Washington: A Life (41 page)

That the British were prepared to unleash patent terror to smash patriotic confidence became self-evident on October 24, when word reached camp that four British vessels had arrived at Falmouth, Massachusetts; after warning the inhabitants to evacuate, they had incinerated more than three hundred houses. Profoundly shaken, Washington told General Schuyler that the perpetrators had acted “with every circumstance of cruelty and barbarity which revenge and malice would suggest.”
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For Washington, who saw the Revolution as an old-fashioned struggle between good and evil, the Falmouth conflagration was further “proof of the diabolical designs” of the leadership in London.
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Responding to the Falmouth atrocities, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted legislation permitting American privateers to patrol the coast. With the war having idled much of the New England merchant fleet, Washington obtained congressional approval to arm several vessels as privateers that could keep one-third of the value of any British ships captured. Before long six such ships, dubbed “George Washington’s Navy,” prowled the eastern seaboard, marking the birth of the U.S. Navy.
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Afraid they might operate like lawless pirate ships, Washington demanded impeccable behavior from these privateers. “Whatever prisoners you may take, you are to take with kindness and humanity as far as is consistent with your own safety,” he exhorted the captain of the first schooner fitted out.
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Washington’s spirits were buoyed in late November by the capture of the British brig
Nancy,
carrying a small bonanza of weaponry, including two thousand small arms, which Washington celebrated as an “instance of divine favor.”
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In an action that bespoke exceptional trust in twenty-five-year-old Henry Knox, Washington gave him vast discretionary power to rove through upstate New York and procure any artillery he could find at Fort Ticonderoga or elsewhere and haul it back to Massachusetts.

Often dismayed by his men, Washington never tired in his efforts at moral improvement. Not just a citizen-soldier, he was a citizen-statesman who wanted his troops to uphold high standards of conduct. He wished them to be more than superb soldiers: they should set an example for patriots everywhere. In general orders to his troops, he articulated their ideals and scolded their vices almost daily. Even in the chaos of war, amid the squalor of an army camp, George Washington evinced unflagging belief in civilized conduct.

With the possible exception of gambling, no moral failing made Washington more apoplectic than alcohol abuse. Just as he had faulted Mount Vernon employees for excessive drinking, he grew vigilant about bibulous generals. In a “Memorandum on General Officers” that he later drew up as president, he recorded the demerits of each general and in almost every case commented on his drinking habits. He faulted one as “rather addicted to ease and pleasure—and no enemy it is said to the bottle,” while another “by report is addicted to drinking.”
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The chief dilemma in curbing alcohol consumption was that strong drink fortified the spirits of troops. As Washington told John Hancock, the “benefits arising from moderate use of liquor have been experienced in all armies and are not to be disputed.”
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It was hard to keep drinking within bounds, however, especially when tavern keepers rushed to slake the thirst of idle men. Washington meted out dozens of lashes to those found guilty of drunkenness and began regulating purveyors of liquor.

As part of his campaign for personal improvement, Washington encouraged his men to attend divine service, being careful to project an ecumenical spirit. When troops were about to celebrate Pope’s Day in early November—the colonial equivalent of Guy Fawkes Day—Washington learned of plans to burn the pope in effigy. Hoping to draw French Catholics in Canada to the patriotic side, he chastised his men for being “so void of common sense as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this juncture.”
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Early on Washington recognized that both armies competed for the loyalty of a wavering civilian population, and he held his men accountable for behavior on and off the battlefield, admonishing them that robbing local gardens would be “punished without mercy.”
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He approved a sentence for one man “to receive thirty-nine lashes upon his bare back” merely for stealing a cheese.
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During the summer heat he allowed men to go swimming, then was horrified to learn they were “running naked upon the [Cambridge] Bridge, whilst passengers and even ladies of the first fashion in the neighborhood are passing over it.”
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In such general orders, one hears echoes of the decorous planter from Virginia, especially when it pertained to elegant members of the opposite sex.

In the fall of 1775 Washington banked enormous hope on an invasion of Canada led by General Richard Montgomery and Colonel Benedict Arnold. Washington feared that, if Canada remained in British hands, it would always represent a potential threat on the northern border. As Arnold led an expeditionary force through the Maine wilderness, it was slowed by heavy rains, swollen streams, and fierce rapids. Starving troops devoured soap and candles and gnawed on boiled moccasins. After braving inhospitable wilds, the detachment reached the walled city of Quebec in early December for a rendezvous with General Montgomery. Arnold’s feat astonished Washington, who expressed jubilation over the “enterprising and persevering spirit” of the redoubtable colonel.
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As he informed General Schuyler, “The merit of this gentleman is certainly great and I heartily wish that fortune may distinguish him as one of her favorites.”
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Washington was so supremely confident that Montgomery and Arnold would prevail at Quebec that he even asked them to forward blankets, clothing, and other military stores captured in the conquered city.

Even as Washington sent this request, Schuyler sat down to write a somber message, announcing General Montgomery’s death in a shattering defeat at Quebec. “I wish I had no occasion to send my dear general this melancholy account,” wrote Schuyler.
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Moreover a musket ball had torn a jagged slash below Arnold’s knee, the first of two major leg injuries that scarred him with a permanent limp. The Quebec catastrophe was a severe setback for Washington, whose first strategic plan had misfired. The defeat also confirmed his worst fears that inexperienced troops would lose their nerve and flee in panic. For Washington, the disaster underscored the danger of relying on men with short enlistments; had Montgomery not labored under that restriction, he believed, he might have continued a blockade of Quebec and averted disaster. Arnold’s bravery, meanwhile, fostered an image, later hard to eradicate, of an officer who was dedicated root and branch to the cause and who acted courageously on his own initiative.

