The Beginner's American History

158. The emigrants settle on the Watauga River[4] in Tennessee.—When the little party had crossed the mountains into what is now the state of Tennessee, they found a delightful valley. Through this valley there ran a stream of clear sparkling water called the Watauga River; the air of the valley was sweet with the smell of wild crab-apples.

On the banks of that stream the emigrants built their new homes. Their houses were simply rough log huts, but they were clean and comfortable. When the settlers put up these cabins, they chopped down every tree near them which was big enough for an Indian to hide behind. They knew that they might have to fight the savages; but they had rather do that than be robbed by tax-collectors. In the wilderness Governor Tryon could not reach them—they were free; free as the deer and the squirrels were: that one thought made them contented and happy.

4 Watauga River (Wa-taw'ga): see map in paragraph 150.

159. John Sevier goes to settle at Watauga; what he and Robertson did.—The year after this little settlement was made John Sevier went from Virginia to Watauga, as it was called. He and Robertson soon became fast friends—for one brave man can always see something to respect and like in another brave man. Robertson and Sevier hunted together and worked together.

After a while they called a meeting of the settlers and agreed on some excellent laws, so that everything in the log village might be done decently and in order; for although these people lived in the woods, they had no notion of living like savages or wild beasts. In course of time President Washington made James Robertson General Robertson, in honor of what he had done for his country.

Out of this settlement on the Watauga River grew the state of Tennessee. A monument in honor of John Sevier stands in Nashville, a city founded by his friend Robertson. Sevier became the first governor of the new state.

160. Summary.—James Robertson, of North Carolina, and John Sevier, of Virginia, emigrated across the mountains to the western wilderness. They settled on the Watauga River, and that settlement, with others made later, grew into the state of Tennessee, of which John Sevier became the first governor.

What friend did Boone have in North Carolina? Tell about Governor Tryon. What happened on the Alamance River? Where did Robertson and others go? Where did they settle? Why did they like to be there? Tell about John Sevier. What did he and Robertson do? What did Washington do for Robertson? What state grew out of the Watauga settlement? What did Sevier become? Where is his monument?

161. The British in the west; their forts; hiring Indians to fight the settlers.—While Washington was fighting the battles of the Revolution in the east, the British in the west were not sitting still. They had a number of forts in the Wilderness,[1] as that part of the country was then called. One of these forts was at Detroit,[2] in what is now Michigan; another was at Vincennes,[3] in what is now Indiana; a third fort was at Kaskaskia,[4] in what is now Illinois.

Colonel Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, was determined to drive the American settlers out of the west. In the beginning of the Revolution the Americans resolved to hire the Indians to fight for them, but the British found that they could hire them better than we could, and so they got their help. The savages did their work in a terribly cruel way. Generally they did not come out and do battle openly, but they crept up secretly, by night, and attacked the farmers' homes. They killed and scalped the settlers in the west, burned their log cabins, and carried off the women and children prisoners. The greater part of the people in England hated this sort of war. They begged the king not to hire the Indians to do these horrible deeds of murder and destruction. George the Third was not a bad-hearted man; but he was very set in his way, and he had fully made up his mind to conquer the "American rebels," as he called them, even if he had to get the savages to help him do it.

1 See map in paragraph 187.

2 Detroit (De-troit'): for these forts see map in this paragraph.

3 Vincennes (Vin-senz').

4 Kaskaskia (Kas-kas'ki-a).

162. George Rogers Clark gets help from Virginia and starts to attack Fort Kaskaskia.—Daniel Boone had a friend in Virginia named George Rogers Clark,[5] who believed that he could take the British forts in the west and drive out the British from all that part of the country. Virginia then owned most of the Wilderness. For this reason Clark went to Patrick Henry, governor of Virginia, and asked for help. The governor liked the plan, and let Clark have money to hire men to go with him and try to take Fort Kaskaskia to begin with.

Clark started in the spring of 1778 with about a hundred and fifty men. They built boats just above Pittsburg[6] and floated down the Ohio River, a distance of over nine hundred miles. Then they landed in what is now Illinois, and set out for Fort Kaskaskia.[7]

5 George Rogers Clark was born near Monticello, Virginia. See map in paragraph 140.

6 Pittsburg: see map in paragraph 140.

7 Fort Kaskaskia: see map in paragraph 161.

163. The march to Fort Kaskaskia; how a dance ended.—It was a hundred miles to the fort, and half of the way the men had to find their way through thick woods, full of underbrush, briers, and vines. The British, thinking the fort perfectly safe from attack, had left it in the care of a French officer. Clark and his band reached Kaskaskia at night. They found no one to stop them. The soldiers in the fort were having a dance, and the Americans could hear the merry music of a violin and the laughing voices of girls.

