For consider the record of that older Washington of 1775 beneath the Cambridge elm. He had capitulated at Fort Necessity, with the first army he ever commanded, after the first battle he ever fought! He had marched with Braddock’s ill-starred army, in which he had no official position whatever until defeat and rout threw upon his shoulders a large share of the responsibility of saving the army from complete annihilation. He had marched with Forbes, only to write his Governor begging to be allowed to go to England to tell the King the sad story of the campaign--of “how grossly his glory and interest and the public money, have been prostituted.” For the past sixteen years he had led a quiet life on his farms.
Why, now, in 1775, should he have had the unstinted confidence of all men, in the hour of his country’s great crisis? Why should his journey from Mt. Vernon to Cambridge have been a triumphal march? Professor McMaster asserts that the General and the President are known to us, “but George Washington is an unknown.” How untrue this was in 1775! How the nation believed it knew the man! How much of reputation he had gained while those by his side lost all of theirs! What a hero--of many defeats! What a man to fight England to a standstill, after many a wary, difficult retreat and dearly fought battle-field! Aye--but he had been to school with Gates and Mercer, Lewis and Stephen and Gladewin, on that swath of a road in the Alleghenies which led to Fort Necessity.
Half a century ago multitudes were pointed to the man Washington in the superb oratory of Edward Everett. But how, if not by quoting that memorable extract from the letter of the _youthful surveyor_, who boasted of earning an honest dubloon a day? Thus, the orator declared, he presented to his audience “not an ideal hero, wrapped in cloudy generalities and a mist of vague panegyric, but the real, identical man.” And, again, did he not quote that pathetic letter from the _youth_ Washington to Governor Dinwiddie from the bleeding Virginia border, after Braddock’s defeat, that his hearers might “see it all--see the whole man.”? Was Edward Everett mistaken, are these letters not extant today, or are they unread? Surely the latter supposition must be the true one if the man Washington is being forgotten.