The ignorant criticism of the time is well illustrated from the dark winter days of Valley Forge. There, so little had Congress done for the army, the soldiers were literally starving. Most of them were barefoot, and so poorly provided that they had to sit up all night close to their camp-fire in order to keep from freezing. And yet the legislature of Pennsylvania issued a stern remonstrance against their going into winter quarters. Washington must keep to the open field and be in continual operation against the well-fed, thoroughly trained and highly equipped British troops.
Washington closed a letter to Congress, saying, in referring to those who thus condemned him, “They seem to have little feeling for the naked and distressed soldiers. I feel superabundantly for them, and from my soul I pity those miseries which it is neither in my power to relieve nor prevent.”
As in our own times, big business found opportunity to fatten itself on the needs of the people. The greatness of Washington is in startling evidence when it is seen how he not only had to conduct a war and guide an unprovided army split up into rival sections, but he had to be statesman and diplomat enough to manage a menagerie of ideas ranging through the congressional sessions like animals broken loose in a circus. Each one was trying to perform something that was in effect worse than nothing. The representatives of the people gathered in the American capital have often since that time repeated the original show.
III. THE STRONG MIND FOR GREAT NEEDS
The union that is strength is always slow in the making. Minds get together slowly wherever there is freedom in thinking for thought-out individual responsibility.
In writing to Benjamin Harrison, Washington pointed out how detrimental it was for each colony to be centering itself on its own prosperity. To Colonel Joseph Reed, December, 1778, he wrote more freely of the “monopolizers, forestallers, and engrossers” who were “murderers of our cause.”
“It is much to be lamented,” he said, “that each state, long ere this, has not hunted them down as pests to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America. I would to God that some one of the most atrocious in each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the man who can build his greatness upon his country’s ruin.”
This shows how Washington loathed meanness and treachery and how he minced no words in saying so. Only such men are leaders of men. No man who believes anything and is afraid to say it has a place in the political meaning of America.
Benjamin Harrison, full of the same righteous resentment, writes at the time, “If I were to be called upon to draw a picture of the times and of men, from what I have seen, heard, and in part know, I should in one word say that idleness, dissipation, and extravagance seem to have laid fast hold of most of them; that speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration, and almost every order of men; that party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day.”
And so, to one patriot and then to another, Washington appealed for help to save the wasting fortunes of his country.