Free To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 by William R. Forstchen, Newt Gingrich, Albert S. Hanser Page A

about all that life had handed him so far, he felt for the first time that he belonged to something. He had helped to start something. Now he was being asked to ensure that it survived, and that was exactly why he was drunk.
    He was not sure what to write.
    Two years ago he had been an utter failure, a stay and corset maker like his father. That had ended when his first wife, Mary, died trying to give birth to their child. He drank himself half to death after she and the baby were put into the ground. Friends helped to get him a job as an excise collector. My God, he thought ruefully, I actually collected taxes for that damned king. Finally lost that position, too, sinking the ship when, among other things, he had written a protest pamphlet demanding better conditions and pay for the excisemen who squeezed the taxes for the crown. It was hard to admit to another reason, that, more than once, rather than showing up for a day’s work, he was passed out drunk. Even tried a tobacco shop. It failed. Tried a second marriage. It failed, and as he looked back uponit, he could not blame Elizabeth for pushing him out of her bed and life. Perhaps memories of Mary had haunted that second marriage and brought it to a rapid and untimely end.
    He opened the flagon, looked at it, and forced the cork back in. He knew where this was leading. Finish off the rum, collapse on the cot, shiver through the night, and, at dawn, fall back in with the troops, swarming southward, away from British-occupied New York, panic-stricken in retreat. And not a word on paper to explain why.
    They want me to explain why. They look to me to give meaning to their sacrifice and pain. Their eyes look hauntingly in expectation.
    “I’m cursed by my own success.”
    And penniless as well. That was the joke of it. He could picture his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush shaking his head at him and his self-inflicted poverty. It was Rush who had literally carried him off the boat two years earlier when it docked in Philadelphia, half the passengers near dead from typhoid, and nursed him back to health. It was Rush who had told him to write, that writing was his God-given mission for “the Cause.”
    Common Sense
had sold over a hundred thousand copies so far, the most popular work ever written on this shore, and yet he had barely collected a pound for it. One evening Rush had run a calculation for him, how many hundreds of pounds he should have in his pocket this day, and he had given it all away, telling publishers to print it and be damned who made the money. In his passion for “the Cause” many another had freely published his work and he had pocketed only a few guineas, which he had quickly drunk away.
    Rush called me a bloody idealistic fool and blessed me for it, he thought with a sad smile. Published it for “the Cause,” and now I sit here penniless, half drunk, freezing. And they want me to write another uplifting, compelling, reassuring pamphlet. General Greene had openly begged him for it. Rush had sent him a dozen missives, each one with more pressure than the last, even “His Excellency” George Washington had sat him down and said, “You have to write something! Anything!”
    “Damn them.” He sighed and stood up, his head brushing the inside of the tent, the sodden canvas spilling more water onto his bare head.
    He had given his hat away the day before to a piteous freezing scarecrow standing picket, shivering with fever. He took an old scarf, hanging on the inside of the tent pole where it was supposed to dry out a bit. The wool was wet, stinking of sweat and filth. He covered the top of his head, and tied it under his chin, pulled back the flap of his tent, and stepped out.
    The rain was easing slightly, coming in fitful bursts, a cold edge to it. Snow by morning most likely, he thought. Maybe a blessing; maybe it will just make the suffering worse.
    The vista before him was pathetic. The small village of Newark, a few hundred homes and shops huddled