charges. Who was to pay? In any event, the colonists, having put twenty-five thousand men into the field and sustained them by huge outlays, were in no mood to bear additional burdens. To make matters worse, the swollen war prices collapsed, forcing a liquidation such as usually follows a desperate world conflict, and bringing ruin in its train. There lay the causes of new clashes with the English governing machine.
And America was ready for a trial of strength. The war had developed a body of veterans—officers and men—who were in some measure at least prepared for the test of Revolution when it came. The war had done more. The haughty conduct of the British military officers in America had aroused in the breasts of the colonials a passionate resentment akin to their ill-will for royal governors; while experience in fighting had given confidence to militiamen. In many cases they had done badly themselves but on other occasions they had seen the pomp of British officers and the pride of British regulars pricked like bubbles. The disaster which overwhelmed Braddock, as Franklin said, "gave us Americans the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well founded." It was no mere accident that the young officer who had labored to save Braddock's forces from utter ruin in the wilderness of Pennsylvania was called upon twenty years later to draw his sword under the elm at Cambridge in defense of the American Revolution.
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