ne, military figure.
George Washington alone attended the sittings in uniform. This colonel
from Virginia, now in his forty-fourth year, was a great landholder, an
owner of slaves, an Anglican churchman, an aristocrat, everything that
stands in contrast with the type of a revolutionary radical. Yet from
the first he had been an outspoken and uncompromising champion of the
colonial cause. When the tax was imposed on tea he had abolished the use
of tea in his own household and when war was imminent he had talked of
recruiting a thousand men at his own expense and marching to Boston. His
steady wearing of the uniform seemed, indeed, to show that he regarded
the issue as hardly less military than political.

The clash at Lexington, on the 19th of April, had made vivid the reality
of war. Passions ran high. For years there had been tension, long
disputes about buying British stamps to put on American legal papers,
about duties on glass and paint and paper and, above all, tea. Boston
had shown turbulent defiance, and to hold Boston down British soldiers
had been quartered on the inhabitants in the proportion of one soldier
for five of the populace, a great and annoying burden. And now British
soldiers had killed Americans who stood barring their way on Lexington
Green. Even calm Benjamin Franklin spoke later of the hands of British
ministers as "red, wet, and dropping with blood." Americans never forgot
the fresh graves made on that day. There were, it is true, more British
than American graves, but the British were regarded as the aggressors.
If the rest of the colonies were to join in the struggle, they must have
a common leader. Who should he be?

In June, while the Continental Congress faced this question at
Philadelphia, events at Boston made the need of a leader more urgent.
Boston was besieged by American volunteers under the command of General
Artemas Ward. The siege had lasted for two months, each side watching
the other at long range. General Gage, the British Commander, had the
sea open to him and a finely tempered army upon which he could rely. The
opposite was true of his opponents. They were a motley host rather than
an army. They had few guns and almost no powder. Idle waiting since
the fight at Lexington made untrained troops restless and anxious to go
home. Nothing holds an army together like real war, and shrewd officers
knew that they must give the men some hard task to keep up their
fighting spirit. It wa