rber. In time, however, the authority
of military rank came to be respected throughout the whole army. An
amusing contrast with earlier conditions is found in 1779 when a captain
was tried by a brigade court-martial and dismissed from the service for
intimate association with the wagon-maker of the brigade.

The first thing to do at Cambridge was to get rid of the inefficient and
the corrupt. Washington had never any belief in a militia army. From
his earliest days as a soldier he had favored conscription, even in free
Virginia. He had then found quite ineffective the "whooping, holloing
gentlemen soldiers" of the volunteer force of the colony among whom
"every individual has his own crude notion of things and must undertake
to direct. If his advice is neglected he thinks himself slighted,
abused, and injured and, to redress his wrongs, will depart for his
home." Washington found at Cambridge too many officers. Then as later
in the American army there were swarms of colonels. The officers from
Massachusetts, conscious that they had seen the first fighting in the
great cause, expected special consideration from a stranger serving
on their own soil. Soon they had a rude awakening. Washington broke a
Massachusetts colonel and two captains because they had proved
cowards at Bunker Hill, two more captains for fraud in drawing pay and
provisions for men who did not exist, and still another for absence
from his post when he was needed. He put in jail a colonel, a major, and
three or four other officers. "New lords, new laws," wrote in his diary
Mr. Emerson, the chaplain: "the Generals Washington and Lee are upon
the lines every day... great distinction is made between officers and
soldiers."

The term of all the volunteers in Washington's any expired by the end of
1775, so that he had to create a new army during the siege of Boston. He
spoke scornfully of an enemy so little enterprising as to remain supine
during the process. But probably the British were wise to avoid a
venture inland and to remain in touch with their fleet. Washington made
them uneasy when he drove away the cattle from the neighborhood. Soon
beef was selling in Boston for as much as eighteen pence a pound. Food
might reach Boston in ships but supplies even by sea were insecure, for
the Americans soon had privateers manned by seamen familiar with New
England waters and happy in expected gains from prize money. The British
were anxious about the elementary pr