Professor Roberts, in his “History of Canada,” already cited, represents the migration of thirty thousand Americans to that country immediately after the Revolutionary War, as “no less far-reaching and significant in its results than the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.”
There have been those who regarded as the most noble and unselfish act of Washington’s public career, his patriotic protest against the demands of his unpaid, starving, and self-sacrificing comrades, that he accept royal dignity or else become the Oliver Cromwell of his generation. But the consideration, firmness, and justice with which he dismissed these mustered-out, disbanded royalists, and, in spite of abuse and outcry, assisted them to independence in a land of their own choice, adds another laurel to his chaplet as the magnanimous, no less than the great, soldier. The subsequent triumphal entry of Washington into the City of New York, on the twenty-fifth day of November, 1783, was the crowning military incident of the war.
The numerous Centennial observances in honor of events of the Revolution, since the second century of American Independence began, have helped to bring to light many family and other historical data which otherwise would have been lost; and all of these relating to the American Commander-in-Chief have only confirmed the world’s estimate of Washington the Soldier.
Words, at best, are feeble exponents of principles which actions so much better reveal; and battles on paper, however minutely described, can never expose the brain processes through which military orders are matured; nor can the pen portray the experiences of the “rank and file” of a suffering army, during such an ordeal of war as that in which George Washington was both the centra executive force and the sympathetic guardian of the rights of all, of whatever grade of service or duty. Stupidity, jealousy, self-sufficiency, personal ambition, and treason, could not survive their impact upon Washington. His mastery of every antagonistic force, whether professedly military or distinctly political, was due to that unsought but real supremacy which incarnated unselfish patriotism, and made American Independence the sole objective of a righteous judgment and an irresistible will.
On the eighth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, April 19, 1783, the American Commander-in-Chief proclaimed a formal “Cessation of hostilities between the United States and Great Britain,” as the result of negotiations concluded with Sir Guy Carleton on the previous day.
This Proclamation, like the Letter of Louis XVI., received at Valley Forge on the seventh day of May, 1778, was ordered to be read at the head of every regiment and corps of the army; after which, as the order reads:
“The chaplains with the several brigades will render thanks to Almighty God for all His mercies; particularly, for overruling the wrath of man to His own glory, and causing the rage of War to cease among the nations.
“On such a happy day, which is the harbinger of peace—a day which completes the eighth year of the war, it would be ingratitude not to rejoice; it would be insensibility not to participate in the general felicity.
“Happy, happy, thrice happy, shall they be pronounced, hereafter, who have contributed anything, who have performed the meanest office, in erecting this stupendous fabric of freedom and empire on the broad basis of independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of human nature, and in establishing an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.”