few that many of the men were without covering at night. In the
warm summer weather this did not much matter but bleak autumn and harsh
winter would bring bitter privation. The sick in particular suffered
severely, for the hospitals were badly equipped.

A deep conviction inspired many of the volunteers. They regarded as
brutal tyranny the tax on tea, considered in England as a mild expedient
for raising needed revenue for defense in the colonies. The men of
Suffolk County, Massachusetts, meeting in September, 1774, had declared
in high-flown terms that the proposed tax came from a parricide who
held a dagger at their bosoms and that those who resisted him would earn
praises to eternity. From nearly every colony came similar utterances,
and flaming resentment at injustice filled the volunteer army. Many a
soldier would not touch a cup of tea because tea had been the ruin of
his country. Some wore pinned to their hats or coats the words "Liberty
or Death" and talked of resisting tyranny until "time shall be no more."
It was a dark day for the motherland when so many of her sons believed
that she was the enemy of liberty. The iron of this conviction entered
into the soul of the American nation; at Gettysburg, nearly a century
later, Abraham Lincoln, in a noble utterance which touched the heart of
humanity, could appeal to the days of the Revolution, when "our fathers
brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty." The
colonists believed that they were fighting for something of import to
all mankind, and the nation which they created believes it still.

An age of war furnishes, however, occasion for the exercise of baser
impulses. The New Englander was a trader by instinct. An army had come
suddenly together and there was golden promise of contracts for supplies
at fat profits. The leader from Virginia, untutored in such things, was
astounded at the greedy scramble. Before the year 1775 ended Washington
wrote to his friend Lee that he prayed God he might never again have to
witness such lack of public spirit, such jobbing and self-seeking,
such "fertility in all the low arts," as now he found at Cambridge.
He declared that if he could have foreseen all this nothing would have
induced him to take the command. Later, the young La Fayette, who had
left behind him in France wealth and luxury in order to fight a hard
fight in America, was shocked at the slackness and indifference among
the supposed patriots