Let it be admitted that Washington, ever ready to pay his own dues, was strict, and sometimes severe, in demanding them of others; but let it be also remembered, this is the worst that can be said.  He was always ready to overlook faults of omission or commission; he would pardon easily mismanagement or extravagance on his estate or in his household; but he had no mercy for anything that savored of ingratitude, treachery, or dishonesty, and he carried this same feeling into public as well as private affairs.  No officer who had bravely done his best had anything to fear in defeat from Washington’s anger.  He was never unjust, and he was always kind to misfortune or mistake, but to the coward or the traitor he was entirely unforgiving.  This it was which made Arnold’s treason so bitter to him.  Not only had he been deceived, but the country as well as himself had been most basely betrayed; and for this reason he was relentless to Andre, whom it is said he never saw, living or dead.  The young Englishman had taken part in a wretched piece of treachery, and for the sake of the country, and as a warning to traitors, Washington would not spare him.  He would never have ordered a political prisoner to be taken out and shot in a ditch, after the fashion of Napoleon; nor would he have dealt with any people as the Duke of Cumberland dealt with the clansmen after Culloden.  Such performances would have seemed to him wanton as well as cruel, and he was too wise and too humane a man to be either.  Indian atrocities, for instance, with which he was familiar, never led him to retaliate in kind.  But he was perfectly prepared to exact the extremest penalty by just and recognized methods; and had it not been for the urgent entreaties of his friends, he would have sent Asgill to the scaffold, repugnant as it was to his feelings, because he felt that the murder of Huddy was a crime for which the English army was responsible, and which demanded a just and striking vengeance.  He was, it may be freely confessed, of anything but a tame nature.  There was a good deal of Berserker in his make-up, and he was fierce in his anger when he believed that a great wrong had been done.  But because he was stern and unrelenting when he felt that justice and his duty required him to be so, no more proves that he had a cold heart than does the fact that he was silent, dignified, and reserved.  Cold-blooded men are not fierce in seeking to redress the wrongs of others, nor are the fluent of speech the only kind and generous members of the human family.

Washington’s whole life, indeed, contradicts the charge that he was cold of heart and sluggish of feeling.  The man who wrote as he did in his extreme youth, when Indians were harrying the frontier where he commanded, was not lacking in humanity or sympathy; and such as he then was he remained to the end of his life.  A soldier by instinct and experience, he never grew indifferent to the miseries of war.  Human suffering always appealed to him and moved him deeply, and when it was wantonly inflicted stirred him to anger and to the desire for the wild justice of revenge.