a vital wound will be given to the peace of this great country, as time itself cannot cure or eradicate the remembrance of.”  Washington was not a political agitator like Sam Adams, planning with unerring intelligence to bring about independence.  On the contrary, he rightly declared that independence was not desired.  But although he believed in exhausting every argument and every peaceful remedy, it is evident that he felt that there now could be but one result, and that violent separation from the mother country was inevitable.  Here is where he differed from his associates and from the great mass of the people, and it is to this entire veracity of mind that his wisdom and foresight were so largely due, as well as his success when the time came for him to put his hand to the plough.

When Congress adjourned, Washington returned to Mount Vernon, to the pursuits and pleasures that he loved, to his family and farm, and to his horses and hounds, with whom he had many a good run, the last that he was to enjoy for years to come.  He returned also to wait and watch as before, and to see war rapidly gather in the east.  When the Virginia convention again assembled, resolutions were introduced to arm and discipline men, and Henry declared in their support that an “appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts” was all that was left.  Washington said nothing, but he served on the committee to draft a plan of defense, and then fell to reviewing the independent companies which were springing up everywhere.  At the same time he wrote to his brother John, who had raised a troop, that he would accept the command of it if desired, as it was his “full intention to devote his life and fortune in the cause we are engaged in, if needful.”  At Mount Vernon his old comrades of the French war began to appear, in search of courage and sympathy.  Thither, too, came Charles Lee, a typical military adventurer of that period, a man of English birth and of varied service, brilliant, whimsical, and unbalanced.  There also came Horatio Gates, likewise British, and disappointed with his prospects at home; less adventurous than Lee, but also less brilliant, and not much more valuable.

Thus the winter wore away; spring opened, and toward the end of April Washington started again for the North, much occupied with certain tidings from Lexington and Concord which just then spread over the land.  He saw all that it meant plainly enough, and after noting the fact that the colonists fought and fought well, he wrote to George Fairfax in England:  “Unhappy it is to reflect that a brother’s sword has been sheathed in a brother’s breast, and that the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched in blood or inhabited by slaves.  Sad alternative.  But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?” Congress, it would seem, thought there was a good deal of room for hesitation, both for virtuous men and others, and after the fashion of their race determined to do a little more debating