Scouting, Volume 60, Number 1, January-February 1972 Page: 3
68, [20] p. : ill. ; 28 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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GEORGE WASHINGTON:
THE SYMBOL
AND THE MAN
ing and card playing, good food,
good talk and riding out to watch
his hunting dogs dash across dew-
wet fields. He was gloriously alive
always, and at the beginning of the
war, in black velvet with red bows
at his knees could dance for 3
hours straight. But the time had not
yet come when he had to dance
every set so admiring ladies could
"get a touch of him." He was so tall,
over 6 feet; his hands and feet were
so big; his very masculinity over-
whelmed the ladies.
Even at Mt. Vernon, he knew defeat
and despair. He had lost his father
and the beloved older brother who
was like a father to him. He well
knew "the inflammable matter in the
human heart," having hopelessly
loved his best friend's wife. His later
marriage to the tiny, exquisitely femi-
nine Martha Custis was a happy one,
yet the children he longed for never
came. He yearned for one great ad-
venture, never reckoning on what he
had found.
"The most unlikely of rebels," he
had everything to lose in the revolu-
tionary cause: his great fortune, his
fame, his honor, and as a "damn'd
rebel," if captured, life itself. Once,
it had been his pride to serve Eng-
land. But now, he put himself on the
line, at last convinced that the very
rights of Englishmen were at stake.
They were all so English still, these
Colonials; Virginia had the very look
and feel of the British countryside;
New England repeated old England,
with its little villages clustered
around the greens.
So Washington sat quietly in the
Continental Congress, as he was later
to sit in the Constitutional Conven-
tion, a big man in uniform, with a big
nose, and the look of authority and
purpose that big men often have. It
was as a symbol that he wore his
uniform and sat so quietly. The Con-
gress had looked at him and the way
he held his head, and heard John
Adams hail him as the one man who
could draw the northern and south-
ern colonies together. They agreed;
they named him to the command. He
had had 3 days' combat experience;
in Philadelphia he purchased five
books on the art of war, with which
to repel the finest fighting force in the
world.
Off to Massachusetts he had gone,
to whip a disheveled, undisciplined
militia into an army. He had looked in
amazement at an officer shaving a
private, a sentry refusing to salute.
He stood, in frozen anger, when he
found out how little gunpowder there
was, how Bunker Hill, itself, had been
lost for want of ammunition. Yet,
somehow, he "accomplished mira-
cles" among the soldiers.
Bottled up in Boston, Howe with-
drew to New York. Washington fol-
lowed. He had four small brass can-
non and an army of 10,000 men that
was continually melting away. Like a
hound after a fox, Howe hunted them
down. At Long Island, Washington
stood helpless, tears rolling down ^
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Boy Scouts of America. Scouting, Volume 60, Number 1, January-February 1972, periodical, January 1972; New Brunswick, New Jersey. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth353658/m1/7/: accessed May 1, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Boy Scouts of America National Scouting Museum.