The General serving as Sergeant

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 61.

A memorable story of an incident that occurred at about this time may or may not be entirely reliable, but portrays vividly the level of tension among the troops and Washington’s own pent-up anger and exasperation. It was told years afterward by Israel Trask, the ten-year-old boy who had enlisted with his father and in whose eyes Washington seemed almost supernatural.

A snowball fight broke out on Harvard Yard between fifty or more backwoods Virginia riflemen and an equal number of sailors from the Marblehead regiment. The fight quickly turned fierce, with “biting and gouging on the one part, and knockdown on the other part with as much apparent fury as the most deadly enmity could create,” according to Trask. Hundreds of others rushed to the scene. Soon more than a thousand men had joined in a furious brawl. Then Washington arrived:

I only saw him and his colored servant, both mounted [Trask remembered]. With the spring of a deer, he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee, with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternating shaking and talking to them.

Seeing this, the others took flight “at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict.” If Trask’s memory served, the whole row, from start to finish, lasted all of fifteen minutes and nothing more came of it.”