When Braddock died, the hero of a hopeless fight and the martyr of his
own folly, the funeral service was read over his body by the young
Virginian soldier who had fought by his side and had warned him against
his rashness. To men in later years there seemed to be something
prophetic, with the blended irony and pathos of prophecy, in the
picture of that dead Englishman, his scarlet coat torn and bloody with
so many wounds, lying in his grave while his American lieutenant read
over him the words that committed so much wasted courage to the earth.
At the time and hour the thing signified no more than the price of a
petty victory of allied French and Indians, which the Virginian soldier
was soon to avenge. After planting the banner of King George on the
ruins of Fort Duquesne, Captain Washington sheathed his sword and
retired from military into civil life, with as little likelihood as
desire of ever carrying arms again. All he asked and all he
anticipated was to live the tranquil life of a comfortable colonial
gentleman. After a youth that had been vexed by many experiences of
the passion of love he had married happily and wisely, and had settled
down to a gracious rural life at Mount Vernon, on the banks of the
Potomac River. He wished no better than to be a country gentleman,
with a country gentleman's pleasures and pursuits--farming, hunting,
fishing--with a country gentleman's friendships for neighbors like
himself. He was a dutiful servant of his State; he was a member of the
Virginia Houses of Burgesses for fifteen years after the fall of Fort
Duquesne, and though he seldom played any part in debate he commanded
the confidence and the esteem of his colleagues and of his
fellow-citizens. He lived and enjoyed a peaceful, honorable, useful,
uneventful life, and might have lived it to its end in dignified
obscurity if a rash and headstrong sovereign over-seas had not found
ministers too servile or too foolish to say him nay.

{181}

The Continental Congress, conscious of Washington's ability, offered
him the command of its improvised army. Washington accepted the duty,
well aware of its gravity, its danger, its awful responsibility. He
refused any pay beyond his actual expenses, and he entered upon a
struggle whose difficulties were not all or nearly all due to the enemy
in the sternest and noblest sense of duty to his countrymen and to the
principles of liberty. At first, in his own words, he loathed the ide