o it), under our present
circumstances, that the act of Parliament can be complied with,
were we ever so willing to enforce the execution; for, not to say,
which alone would be sufficient, that we have not money to pay the
stamps, there are many other cogent reasons, to prevent it; and if
a stop be put to our judicial proceedings, I fancy the merchants
of Great Britain, trading to the colonies, will not be among the
last to wish for a repeal of it.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ford, II, 209-10.]

This passage would suffice, were there not many similar which might be
quoted, to prove that Washington was from the start a loyal American.
A legend which circulated during his lifetime, and must have been
fabricated by his enemies, for I find no evidence to support it either
in his letters or in other trustworthy testimony, insinuated that he
was British at heart and threw his lot in with the Colonists only when
war could not be averted. In 1770 the merchants of Philadelphia
drew up an agreement in which they pledged themselves to practise
non-importation of British goods sent to America. Washington's wise
neighbor and friend, George Mason, drafted a plan of association of
similar purport to be laid before the Virginia Burgesses. But Lord
Botetourt, the new Royal Governor, deemed some of these resolutions
dangerous to the prerogative of the King, and dissolved the Assembly.
The Burgesses, however, met at Anthony Hay's house and adopted
Mason's Association. Washington, who was one of the signers of the
Association, wrote to his agents in London: "I am fully determined to
adhere religiously to it."

Five years had now elapsed since the British Tories attempted to fix
on the Colonies the Stamp Act, and although they had withdrawn
that hateful law, the relations between the Mother Country and the
Colonists had not improved. Far from it. The English issued a series
of irritating provisions which convinced the Colonists that the
Government had no real desire to be friendly, and that, on the
contrary, it intended to make no distinction between them and the
other conquered provinces of the Crown. Then and always, the English
forgot that the Colonists were men of their own stock, equally
stubborn in their devotion to principles, and probably more accessible
to scruples of conscience. So they were not likely to be frightened
into subjection. The governing class in England was in a state of mind
which has darkened it