He did not seek to live along upon what
he could get from the estate, and still less did he feel that it was
only possible for him to enter one of the learned professions. Had
he been an Englishman in fact or in feeling, he would have felt very
naturally the force of the limitations imposed by his social position.
But being an American, his one idea was to earn his living honestly,
because it was the creed of his country that earning an honest living
is the most creditable thing a man can do. Boy as he was, he went out
manfully into the world to win with his own hands the money which
would make him self-supporting and independent. His business as a
surveyor took him into the wilderness, and there he learned that the
first great work before the American people was to be the conquest of
the continent. He dropped the surveyor's rod and chain to negotiate
with the savages, and then took up the sword to fight them and the
French, so that the New World might be secured to the English-speaking
race. A more purely American training cannot be imagined. It was not
the education of universities or of courts, but that of hard-earned
personal independence, won in the backwoods and by frontier fighting.
Thus trained, he gave the prime of his manhood to leading the
Revolution which made his country free, and his riper years to
building up that independent nationality without which freedom would
have been utterly vain.
He was the first to rise above all colonial or state lines, and grasp
firmly the conception of a nation to be formed from the thirteen
jarring colonies.
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