Botetourt and his successor, John Murray, earl of Dunmore, he nevertheless took a prominent part, though without speechmaking, in the struggles of the Assembly against Dunmore, and his position was always a radical one. As the breach widened, he even opposed petitions to the king and parliament, on the ground that the claims to taxation and control had been put forward by the ministry on the basis of right, not of expediency, that the ministry could not abandon the claim of right and the colonies could not admit it, and that petitions must be, as they already had been, rejected. “Shall we,” he writes in a letter, “after this whine and cry for relief?”
On the 5th of August 1774 the Virginia convention appointed Washington as one of seven delegates to the first Continental Congress, which met at Philadelphia on the 5th of September, and with this appointment his national career, which was to continue with but two brief intervals until his death, begins. His letters during his service in Congress show that he had fully grasped the questions at issue, that he was under no delusions as to the outcome of the struggle over taxation, and that he expected war. “More blood will be spilled on this occasion,” he wrote, “if the ministry are determined to push matters to extremity, than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America.” His associates in Congress at once recognized his military ability, and although he was not a member of any of the committees of the Congress, he seems to have aided materially in securing the endorsement by Congress of the Suffolk county, Massachusetts, resolves (see Milton, Mass.) looking towards organized resistance. On the adjournment of the Congress he returned to Virginia, where he continued to be active, as a member of the House of Burgesses, in urging on the organization, equipment and training of troops, and even undertook in person to drill volunteers. His attitude towards the mother country at this time, however, must not be misunderstood. Much as he expected war, he was not yet ready to declare in favour of independence, and he did not ally himself with the party of independence until the course of events made the adoption of any other course impossible. In March 1775 he was appointed a delegate from Virginia to the second Continental Congress, where he served on committees for fortifying New York, collecting ammunition, raising money and formulating army rules. It seems to have been generally understood that, in case of war, Virginia would expect him to act as her commander-in-chief, and it was noticed that, in the second Congress, he was the only member who habitually appeared in uniform. History, however, was to settle the matter on broader lines. The two most powerful colonies were Virginia and Massachusetts. The war began in Massachusetts, troops from New England flocking to the neighbourhood of Boston almost spontaneously; but the resistance, if it was to be effective, must have the support of the colonies to the southward, and the Virginia colonel who was serving on all the military committees of Congress, and whose experience in the Braddock campaign had made his name favourably known in England, was the obvious as well as the politic choice. When Congress, after the fights at Lexington and Concord, resolved that the colonies ought to be put in a position of defence, the first practical step was the unanimous selection (June 15), on motion of John Adams of Massachusetts, of Washington as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United Colonies. Refusing any salary and asking only the reimbursement of his expenses, he accepted the position, asking “every gentleman in the room,” however, to remember his declaration that he did not believe himself to be equal to the command, and that he accepted it only as a duty made imperative by the unanimity of the call. He reiterated this belief in private letters even to his wife; and there seems to be no doubt that, to the day of his death, he was the most determined sceptic as to his fitness for the positions to which he was successively called. He was commissioned on the 17th of June 1775, set out at once for Cambridge, Mass., and on the 3rd of July took command of the levies there assembled for action against the British garrison in Boston. The battle of Bunker Hill had already taken place, news of it reaching him on the way north. Until the following March, Washington's work was to bring about some semblance of military organization and discipline, to collect ammunition and military stores, to correspond with Congress and the colonial authorities, to guide military operations in widely separate parts of the country, to create a military system for a people entirely unaccustomed to such a thing and impatient and suspicious under it, and to bend the course of events steadily towards driving the British out of Boston. He planned the expeditions against Canada under Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold, and sent out privateers to harass British commerce. It is not easy to see how Washington survived the year 1775; the colonial poverty, the exasperating annoyances, the outspoken criticism of those who demanded active operations, the personal and party dissensions in Congress, the selfishness or stupidity which cropped out again and again among some of the most patriotic of his coadjutors were enough to have broken down most men. They completed his training. The change in this one winter is very evident. If he was not a great man when he went to Cambridge, he was both a general and a statesman in the fullest sense when he drove the British out of Boston in March 1776. From that time until his death he was admittedly the foremost man of the continent.
The military operations of the remainder of the War of Independence are described elsewhere (see American War of Independence). Washington's retreat through New Jersey; the manner in which he turned and struck his pursuers at Trenton and Princeton, and then established himself at Morristown, so as to make the way to Philadelphia impassable; the vigour with which he handled his army at the Brandywine and Germantown; the persistence with which he held the strategic position of Valley Forge through the dreadful winter of 1777-1778, in spite of the misery of his men, the clamours of the people and the impotence and meddling of the fugitive Congress—all went to show that the fibre of his public character had been hardened to its permanent quality. “These are the times that try men's souls,” wrote Thomas Paine at the beginning of 1776, and the words had added meaning in each year that followed; but Washington had no need to fear the test. The spirit which culminated in the treason of Benedict Arnold was a serious addition to his burdens; for what Arnold did others were almost ready to do. Many of the American officers, too, had taken offence at the close personal friendship which had sprung up between the marquis de La Fayette and Washington, and at the diplomatic deference which the commander-in-chief felt compelled to show to other foreign officers. Some of the foreign volunteers were eventually dismissed politely by Congress, on the ground that suitable employment could not be found for them. The name of one of them, Thomas Conway, an Irish soldier of fortune from the French service, is attached to what is called “Conway's Cabal,” a scheme for superseding Washington by General Horatio Gates, who in October 1777 succeeded in forcing Burgoyne to capitulate at Saratoga, and who had been persistent in his depreciation of the commander-in-chief and in intrigues with members of Congress. A number of officers, as well as of men in civil life, were mixed up in the plot, while the methods employed were the lowest forms of anonymous slander; but at the first breath of exposure every one concerned hurried to cover up his part in it, leaving Conway to shoulder both the responsibility and the disgrace. The treaty of alliance of 1778 with France, following the surrender of Burgoyne, put an end to all such plans. It was absurd to expect foreign nations to deal with a second-rate man as commander-in-chief while Washington was in the field, and he seems to have had no further trouble of this kind. The prompt and vigorous pursuit of Sir Henry Clinton across New Jersey towards New York, and the battle of Monmouth, in which the plan of battle was thwarted by Charles Lee, another foreign recruit of popular reputation, closed the military record of Washington, so far as active campaigning was concerned, until the end of the war. The British confined their operations to other parts of the continent, and Washington, alive as ever to the importance of keeping up connexion with New England,
