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These considerations fully introduce the Commander-in-Chief to the reader, as he imagines the Soldier to be in his tent with the commissions of subordinate officers before him.

He began his duties with the most minute inspection of the material with which he was expected to carry on a contest with Great Britain. Every company and regiment, their quarters, their arms, ammunition, and food supplies, underwent the closest scrutiny. He accepted excuses for the slovenliness of any command with the explicit warning that repetition of such indifference or neglect would be sternly punished.

The troops had hardly been dismissed, after their first formal parade for inspection, before a set repugnance to all proper instruction in the details of a soldier’s duty became manifest. The old method of fighting Indians singly, through thickets, and in small detachments, each man for himself, was clung to stubbornly, as if the army were composed of individual hunters, who must each “bag his own game.” Guard duty was odious. Superiority by virtue of rank was questioned, denied, or ignored. The abuses of places of trust, especially in the quartermaster and commissary departments, and the prostitution of these responsibilities to private ends were constant. “Profanity, vulgarity, and all the vices of an undisciplined mass became frightful,” as Washington himself described the condition, “so soon as any immediate danger passed by.” To sum up the demoralization of the army, he could only add, “They have been trained to have their own way too long.”