[154] Washington to Dinwiddie, July 18, 1755.
[155] Same date. Washington revisited the region in October, 1770, but the entries in his journal contain no allusion to previous events: "We lodged [at Fort Pitt] in what is called the town, about three hundred yards from the fort.... These houses, which are built of logs, and ranged into streets, are on the Monongahela, and, I suppose, may be twenty in number, and inhabited by Indian traders, etc. The fort is built on the point between the rivers Allegheny and Monongahela, but not so near the pitch of it as Fort Duquesne."
[156] To Richard Washington, merchant, London; from Fort Loudoun, April 15, 1757. The same letter enlightens us as to Washington's tastes concerning things material. He orders "sundry things" to be sent him from London, adding: "Whatever goods you may send me where the prices are not absolutely limited, you will let them be fashionable, neat and good in their several kinds." Same tastes shown in his letter to Robert Cary and Co., ordering a chariot "in the new taste, handsome, genteel, and light," painted preferably green, but in that he would be "governed by fashion." (June 6, 1768.) The chariot was sent in September; it was green, "all the framed work of the body gilt, handsome scrawl, shields, ornamented with flowers all over the panels."
[157] Mount Vernon, April 5, 1765.
[158] This continued until the proclamation of independence. By letter of March 19, 1776, Washington notified the President of Congress of the taking of Boston, and the retreat of the "ministerial army." The flag of the "insurgents" was then the British flag with thirteen white and red stripes, emblematic of the thirteen colonies.
[159] An appointment accepted in a characteristically modest spirit, as shown by his letter to his "dear Patsy," his wife, giving her the news, and that to Colonel Bassett, where he says: "I can answer but for three things, a firm belief in the justice of our cause, close attention in the prosecution of it, and the strictest integrity. If these cannot supply the place of ability and experience, the cause will suffer, and, more than probable, my character along with it, as reputation derives its principal support from success." June 9, 1775.
[160] To his brother, John, December 18, 1776.
[161] August 19, 1777.
[162] November 14, 1778.
[163] To Washington, June 15, 1777. Same impression later (1785) on Lafayette, who saw the Prussian grand manœuvres, and sent an account of them to Washington: "The Prussian army is a perfectly regular piece of machinery.... All the situations which may be imagined in war, all the movements which they may cause, have been by constant habit so well inculcated in their heads that all those operations are performed almost mechanically." February 8, 1786. Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette, Bruxelles, 1838, I, 204.
[164] Pp. 10 ff.
[165] To General Sullivan, September, 1778.
[166] December 12, 1779.
[167] To President Reed, May 28, 1780.
[168] "Before York," October 12, 1781.
[169] To Lafayette, October 20, 1782.
[170] February 6, 1783.
[171] Sending him a farewell letter in which he said: "You may rest assured that your abilities and dispositions to serve this country were so well understood, and your service so properly appreciated that the residence of no public minister will ever be longer remembered or his absence more sincerely regretted. It will not be forgotten that you were a witness to the dangers, the sufferings, the exertions and the successes of the United States from the most perilous crises to the hour of triumph." February 7, 1788.
[172] They merely sanctioned some territorial exchanges and restitutions on both sides in the colonies, and stipulated that the British agent in Dunkirk, who had been expelled at the beginning of the war, would not return.
[173] March 29, 1783.
[174] Princeton, October 12, 1783. He started for that journey the following autumn.
[175] September 10, 1791.
[176] Mount Vernon, April 4, 1784.
[177] December 8, 1784. Bayard Tuckerman, Lafayette, 1889, I, 165.
[178] July 25, 1785.
[179] "Excellence, Vos vertus civiles et vos talents militaires ont donné à votre patrie la liberté et le bonheur; mais leur influence sur celui du globe entier est encore préférable à mes yeux. C'est à ce grand but que tend tout homme qui se sent digne d'arriver a l'immortalité," etc. May 28, 1789. Papers of the Continental Congress, LXXVIII, 759, Library of Congress.
[180] June 22, 1784. Jean Antoine Houdon, by C.H. Hart and Ed. Biddle, Philadelphia, 1911, p. 182.
[181] Ibid., p. 189. Peale's full-length portrait, with "a perspective view of York and Gloucester, and the surrender of the British army," price thirty guineas, reached Paris in April, 1785, and has since disappeared.
[182] July 10, 1785. Ibid., p. 191.
[183] Above, p. 12.
[184] Amsterdam, 1783. The author is strongly anti-English and is indignant at the "guilty Anglomania" still existing in France.
[185] In the Mercure de France, 1785, prefacing a review of Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer, and reproduced at the beginning of the French edition of the Letters, 1787.
[186] Observations sur le gouvernement et les loix des Etats Unis d'Amérique, Amsterdam, 1784, 12mo; in the form of letters to John Adams. The Constitutions under discussion are those of the original States. "Tandis," says Mably, "que presque toutes les nations de l'Europe ignorent les principes constitutifs de la société et ne regardent les citoyens que comme les bestiaux d'une ferme qu'on gouverne pour l'avantage particulier du propriétaire, on est étonné, on est édifié que vos treize Républiques ayent connu à la fois la dignité de l'homme et soient allé puiser dans les sources de la plus sage philosophie les principes humains par lesquels elles veulent se gouverner." (P. 2.)