Clark left his men just outside the fort, and, finding a door open, he walked in. He reached the room where the fun was going on, and stopping there, he stood leaning against the door-post, looking on. The room was lighted with torches; the light of one of the torches happened to fall full on Clark's face; an Indian sitting on the floor caught sight of him; he sprang to his feet and gave a terrific war-whoop. The dancers stopped as though they had been shot; the women screamed; the men ran to the door to get their guns. Clark did not move, but said quietly, "Go on; only remember you are dancing now under Virginia, and not under Great Britain." The next moment the Americans rushed in, and Clark and his "Long Knives," as the Indians called his men, had full possession of the fort.

164. How Fort Vincennes was taken; how the British got it back again; what Francis Vigo[8] did.—Clark wanted next to march against Fort Vincennes, but he had not men enough. There was a French Catholic priest[9] at Kaskaskia, and Clark's kindness to him had made him our friend. He said, I will go to Vincennes for you, and I will tell the French, who hold the fort for the British, that the Americans are their real friends, and that in this war they are in the right. He went; the French listened to him, then hauled down the British flag and ran up the American flag in its place.

The next year the British, led by Colonel Hamilton of Detroit, got the fort back again. When Clark heard of it he said, "Either I must take Hamilton, or Hamilton will take me." Just then Francis Vigo, a trader at St. Louis, came to see Clark at Kaskaskia. Hamilton had held Vigo as a prisoner, so he knew all about Fort Vincennes. Vigo said to Clark, "Hamilton has only about eighty soldiers; you can take the fort, and I will lend you all the money you need to pay your men what you owe them."

8 Vigo (Vee-go).

9 The priest was Father Gibault (Zhe-bo').

165. Clark's march to Fort Vincennes; the "Drowned Lands."—Clark, with about two hundred men, started for Vincennes. The distance was nearly a hundred and fifty miles. The first week everything went on pretty well. It was in the month of February, the weather was cold, and it rained a good deal, but the men did not mind that. They would get wet through during the day; but at night they built roaring log fires, gathered round them, roasted their buffalo meat or venison, smoked their pipes, told jolly stories, and sang jolly songs.

But the next week they got to a branch of the Wabash River.[10] Then they found that the constant rains had raised the streams so that they had overflowed their banks; the whole country was under water three or four feet deep. This flooded country was called the "Drowned Lands": before Clark and his men had crossed them they were nearly drowned themselves.

10 See map in paragraph 161.

166. Wading on to victory.—For about a week the Americans had to wade in ice-cold water, sometimes waist deep, sometimes nearly up to their chins. While wading, the men were obliged to hold their guns and powder-horns above their heads to keep them dry. Now and then a man would stub his toe against a root or a stone and would go sprawling headfirst into the water. When he came up, puffing and blowing from such a dive, he was lucky if he still had his gun. For two days no one could get anything to eat; but hungry, wet, and cold, they kept moving slowly on.

The last part of the march was the worst of all. They were now near the fort, but they still had to wade through a sheet of water four miles across. Clark took the lead and plunged in. The rest, shivering, followed. A few looked as though their strength and courage had given out. Clark saw this, and calling to Captain Bowman,—one of the bravest of his officers,—he ordered him to kill the first man who refused to go forward.

At last, with numbed hands and chattering teeth, all got across, but some of them were so weak and blue with cold that they could not take another step, but fell flat on their faces in the mud. These men were so nearly dead that no fire seemed to warm them. Clark ordered two strong men to lift each of these poor fellows up, hold him between them by the arms, and run him up and down until he began to get warm. By doing this he saved every one.

167. Clark takes the fort; what we got by his victory; his grave.—After a long and desperate fight Clark took Fort Vincennes and hoisted the Stars and Stripes over it in triumph. The British never got it back again. Most of the Indians were now glad to make peace, and to promise to behave themselves.

By Clark's victory the Americans got possession of the whole western wilderness up to Detroit. When the Revolutionary War came to an end, the British did not want to give us any part of America beyond the thirteen states on the Atlantic coast. But we said, The whole west, clear to the Mississippi, is ours; we fought for it; we took it; we hoisted our flag over its forts, and we mean to keep it. We did keep it.

