were
bitter at Howe's inactivity, full of tragic meaning for themselves. He
said that he could achieve nothing permanent by attack. It may be so;
but it is a sound principle in warfare to destroy the enemy when this
is possible. There was a time when in Washington's whole force not
more than two thousand men were in a condition to fight. Congress
was responsible for the needs of the army but was now, in sordid
inefficiency, cooped up in the little town of York, eighty miles west
of Valley Forge, to which it had fled. There was as yet no real federal
union. The seat of authority was in the State Governments, and we need
not wonder that, with the passing of the first burst of devotion which
united the colonies in a common cause, Congress declined rapidly in
public esteem. "What a lot of damned scoundrels we had in that second
Congress" said, at a later date, Gouverneur Morris of Philadelphia to
John Jay of New York, and Jay answered gravely, "Yes, we had." The body,
so despised in the retrospect, had no real executive government, no
organized departments. Already before Independence was proclaimed there
had been talk of a permanent union, but the members of Congress had
shown no sense of urgency, and it was not until November 15, 1777, when
the British were in Philadelphia and Congress was in exile at York, that
Articles of Confederation were adopted. By the following midsummer many
of the States had ratified these articles, but Maryland, the last
to assent, did not accept the new union until 1781, so that Congress
continued to act for the States without constitutional sanction during
the greater part of the war.

The ineptitude of Congress is explained when we recall that it was
a revolutionary body which indeed controlled foreign affairs and the
issues of war and peace, coined money, and put forth paper money but
had no general powers. Each State had but one vote, and thus a small and
sparsely settled State counted for as much as populous Massachusetts
or Virginia. The Congress must deal with each State only as a unit; it
could not coerce a State; and it had no authority to tax or to coerce
individuals. The utmost it could do was to appeal to good feeling, and
when a State felt that it had a grievance such an appeal was likely to
meet with a flaming retort.

Washington maintained towards Congress an attitude of deference
and courtesy which it did not always deserve. The ablest men in the
individual States held aloof