OF THE COLONIES PLANTED BY THE ENGLISH ON THE CONTINENT OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM THEIR SETTLEMENT, TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF THAT WAR WHICH PREFACE. So large a portion of the life of General Washington was devoted to the public, so elevated and important were the stations which he filled, that the history of his life is, at the same time, the history of his nation. The part he took, while commander in chief, in the civil as well as military affairs of the United States, was so considerable, that few events of general interest occurred, which were not, in some degree, influenced by him. A detail of the transactions in which he was either immediately or remotely concerned, would comprehend so great a part of those which belong to general history, that the entire exclusion of the few in which he bore no part, while it would scarcely give to the work more of the peculiar character of biography, would expose it to the charge of being an incomplete history of the times. |