There is a grass-grown grave in a burial-ground in Louisville, Kentucky, which has a small headstone marked with the letters G. R. C., and nothing more; that is the grave of General George Rogers Clark, the man who did more than any one else to get the west for us—or what was called the west a hundred years ago.

168. Summary.—During the Revolutionary War George Rogers Clark of Virginia, with a small number of men, captured Fort Kaskaskia in Illinois, and Fort Vincennes in Indiana. Clark drove out the British from that part of the country, and when peace was made, we kept the west—that is, the country as far as the Mississippi River—as part of the United States. Had it not been for him and his brave men, we might not have got it.

What did the British have in the west? Where were three of those forts? Who hired the Indians to fight? How did they fight? What did most of the people in England think about this? What is said of George the Third? What friend did Daniel Boone have in Virginia? What did Clark undertake to do? Tell how he went down the Ohio. Tell how he marched on Fort Kaskaskia. What happened when he got there? What did Clark say to the people in the fort? How was Fort Vincennes taken? What did the British do the next year? Tell about Francis Vigo. What did Clark and his men start to do? How far off was Fort Vincennes? Tell about the first part of the march. What lands did they come to? Tell how the men waded. How did Clark save the lives of some of the men? Did Clark take the fort? What did the Americans get possession of by this victory? What happened at the end of the Revolutionary War? What did we say? What is said of the grave at Louisville, Kentucky? What did Clark get for us?

169. What General Putnam did for Washington, and what the British said of Putnam's work.—When the British had possession of Boston in the time of the Revolution, Washington asked Rufus Putnam,[1] who was a great builder of forts, to help him drive them out. Putnam set to work, one dark, stormy night, and built a fort on some high land[2] overlooking Boston Harbor.

When the British commander woke up the next morning, he saw the American cannon pointed at his ships. He was so astonished that he could scarcely believe his eyes. "Why," said he, "the rebels have done more in one night than my whole army could have done in a week." Another officer, who had command of the British vessels, said, "If the Americans hold that fort, I cannot keep a ship in the harbor."

Well, we know what happened. Our men did hold that fort, and the British had to leave Boston. Next to General Washington, General Rufus Putnam was the man who made them go; for not many officers in the American army could build such a fort as he could.

1 Rufus Putnam was born in Sutton, Massachusetts.

2 Dorchester Heights: now South Boston.

170. General Putnam builds the Mayflower; goes down the Ohio River and makes the first settlement in Ohio.—After the war was over, General Putnam started with a company of people from New England, to make a settlement on the Ohio River. In the spring of 1788 he and his emigrants built a boat at a place just above Pittsburg.[3] They named this boat the Mayflower,[4] because they were Pilgrims going west to make their home there.

At that time there was not a white settler in what is now the state of Ohio. Most of that country was covered with thick woods. There were no roads through those woods, and there was not a steamboat or a railroad either in America or in the world. If you look on the map[5] and follow down the Ohio River from Pittsburg, you will come to a place where the Muskingum joins the Ohio. At that place the Mayflower stopped, and the emigrants landed and began to build their settlement.

3 Pittsburg: see map in paragraph 140.

4 Mayflower: see paragraph 64.

5 See map in paragraph 140.

171. What the settlers named their town; the first Fourth of July celebration; what Washington said of the settlers.—During the Revolutionary War the beautiful Queen Mary of France was our firm friend, and she was very kind and helpful to Dr. Franklin when he went to France for us. A number of the emigrants had fought in the Revolution, and so it was decided to name the town Marietta,[6] in honor of the queen.

When the Marietta settlers celebrated the Fourth of July, Major Denny, who commanded a fort just across the river, came to visit them. He said, "These people appear to be the happiest folks in the world." President Washington said that he knew many of them and that he believed they were just the kind of men to succeed. He was right; for these people, with those who came later to build the city of Cincinnati, were the ones who laid the foundation of the great and rich state of Ohio.

6 The queen's full name in French was Marie Antoinette; the name Marietta is made up from the first and the last parts of her name.

