I am in awe of what George Washington accomplished in the War for Independence.
In a letter to Joseph Reed, one of his inner circle during the war, Washington wrote:
"Few people know the predicament we are in on a thousand counts; fewer still will believe if any disaster happens to these lines from what cause it flows. I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket on my shoulder and entered the ranks; or if I could have justified the measure to posterity and my own conscience, had retired to the back country and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it, to blind the eyes of our enemies; for surely if we get well through this month, it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages we labor under..."
In 1783, the year the peace treaty with Britain was signed, Washington wrote to Nathaniel Greene:
"It will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed for eight years in this country could be baffled in their plan of subjugating it, by numbers infinitely less, composed of men oftentimes half starved, always in rags, without pay and experienced every species of distress, which human nature is capable of undergoing."
(excerpts from Elswyth Thane's Lady Washington and Paul Johnson's George Washington)
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