s plan been adopted, much useless
expenditure of money and shedding of blood would have been avoided. As
it was, the cunning and watchful foe, whose motions were swift as the
birds, and secret as death, could pass between these forts, not only
unopposed, but even unobserved, and, without let or hinderance, lay
waste the country for the protection of which they had been built.
Under this most melancholy state of things, all the region west of the
Blue Ridge was fast becoming the dreary and silent wilderness it had
been in days gone by. Scarcely a shadow of its former population was
left: some had fled to the forts for refuge; some had resettled in the
eastern parts of the province; some had been carried away into cruel
captivity; and many, very many, had met with a horrible death at the
hands of the merciless invaders.

As if all this we have just related were not enough to try the
patience and fortitude of young Washington, evil reports, injurious to
his character, and charging him with being the author of all these
failures and calamities, were set agoing by secret enemies at home.
Foremost among these, you will be surprised and sorry to learn, was
Gov. Dinwiddie, who had for some time past regarded with a jealous and
envious eye this rising hope of the land, and was now seeking, by a
variety of underhand means, to have him disgraced from the service,
that Col. Innez, a particular chum of his, might be advanced to the
chief command of the Virginia troops instead. The lower offices of the
army he was zealous to bestow upon a knot of needy adventurers, who,
being Scotchmen like himself, were in high favor with him, and
scrupled not to make his likes and dislikes their own, if, by so
doing, they could further their own private advantage. Perhaps Gov.
Dinwiddie himself may not have been the direct author of these
reports; but it is quite certain that his hungry hangers-on would
never have dared whisper them had they not been fully aware of the
ill-will he bore the person by whose injury they hoped to profit, and
that they had but to do the thing, when their patron would not only
wink at it, but even give it his secret approval.

When these malicious whisperings came to the ears of Washington, he
was stung to the quick by such unfair and unmerited treatment. Feeling
assured in his own conscience that he had done his whole duty as far
as in him lay, all his strong and manly nature was roused to indignant
anger, that his fa