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Lieutenant Williams had been appalled to find prostitution so in evidence in what was supposedly the center of Puritanism—“There’s perhaps no town of its size could turn out more whores than this could,” he noted in his journal—and accuracy demanded that this, too, be shown on the map.
In truth, the situation was worse than they realized, and no one perceived this as clearly as Washington. Seeing things as they were, and not as he would wish them to be, was one of his salient strengths.
Rule Number One read: “Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those who are present.”)
(During the time he had been held prisoner, Lord Stirling had heard Hessian officers remark that they had never considered it their duty to inquire which of the two sides in the American controversy was right.) A
I hope this is the dark part of the night, which is generally just before day. —General Nathanael Greene
“The year 1776 is over. I am heartily glad of it and I hope you nor America will ever be plagued with such another,”
Pennsylvania Journal, he would be worshiped as a god. “If there are spots on his character, they are like the spots on the sun, only discernible by the magnifying powers of a telescope.”
He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.
The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate.
Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning—how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference—the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.
