signed or admitted had they not been suppressed or softened by the interpreter.*

The course now adopted by Gov. Dinwiddie in the reorganization of the Virginia troops, against which Washington remonstrated, and which would have reduced him to an inferior grade, led at once to his resignation, and, after a brief visit to his mother, he retired to Mount Vernon. He was soon solicited by Gov. Sharpe, of Maryland, then the commander-inchief of the English forces, to resume his station, but under circumstances and upon conditions incompatible with his selfrespect. In declining the invitation he used this memorable language: "I shall have the consolation of knowing that I have opened the way, when the smallness of our numbers exposed us to the attacks of a superior enemy; and that I have had the thanks of my country for the services I have rendered." But now Gen. Braddock was sent over from England with two regiments of regulars, and Washington did not hesitate to accept an appointment on his staff as a volunteer aide-de-camp. The prudent counsels that he gave Braddock before he set out on his ill-fated expedition, and often repeated along the road, were not followed; but Washington, notwithstanding a violent attack of fever, was with him

on the bloody field of the Monongahela, behaving, as his fellow aidede-camp, Col. Orne, testified, "with the greatest courage and resolution," witnessing at last Braddock's defeat and death, and being the only mounted officer not killed or disabled. "By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence," wrote he to his brother, "I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet I escaped unhurt, although death

Washington

was levelling my companions on every side." It fell to him by a striking coincidence-the chaplain being wounded-to read. the funeral service at the burial of Braddock at the Great

Meadows, the scene of his own capitulation the year before. In a sermon to one of the companies organized under the impulse of Braddock's defeat, and in view of the impending dangers of the country, the Rev. Samuel Davies, an eloquent and accomplished preacher, who, in 1759, succeeded Jonathan Edwards as president of Princeton college, after praising the zeal and courage of the Virginia troops, added these prophetic words: "As a remarkable instance of this, I may point out to the public that heroic youth, Col. Washington, whom I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a manner for some important service to his country."

A force of 2,000 men having now been ordered to be raised by the Virginia assembly, Washington was appointed to the chief command, and established his headquarters at Winchester. He broke away from the perplexing cares of this place in February, 1756, to make a hurried visit to Gov. Shirley in Boston, where he settled successfully with him, then the commander-in-chief of the English forces on this continent, a vexatious question of precedence between the provincial officers and those appointed by the crown. On his return he devoted himself to measures for the security of the frontier. In the course of the following year he was again the subject of a violent fever, which prostrated him for several months. "My constitution," he wrote to a friend, "is much impaired, and nothing can retrieve it but the greatest care and the most circumspect course of life." Under these circumstances he seriously contemplated again resigning his command and retiring from all further public business. But his favorite measure, the reduction of Fort Duquesne, was at length to be undertaken, and, after much disappointment and delay, Washington, on 25 Nov., 1758, was privileged to "march in and plant the British flag on the yet smoking ruins" of that fort-henceforth to be known as Fort Pitt, in honor of the great minister of England, afterward Lord Chatham.

Meantime Washington had chanced to meet on his way to Williamsburg, at the house of a hospitable Virginian with whom he dined, a charming widow, who at once won his heart. Most happily he soon succeeded in winning hers also, and on 6 Jan., 1759, she became his wife. Martha Custis, daughter of John Dandridge and widow of John Parke Custis, was henceforth to be known in history as Martha Washington. He had now

finally resigned his commission as a colonial officer, and was preparing to enjoy something of the retirement of private life. But while he was still absent on his last campaign he had been chosen a delegate to the Virginia house of burgesses, and he had hardly established himself at Mount Vernon, a few months after his marriage, when he was summoned to attend a session of that body at Williamsburg. He was not allowed, however, to enter unobserved on his civil career. No sooner did he make his appearance than the Speaker, agreeably to a previous vote of the house, presented their thanks to him, in the name of the colony, for the distinguished military service he had rendered to his country, accompanying the vote of thanks with expressions of compliment and praise which greatly embarrassed him. He attempted to make his acknowledgments, but stammered and trembled and "could not give distinct utterance to a single syllable." "Sit down, Mr. Washington," said the Speaker, with infinite address; "your modesty equals your valor, and that surpasses the power of any language I possess.'

