The Continental Congress fled from Philadelphia. It was a migrating congress for many a day afterwards; travelling from one place of refuge to another with its little printing press and papers carried in a wagon.
If you had been living in those days you would have said that the rebellion had now certainly reached the point of scientific defeat and should be abandoned and all hope of independence given up. Thousands of people at that time said so. The loyalists of course said so; and many who had been rebels, or had been watching to see if the rebellion had any chance at all, now turned against it and took the British oath of allegiance. That is unquestionably what you would have done if you had been living at that time with your present opinions. Your great grandfather however was not of that mind, nor was Washington.
In fact, Washington prepared to become the worst kind of a guerilla; and you will find his letter on the subject in the second volume of Irving's life of him, chapter XLI. In case of being further pressed he said, "We must then retire to Augusta county, in Virginia. Numbers will repair to us for safety and we will then try a predatory war. If overpowered we must cross the Allegheny mountains."
What do you think of that? What a wicked man he must have been. He intended to abandon the seaboard colonies, taking with him all the rebels who would follow him; and a great many including your ancestor would have to follow him, for if they remained behind they would be hung. He proposed a "grand trek" to get away from those British who are said to govern so well, just as the Boers "treked" away from them into the deserts of South Africa nearly a hundred years ago, because they did not fancy what they had experienced of that supposed excellent government.
Having secured a refuge for the rebel congress and his followers on the edge of what was then the Western Wilderness, Washington proposes to maintain himself there by what he calls "predatory war," and I suppose you know what that is. If unsuccessful in that, he intended to cross the Allegheny mountains and plunge into that vast unknown region with the Indians and the buffaloes, which stretched away 3,000 miles to the Pacific ocean. There, assisted by the great distances he could play havoc with an invading British force; cut their slender communications and their cordons of blockhouses as the Boers are doing to-day in South Africa.