Greene, would attend his chief in the siege of Boston; fortify Brooklyn Heights; engage in operations about Forts Washington and Lee; take part in the battles of Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Newport, and Springfield; would then succeed Gates at the south, fight the battles of Guilford Court-House, Hobkirk Hill, and Eutaw Springs, and close his life in Georgia, the adopted home of his declining years.
But, during the midsummer of 1775, the beleaguered City of Boston, astounded by the stolid and bloody resistance to its guardian garrison, began to measure the cost of loyalty to the King, in preference to loyalty to country and duty; while the enclosed patriots began to assure themselves that deliverance was drawing near. Burgoyne, after watching the battle from Copp’s Hill, in writing to England of this “great catastrophe,” prepared the Crown for that large demand for troops upon which he afterwards conditioned his acceptance of a command in America.
The days of waiting for a distinct battle-issue had been fulfilled. The days of waiting for the consolidation of the armies about Boston, under one competent guide and master, also passed. Washington had left Philadelphia and was journeying toward Cambridge.
WASHINGTON AT FOUR PERIODS OF HIS MILITARY CAREER.
[Etching from H. H. Hall’s Sons’ engraving.]
CHAPTER V.
WASHINGTON IN COMMAND.
On the twenty-first day of June, 1775, Washington left Philadelphia for Boston, and on the third day of July assumed command of the Continental Army of America, with headquarters at Cambridge.
At this point one is instinctively prompted to peer into the closed tent of the Commander-in-Chief and observe his modest, but wholly self-reliant attitude toward the grave questions that are to be settled, in determining whether the future destiny of America is to be that of liberty, or abject submission to the Crown.
For fully two months the yeomanry of New England had firmly grasped all approaches to the City of Boston. This pressure was now and then resisted by efforts of the garrison to secure supplies from the surrounding country farms; which only induced a tighter hold, and aroused a stubborn purpose to crowd that garrison to surrender, or escape by sea. The islands of the beautiful bay and of the Nantasket roadstead had become miniature fields of daily conflict; and persistent efforts to procure bullocks, flour, and other needed provisions, through the boats of the British fleet, only developed a counter system of boat operations which neutralized the former, and gradually restricted the country excursions of the troops within the city to the range of their guns.
And yet the beleaguering force had fluctuated every day, so that but few of the hastily improvised regiments maintained either identity of persons, or permanent numbers. Exchanges were frequent between those on duty and others at their homes. The sudden summons from so many and varied industrial pursuits and callings was like the unorganized rush of men at an alarm of fire, quickened by the conviction that some wide, sweeping, and common danger was to be withstood, or some devouring element to be mastered. The very independence of opinion and sense of oppression which began to assert a claim to absolutely independent nationality, became impatient of all restraint, until military control, however vital to organized success, had become tiresome, offensive, and sharply contested. Offices also, as in more modern times, had been conferred upon those who secured enlistments, and too often without regard to character or signal merit; while the familiarities of former neighborhood friends and acquaintances ill-fitted them to bear rigid control by those who had been, only just before, companions on a common level.