172. Fights with the Indians; how the settlers held their town; Indian Rock; the "Miami[7] Slaughter House."—But the people of Marietta had hardly begun to feel at home in their little settlement before a terrible Indian war broke out. The village of Marietta had a high palisade[8] built round it, and if a man ventured outside that palisade he went at the risk of his life; for the Indians were always hiding in the woods, ready to kill any white man they saw. When the settlers worked in the cornfield, they had to carry their guns as well as their hoes, and one man always stood on top of a high stump in the middle of the field, to keep a bright lookout.

There is a lofty rock on the Ohio River below Marietta, which is still called Indian Rock. It got its name because the Indians used to climb up to the top and watch for emigrants coming down the river in boats. When they saw a boat, they would fire a shower of bullets at it, and perhaps leave it full of dead and wounded men to drift down the river. In the western part of Ohio, on the Miami River, the Indians killed so many people that the settlers called that part of the country by the terrible name of the "Miami Slaughter House."

7 Miami (Mi-am'i).

8 See picture of a palisade in paragraph 70.

173. What General Wayne did.—But President Washington sent a man to Ohio who made the Indians beg for peace. This man was General Wayne; he had fought in the Revolution, and fought so furiously that he was called "Mad Anthony Wayne." The Indians said that he never slept, and named him "Black Snake," because that is the quickest and boldest snake there is in the woods, and in a fight with any other creature of his kind he is pretty sure to win the day. General Wayne won, and the Indians agreed to move off and give up a very large part of Ohio to the white settlers. After that there was not much trouble, and emigrants poured in by thousands.

174. Summary.—In 1788 General Rufus Putnam, with a company of emigrants, settled Marietta, Ohio. The town was named in honor of Queen Mary of France, who had helped us during the Revolution. It was the first town built in what is now the state of Ohio. After General Wayne conquered the Indians that part of the country rapidly increased in population.

What did General Rufus Putnam do for Washington? Where did General Putnam go in 1788? What is said of Ohio at that time? Where did the Mayflower stop? What is said of Queen Mary of France? What did the settlers name their town? What did Washington say about the settlers? What did these people do? What is said about the Indians? What about Indian Rock? What was the country on the Miami River called? What is said about General Wayne? What did the Indians call him? Why did they give him that name? What did the Indians agree to do? What happened after that?

175. The name cut on a door.—Near Westboro', Massachusetts,[1] there is an old farm-house which was built before the war of the Revolution. Close to the house is a small wooden building; on the door you can read a boy's name, just as he cut it with his pocket-knife more than a hundred years ago.[2] Here is the door with the name. If the boy had added the date of his birth, he would have cut the figures 1765; but perhaps, just as he got to that point, his father appeared and said rather sharply: Eli, don't be cutting that door. No, sir, said Eli, with a start; and shutting his knife up with a snap, he hurried off to get the cows or to do his chores.[3]

1 See map in paragraph 135.

2 The house is no longer standing, and the door has disappeared.

3 Chores: getting in wood, feeding cattle, etc.

176. What Eli Whitney used to do in his father's little workshop; the fiddle.—Eli Whitney's father used that little wooden building as a kind of workshop, where he mended chairs and did many other small jobs. Eli liked to go to that workshop and make little things for himself, such as water-wheels and windmills; for it was as natural for him to use tools as it was to whistle.

Once when Eli's father was gone from home for several days, the boy was very busy all the while in the little shop. When Mr. Whitney came back he asked his housekeeper, "What has Eli been doing?" "Oh," she replied, "he has been making a fiddle." His father shook his head, and said that he was afraid Eli would never get on much in the world. But Eli's fiddle, though it was rough-looking, was well made. It had music in it, and the neighbors liked to hear it: somehow it seemed to say through all the tunes played on it, "Whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well."

177. Eli Whitney begins making nails; he goes to college.—When Eli was fifteen, he began making nails. We have machines to-day which will make more than a hundred nails a minute; but Eli made his, one by one, by pounding them out of a long, slender bar of red-hot iron. Whitney's hand-made nails were not handsome, but they were strong and tough, and as the Revolutionary War was then going on, he could sell all he could make.

After the war was over the demand for nails was not so good. Then Whitney threw down his hammer, and said, "I am going to college." He had no money; but he worked his way through Yale College, partly by teaching and partly by doing little jobs with his tools. A carpenter who saw him at work one day, noticed how neatly and skilfully he used his tools, and said, "There was one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college."

