Patriots (81 page)

Horatio Gates’s disgrace at Camden had endured for two years before the Congress repealed its call for an official inquiry and reinstated him as the second-ranking officer of the Continental Army. The same year the peace treaty was signed, Gates left military service to attend to his dying wife at Traveller’s Rest.

General Washington’s indispensable partner at Yorktown, Admiral de Grasse, was defeated in American waters only six months later. In April 1782 the British Navy bested him in a battle off Saints Passage in the West Indies, and de Grasse was taken prisoner.

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Silas Deane had helped bring de Grasse’s fleet to America, but with one action he ensured that his country would never honor him for it. In March 1781 Deane had offered his services to Lord North’s government and written letters from London urging Americans to end the war and to stop insisting on independence. His letters were printed in New York while the nation was celebrating Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. By 1783 Deane had moved on to Belgium, where he was living in cheap hotels and avoiding any face from home.

Thomas Paine had been second only to Arthur Lee in attacking Deane, and Paine had also gone to Europe in 1781 to secure aid from the French court. He returned with a gift for America of two and a half million silver livres but reaped nothing from his achievement. After Yorktown, he had to remind George Washington
that “the country which ought to have been a home has scarcely afforded me an asylum.” Washington contacted Robert Morris, America’s superintendent of finance, and arranged for Paine secretly to be paid eight hundred dollars a year for his future writings.

Paine had planned to write the history of the American Revolution as Benjamin Franklin had once urged him to do, but the closest he got was reviewing a book on the war by Abbé Raynal in France. When the peace treaty was signed, Paine’s clandestine salary ended. He wrote one final
Crisis:
“
The times that tried men’s souls are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.” Over the following months, General Washington continued to solicit money for Paine—“
He is poor! He is chagrined!” Washington wrote—but a bill in the Virginia legislature that would have awarded him a grant of land lost on its third reading. The Treaty of Paris was a year old before the state of Pennsylvania voted Paine a generous payment for his past services.

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Francis Bernard had died of an epileptic seizure long before Yorktown, and Thomas Hutchinson had died of a stroke. Hutchinson’s last act was to reject a shirt that his servant had brought him. It was soiled, Hutchinson said, and he was determined to “
die clean.” He didn’t live to hear that James Warren and his wife bought his estate in Milton and took delight, as Hutchinson had, in its lovely vistas. John Adams heard of Hutchinson’s death while in Europe and sent a letter to the Boston press that became the former governor’s obituary. Adams did not feel obliged to temper his judgment, and the words “ambition” and “avarice” figured prominently. But in his hatred Adams endowed Thomas Hutchinson with a sort of grandeur: “
He was, perhaps, the only man in the world who could have brought on the controversy between Great Britain and America . . .”

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As America had waited anxiously for peace, General Washington was still doing battle once more but this time with the officers and men of his own army. In January 1783 a committee of Continental Army officers went to Philadelphia to demand that
the Congress release the soldiers’ back pay and benefits for the wounded. Their claims went back at least three years. Washington warned a member of Congress, “The temper of the army is much soured and has become more irritable than at any period since the commencement of the war.” But Congress lacked the necessary funds. Unless the states amended the Articles of Confederation to allow Congress to collect its own taxes, the members could not meet the army’s demands.

Some men hoped to use the discontent to shape a future government they preferred. Alexander Hamilton had been elected to the Congress from New York, and, along with such allies as Robert Morris, Horatio Gates and Henry Knox, he was pressing for a strong central government. Hamilton wanted the army to state that it would not fight again even if treaty negotiations failed and the war resumed, but that it would not disband if there was a peace. Washington suspected who was fomenting the army’s discord, although some participants, like Henry Knox, denied their role and seemed to agree when Washington called the army “
a dangerous instrument to play with.”

The plotters had first tried to enlist the commander in chief as the head of their movement. The previous year, a colonel had urged Washington to resolve the delays and frustrations of civilian politics by declaring himself king, but Washington viewed that idea with abhorrence. Now, because Alexander Hamilton had remained a colonel in the army, he felt he could lecture Washington on the mood within the general’s ranks. He wrote that if the army was not properly compensated after peace was declared, the soldiers would use their bayonets to procure justice, with or without General Washington.

Washington contemplated his decision for days before responding to Hamilton that he could not accept actions that would disrupt society and end in blood. He would trust the more discerning officers to remember his past conduct and endorse his resistance to any armed rebellion. To succeed, the leaders of the revolt would have to remove or discredit him.

Early in March 1783, an unsigned leaflet passed among the officers at Newburgh, New York, where Washington was waiting for Britain to withdraw her troops. The circular, written by an aide to Horatio Gates, attacked the Congress for its coldness and
severity to the army and urged officers to suspect any man who advised them to be more patient or moderate. General Washington responded immediately with an order forbidding his men to meet secretly, and he scheduled an open discussion for March 15. Washington wasn’t going to attend, but when a second leaflet claimed that he had endorsed the rebel officers’ demands by calling the meeting, Washington changed his mind and went.

The confrontation was held in a new wooden hall built for both chapel services and dancing. George Washington had relied throughout his public career on other men to voice his sentiments and write his speeches. He arrived visibly nervous, with a paper prepared by an aide. He briefly rebutted the anonymous writer of the leaflets. “
Can he be a friend to the army?” Washington asked. “Can he be a friend to this country?”

As the officers listened, they showed no emotion. They seemed to treat Washington as a stranger who had to win them over on the strength of his arguments.

