Mary Ball Washington by Craig Shirley

Author:Craig Shirley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Off to War

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

1775‒1783

“I shall be ready to receive the misled with tenderness and mercy.”

George Washington returned to Mount Vernon from Fredericksburg on the last day of March 1775, after dropping off his yearly allowance to Mary and dining with Fielding and Betty Lewis. On April 19, 1775, the weather was clear, but a hard wind from the west battered George’s Mount Vernon home. That night, two of his indentured servants, twenty-year-old Thomas Spears of Bristol and thirty-year-old William Webster of Scotland, sailed away from the plantation, taking a small yawl with them. George offered a hefty reward for their return.1 Indentured servants and slaves were prone to escape, to ironically seek that same freedom that the colonists and landowners wanted (in fact, Webster himself had previously run away); but overall, April 19, 1775, was normal.

In Massachusetts that day, something entirely different happened. There was no preparation for war. There was war. In the early dawn hours, at 5:00 a.m., British troops led by Commander Francis Smith, at least four hundred in number, entered a town northwest from Boston named Lexington with the intent of arresting and confiscating the revolutionary leaders and armaments. A battle broke out, with the band of misfit militiamen surprisingly driving out the professional redcoats. About eighteen Americans were killed or wounded. Two hours later, in Concord, farther west, the same British companies entered the town and were similarly repelled by what were becoming known as the Minute Men. That day, there were one hundred colonist causalities, but over two hundred British were dead and wounded. It was a decisive victory.2

Washington himself was “sobered and dismayed” by the news; writing to George Fairfax in late May, he noted that “unhappy it is though to reflect, that a Brother’s Sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative!”3 Whatever peace they had built up or tried to build, whatever pleas to the king, it was for naught.

War had come to America. In lore, the firing by the Americans at Lexington and Concord became forever known as “the shot heard ’round the world.”

THE DATE OF THE SECOND CONTINENTAL CONGRESS WAS ESTABLISHED AT the close of their first meeting and could not have come at a better time. Delegates met at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia on May 10, with a simple question: since no tension had abated, what should they do? The answer, however, was not so simple. Unlike the first, this congress would last until March of 1781, a period of nearly six years, through war, through upheaval, and through independence.

Militiamen and civilians welcomed incoming delegates at the outskirts of Philadelphia, making this a different and more popular—perhaps more urgent—congress. “The spirit of almost everything that day seemed encouragingly different” than those eight months earlier.4

For its day, the congress worked quickly.

On Wednesday, June 14, 1775, a Continental Army was formed.

The next day,

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