We can imagine how exasperating such requests and suggestions must have been.  It was very much as if Congress had said:  “Good General, bring in the Atlantic tides and drown the enemy; or pluck the moon from the sky and give it to us, as a mark of your loyalty.”  Such requests are not soothing to any man struggling his best with great anxieties, and with a host of petty cares.  Washington, nevertheless, kept his temper, and replied only by setting down a few hard facts which answered the demands of Congress in a final manner, and with all the sting of truth.  Thus a little irritation had been generated in Congress against the general, and there were some members who developed a good deal of pronounced hostility.  Sam Adams, a born agitator and a trained politician, unequaled almost in our history as an organizer and manager of men, able, narrow, coldly fierce, the man of the town meeting and the caucus, had no possibility of intellectual sympathy with the silent, patient, hard-gripping soldier, hemmed with difficulties, but ever moving straight forward to his object, with occasional wild gusts of reckless fighting passion.  John Adams, too, brilliant of speech and pen, ardent, patriotic, and high-minded, was, in his way, out of touch with Washington.  Although he moved Washington’s appointment, he began almost immediately to find fault with him, an exercise to which he was extremely prone.  Inasmuch as he could see how things ought to be done, he could not understand why they were not done in that way at once, for he had a fine forgetfulness of other people’s difficulties, as is the case with most of us.  The New England representatives generally took their cue from these two, especially James Lovell, who carried his ideas into action, and obtained a little niche in the temple of fame by making himself disagreeably conspicuous in the intrigue against the commander-in-chief, when it finally developed.

There were others, too, outside New England who were discontented, and among them Richard Henry Lee, from the General’s own State.  He was evidently critical and somewhat unfriendly at this time, although the reasons for his being so are not now very distinct.  Then there was Mr. Clark of New Jersey, an excellent man, who thought the General was invading popular rights; and to him others might be added who vaguely felt that things ought to be better than they were.  This party, adverse to Washington, obtained the appointment of Gates to the northern department, under whom the army won a great victory, and they were correspondingly happy.  John Adams wrote his wife that one cause of thanksgiving was that the tide had not been turned by the commander-in-chief and southern troops, for the adulation would have been intolerable; and that a man may be wise and virtuous and not a deity.