had had no fighting, and they knew nothing of war or its necessities.  Unaccustomed to the large affairs into which they were suddenly plunged, they displayed a narrow and provincial spirit.  Keenly alive to their own rights and privileges, they were more occupied in quarreling with Dinwiddie than in prosecuting the war.  In the weak proprietary governments of Maryland and Pennsylvania there was the same condition of affairs, with every evil exaggerated tenfold.  The fighting spirit was dominant in Virginia, but in Quaker-ridden Pennsylvania it seems to have been almost extinct.  These three were not very promising communities to look to for support in a difficult and costly war.

With all this inertia and stupidity Washington was called to cope, and he rebelled against it in vigorous fashion.  Leaving Colonel Fry to follow with the main body of troops, Washington set out on April 2, 1754, with two companies from Alexandria, where he had been recruiting amidst most irritating difficulties.  He reached Will’s Creek three weeks later; and then his real troubles began.  Captain Trent, the timid and halting envoy, who had failed to reach the French, had been sent out by the wise authorities to build a fort at the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela, on the admirable site selected by the keen eye of Washington.  There Trent left his men and returned to Will’s Creek, where Washington found him, but without the pack-horses that he had promised to provide.  Presently news came that the French in overwhelming numbers had swept down upon Trent’s little party, captured their fort, and sent them packing back to Virginia.  Washington took this to be war, and determined at once to march against the enemy.  Having impressed from the inhabitants, who were not bubbling over with patriotism, some horses and wagons, he set out on his toilsome march across the mountains.

It was a wild and desolate region, and progress was extremely slow.  By May 9 he was at the Little Meadows, twenty miles from his starting-place; by the 18th at the Youghiogany River, which he explored and found unnavigable.  He was therefore forced to take up his weary march again for the Monongahela, and by the 27th he was at the Great Meadows, a few miles further on.  The extreme danger of his position does not seem to have occurred to him, but he was harassed and angered by the conduct of the assembly.  He wrote to Governor Dinwiddie that he had no idea of giving up his commission.  “But,” he continued, “let me serve voluntarily; then I will, with the greatest pleasure in life, devote my services to the expedition, without any other reward than the satisfaction of serving my country; but to be slaving dangerously for the shadow of pay, through woods, rocks, mountains,—­I would rather prefer the great toil of a daily laborer, and dig for a maintenance, provided I were reduced to the necessity, than serve upon such ignoble terms; for I really do not see why the lives of his Majesty’s subjects in Virginia should be of less value than those in other parts of his American dominions, especially when it is well known that we must undergo double their hardship.”  Here we have a high-spirited, high-tempered young gentleman, with a contempt for shams that it is pleasant to see, and evidently endowed also with a fine taste for fighting and not too much patience.