History of the United States Constitution. George Ticknor Curtis

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СКАЧАТЬ effect on all my colleagues." "This conversation," he continues, "and the principles, facts, and motives suggested in it, have given a color, complexion, and character to the whole policy of the United States from that day to this. Without it, Mr. Washington would never have commanded our armies; nor Mr. Jefferson have been the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor Mr. Richard Henry Lee the mover of it; nor Mr. Chase the mover of foreign connections. If I have ever had cause to repent of any part of this policy, that repentance ever has been and ever will be unavailing. I had forgot to say, nor had Mr. Johnson ever have been the nominator of Washington for general." (Works, II. 512, 513.)

      Without impeaching the accuracy of Mr. Adams's recollection, on the score of his age when this letter was written, and without considering here how or why Mr. Jefferson came to be the author of the Declaration of Independence, it is believed that Mr. Adams states other facts, in his autobiography, sufficient to show that motives of policy towards Virginia were not the sole or the principal reasons why Washington was elected general. Mr. Adams states in his autobiography, that at the time when he observed the professed jealousy of the South against a New England army under the command of a Northern general, it was very visible to him "that Colonel Washington was their object"; "and," he adds, "so many of our stanchest men were in the plan, that we could carry nothing without conceding it." (Works, II. 415.) When Mr. Adams came, as he afterwards did, to put himself at the head of this movement, and to propose in Congress that the army at Cambridge should be adopted, and that a general should be appointed, he referred directly to Washington as the person whom he had in his mind, and spoke of him as "a gentleman from Virginia who was among us and very well known to all of us, a gentleman whose skill and experience as an officer, whose independent fortune, great talents, and excellent universal character, would command the approbation of all America, and unite the cordial exertions of all the colonies better than any other person in the Union. Mr. Washington, who happened to sit near the door, as soon as he heard me allude to him, from his usual modesty, darted into the library-room." (Works, II. 417.) It is quite clear, therefore, that Mr. Adams put the appointment of Washington, in public, upon his qualifications and character, known all over the Union. He further states, that the subject came under debate, and that nobody opposed the appointment of Washington on account of any personal objection to him; and the only objection which he mentions as having been raised, was on the ground that the army near Boston was all from New England, and that they had a general of their own, with whom they were entirely satisfied. He mentions one of the Virginia delegates, Mr. Pendleton, as concurring in this objection; that Mr. Sherman of Connecticut and Mr. Cushing of Massachusetts also concurred in it, and that Mr. Paine of Massachusetts expressed strong personal friendship for General Ward, but gave no opinion upon the question. Afterwards, he says, the subject being postponed to a future day, "pains were taken out of doors to obtain a unanimity, and the voices were generally so clearly in favor of Washington, that the dissentient members were persuaded to withdraw their opposition, and Mr. Washington was nominated, I believe, by Mr. Thomas Johnson of Maryland, unanimously elected, and the army adopted." (Ibid.)

      It is worth while to inquire, therefore, what were the controlling reasons, which so easily and so soon produced this striking unanimity. If it was brought about mainly by the exertions of a Southern against a Northern party, and by the yielding of Northern men to the Virginians from motives of policy, it would not have been accomplished with so much facility, although even a Washington were the candidate of Virginia. Sectional jealousies and sectional parties inflame each other; the struggles which they cause are protracted; and the real merits of men and things are lost sight of in the passions which they arouse. If policy, as a leading or a principal motive, gave to General Washington the great body of the Northern votes, there would have been more dissentients from that policy than any of the accounts authorize us to suppose there were, at any moment, while the subject was under consideration. Nor does the previous conduct of Virginia warrant the belief, that her subsequent exertions in the cause of American liberty were mainly purchased by the honors bestowed upon her great men, or by so much of precedence as was yielded in the public councils to the unquestionable abilities of her statesmen. Some of them had undoubtedly been in favor of measures of conciliation to a late period; and some of them, as Washington, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee, had been, from an early period, convinced that the sword must decide the controversy. They were perhaps as much divided upon this point, until the army at Boston was adopted, as the leading men of other colonies. But when the necessity of that measure became apparent, it was the peculiar happiness of Virginia to be able to present to the country, as a general, a man whose character and qualifications threw all local and political objects at once into the shade. In order to form a correct judgment, at the present day, of the motives which must have produced a unanimity so remarkable and so prompt, we have only to recollect the previous history of Washington, as it was known to the Congress, at the moment when he shrank from the mention of his name in that assembly.

      He was forty-three years of age. From early youth, he had had a training that eminently fitted him for the great part which he was afterwards to play, and which unfolded the singular capacities of his character to meet the extraordinary emergencies of the post to which he was subsequently called. That training had been both in military and in civil life. His military career had been one of much activity and responsibility, and had embraced several brilliant achievements. In 1751, it became necessary to put the militia of Virginia in a condition to defend the frontiers against the French and the Indians. The province was divided into military districts, in each of which an adjutant-general, with the rank of major, was commissioned to drill and inspect the militia. Washington, at the age of nineteen, received the appointment to one of these districts; and in the following year, the province was again divided into four grand military divisions, of which the northern was assigned to him as adjutant-general. In 1753, the French crossed the lakes, to establish posts on the Ohio, and were joined by the Indians. Major Washington was sent by the Governor of Virginia to warn them to retire. This expedition was one of difficulty and of delicacy. He crossed the Alleghany Mountains, reached the Ohio, had interviews with the French commander and the Indians, and returned to Williamsburg to make report to the Governor. Of this journey, full of perilous adventures and narrow escapes, he kept a journal, which was published by the Governor; was copied into most of the newspapers of the other colonies; and was reprinted in London, as a document of much importance, exhibiting the views and designs of the French. In 1754, he was appointed, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, second in command of the provincial troops raised by the Legislature to repel the French invasion. On the first encounter with a party of the enemy under Jumonville, on the 28th of May, 1754, the chief command devolved on Washington, in the absence of his superior. The French leader was killed, and most of his party were taken prisoners. Washington commanded also at the battle of the Great Meadows, and received a vote of thanks for his services from the House of Burgesses. This was in 1754, when he was at the age of twenty-two. During the next year, in consequence of the effect of some new arrangement of the provincial troops, he was reduced from the rank of colonel to that of captain, and thereupon retired from the army, with the consolation that he had received the thanks of his country for the services he had rendered. In 1755, he consented to serve as aide-de-camp to General Braddock, who had arrived from England with two regiments of regular troops. In this capacity he served in the battle of the Monongahela with much distinction. The two other aids were wounded and disabled early in the action, and the duty of distributing the General's orders devolved wholly upon Washington. It was in this battle that he acquired with the Indians the reputation of being under the special protection of the Great Spirit, because he escaped the aim of many of their rifles, although two horses were shot under him, and his dress was perforated by four bullets. His conduct on this occasion became known and celebrated throughout the country; and when he retired to Mount Vernon, as he did soon after, at the age of three-and-twenty, he not only carried with him a decisive reputation for personal bravery, but he was known to have given advice to Braddock, before the action, which all men saw, after it, would, if it had been duly heeded, have prevented his defeat. But he was not allowed to remain long in retirement. In August, 1755, he was appointed commander-in-chief of all the provincial forces of Virginia, and immediately entered upon the duties of reorganizing the old and raising new troops, in the course of which he visited all the outposts along the frontier. Soon afterwards, a dispute about rank having arisen with a person who claimed СКАЧАТЬ