Henry Cabot Lodge: “Through it all ran a golden thread of personal feeling which gleams so rarely in the somber formalism of public grief.”

He accomplished this great labor more successfully by honest and lawful methods than if he had taken the path of the strong-handed savior of society, and his work in this field did more for the welfare of his country than all his battles.

He had that entire simplicity of manners and modes of life which is the crowning result of the highest culture and the finest nature.

It was a difficult thing for men who had been born colonists to rise to a sense of national opportunities, but Washington passed at a single step from being a Virginian to being an American, and in so doing he stood alone.

This was not a safe man for the gentlemen of Pennsylvania to cross too far, nor could they swerve him, with all his sense of public opinion, one jot from what he meant to do.