Fourteen or fifteen years more elapsed before the great struggle for American independence began, and during all this time he continued to be a member of the house of burgesses. He was punctual in his attendance at all their sessions, which were commonly at least two in a year, and took an earnest interest in all that was said and done, but "it is not known," says Sparks, "that he ever made a set speech or entered into. a stormy debate." He had a passion for agricultural pursuits. He delighted in his quiet rural life at Mount Vernon with his wife and her children-he had none of his own-finding ample occupation in the management of his farms, and abundant enjoyment in hunting and fishing with the genial friends and relatives in his neighborhood. He was a vestryman of two parishes, regular in his attendance at one or the other of the parochial churches, at Alexandria or at Pohick, and both he and his wife were communicants. Meantime he was always at the service of his friends or the community for any aid or counsel that he could render them. He was often called on to be an arbitrator, and his judgment and impartiality were never questioned. As a commissioner for settling the military accounts of the colony, after the treaty of peace of 1763, he spared himself no labor in the execution of a most arduous and complicated task. In a word, he was a good citizen, an exem

plary Christian, a devoted father, a kind master to the slaves who had come to him by inheritance or marriage, and was respected and beloved by all.

At length, at forty-three years of age, he was called upon to begin a career that closed only with his life, during which he held the highest and most responsible positions in war and in peace, and rendered inestimable services to his country and to mankind. To follow that career in detail would require nothing less than a history of the United States for the next fiveand-twenty years. Washington was naturally of a cautious and conservative cast, and by no means disposed for a rupture with the mother country, if it could be avoided without the sacrifice of rights and principles. But as the various stages of British aggression succeeded each other, beginning with the stamp-act, the repeal of which he hailed with delight, and followed by the tea tax and the Boston port bill, he became keenly alive to the danger of submission, and was ready to unite in measures of remonstrance, opposition, and ultimately of resistance. When he heard at Williamsburg, in August, 1773, of the sufferings resulting from the port bill, he is said to have exclaimed, impulsively: "I will raise a thousand men, subsist them at my own expense, and march with them, at their head, for the relief of Boston." He little dreamed at that moment that within two years he was destined to be hailed as the deliverer of Boston from British occupation. He accepted an election as a delegate to the first Continental congress in 1774, and went to the meeting at Philadelphia in September of that year, in company with Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton, who called for him at Mount Vernon on horseback. That congress sat in Carpenter's Hall with closed doors, but the great papers that it prepared and issued form a proud part of American history. Those were the papers and that the congress of which Chatham in the house of lords, in his memorable speech on the removal of troops from Boston, 20 Jan., 1775, said: "When your lordships look at the papers transmitted to us from America, when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must declare and avow that in all my reading and observation-and it has been my favorite study-I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world-that for solidity of reasoning,

force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general congress at Philadelphia." The precise part taken by Washington within the closed doors of Carpenter's Hall is no

where recorded, but the testimony of one of its most distinguished members cannot be forgotten. When Patrick Henry returned home from the meeting, and was asked whom he considered the greatest man in that congress, he replied: "If you speak of eloquence, Mr. Rutledge, of South Carolina, is by far the

greatest orator; but if you speak of solid information and sound judgment, Col. Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on that floor." It is an interesting tradition that, during the prayers with which Dr. Duché opened that meeting at Carpenter's Hall on 5 Sept., 1774, while most of the other members were standing, Washington was kneeling.

He was again a delegate to the Continental congress (the second) that assembled at Philadelphia on 10 May, 1775, by which, on the 15th of June, on the motion of Thomas Johnson, a delegate of Maryland, at the earnest instigation of John Adams, of Massachusetts, he was unanimously elected commander-inchief of all the Continental forces raised, or to be raised, for the defence of American liberty. On the next morning he accepted the appointment and expressed his deep and grateful sense of the high honor conferred upon him, "but," added he, "lest some unlucky event should happen, unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in the room that I this day declare, with the utmost sincerity, that I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with." "As to pay," he continued, "I beg leave to assure the congress that, as no pecuniary consideration could have tempted me to accept this arduous employment, at the expense of my domestic ease and happiness, I do not wish to make any profit of it. I will keep an exact account of my expenses. Those I doubt not they will discharge, and that is all I desire." "You may believe me," he wrote to his