Excerpt from Washington and Lincoln Portraits

So far as it can be true that any one man ever did win a war, George Washington won the Revolution single-handed. He did not so much lead the Ameri can people, as drag them after him to a victory and an independence which they had not entirely made up their minds to seek. Washington was born as he thought to poverty, trained himself to make his own way in the world, and when he unexpectedly in herited a great fortune found himself well fitted to make the best use of it. To years of hard labor and outdoor life, he owed his vigorous constitution and physical endurance; his Indian campaigns and ser vice under Braddock made him the Only man in the colonies with any considerable actual experience in military matters and the only man acquainted with the effect upon British troops of the conditions under which a war would have to be fought here. He knew from experience the hopelessness of conducting a wilderness campaign upon the European model, and he never forgot it. The final victory in the Revolu tion we owe to his keen use of the topography of the country to create an impregnable defense. He was one of those rare men who loom gigantic before the eyes of their contemporaries. Somehow he possessed that rarer thing than genius, more intangible than magnetism, a superlative sanity and probity. Scarce ly a dozen men have ever possessed m all history the confidence of a great body of men to the degree he did. Their willingness to follow him without asking explanations or expecting comprehension of the reasons is one of the decisive factors in the movements of the time. His personal influence kept an army in the field during the war, held the jarring statesmen together till the Constitution was formed, and then set the new government on its feet. One cannot con-celve of the Revolution without him. He is in the truest sense the father of the present' nation. Had colonial America never developed into the United States, it would still be famous in history because it had produced such a man as Washington.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.