en won {179} with such a fearful waste of British
blood. Breed Hill was a nominal victory for the King; it was a real
victory for the rebels, who had shown what an undisciplined force,
composed of farmers, trappers, lawyers, shopkeepers, and divines, could
do against the finest troops in the world.

[Sidenote: 1775--The Continental Army]

Already insurgent America had an army, and an army of investment. The
rebels, whom Gage affected to despise almost as much as he was himself
despised by General Burgoyne, were massed in numbers unknown to the
loyalists before Boston, and the English soldiers were cooped up in the
city they had crossed the seas to command. The colonial army was rude
and rough, but earnest and resolute, and it had evolved generals of its
own making, rough and rude as itself, but able, daring, and fearless.
Israel Putnam, who killed a wolf once with his own hands in his wild
youth, gripping it by the throat till he had choked its life out, had
come to fight against the flag beneath which he had fought so well in
the French wars. Nathaniel Greene had flung down his military books
and caught up the sword, had abandoned the theory for the practice, and
was beginning to make a name. Benedict Arnold, after a life as varied,
as shady, and as adventurous as that of any picaroon in a Spanish
story, leaped into fame as a daring spirit by the way in which he and
Ethan Allen, at the head of a mixed force of Vermonters and New
Englanders, had taken Fort Ticonderoga, on the great lakes, by
surprise, and had endowed the dawning army with its captured cannon.
Prescott, the hero of Breed Hill, was now a veteran soldier; and the
names of Artemas Ward, of Schuyler, of Pomeroy, Heath and Thomas,
Sullivan and Montgomery, Wooster and Spencer were becoming more than
mere names to Englishmen in Boston and in London. Two Englishmen held
rank as generals in the crude colonial army--the adventurer Charles
Lee, whom some foolish people believed to be the real Junius, and
Horatio Gates. There were few thoroughly worthless men in the young
army, but it is painful to record that Lee and Gates were eminent among
them. These were the generals of what was now to be called the {180}
Continental Army. Happy in most of them, happy in much, it was
happiest of all in this: that it had for its commander-in-chief the
noblest man, who was to prove the greatest soldier, then living in the
world.

[Sidenote: 1775--George Washington]