Religion offered its consolations in the army and Washington gave much thought to the service of the chaplains.He told his army that fine as it was to be a patriot it was finer still to be a Christian.It is an odd fact that, though he attended the Anglican Communion service before and after the war, he did not partake of the Communion during the war.What was in his mind we do not know.He was disposed, as he said himself, to let men find "that road to Heaven which to them shall seem the most direct,"and he was without Puritan fervor, but he had deep religious feeling.During the troubled days at Valley Forge a neighbor came upon him alone in the bush on his knees praying aloud, and stole away unobserved.He would not allow in the army a favorite Puritan custom of burning the Pope in effigy, and the prohibition was not easily enforced among men, thousands of whom bore scriptural names from ancestors who thought the Pope anti-Christ.
Washington's winter quarters at Valley Forge were only twenty miles from Philadelphia, among hills easily defended.It is matter for wonder that Howe, with an army well equipped, did not make some attempt to destroy the army of Washington which passed the winter so near and in acute distress.The Pennsylvania Loyalists, with dark days soon to come, were bitter at Howe's inactivity, full of tragic meaning for themselves.He said that he could achieve nothing permanent by attack.It may be so; but it is a sound principle in warfare to destroy the enemy when this is possible.There was a time when in Washington's whole force not more than two thousand men were in a condition to fight.
Congress was responsible for the needs of the army but was now, in sordid inefficiency, cooped up in the little town of York, eighty miles west of Valley Forge, to which it had fled.There was as yet no real federal union.The seat of authority was in the State Governments, and we need not wonder that, with the passing of the first burst of devotion which united the colonies in a common cause, Congress declined rapidly in public esteem.
"What a lot of damned scoundrels we had in that second Congress"said, at a later date, Gouverneur Morris of Philadelphia to John Jay of New York, and Jay answered gravely, "Yes, we had." The body, so despised in the retrospect, had no real executive government, no organized departments.Already before Independence was proclaimed there had been talk of a permanent union, but the members of Congress had shown no sense of urgency, and it was not until November 15, 1777, when the British were in Philadelphia and Congress was in exile at York, that Articles of Confederation were adopted.By the following midsummer many of the States had ratified these articles, but Maryland, the last to assent, did not accept the new union until 1781, so that Congress continued to act for the States without constitutional sanction during the greater part of the war.
The ineptitude of Congress is explained when we recall that it was a revolutionary body which indeed controlled foreign affairs and the issues of war and peace, coined money, and put forth paper money but had no general powers.Each State had but one vote, and thus a small and sparsely settled State counted for as much as populous Massachusetts or Virginia.The Congress must deal with each State only as a unit; it could not coerce a State;and it had no authority to tax or to coerce individuals.The utmost it could do was to appeal to good feeling, and when a State felt that it had a grievance such an appeal was likely to meet with a flaming retort.
Washington maintained towards Congress an attitude of deference and courtesy which it did not always deserve.The ablest men in the individual States held aloof from Congress.They felt that they had more dignity and power if they sat in their own legislatures.The assembly which in the first days had as members men of the type of Washington and Franklin sank into a gathering of second-rate men who were divided into fierce factions.They debated interminably and did little.Each member usually felt that he must champion the interests of his own State against the hostility of others.It was not easy to create a sense of national life.The union was only a league of friendship.States which for a century or more had barely acknowledged their dependence upon Great Britain, were chary about coming under the control of a new centralizing authority at Philadelphia.The new States were sovereign and some of them went so far as to send envoys of their own to negotiate with foreign powers in Europe.
When it was urged that Congress should have the power to raise taxes in the States, there were patriots who asked sternly what the war was about if it was not to vindicate the principle that the people of a State alone should have power of taxation over themselves.Of New England all the other States were jealous and they particularly disliked that proud and censorious city which already was accused of believing that God had made Boston for Himself and all the rest of the world for Boston.The religion of New England did not suit the Anglicans of Virginia or the Roman Catholics of Maryland, and there was resentful suspicion of Puritan intolerance.John Adams said quite openly that there were no religious teachers in Philadelphia to compare with those of Boston and naturally other colonies drew away from the severe and rather acrid righteousness of which he was a type.
