I now find, is also wanting to quit his inspectorship for a command in the line.  This will be productive of much discontent to the brigadiers.  In a word, although I think the baron an excellent officer, I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner among us except the Marquis de Lafayette, who acts upon very different principles from those which govern the rest.”  A few days later he said, on the same theme, to the president of Congress:  “I trust you think me so much a citizen of the world as to believe I am not easily warped or led away by attachments merely local and American; yet I confess I am not entirely without them, nor does it appear to me that they are unwarrantable, if confined within proper limits.  Fewer promotions in the foreign line would have been productive of more harmony, and made our warfare more agreeable to all parties.”  Again, he said of Steuben:  “I regret that there should be a necessity that his services should be lost to the army; at the same time I think it my duty explicitly to observe to Congress that his desire of having an actual and permanent command in the line cannot be complied with without wounding the feelings of a number of officers, whose rank and merits give them every claim to attention; and that the doing of it would be productive of much dissatisfaction and extensive ill consequences.”

Washington’s resistance to the colonial deference for foreigners has already been pointed out, but this second burst of opposition, coming at this especial time, deserves renewed attention.  The splendid fleet and well-equipped troops of our ally were actually at our gates, and everybody was in a paroxysm of perfectly natural gratitude.  To the colonial mind, steeped in colonial habits of thought, the foreigner at this particular juncture appeared more than ever to be a splendid and superior being.  But he did not in the least confuse or sway the cool judgment that guided the destinies of the Revolution.  Let us consider well the pregnant sentences just quoted, and the letters from which they are taken.  They deserve it, for they throw a strong light on a side of Washington’s mind and character too little appreciated.  One hears it said not infrequently, it has been argued even in print with some solemnity, that Washington was, no doubt, a great man and rightly a national hero, but that he was not an American.  It will be necessary to recur to this charge again and consider it at some length.  It is sufficient at this point to see how it tallies with his conduct in a single matter, which was a very perfect test of the national and American quality of the man.  We can get at the truth by contrasting him with his own contemporaries, the only fair comparison, for he was a man and an American of his own time and not of the present day, which is a point his critics overlook.