Weary of waiting, John Adams at last declared that Congress must adopt the army and make Washington, who at this mention of his name stepped out of the room, commander-in-chief.
On June 15, formal motions were made to this effect and unanimously adopted, and the next day Washington appeared before Congress and accepted the trust.

His words were few and simple.

He expressed his sense of his own insufficiency for the task before him, and said that as no pecuniary consideration could have induced him to undertake the work, he must decline all pay or emoluments, only looking to Congress to defray his expenses.

In the same spirit he wrote to his soldiers in Virginia, to his brother, and finally, in terms at once simple and pathetic, to his wife.

There was no pretense about this, but the sternest reality of self-distrust, for Washington saw and measured as did no one else the magnitude of the work before him.