The Youth of Washington: Told in the Form of an Autobiography

by S. Weir Mitchell

As I was about to begin, Lieutenant-Colonel Burton came forward with a flag and laid it decently over the dead man. Then he placed on it his sword, and fell back, and all uncovered. After this I read slowly, for the light was yet dim, the service of the church. This being over, the men lowered the body into the grave and filled it up with earth, and cast stones and bushes over it. No guard was ordered, and no volley fired, lest, as was said, it might be heard by the enemy, which appeared to me foolish, for there was noise enough, and at any minute one hundred men in the woods would have routed the whole camp.

Thus died a man whose good and bad qualities were intimately blended. He was brave even to a fault and in regular service would have done honour to the army. His attachments were warm, his enmities were strong, and, having no disguise about him, both appeared in full force. He was generous and disinterested, but plain and blunt in his manner, even to rudeness.

Dunbar made haste to get away, and I was not less pleased to be out of an ill-contrived business.

This affair was a serious blow to the belief in the colonies as to the high value of the King’s soldiers. It became like a proverb in Virginia to say a man “ran like a regular.”

Mr. Franklin said to me long afterwards that this disaster gave us the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the powers of British regular troops had not been well founded, and indeed I am assured that when Lord Percy’s and Colonel Pitcairn’s force was put to flight at Lexington the older farmers on our own frontiers, when they knew what had been done, were less amazed than the minute-men of Massachusetts.

We reached Wills Creek on the 18th, as Morris said, the worst-beaten army that had not been in battle. Colonel Dunbar did not require my aid, and my general being dead, my service as a volunteer was at an end.

The march to the settlements was most disgraceful—all in cowardly haste to get out of the wilderness. I am satisfied that no troops are so given to pillage as a retreating army, and certainly none was ever worse conducted by the officers or more disorderly than Colonel Dunbar’s force. The settlers and outlying farms near Fort Cumberland suffered much; men and women were misused, and chickens and cattle stolen. I heard afterwards that in their march through Pennsylvania Dunbar’s men plundered and insulted the farmers still worse, and were quite enough, Mr. Franklin said, to put us out of all patience with such defenders.

I bade good-by to the aides of the general, and would have had Orme and Morris go home with me to be cared for by Dr. Craik, but they preferred to go on to Philadelphia. They were much dispirited, but had only warm praise for my Virginia rangers. I was in no better humour, and felt, as I rode away, that we were on the edge of an awful crisis for the border counties. The favourable sentiments Sir John St. Clair and Colonel Burton were pleased to express respecting me could not but be pleasing; but the situation of our affairs was, to my mind, so serious as to put me into one of my melancholic moods and to make me feel, as I often did in the greater war, that, what with want of patriotism and lack of spirit, only that Providence in which I have always trusted could carry us through a great peril. As usual, a brisk ride jolted me into a more hopeful state of mind.

I lay for a day at Winchester in a poor tavern, cared for by the general’s man, Bishop. There, to my comfort, came Lord Fairfax, who had the kindness to bring with him a good horse, which I was the better pleased to have because what became of the horse the general would have had me have I was never able to hear. His lordship insisted that I rest at Greenway Court until I was more fit to travel. I had here many letters; one said that I was given up for killed, and there was come a long story about my dying speech. My mother was in a sad worry about me, and when she received my letter contradicting my death, and that I had never composed any dying speech, she declared I was always making her anxious and had no right to distress her by doing things that gave her occasion to think I was dead. His lordship overcame my objections, and I remained with him at the court several days, well pleased to be at rest.

When alone with Lord Fairfax, he showed me the affection and concern which, like myself, he was averse to displaying in company. After I had been made to give him a full account of the march and the battle, he said: “You will be wise to write and to say little of what took place, and to let others say what they will. The men who, having done something worthy of praise, do not incline to speak of it, are sure to be enough spoken of by others.”