The military anxiety was increasing. Thomas had but 700 men at Roxbury, which he tried to magnify in the British eyes by marching them in and out of sight, so as to make the same men serve the appearance of many more. On the 8th of May there was an alarm that the royal troops were coming out, and the militia of the near towns were summoned.[390] To put on an air of confidence, a few days later (May 13), Putnam, from Cambridge, marched with 2,200 men into Charlestown and out again, without being molested, though part of the time within range of the enemy's guns. It was the military assertion of the idea, which the day before the Watertown congress had expressed, of governing themselves. "It is astonishing how they have duped the whole continent", wrote Gage to Dartmouth,[391] and perhaps he had not heard even then of the last victory of opinion down in Georgia, where parishes of New England descent were forcing issues with their neighbors. The Committee of Safety now resolved to remove the live-stock from the islands in Boston Harbor; and Gage, on his part, determined on securing some hay on Grape Island, near Weymouth. These counter-forays led to fighting, and for some weeks the harbor was alive with skirmishing.[392] Meanwhile the Massachusetts congress had urged Connecticut to let Arnold bring some of the cannon captured on Lake Champlain to Cambridge,[393] and the day before the brush occurred at Grape Island they had delivered (May 20) a commission as commander-in-chief of the Massachusetts troops to Artemas Ward. In Boston the remaining loyalists were soon cheered by advices promising large reinforcements, which they now confidently began to expect,[394] and the feeling grew apace among the beleaguerers that a better organization and a closer dependence of the colonies among themselves were necessary to meet the impending dangers. Dr. Langdon, the president of Harvard College, in the election sermon[395] on the day when the new provincial congress met (May 31), had recognized the general obedience which was already paid to the advice of the Continental Congress. There were not a few who remembered how, twenty years before, the young Virginian, Colonel George Washington, had come to Boston, and who recalled the good impression he had made. They had heard lately of the active interest and sympathy with the patriots' cause which he was manifesting among his neighbors in that colony. On the 4th of May, Elbridge Gerry, with the approval of Warren, wrote to the Massachusetts delegates at Philadelphia, that they would "rejoice to see this way the beloved Colonel Washington" as generalissimo.[396] This was the feeling, while the army which lay about Boston was a mere inchoate mass, far from equal to the task which they had undertaken; but brave words did much; brave spirits did more; and John Adams was writing from Philadelphia that one "would burst to see whole companies of armed Quakers in that city, in uniforms, going through