nerous feelings, nevertheless, seemed wholly to take possession of him, and during all the period of André's confinement and trial, he exhausted every means to alleviate his sufferings, and to withdraw him from the bitterness of his reflections.

As soon as he was brought in, addressing to a much loved friend the unnecessary request, he said, “Major Jackson, I have learned that André was very kind to you when you were a prisoner, will you not visit him?" Thus awakening the sympathies of the army, he turned their resentment upon the traitor, to whose criminal arts the British officer had unhappily lent himself. The conduct of André's captors was the theme of honest pride, and every soldier in the camp participated in their triumph; but when the day of his execution came, he was followed only by the brigade on duty, and with the exception of those officers who surrounded the scaffold to soothe its victim, not an officer or soldier was to be seen as a spectator. All retired to their tents, exhibiting that delicacy and sensibility which became the soldiers of such a cause.

It is, indeed, impossible to trace the annals of the revolution without remarking the kind temper of the Americans towards their enemies, and the happy commingling of the heroic with the milder virtues, both in the army and in the people.

Habituated to all the comforts, indeed luxuries, which render the condition of the American commonalty an object of envy among those of less happy regions, and free as the wilderness which surrounded them, the aggravated privations that followed the march of war, aggravated by the insolent bearing of an enemy, who threatened to visit on them the calamities which their own nation had experienced in a former age, and avowed the dispossession of the inhabitants, and the disherison of their progeny, as the reward promised to the subjugation of rebels, — amid ra

pine and devastation, when even congress felt it necessary to advise the people to erect places of refuge in the forest, far from their dwellings, for their aged parents, their children, and their wives, yet whenever the instruments of these evils fell into their hands, they are seen nursing their wounds, fostering them amid their sufferings, and winning them by their kindnesses to a detestation of the cause in which they had embarked. In vain are sought instances of cruelty to the enemy. It would have been too great a violation of public sentiment, and would have doomed its perpetrators to infamy.

This virtue of a humane people, was followed by its reward. The enemy lost more by desertion than by the sword, especially among the mercenaries of the continent; and thus the seeds of those kind feelings were planted in the midst of war, which have drawn within the bosom of our country, and linked to her institutions, the oppressed of every other.

CHAPTER XII.

[1780.]

DURING the series of events which have been related in the preceding chapter, the mind of Hamilton, roused to the great political questions which engaged so strongly the public attention, though oppressed with the various labours of his situation, to which the letters of his friends frequently advert, turned with eager aptitude to an examination of the defects of the existing government, and the remedies which might be applied.

Mere military movements had become of secondary interest; temporary expedients for the financial embarrassments were sought in vain; and while the public press was engaged in the discussion of transient questions, he was looking with intense anxiety to the adoption of some great and effectual mean by which the distresses of the country might be reached at their sources.

From his first entrance into the public service, he felt the necessity of a more energetic system; and it was objected to him then, as it has been since, that he looked with too fearful an apprehension upon a government merely federative and advisory.

An attempt, the most flagitious, was made on this ground, to produce a breach between him and the commander-inchief, which was detected, exposed, and defied with a lofty tone of conscious purity.*

The same sense of the public dangers, influenced in common the minds of Washington and Hamilton; and while

The instrument was Doctor Gordon, author of the Ilistory of the American War.

the former in his addresses to congress was enforcing his apprehensions with all the solemnity which the dignity of his station authorized, the other, by letters to his friends, and by personal solicitation, sought, within a more limited sphere, to urge attention to this great object of his just and honest solicitude. In a letter to Isaac Sears, with whom his intimacy had been formed in the early struggles of NewYork, he thus expresses himself:

"I was much obliged to you, my dear sir, for the letter which you did me the favour to write me since your return to Boston. I am sorry to find that the same spirit of indifference to public affairs prevails. It is necessary we should rouse, and begin to do our business in earnest, or we shall play a losing game. It is impossible the contest can be much longer supported on the present footing. We must have a government with more power. We must have a tax in kind. We must have a foreign loan. We must have a bank, on the true principles of a bank. We must have an administration distinct from congress, and in the hands of single men under their orders. We must, above all things, have an army for the war, and an establishment that will interest the officers in the service.

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Congress are deliberating on our military affairs; but I apprehend their resolutions will be tinctured with the old spirit. We seem to be proof against experience. They will, however, recommend an army for the war, at least as a primary object. All those who love their country, ought to exert their influence in the states where they reside to determine them to take up this object with energy. The states must sink under the burden of temporary enlistments, and the enemy will conquer us by degrees during the intervals of our weakness.

"Clinton is now said to be making a considerable detachment to the southward. My fears are high, my hopes low. We are told here, there is to be a congress of the neutral