a
of independence. He only took up arms to defend cherished rights; the
day was not yet, though the day was not far off, when the Virginian
soldier would renounce his allegiance to the King whose commission he
had carried and to the country from which his race stemmed.
Washington's military genius soon showed itself in the use he made of
the loose, incoherent, disorganized mass of men which was called the
Continental Army. It was fortunate for the Continental cause that the
English generals, penned up within the walls of Boston, had little idea
of the obstacles Washington had to overcome, the opposition he had to
encounter, the sore straits to which the want of everything essential
to a besieging army drove him. But his indomitable courage, his
unfailing coolness, his unconquerable resource overcame a sea of
troubles that might well have swept even a strong man and a brave
soldier off his feet. With regiment after regiment quietly disbanding
as their term of service expired; with a plentiful lack of powder, of
arms, of provisions, of uniforms; with a force that at moments
threatened to dissolve into nothingness and leave him with a handful of
generals alone beneath his insurgent flag, Washington never allowed the
enemy, and seldom allowed a friend, to guess how near at times he came
to despair. He raised troops somehow; he got provisions somehow;
somehow he managed to obtain powder; somehow he managed to obtain arms.
The want of weapons was so great that many bodies of men were only
provided with pikes, and that Franklin was driven to suggest, and
partly in a spirit of humanity, that American farmers fighting for
their liberty should be armed with the bows and arrows of the red {182}
men, and should strive to renew upon the fields of Massachusetts the
successes of their ancestors, the yeomen of Agincourt, with their
clothyard shafts.

The generals shut up in Boston knew nothing of the cares that harassed
the mind of Washington. All they knew was that they were closely
beleaguered; that they were cooped up in Boston by a large if irregular
army, and that they could not get out. They affected, of course, to
despise their enemy. At the private theatricals which were given to
divert the enforced leisure of Lord Howe an actor who came on as a
caricature of Washington, attired like a military scarecrow, never
failed to please. Burgoyne was confident that sooner or later he could
find that "elbow-room" the ungratifie