was lacking, if anywhere.  He saw facts, knew them, mastered and used them, and never gave much play to fancy; but as his business in life was with men and facts, this deficiency, if it was one, was of little moment.  He was also a man of the strongest passions in every way, but he dominated them; they never ruled him.  Vigorous animal passions were inevitable, of course, in a man of such a physical make-up as his.  How far he gave way to them in his youth no one knows, but the scandals which many persons now desire to have printed, ostensibly for the sake of truth, are, so far as I have been able to learn, with one or two dubious exceptions, of entirely modern parentage.  I have run many of them to earth; nearly all are destitute of contemporary authority, and they may be relegated to the dust-heaps.[1] If he gave way to these propensities in his youth, the only conclusion that I have been able to come to is that he mastered them when he reached man’s estate.

[Footnote 1:  The charge in the pamphlet purporting to give an account of the trial of the New York conspirators in 1776 is of such doubtful origin and character that it hardly merits consideration, and the only other allusion is in the well-known intercepted letter of Harrison, which is of doubtful authenticity in certain passages, open to suspicion from having been intercepted and published by the enemy and quite likely to have been at best merely a coarse jest of a character very common at that period and entirely in keeping with the notorious habits of life and speech peculiar to the writer. (See Life of John Adams, iii. 35.)]

He had, too, a fierce temper, and although he gradually subdued it, he would sometimes lose control of himself and burst out into a tempest of rage.  When he did so he would use strong and even violent language, as he did at Kip’s Landing and at Monmouth.  Well-intentioned persons in their desire to make him a faultless being have argued at great length that Washington never swore, and but for their argument the matter would never have attracted much attention.  He was anything but a profane man, but the evidence is beyond question that if deeply angered he would use a hearty English oath; and not seldom the action accompanied the word, as when he rode among the fleeing soldiers at Kip’s Landing, striking them with his sword, and almost beside himself at their cowardice.  Judge Marshall used to tell also of an occasion when Washington sent out an officer to cross a river and bring back some information about the enemy, on which the action of the morrow would depend.  The officer was gone some time, came back, and found the general impatiently pacing his tent.  On being asked what he had learned, he replied that the night was dark and stormy, the river full of ice, and that he had not been able to cross.  Washington glared at him a moment, seized a large leaden inkstand from the table, hurled it at the offender’s head, and said with a fierce oath, “Be off, and send me a man!” The officer went, crossed the river, and brought back the information.