The day before the battle of Bunker’s Hill, the Provincial congress at Philadelphia, having voted to raise an army of 20,000 men, proceeded to elect George Washington, then present as delegate from Virginia, to the rank of commander-in-chief. The northern colonies had resolved, in order to secure the adherence of the South, to choose a southern commander, and the superior wisdom of Providence guided them in the selection. God provides the man for the work, and Washington was the appointed agent of a great people’s emancipation. Divine wisdom, and not that of man, guided the choice. Washington, with great modesty and dignity, accepted the appointment, declining all compensation for his services beyond the defrayment of expenses. At the same time that Washington received the command in chief, Artemas Ward, of Massachusetts, Colonel Lee, formerly a British officer, Philip Schuyler, of New York, and Israel Putnam, of Connecticut, then with the camp before Boston, were appointed major-generals, and Horatio Gates adjutant-general. Washington, accompanied by a number of ardent young men from the South, soon appeared in the camp and assumed command. He found excellent _materiel_ for an army, but great want of arms and ammunition as well as deficiency of discipline. The troops, now amounting to 14,000 men, were arranged in three divisions; the right wing under General Ward, at Roxbury; the left, under Lee, on Prospect Hill; and the centre at Cambridge, where were Washington’s head-quarters. The post of quarter-master-general was given by Washington to Mifflin, the young Quaker of Philadelphia, who had accompanied him as aide-de-camp; and Robert Harrison, a lawyer of Maryland, was chosen by him for the important office of his secretary, the duties of which he faithfully performed for several years. Among the new companies which now joined the camp was one from Virginia, led by that same village wrestler, Daniel Morgan, who was hired by Benjamin Franklin to aid in the removal of stores for Braddock’s army, and in whose defeat he was wounded. The British, thus hemmed in at Boston, suffered greatly from want of provisions.