The Continental Congress, conscious of Washington's ability, offered him the command of its improvised army. Washington accepted the duty, well aware of its gravity, its danger, its awful responsibility. He refused any pay beyond his actual expenses, and he entered upon a struggle whose difficulties were not all or nearly all due to the enemy in the sternest and noblest sense of duty to his countrymen and to the principles of liberty. At first, in his own words, he loathed the idea of independence. He only took up arms to defend cherished rights; the day was not yet, though the day was not far off, when the Virginian soldier would renounce his allegiance to the King whose commission he had carried and to the country from which his race stemmed. Washington's military genius soon showed itself in the use he made of the loose, incoherent, disorganized mass of men which was called the Continental Army. It was fortunate for the Continental cause that the English generals, penned up within the walls of Boston, had little idea of the obstacles Washington had to overcome, the opposition he had to encounter, the sore straits to which the want of everything essential to a besieging army drove him. But his indomitable courage, his unfailing coolness, his unconquerable resource overcame a sea of troubles that might well have swept even a strong man and a brave soldier off his feet. With regiment after regiment quietly disbanding as their term of service expired; with a plentiful lack of powder, of arms, of provisions, of uniforms; with a force that at moments threatened to dissolve into nothingness and leave him with a handful of generals alone beneath his insurgent flag, Washington never allowed the enemy, and seldom allowed a friend, to guess how near at times he came to despair. He raised troops somehow; he got provisions somehow; somehow he managed to obtain powder; somehow he managed to obtain arms. The want of weapons was so great that many bodies of men were only provided with pikes, and that Franklin was driven to suggest, and partly in a spirit of humanity, that American farmers fighting for their liberty should be armed with the bows and arrows of the red {182} men, and should strive to renew upon the fields of Massachusetts the successes of their ancestors, the yeomen of Agincourt, with their clothyard shafts.