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.
