Colonel Washington received his formal commission on the 19th, and was on horseback for the journey northward by the 21st. On the 3d of July he assumed command at Cambridge. In choosing Washington for the command of the raw levies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire set down in impromptu siege before Boston, Mr. John Adams and the other New Englanders who acted with him had meant, not only to secure the services of the most experienced soldier in America, but also, by taking a man out of the South, to give obvious proof of the union and co-operation of the colonies. They had chosen better than they knew. It was no small matter to have so noticeable a man of honor and breeding at the head of an army whose enemies deemed it a mere peasant mob and rowdy assemblage of rebels. Washington himself, with his notions of authority, his pride of breeding, his schooling in conduct and privilege, was far from pleased till he began to see below the surface, with the disorderly array he found of uncouth, intractable plough boys and farmers, one esteeming himself as good as another, with free-and-easy manners and a singular, half-indifferent insolence against authority or discipline. [Illustration: BOSTON AND BUNKER HILL, FROM A PRINT PUBLISHED IN 1781] “There are some fine fellows come from Virginia,” Joseph Reed, of Pennsylvania, had written of the Virginian delegates to the Congress at Philadelphia; “but they are very high. We understand they are the capital men of the colony.” It was good that one of the masterful group should ride all the public way from Philadelphia to Boston to take command of the army, the most conspicuous figure in the colonies, showing every one of the thousands who crowded to greet or see him as he passed how splendid a type of self-respecting gentlemen was now to be seen at the front of affairs, putting himself forward soberly and upon principle. The leaders of the revolt in Massachusetts were by no means all new men like John Adams or habitual agitators like Samuel Adams; many a man of substance and of old lineage had also identified himself with the popular cause. But new, unseasoned men were very numerous and very prominent there among those who had turned affairs upside down; a very great number of the best and oldest families of the colony had promptly ranged themselves on the side of the government; the revolution now at last on foot in that quarter could too easily be made to look like an affair of popular clamor, a mere rising of the country. It was of signal advantage to have high personal reputation and a strong flavor, as it were, of aristocratic distinction given it by this fortunate choice the Congress had made of a commander. It was no light matter to despise a cause which such men openly espoused and stood ready to fight for.