The task of facing and fighting the enemy was enough for the ablest of men; but Washington was obliged also to combat and overcome the inertness and dullness born of ignorance, and to teach Congress how to govern a nation at war.  In the hours “allotted to sleep,” he sat in his headquarters, writing a letter, with “blots and scratches,” which told Congress with the utmost precision and vigor just what was needed.  It was but one of a long series of similar letters, written with unconquerable patience and with unwearied iteration, lighted here and there by flashes of deep and angry feeling, which would finally strike home under the pressure of defeat, and bring the patriots of the legislature to sudden action, always incomplete, but still action of some sort.  It must have been inexpressibly dreary work, but quite as much was due to those letters as to the battles.  Thinking for other people, and teaching them what to do, is at best an ungrateful duty, but when it is done while an enemy is at your throat, it shows a grim tenacity of purpose which is well worth consideration.

In this instance the letter of September 24, read in the light of the battles of Long Island and Kip’s Bay, had a considerable effect.  The first steps were taken to make the army national and permanent, to raise the pay of officers, and to lengthen enlistments.  Like most of the war measures of Congress, they were too late for the immediate necessity, but they helped the future.  Congress, moreover, then felt that all had been done that could be demanded, and relapsed once more into confidence.  “The British force,” said John Adams, chairman of the board of war, “is so divided, they will do no great matter this fall.”  But Washington, facing hard facts, wrote to Congress with his unsparing truth on October 4:  “Give me leave to say, sir, (I say it with due deference and respect, and my knowledge of the facts, added to the importance of the cause and the stake I hold in it, must justify the freedom,) that your affairs are in a more unpromising way than you seem to apprehend.  Your army, as I mentioned in my last, is on the eve of its political dissolution.  True it is, you have voted a larger one in lieu of it; but the season is late; and there is a material difference between voting battalions and raising men.”

The campaign as seen from the board of war and from the Plains of Harlem differed widely.  It is needless to say now which was correct; every one knows that the General was right and Congress wrong, but being in the right did not help Washington, nor did he take petty pleasure in being able to say, “I told you how it would be.”  The hard facts remained unchanged.  There was the wholly patriotic but slumberous, and for fighting purposes quite inefficient Congress still to be waked up and kept awake, and to be instructed.  With painful and plain-spoken repetition this work was grappled with and done methodically, and like all else as effectively as was possible.