There was no costly throne set up at Morristown, or Middlebrook. There was no luxury there. There were camp-cots, and camp-chairs, and usually, rations sufficient for the daily need; but the centre of the upheaving energies of American Liberty was there; and these energies were controlled and directed, with no loss in transmission, by the immediate presence of the Commander-in-Chief. It will be remembered, at the very mention of Southern Colonies, or Southern States, how peculiar was their relation to the mother country, from the earliest British supremacy along the eastern Atlantic coast. The Romanist, the Churchman, the Presbyterian, and the Huguenot, in their respective search for larger liberty and missionary work, had shared equally in a sense of oppression, before their migration to America. They had much in common with the early settlers of the New England coast. The Hollanders of New Jersey and the Quakers of Pennsylvania, between the extremes, were not wholly absorbed in business ventures. But all alike had additional incentives to a more independent life, far removed from those social and artificial obligations which reigned supreme in the Old World. There were indeed adventurers for conquest, for wealth, and for political power, among them; and the aristocratic usages which accompanied the royal prerogative were fostered by the presence of slavery, so that they affected the vital functions of the new Republic for generations. But, with the exception of elements earlier noticed, the “ferment of American Liberty” was never more decided, pure, and constant in Massachusetts than in Virginia; nor more bold, desperate and defiant, among the Green Mountains of Vermont than among the pine woods and palmetto groves of North and South Carolina. The closing months of the nineteenth century seem to have been reserved, in the providence of God, for the consummation of that lofty anticipation of Washington which Daniel Webster formulated in one sublime utterance, “The Union; now and forever; One and Inseparable.” And now, in the spirit of this memory of the pioneers of American civilization, the narrative returns to the immediate burdens upon the mind of Washington; as, in the closing months of 1779, we face the mirror southward, and catch its reflections.