PICTORIAL LIFE

OF

GEORGE WASHINGTON:

A COMPLETE HISTORY

THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR, THE
FORMATION OF THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION, AND

THE ADMINISTRATION OF WASHINGTON.

BY J. FROST, LL. D.
AUTHOR OF PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD," ETC.

WITH UPWARDS OF ONE HUNDRED ENGRAVINGS,

BY CROOME & DEVE REUX.

LIBRARY

1312

ENTERED according to act of Congress, in the year 1847, by

L. JOHNSON,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Printed by T. K. & P. G. Collins.

WASHINGTON was so completely a public man, that his biography is necessarily a history of the period in which he lived. In compiling the following narrative I have, therefore, endeavoured not only to bring into view the transactions in which he was personally concerned, but all those contemporary events which were of sufficient importance to deserve attention in a general history of the period. The volume will, consequently, if I have succeeded in my design, present a history of Washington and his times.

The authorities on which I have chiefly relied, besides the biographies of Washington by Ramsay, Marshall, Paulding, Sparks, and others, are the general histories of the Revolution by Ramsay, Gordon, Allen, Botta, and others; the correspondence of Washington and his cotemporaries, state papers and documents, and

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a history of the United States, entitled the Western World. In using these authorities I have not hesitated to adopt their phraseology, where it was not too diffuse for a work of so limited extent as the present. This general acknowledgment, and the frequent references in the foot notes, are considered sufficient to enable the reader to recognise the grounds of authenticity upon which the narrative rests.

My thanks are due to many literary friends for the assistance they have rendered me in the present undertaking; and in particular to Dr. Thomas R. Maris, for the obliging loan of the sketch by Volozan, from which Mr. Croome's drawing was made for the fulllength portrait of Washington; and to my accomplished friend, Mr. J. Russel Smith, for the use of his original sketches of Braddock's Field, and the scenery in the neighbourhood of Mount Vernon.

Whoever has occasion to examine carefully into the bistory of the period in which Washington lived, will find his reverence for the character of that illustrious man always increasing. The more intimately one becomes acquainted with the facts, the more firmly he becomes convinced that Washington was, throughout the whole forming period of the republic, the grand moving power. Every thing seems to have depended on him.

The leaders of popular opinion looked to him for advice; the Congress for direction.

While the war was raging he guided every movement, re