eceive
at the advanced posts, should appear to exist, the lesser must yield to
the greater duties of my office, and I shall cross the mountains with
the troops; if not, I shall place the command of the combined troops
under the orders of Governor Lee, of Virginia, and repair to the seat of
government."

In a private letter to Randolph, the secretary of state, on the
following day, the president said, "The insurgents are alarmed, but not
yet brought to their proper senses. Every means is devised by themselves
and their associates to induce a belief that there is no necessity for
troops crossing the mountains; although we have information, at the same
time, that part of the people there are obliged to embody themselves to
repel the insults of another part."

The Pennsylvania troops moved forward from Carlisle on the tenth of
October, and Washington proceeded to Fort Cumberland, the place of
rendezvous for the Maryland and Virginia troops, where he arrived on the
sixteenth. Quite a large number were already there, and fifteen hundred
more from Virginia were near at hand. There Washington received such
information as convinced him that the spirits of the insurgents were
broken, and that the greatest alarm prevailed in their ranks. He
hastened on to Bedford, thirty miles distant, and there this
intelligence was confirmed. Satisfied that his presence would be no
longer needed with the army, he arranged a plan of operations against
the insurgents, and prepared to return to Philadelphia; "but not," he
said in a letter to Randolph, "because the impertinence of Mr. Bache
[editor of the "General Advertiser," the opposition paper] or his
correspondent has undertaken to pronounce that I can not
constitutionally command the army whilst Congress are in session."

The command of the army was left with Governor Lee. On the twentieth of
October he received from Washington his instructions, drawn by Hamilton,
with a letter from the president's own hand, in which he said, "I can
not take my departure without conveying to you, through the army under
your command, the very high sense I entertain of the enlightened and
patriotic zeal for the constitution and the laws, which has led them
cheerfully to quit their families, homes, and the comforts of private
life, to undertake, and thus far to perform, a long and fatiguing march,
and to encounter and endure the hardships and privations of a military
life.... No citizens of the United States c