178. Whitney goes to Georgia; he stops with Mrs. General Greene; the embroidery frame.—When the young man had completed his course of study he went to Georgia to teach in a gentleman's family. On the way to Savannah he became acquainted with Mrs. Greene, the widow of the famous General Greene[4] of Rhode Island. General Greene had done such excellent fighting in the south during the Revolution that, after the war was over, the state of Georgia gave him a large piece of land near Savannah.

Mrs. Greene invited young Whitney to her house; as he had been disappointed in getting the place to teach, he was very glad to accept her kind invitation. While he was there he made her an embroidery frame. It was much better than the old one that she had been using, and she thought the maker of it was wonderfully skilful.

4 General Greene: see paragraph 140.

179. A talk about raising cotton, and about cotton seeds.—Not long after this, a number of cotton-planters were at Mrs. Greene's house. In speaking about raising cotton they said that the man who could invent a machine for stripping off the cotton seeds from the plant would make his fortune.

For what is called raw cotton or cotton wool, as it grows in the field, has a great number of little green seeds clinging to it. Before the cotton wool can be spun into thread and woven into cloth, those seeds must be pulled off.

At that time the planters set the negroes to do this. When they had finished their day's labor of gathering the cotton in the cotton field, the men, women, and children would sit down and pick off the seeds, which stick so tight that getting them off is no easy task.

After the planters had talked awhile about this work, Mrs. Greene said, "If you want a machine to do it, you should apply to my young friend, Mr. Whitney; he can make anything." "But," said Mr. Whitney, "I have never seen a cotton plant or a cotton seed in my life"; for it was not the time of year then to see it growing in the fields.

180. Whitney gets some cotton wool; he invents the cotton-gin; what that machine did.—After the planters had gone, Eli Whitney went to Savannah and hunted about until he found, in some store or warehouse, a little cotton wool with the seeds left on it. He took this back with him and set to work to make a machine which would strip off the seeds.

He said to himself, If I fasten some upright pieces of wire in a board, and have the wires set very close together, like the teeth of a comb, and then pull the cotton wool through the wires with my fingers, the seeds, being too large to come through, will be torn off and left behind. He tried it, and found that the cotton wool came through without any seeds on it. Now, said he, if I should make a wheel, and cover it with short steel teeth, shaped like hooks, those teeth would pull the cotton wool through the wires better than my fingers do, and very much faster.

He made such a wheel; it was turned by a crank; it did the work perfectly; so, in the year 1793, he had invented the machine the planters wanted.

Before that time it used to take one negro all day to clean a single pound of cotton of its seeds by picking them off one by one; now, Eli Whitney's cotton-gin,[5] as he called his machine, would clean a thousand pounds in a day.

5 Gin: a shortened form of the word engine, meaning any kind of a machine.

181. Price of common cotton cloth to-day; what makes it so cheap; "King Cotton."—To-day nothing is much cheaper than common cotton cloth. You can buy it for ten or twelve cents a yard, but before Whitney invented his cotton-gin it sold for a dollar and a half a yard. A hundred years ago the planters at the south raised very little cotton, for few people could afford to wear it; but after this wonderful machine was made, the planters kept making their fields bigger and bigger. At last they raised so much more of this plant than of anything else, that they said, "Cotton is king." It was Eli Whitney who built the throne for that king; and although he did not make a fortune by his machine, yet he received a good deal of money for the use of it in some of the southern states.

Later, Mr. Whitney built a gun-factory near New Haven, Connecticut, at a place now called Whitneyville; at that factory he made thousands of the muskets which we used in our second war with England in 1812.

6 In the war of 1812 the British war-ships attacked Fort McHenry, one of the defences of Baltimore. Francis Scott Key, a native of Maryland, who was then detained on board a British man-of-war, anxiously watched the battle during the night; before dawn the firing ceased. Key had no means of telling whether the British had taken the fort until the sun rose; then, to his joy, he saw the American flag still floating triumphantly above the fort—that meant that the British had failed in their attack, and Key, in his delight, hastily wrote the song of the Star Spangled Banner on the back of a letter which he had in his pocket. The song was at once printed, and in a few weeks it was known and sung from one end of the United States to the other.

182. Summary.—About a hundred years ago (1793), Eli Whitney of Westboro', Massachusetts, invented the cotton-gin, a machine for pulling off the green seeds from cotton wool, so that it may be easily woven into cloth. That machine made thousands of cotton-planters and cotton manufacturers rich, and by it cotton cloth became so cheap that everybody could afford to use it.

