clumsy Tory forgery, put forward with the same idle
story of "captured papers" employed in the "spurious letters" of
Washington, and sent forth from the same press (J. Bew) from which that
forgery and several others issued.

The source from which the English fabricator drew this scandal is
fortunately known. In 1775 a letter to Washington from his friend Benjamin
Harrison was intercepted by the British, and at once printed broadcast in
the newspapers. In this the writer gossips to Washington "to amuse you and
unbend your minds from the cares of war," as follows: "As I was in the
pleasing task of writing to you, a little noise occasioned me to turn my
head around, and who should appear but pretty little Kate, the
Washer-woman's daughter over the way, clean, trim and as rosy as the
morning. I snatched the golden, glorious opportunity, and, but for the
cursed antidote to love, Sukey, I had fitted her for my general against his
return. We were obliged to part, but not till we had contrived to meet
again: if she keeps the appointment, I shall relish a week's longer stay."
From this originated the stories of Washington's infidelity as already
given, and also a coarser version of the same, printed in 1776 in a Tory
farce entitled "The Battle of Brooklyn."

Jonathan Boucher, who knew Washington well before the Revolution, yet who,
as a loyalist, wrote in no friendly spirit of him, asserted that "in his
moral character, he is regular." A man who disliked him far more, General
Charles Lee, in the excess of his hatred, charged Washington in 1778 with
immorality,--a rather amusing impeachment, since at the very time Lee was
flaunting the evidence of his own incontinence without apparent shame,--and
a mutual friend of the accused and accuser, Joseph Reed, whose service on
Washington's staff enabled him to speak wittingly, advised that Lee
"forbear any Reflections upon the Commander in Chief, of whom for the
first time I have heard Slander on his private Character, viz., great
cruelty to his Slaves in Virginia & Immorality of Life, tho' they
acknowledge so very secret that it is difficult to detect. To me who have
had so good opportunities to know the Purity of the latter & equally
believing the Falsehood of the former from the known excellence of his
disposition, it appears so nearly bordering upon frenzy, that I can pity
the wretches rather than despise them."

Washington was too much of a man, however, to have his marriage lessen