American army, Washington assumed the command. He sat on
horseback under an elm tree and an observer noted that his
appearance was "truly noble and majestic." This was milder praise
than that given a little later by a London paper which said:
"There is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de
chambre by his side." New England having seen him was henceforth
wholly on his side. His traditions were not those of the
Puritans, of the Ephraims and the Abijahs of the volunteer army,
men whose Old Testament names tell something of the rigor of the
Puritan view of life. Washington, a sharer in the free and often
careless hospitality of his native Virginia, had a different
outlook. In his personal discipline, however, he was not less
Puritan than the strictest of New Englanders. The coming years
were to show that a great leader had taken his fitting place.


Washington, born in 1732, had been trained in self-reliance, for
he had been fatherless from childhood. At the age of sixteen he
was working at the profession, largely self-taught, of a surveyor
of land. At the age of twenty-seven he married Martha Custis, a
rich widow with children, though her marriage with Washington was
childless. His estate on the Potomac River, three hundred miles
from the open sea, recently named Mount Vernon, had been in the
family for nearly a hundred years. There were twenty-five hundred
acres at Mount Vernon with ten miles of frontage on the tidal
river. The Virginia planters were a landowning gentry; when
Washington died he had more than sixty thousand acres. The
growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the
time, with its half million people, was connected with the
ownership of land. On their great estates the planters lived