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In the Revolutionary time the Indian was to the American what the "Hun" was to the anti-German propagandist. The difference is that it was only a few years after the World War when the propaganda weapons were recognized as empty shells, while the accusations against British atrocity in the use of Indians are still enshrined in the American museum of hate.

As a matter of fact, the English officers dreaded the American fondness for Indian allies, and Col. Bouquet had refused to heed Washington's prayers to use them on Forbes' expedition.

A hitherto unpublished letter of Washington's shows how little squeamish he was about scalps white or red. He wrote it in 1758:

"You yet seem to be unacquainted with the Villainy of the Raven Warrior and his Party. I shall therefore inform you, that he brought two White Men's Scalps from his Nation, and after making a small excursion from Fort Frederick in Maryland endeavourd to impose them upon us for some of the Enemy's, but being detected in the deception by the rest of the Warriors, & fearing the effects of their Resentment & being conscious of his own guilt thought proper to March of." 30

His horror was not at the taking of the white scalps, but at the pretence that they were the enemy's.

Propaganda is as good a weapon in war as poison gas, but it does not belong in the pages of honorable history. To allege that it was infamous of Burgoyne to bring Indians into the war against Americans, who had always used them, is carrying hypocrisy a trifle beyond the line of decency.

Out of Indians, "Boys, Deserters and Negroes," cowards, thieves, good honest blockheads, farmers, sailors, tradesmen, and heroes, Washington was expected to form a conquering machine.

Within gunshot of Boston, he accomplished what he ac

complished with the unwilling connivance of the British, who, from lack of energy and supplies, contented themselves with occasional bombardments, so casual that women and children gathered about the cannon to see the fun.

The cannon balls rarely did any damage, and the colonists chased them as they rolled, and pulled the flaming fuses out of the shells. On one occasion two men were killed trying to stop a projectile, but the soldiers were encouraged by the knowledge that everyone who took a British cannon ball to his captain received a gallon of rum.

In spite of the colonial need of powder, some of the soldiers shot at crows flying overhead, or fired off their arms in sheer hilarity till Washington threatened heavy penalties. Then they went outside the lines and wasted their powder on the atmosphere.

The camp resembled in many ways a county fair or a gigantic rural picnic, with an extraordinary amount of gambling going on-which Washington called "infamous" a strange word coming from such a devotee.

Bad as the troops were, the paucity of their numbers was worse. Washington wrote to Congress that it fell "so far short of the Establishment and below all Expectation.. I entertain some doubts whether the number required can be raised here." 81

In this first letter his patience was angelic:

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"This unhappy and devoted Province has been so long in a State of Anarchy, and the Yoke of ministerial Oppression has been laid so heavily on it that great Allowances are to be made. . . their Spirit has exceeded their Strength.'

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He ended with a wish for more immediate "Assistance and Direction" from Congress.

On the same day he wrote to his friend, Benjamin Harrison, a letter which is lost. It evidently bewailed his fatigues

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and troubles, judging from Harrison's reply, which in its turn was intercepted by the British.

It was published in the London Advertiser. In republishing it in the Gentleman's Magazine, some zealous hand seems to have added a famous and scandalous passage.

According to the revised version, Harrison described the attractions of a girl, "pretty little Kate the washerwoman's daughter" who came into the room where he was writing, and might have yielded to his blandishments if another woman had not happened in, "and but for the cursed antidote to love, Sukey, I had fitted her for my General against his return."

This whiff of persiflage is almost as blood-curdling as Franklin's witty handling of the thousand scalps, and it has delighted numberless people who hate to think of Washington as superhuman or, worse yet, sub-human.

The original manuscript of the letter is in the Public Record Office in London, but it does not contain this muchquoted passage at all. In the words of Mr. Fitzpatrick,32 "the brazen forgery seems to have been a facetious attempt to spice up a sober-toned, political news-letter."

He thinks it is the foundation for an even more famous mythical letter, which everybody quotes and nobody can find. According to this legendary epistle, Washington invited Jefferson (or Lafayette-or almost anyone else) to visit him at Mount Vernon, and promised the guest as an extra inducement the society of a mulatto maiden variously and vividly described.

The will-o'-the-wisp itself has not been more tauntingly dangled before the seekers than this letter, nor more vainly clutched at. Lodge 33 and other biographers confess their unavailing efforts to trace it; but the more it eludes the eye, the more it flits from mouth to ear.

It belongs in that undying undercurrent of scandal that

flows beneath the ice of Washington's public fame, and there is no evidence whatever that it ever existed, except in the imagination of the same playful malice that invented Benjamin Harrison's reference to the tawny Kate, the washerwoman's daughter.

In Harrison's actual letter the Congressman hints slyly at the Virginian antipathy to the New Englanders, saying that Washington's distresses "are not more than I expected, knowing the people you have to deal with by the sample we have here." Washington was soon expressing his disgust in language of no restraint, laying about him with a kind of bewildered ferocity in an abuse of nearly everything, and with abundant cause.

XXIII

HIS STRUGGLE TO BUILD AN ARMY

"W

E are in an exceedingly dangerous situation," Washington wrote to R. H. Lee on July 10, 1775. "We have but about sixteen thousand effective men in all this department, whereas, by the accounts which I received from even the first officers in command, I had no doubt of finding between eighteen and twenty thousand; out of these there are only fourteen thousand fit for duty...

"The abuses in this army, I fear, are considerable, and the new modelling of it, in the face of an enemy, from whom we every hour expect an attack, is exceedingly difficult and dangerous. If things therefore should not turn out as the Congress would wish, I hope they will make proper allowances." 1

The returns of strength which should have been ready in an hour, were put off and put off and were so imperfect that it took him eight days to find out what men he had. Three years later the army paper-work was still in such shape that some men were carried on the rolls after an absence of a year.

2

In his first letter to Congress Washington had begun that eternal cry of his about the nakedness of his men. He notes that they are "very deficient in necessary Cloathing." Back in 1754, a letter to Governor Dinwiddie on taking command of his first troops had said the same thing: they were "destitute of Cloaths. There is many of them without Shoes, other's wants Stockings.' He would keep up the cry throughout the war.

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