XI. YORKTOWN

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE



WASHINGTON AND HIS COMRADES IN ARMS


CHAPTER I. THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF

Moving among the members of the second Continental Congress,
which met at Philadelphia in May, 1775, was one, and but one,
military figure. George Washington alone attended the sittings in
uniform. This colonel from Virginia, now in his forty-fourth
year, was a great landholder, an owner of slaves, an Anglican
churchman, an aristocrat, everything that stands in contrast with
the type of a revolutionary radical. Yet from the first he had
been an outspoken and uncompromising champion of the, colonial
cause. When the tax was imposed on tea he had abolished the use
of tea in his own household and when war was imminent he had
talked of recruiting a thousand men at his own expense and
marching to Boston. His steady wearing of the uniform seemed,
indeed, to show that he regarded the issue as hardly less
military than political.

The clash at Lexington, on the 19th of April, had made vivid the
reality of war. Passions ran high. For years there had been
tension, long disputes about buying British stamps to put on
American legal papers, about duties on glass and paint and paper