Where he differed from the men of his own time was in the fact that he rose to a breadth and height of Americanism and of national feeling which no other man of that day touched at all.  Nothing is more intense than the conservatism of mental habits, and although it requires now an effort to realize it, it should not be forgotten that in every habit of thought the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies were wholly colonial.  If this is properly appreciated we can understand the mental breadth and vigor which enabled Washington to shake off at once all past habits and become an independent leader of an independent people.  He felt to the very core of his being the need of national self-respect and national dignity.  To him, as the chief of the armies and the head of the Revolution, all men, no matter what tongue they spake or what country they came from, were to be dealt with on a footing of simple equality, and treated according to their merits.  There was to him no glamour in the fact that this man was a Frenchman and that an Englishman.  His own personal pride extended to his people, and he bowed to no national superiority anywhere.  Hamilton was national throughout, but he was born outside the thirteen colonies, and knew his fellow-citizens only as Americans.  Franklin was national by the force of his own commanding genius.  John Adams grew to the same conception, so far as our relations to other nations were concerned.  But beyond these three we may look far and closely before we find another among all the really great men of the time who freed himself wholly from the superstition of the colonist about the nations of Europe.

When Washington drew his sword beneath the Cambridge elm he stood forth as the first American, the best type of man that the New World could produce, with no provincial taint upon him, and no shadow of the colonial past clouding his path.  It was this great quality that gave the struggle which he led a character it would never have attained without a leader so constituted.  Had he been merely a colonial Englishman, had he not risen at once to the conception of an American nation, the world would have looked at us with very different eyes.  It was the personal dignity of the man, quite as much as his fighting capacity, which impressed Europe.  Kings and ministers, looking on dispassionately, soon realized that here was no ordinary agitator or revolutionist, but a great man on a great stage with great conceptions.  England, indeed, talked about a militia colonel, but this chatter disappeared in the smoke of Trenton, and even England came to look upon him as the all-powerful spirit of the Revolution.  Dull men and colonial squires do not grasp a great idea and carry it into action on the world’s stage in a few months.  To stand forward at the head of raw armies and of a colonial people as a national leader, calm, dignified, and far-seeing, requires not only character, but intellect of the highest and strongest kind.  Now that we have come as a people, after more than a century’s struggle, to the national feeling which Washington compassed in a moment, it is well to consider that single achievement and to meditate on its meaning, whether in estimating him, or in gauging what he was to the American people when they came into existence.