When he first went among the New England troops at the siege of Boston, the rough, democratic ways of the people jarred upon him, and offended especially his military instincts, for he was not only a Virginian but he was a great soldier, and military discipline is essentially aristocratic. These volunteer soldiers, called together from the plough and the fishing-smack, were free and independent men, unaccustomed to any rule but their own, and they had still to learn the first rudiments of military service. To Washington, soldiers who elected and deposed their officers, and who went home when they felt that they had a right to do so, seemed well-nigh useless and quite incomprehensible. They angered him and tried his patience almost beyond endurance, and he spoke of them at the outset in harsh terms by no means wholly unwarranted. But they were part of his problem, and he studied them. He was a soldier, but not an aristocrat wrapped up in immutable prejudices, and he learned to know these men, and they came to love, obey, and follow him with an intelligent devotion far better than anything born of mere discipline. Before the year was out, he wrote to Lund Washington praising the New England troops in the highest terms, and at the close of the war he said that practically the whole army then was composed of New England soldiers. They stayed by him to the end, and as they were steadfast in war so they remained in peace. He trusted and confided in New England, and her sturdy democracy gave him a loyal and unflinching support to the day of his death.
This openness of mind and superiority to prejudice were American in the truest and best sense; but Washington showed the same qualities in private life and toward individuals which he displayed in regard to communities. He was free, of course, from the cheap claptrap which abuses the name of democracy by saying that birth, breeding, and education are undemocratic, and therefore to be reckoned against a man. He valued these qualities rightly, but he looked to see what a man was and not who he was, which is true democracy. The two men who were perhaps nearest to his affections were Knox and Hamilton. One was a Boston bookseller, who rose to distinction by bravery and good service, and the other was a young adventurer from the West Indies, without either family or money at his back. It was the same with much humbler persons. He never failed, on his way to Philadelphia, to stop at Wilmington and have a chat with one Captain O'Flinn, who kept a tavern and had been a Revolutionary soldier; and this was but a single instance among many of like character. Any soldier of the Revolution was always sure of a welcome at the hands of his old commander. Eminent statesmen, especially of the opposition, often found his manner cold, but no old soldier ever complained of it, no servant ever left him, and the country people about Mount Vernon loved him as a neighbor and friend, and not as the distant great man of the army and the presidency.