is, in these days there was no officer's duty with which Washington was not acquainted. He supervised the building of forts, the transportation of stores and guns and ammunition, here reprimanding a coarse mountaineer for profanity, there leading the scouts as they threshed a mountain for lurking Delawares; he personally hurried off wagons to endangered outposts with flour and powder, and then listened to and quieted the fears of frantic women and men.
Is the splendid lesson of these years clear? By Providential dispensation these colonies were a miniature of the America of 1775, suddenly thrown upon its own resources and in war. The divine hand is not more clearly seen in our national development than in the struggle of the colonies between 1745 and 1763, which prepared a nation for the hour her independence should strike. And now it was that Washington, Gates, Mercer, Gladwin, Lewis, Putnam, Crawford, Gibson, Stephen, St. Clair, and Stewart learned for themselves and then taught their countrymen to fight; now Washington found what it meant to