Washington ended his prepared remarks with fine, flattering cadences: “You will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, ‘Had this day been wanting, the world would never have seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’ ”

His speech was finished, but Washington was not. He had brought a letter from a Virginia congressman who spoke forcefully of the nation’s debt to the army and promised to redeem it. As Washington began to read, he faltered. After the first paragraph, he stopped, fished in a pocket and took out a new pair of spectacles.

“Gentlemen,” Washington said, “you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now I find myself growing blind.”

Tears welled up in the eyes of many of the men. Washington finished reading the letter and left the hall. When he had gone, the assembled officers voted unanimously to express their confidence in the Congress and to ask George Washington to continue as their spokesman.

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On April 19, 1783, eight years to the day since General Gage’s troops fired on Lexington Green, the cessation of hostilities
between Great Britain and the United States of America was announced. At Continental Army headquarters, the men gave three huzzahs and sang a song called “Independence.”

In June, General Washington wrote the last of his circular letters—appeals he had made regularly to the governors of all thirteen states asking them for recruits and provisions. The tone was different this time, and men were soon calling it
“Washington’s Legacy.” The commander in chief reminded the states that they were entering a time of political probation. Washington named four things that would be necessary to preserve American independence: an indissoluble union of states under one federal head; a sacred regard for public justice; the adoption of a proper peace establishment, which meant an army scaled down and disciplined to America’s new needs; and a friendly willingness of the people of the United States to forget their local prejudices and, when called upon, to sacrifice their individual advantages to the good of the community.

Before the month was out, the country learned the urgency of what Washington called “a proper peace establishment” when eighty soldiers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, mutinied over their grievances. Less portentous than the insurrection Washington had faced down at Newburgh, this one had more immediate impact. When the rebels marched on the capital, soldiers in Philadelphia joined them and increased their number to five hundred. They surrounded the Congress, shouting and pointing their muskets at the windows.

The revolt was soon over, and its two ringleaders escaped on a ship just leaving for Europe. But during the threatening hours members of the Congress had fled to Princeton, New Jersey. When calm was restored, Philadelphians asked them to return, but the delegates were tired of being abused and mocked there and voted not to go back. After several months in Princeton, they moved on to Annapolis. The members decided to build two federal towns—one on the banks of the Delaware, another, to mollify the Southern states, on the Potomac River.

In rueful letters to friends and family throughout the years he had been away from home, General Washington had repeated a Biblical phrase: he longed for the day when he could repose again under his own vine and fig tree. Now, in the autumn of 1783, he
judged that the time had come. On November 25 the last British soldiers were evacuated from New York, and Washington returned there for the first time in seven years. He held up his procession through the streets for an hour because he wanted the American flag flying before he started down Broadway, but the departing British troops had greased the flagpole and the Americans couldn’t shinny up it. At last a young man borrowed cleats from an ironmonger and climbed to the top.

At noon on Tuesday, December 4, Washington’s officers in New York held a farewell dinner for him at Fraunces Tavern in Pearl Street. When the general arrived, his men seemed to hold their breath. No one spoke. Washington filled his glass with wine and raised it.

“
With a heart full of love and gratitude,” he began, “I now take leave of you.”

Washington wished for them that their days ahead would be as prosperous and happy as the days behind them had been glorious and honorable.

His officers took up their glasses. Then Washington said, “I cannot come to each of you, but I shall feel obliged if each of you come and take me by the hand.”

Henry Knox was nearest. As he grasped the general’s hand, Washington’s face was bathed in tears and they embraced silently. After that, each officer came forward and kissed Washington on the cheek. The only sound was weeping. George Washington would return to Mount Vernon, and his officers felt they would never see him again.

Washington’s leavetaking continued through tumultuous receptions in Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore. At Philadelphia, Washington left an accounting of his expenses since 1775. He included the cost of bringing his wife to headquarters between campaigns, along with his supplies, travel, pay for secret intelligence and the entertainment necessary for a man in his position. The eight-year total was 1,972 pounds, nine shillings and fourpence. When auditors went over the accounts, they found that Washington’s figures were off by less than one American dollar.

At Annapolis, although many delegates had already left the Congress to attend to business at home, more than two hundred men turned out for a dinner in Washington’s honor. As one guest
observed, the mood of the affair was so elevated that not a soul got drunk. Washington attended a ball that evening at the State House, where he danced every set—he still loved to dance—because he owed it to the ladies to give each that memory.

On Tuesday, December 23, 1783, General Washington entered the congressional chamber of the Maryland State House precisely at noon. He left his horses waiting at the door. When the ceremony was over, Washington planned to set out on the fifty-mile ride that would have him at Mount Vernon in time for Christmas. He would take with him trunks of official papers and two young former officers who would help him sort and arrange them.

Washington had been yearning to retire to his plantation, and now he was almost free and on his way. He had no reason to think that his countrymen would ever demand that he asssume new burdens for America. Yet Washington made two changes in the draft of his farewell to the Congress before he delivered it. In his “affectionate and final farewell” to the Congress, he removed the words “and final.” And when he spoke of taking his “ultimate leave” of public life, Washington struck the word “ultimate.”

Charles Thomson, the first secretary of the Congress, escorted General Washington to his seat. Thomas Mifflin, once suspected of plotting in the Conway Cabal, was the presiding officer. “Sir,” said President Mifflin as the galleries quieted, “the United States in Congress assembled are prepared to receive your communications.”

General Washington stood and bowed to the twenty members. As he pulled out his farewell remarks, the general’s hands trembled. He congratulated the Congress on the nation’s independence and said that he was resigning
“with satisfaction the appointment I accepted with diffidence—a diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our cause, the support of the supreme power of the union and the patronage of Heaven.”