The next day he rode forth in the presence of a great multitude, and the troops having been drawn up before him, he drew his sword beneath the historical elm-tree, and took command of the first American army.  “His excellency,” wrote Dr. Thatcher in his journal, “was on horseback in company with several military gentlemen.  It was not difficult to distinguish him from all others.  He is tall and well proportioned, and his personal appearance truly noble and majestic.”  “He is tall and of easy and agreeable address,” the loyalist Curwen had remarked a few weeks before; while Mrs. John Adams, warm-hearted and clever, wrote to her husband after the general’s arrival:  “Dignity, ease, and complacency, the gentleman and the soldier, look agreeably blended in him.  Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.  Those lines of Dryden instantly occurred to me,—­

  ’Mark his majestic fabric!  He’s a temple
  Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine;
  His soul’s the deity that lodges there;
  Nor is the pile unworthy of the God.’”

Lady, lawyer, and surgeon, patriot and tory, all speak alike, and as they wrote so New England felt.  A slave-owner, an aristocrat, and a churchman, Washington came to Cambridge to pass over the heads of native generals to the command of a New England army, among a democratic people, hard-working and simple in their lives, and dissenters to the backbone, who regarded episcopacy as something little short of papistry and quite equivalent to toryism.  Yet the shout that went up from soldiers and people on Cambridge common on that pleasant July morning came from the heart and had no jarring note.  A few of the political chiefs growled a little in later days at Washington, but the soldiers and the people, high and low, rich and poor, gave him an unstinted loyalty.  On the fields of battle and throughout eight years of political strife the men of New England stood by the great Virginian with a devotion and truth in which was no shadow of turning.  Here again we see exhibited most conspicuously the powerful personality of the man who was able thus to command immediately the allegiance of this naturally cold and reserved people.  What was it that they saw which inspired them at once with so much confidence?  They looked upon a tall, handsome man, dressed in plain uniform, wearing across his breast a broad blue band of silk, which some may have noticed as the badge and symbol of a certain solemn league and covenant once very momentous in the English-speaking world.  They saw his calm, high bearing, and in every line of face and figure they beheld the signs of force and courage.  Yet there must have been something more to call forth the confidence then so quickly given, and which no one ever long withheld.  All felt dimly, but none the less surely, that here was a strong, able man, capable of rising to the emergency, whatever it might be, capable of continued growth and development, clear of head and warm of heart; and so the New England people gave to him instinctively their sympathy and their faith, and never took either back.