[Pamphlets. American history]

7
Washington by Hancock, the president of Congress, and was accepted on
the spot.
The commander, impressed with the imminence of the crisis, denied himself the sad privilege of a farewell in person to his own household, took
leave of his wife in a letter equally brave and tender, and on the 21st comnmenced his northward journey. Twenty miles firom Philadelphia he met a
courier with tidings of the battle of Bunker Hill. Eagerly inquiring as to
the details of the transaction, and learning the promptness, skill and courage that had made the day forever memorable, he exclaimed, " The liberties
of the country are safe!" A deputation from the Provincial Congress met
him at Springfield, and volunteer cavalcades gave him honorable attendance
from town to town, till, on the 2d of July, he arrived at Watertown, received
and returned the congratulatory address of the Congress there assembled,
and was then escorted by a company of horse and a goodly body of mounted
civilians to the president's house, now known as Wadsworth House. The
rapid journey on horseback from Philadelphia to Cambridge, and that in
part over rough roads-an enterprise beyond the easy conception of our
time-must have rendered the brief repose of that midsummer night essential
to the prestige of the morrow, when on the first impressions of the hour may
have been poised the destiny of the nation.
There were reasons why Washington not only might have been, but
would inevitably have been ill received, had lie not been made to win men's
confidence and love. Several of the officers already on the ground had
shown their capacity for great things, and had their respective circles of
admirers, who were reluctant to see them superseded by a stranger; and had
not the officers themselves manifested a magnanimity equal to their courage,
the camp would have been already distracted by hostile factions. Then,
too, the Virginian and New-England character, manners, style of speech,
modes of living, tastes, aptitudes, had much less in common at that time of
infrequent intercourse than half a century later, when, as we well know,
apart from political divergence, mere social differences were sufficient to
create no little mutual repugnancy. Washington was also well known to
be an Episcopalian, and Episcopacy, from the first offensive on Puritan soil,
was never more abhorred than now, when its Northern professors, with
hardly an exception, were openly hostile to the cause of the people,-when
in Cambridge almost every conspicuous dwelling from Fresh Pond to the
Inman House in Cambridgeport had been the residence of a refugee royalist
member of the English Church.
The morning of the third of July witnessed on the Cambridge Common,
and at every point of view in and upon the few surrounding houses, such a
multitude of men, women and children as had never been gathered here before, and perhaps has never since assembled till this very day. Never was