitz or Newcastle.
For consider the record of that older Washington of 1775 beneath the
Cambridge elm. He had capitulated at Fort Necessity, with the first
army he ever commanded, after the first battle he ever fought! He had
marched with Braddock’s ill-starred army, in which he had no official
position whatever until defeat and rout threw upon his shoulders a
large share of the responsibility of saving the army from complete
annihilation. He had marched with Forbes, only to write his Governor
begging to be allowed to go to England to tell the King the sad story
of the campaign--of “how grossly his glory and interest and the public
money, have been prostituted.” For the past sixteen years he had led a
quiet life on his farms.
Why, now, in 1775, should he have had the unstinted confidence of all
men, in the hour of his country’s great crisis? Why should his journey
from Mt. Vernon to Cambridge have been a triumphal march? Professor
McMaster asserts that the General and the President are known to us,
“but George Washington is an unknown.” How untrue this was in 1775!
How the nation believed it knew the man! How much of reputation he had
gained while those by his side lost all of theirs! What a hero--of
many defeats! What a man to fight England to a standstill, after many
a wary, difficult retreat and dearly fought battle-field! Aye--but he
had been to school with Gates and Mercer, Lewis and Stephen and
Gladewin, on that swath of a road in the Alleghenies which led to Fort
Necessity.
Half a century ago multitudes were pointed to the man Washington in
the superb oratory of Edward Everett. But how, if not by quoting that
memorable extract from the letter of the _youthful surveyor_, who
boasted of earning an honest dubloon a day? Thus, the orator declared,
he presented to his audience “not an ideal hero, wrapped in cloudy
generalities and a mist of vague panegyric, but the real, identical
man.” And, again, did he not quote that pathetic letter from the
_youth_ Washington to Governor Dinwiddie from the bleeding Virginia
border, after Braddock’s defeat, that his hearers might “see it
all--see the whole man.”? Was Edward Everett mistaken, are these
letters not extant today, or are they unread? Surely the latter
supposition must be the true one if the man Washington is being
forgotten.
A candid review of the more popular school histories will bring out
the fact that the man Washington is almost forgotten, in so far as the
General and statesman do not portray him. In one of the best known
school histories there seems to be but one line, of five words, which
describes the character of Washington. Could we not forego, for once,
what the Indian chieftain said of his bearing a charmed life at
Braddock’s defeat, to make room for one little reason why Washington
was “completer in nature” and of “a nobler human type” than any and
all of the heroes of romance?
Mr. Otis Kendall Stuart has written a most interesting account of “The
Popular Opinion of Washington” as ascertained by inquiry among persons
of all ages, occupations and conditions. He found that Washington was
held to be a “broad,” “brave,” “thinking,” “practical,” man; an
aristocrat, so far as the dignity of his position demanded, but
willing to “work with his hands” and with a credit that was “A 1!”
Also, “when he did a thing, he did it,” and, if to the question, “Was
he a great general and statesman?” there was some hesitation, to the
question, “Was he a great man?” the answer was an unhesitating, “Yes.”
One may hold that such opinions as these have been gained from our
school histories, but I think they are not so much from the histories,
as from the popular legends of Washington, which, true and false, will
never be forgotten by the common people, until they cease to
represent,--not the patient, brave and wary general, or the calm,
far-seeing statesman, but the man--“simple, stainless, and robust
character,” as President Eliot has so beautifully described it, “which
served with dazzling success the precious cause of human progress
through liberty, and so stands, like the sunlit peak of Matterhorn,
unmatched in all the world.”
The real essence of that “simple, stainless, and robust character” is
nowhere so clearly seen as in these Allegheny vales where Colonel
Washington first touched hands with fortune. Here truly, we may still
“see it all--see the whole man.”
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Colonel Washington, by Archer Butler Hulbert