What name did a boy cut on a door? What did Eli make in that workshop? What did he make while his father was away? What did his father say? What did Eli's fiddle seem to say? What did Eli make next? How did he make his nails? Where did he go after he gave up making nails? When he left college where did he go? What lady did he become acquainted with? What did he make for her? What did the cotton-planters say? What must be done to raw cotton before it can be made into cloth? Who did this work? What did Mrs. Greene say to the planters? What did Mr. Whitney say? What did he do? Tell how he made his machine. What did he call it? How many pounds of cotton would his cotton-gin clean in a day? How much could one negro clean? What is said about the price of cotton cloth? What did the planters say about cotton? Who built the throne for King Cotton? What did Mr. Whitney build at Whitneyville? What did he make there?

183. How much cotton New Orleans sends to Europe; Eli Whitney's work; who it was that bought New Orleans and Louisiana for us.—To-day the city of New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, sends more cotton to England and Europe than any other city in America.

If you should visit that city and go down to the riverside, you would see thousands of cotton bales[1] piled up, and hundreds of negroes loading them on ocean steamers. It would be a sight you would never forget.

Before Eli Whitney[2] invented his machine, we sent hardly a bale of cotton abroad. Now we send so much in one year that the bales can be counted by millions. If they were laid end to end, in a straight line, they would reach clear across the American continent from San Francisco to New York, and then clear across the ocean from New York to Liverpool, England. It was Eli Whitney, more than any other man, who helped to build up this great trade. But at the time when he invented his cotton-gin, we did not own New Orleans, or, for that matter, any part of Louisiana or of the country west of the Mississippi River. The man who bought New Orleans and Louisiana for us was Thomas Jefferson.

1 A bale or bundle of cotton is usually somewhat more than five feet long, and it generally weighs from 400 to 550 pounds. The cotton crop of this country in 1891 amounted to more than 8,650,000 bales; laid end to end, in a straight line, these bales would extend more than 8000 miles.

2 See paragraph 180.

184. Who Thomas Jefferson was; Monticello;[3] how Jefferson's slaves met him when he came home from Europe.—Thomas Jefferson was the son of a rich planter who lived near Charlottesville in Virginia.[4] When his father died, he came into possession of a plantation of nearly two thousand acres of land, with forty or fifty negro slaves on it.

There was a high hill on the plantation, which Jefferson called Monticello, or the little mountain. Here he built a fine house. From it he could see the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge for an immense distance. No man in America had a more beautiful home, or enjoyed it more, than Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's slaves thought that no one could be better than their master. He was always kind to them, and they were ready to do anything for him. Once when he came back from France, where he had been staying for a long time, the negroes went to meet his carriage. They walked several miles down the road; when they caught sight of the carriage, they shouted and sang with delight. They would gladly have taken out the horses and drawn it up the steep hill. When Jefferson reached Monticello and got out, the negroes took him in their arms, and, laughing and crying for joy, they carried him into the house. Perhaps no king ever got such a welcome as that; for that welcome was not bought with money: it came from the heart. Yet Jefferson hoped and prayed that the time would come when every slave in the country might be set free.

3 Monticello (Mon-ti-cel'lo).

4 See map in paragraph 140.

185. Thomas Jefferson hears Patrick Henry speak at Richmond.—Jefferson was educated to be a lawyer; he was not a good public speaker, but he liked to hear men who were. Just before the beginning of the Revolutionary War (1775), the people of Virginia sent men to the city of Richmond to hold a meeting in old St. John's Church. They met to see what should be done about defending those rights which the king of England had refused to grant the Americans.

One of the speakers at that meeting was a famous Virginian named Patrick Henry. When he got up to speak he looked very pale, but his eyes shone like coals of fire. He made a great speech. He said, "We must fight! I repeat it, sir,—we must fight!" The other Virginians agreed with Patrick Henry, and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, with other noted men who were present at the meeting, began at once to make ready to fight.

186. Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence; how it was sent through the country.—Shortly after this the great war began. In a little over a year from the time when the first battle was fought, Congress asked Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and some others to write the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson really wrote almost every word of it. He was called the "Pen of the Revolution"; for he could write quite as well as Patrick Henry could speak.

The Declaration was printed and carried by men mounted on fast horses all over the United States. When men heard it, they rang the church bells and sent up cheer after cheer. General Washington had the Declaration read to all the soldiers in his army, and if powder had not been so scarce, they would have fired off every gun for joy.