George Washington | Page 9

western settlements in alarm but agitated the tidewater towns and
villages. The Burgesses and many of the inhabitants had not yet learned
their lesson sufficiently to set about reorganizing their army system, but
the Assembly partially recognized its obligation to the men who had
fought by voting to them a small sum for losses during their previous
service. Washington received £300, but his patriotic sense of duty kept
him active. In the winter of 1758, however, owing to a very serious
illness, he resigned from the army and returned to Mount Vernon to
recuperate.
During the long and tedious weeks of sickness and recovery,
Washington doubtless had time to think over, to clarify in his mind, and
to pass judgment on the events in which he had shared during the past
six or seven years. From boyhood that was his habit. He must know the
meaning of things. An event might be as fruitless as a shooting star

unless he could trace the relations which tied it to what came before
and after. Hence his deliberation which gave to his opinions the solidity
of wisdom. Audacious he might be in battle, but perhaps what seems to
us audacity seemed to him at the moment a higher prudence. If there
were crises when the odds looked ten to one against him, he would take
the chance. He knew the incalculable value of courage. His experiences
with the British regulars and their officers left a deep impression on
him and colored his own decisions in his campaigns against the British
during the Revolutionary War. To genius nothing comes amiss, and by
genius nothing is forgotten. So we find that all that Washington saw
and learned during his years of youth--his apprenticeship as surveyor,
his vicissitudes as pioneer, tasks as Indian fighter and as companion of
the defeated Braddock--all contributed to fit him for the supreme work
for which Fate had created him and the ages had waited.
CHAPTER II
MARRIAGE. THE LIFE OF A PLANTER
War is like the wind, nobody can tell into whose garden it may blow
desolation. The French and Indian War, generally called now the Seven
Years' War, beginning as a mere border altercation between the British
and French backwoodsmen on the banks of the upper Ohio River, grew
into a struggle which, by the year 1758, when Washington retired from
his command of the Virginia Forces, spread over the world. A new
statesman, one of the ablest ever born in England, came to control the
English Government. William Pitt, soon created Earl of Chatham, saw
that the British Empire had reached a crisis in its development.
Incompetence, inertia, had blurred its prestige, and the little victories
which France, its chief enemy, had been winning against it piecemeal,
were coming to be regarded as signs that the grandeur of Britain was
passing. Pitt saw the gloomy situation, and the still gloomier future
which it seemed to prophesy, but he saw also the remedy. Within a few
months, under his direction, English troops were in every part of the
world, and English ships of war were sailing every ocean, to recover
the slipping elements and to solidify the British Empire. Just as Pitt was
taking up his residence at Downing Street, Robert Clive was winning

the Battle of Plassey in India, which brought to England territory of
untold wealth. Two years later James Wolfe, defeating the French
commander, Montcalm, on the Plains of Abraham, added not only
Quebec, but all Canada, to the British Crown, and ended French rivalry
north of the Great Lakes. Victories like these, seemingly so casual,
really as final and as unrevisable as Fate, might well cause Englishmen
to suspect that Destiny itself worked with them, and that an Englishman
could be trusted to endure through any difficulties to a triumphant
conclusion.
Beaten at every point where they met the British, the French, even after
they had secured an alliance with Spain, which proved of little worth,
were glad to make peace. On February 10, 1763, they signed the Treaty
of Paris, which confirmed to the British nearly all their victories and
left England the dominant Power in both hemispheres. The result of the
war produced a marked effect on the people of the British Colonies in
North America. "At no period of time," says Chief Justice Marshall, in
his "Life of Washington," "was the attachment of the colonists to the
mother country more strong, or more general, than in 1763, when the
definitive articles of the treaty which restored peace to Great Britain,
France, and Spain, were signed."[1] But we who know the sequel
perceive that the Seven Years' War not only strengthened the
attachment between the Colonies and the Mother Country, but that it
also made the Colonies aware of their common interests, and awakened