 

 

IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE REVOLUTION, George Washington endured a Sisyphean nightmare of whipping raw recruits into shape, only to see them melt away when their one-year enlistments expired. Officers were reduced to drill sergeants training soldiers in rudimentary warfare, then lost them once they learned to fight. For Washington, the failure to create a permanent army early in the war was the original sin from which the patriots almost never recovered. Of the pernicious effect of short-term enlistments, he later wrote, “It may easily be shown that all the misfortunes we have met with in the military line are to be attributed to this cause.”
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Washington faced the grim prospect that on January 1, 1776, the bulk of his army would simply vanish.

Forced to deal with human nature as it was, Washington didn’t rely on revolutionary fervor alone to win the war: he knew he had to cater to economic self-interest as well. This aim was complicated by the fact that some states offered higher bounties for enlistment in their militias. The soldiers exploited this system by dropping out of one unit, then popping up in another to collect a new bounty, a ruse so pervasive that Washington said disputes about it could have engrossed all his time.
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Instead of raising bounties to attract new recruits, Washington would have preferred a draft, but it ran afoul of republican resistance to anything resembling a standing army.

By late November, as snow blanketed the American camp, Washington’s spirits drooped along with the temperature. He felt himself sinking in a quicksand from which he might never escape. “No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means to extricate himself from them,” he confided to his brother Jack.
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By the end of November, a paltry 3,500 men had agreed to stay with the dwindling army. In a confidential letter to Joseph Reed, Washington succumbed to black despair, railing against the mercenary spirit of the New Englanders as they haggled for more money, better clothes, and more furloughs before reenlisting. The vehemence of his anguish belies the image of a cool, unemotional Washington. “Could I have foreseen what I have and am like to experience,” he told Reed, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command,” he said with a touch of melodrama.
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As he mulled over various schemes to strengthen his frail army, Washington wrestled with the vexed question of whether to accept blacks into the Continental Army, not as an instrument of social policy but as a matter of stark military necessity. Many people were struck, not always favorably, by the prevalence of black soldiers in Cambridge. Captain Alexander Graydon of Pennsylvania sniffed that the “number of Negroes … had a disagreeable, degrading effect.”
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In contrast, General John Thomas of Massachusetts told John Adams, “We have some Negroes, but I look upon them in general [as] equally serviceable with other men … many of them have proved themselves brave.”
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During the summer Washington pretty much dismissed blacks as riffraff, halting the enlistment of “any deserter from the ministerial army, nor any stroller, negro, or vagabond.”
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For a large southern slaveholder, the idea of arming blacks stirred up uncomfortable fantasies of slave revolts. But Washington had to reckon with the tolerance of his New England men, who had accepted blacks as stout-hearted comrades at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. A black man, Peter Salem, had fought so heroically at Bunker Hill that he had been brought to Washington’s attention. Nonetheless at an October war council, Washington and his generals voted unanimously “to reject all slaves and by a great majority to reject Negroes altogether.”
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A month later Washington made this exclusionary policy explicit: “Neither Negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men unfit to endure the fatigues of the campaign are to be enlisted.”
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By lumping healthy black soldiers with boys and old men, Washington insinuated that they were inferior and could be counted on only as a last resort.

On November 7 Lord Dunmore announced that slaves or indentured servants who had fled from their rebel masters could join his Royal Ethiopian Regiment and win their freedom. Eight hundred slaves soon flocked to his banner and were clad in British uniforms with the motto “Liberty to Slaves” stitched across them.
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For the first wave of escapees, such liberty proved deceptive: many died of smallpox on ships cruising Virginia’s rivers. In early December Lund Washington informed the commander in chief of the “dreaded proclamation” and conjectured that, while white indentured servants at Mount Vernon might be tempted to escape, he didn’t worry about the slaves. Washington already loathed Lord Dunmore, having recently observed that if “one of our bullets a[i]med for him, the world would be happily rid of a monster.”
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Outraged by his slave proclamation, he warned Richard Henry Lee that if “that man is not crushed before spring, he will become the most formidable enemy America has.”
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In an odd twist of self-serving logic, Washington branded Dunmore an “arch traitor to the rights of humanity.”
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Whatever his personal trepidation as a slave owner, Washington knew he couldn’t afford to cast off able-bodied men, even if they happened to be black. The Revolution forced him to contemplate thoughts that would have seemed unthinkable a year earlier. Even as he fumed about Lord Dunmore, in late December 1775 he dashed off a letter to John Hancock stating that “it has been represented to me that the free Negroes who have served in this army are very much dissatisfied at being discarded. As it is to be apprehended that they may seek employ in the ministerial army, I have presumed to depart from the resolution respecting them and have given licence for their being enlisted.”
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Two weeks later the Congress ratified this extraordinary decision and allowed free blacks to reenlist. Plainly Washington had acted under duress. He urgently needed more men before enlistments expired at year’s end and feared that black soldiers might defect to the British. At the same time, he was forced to recognize the competence of black soldiers. Whatever his motivations, it was a water-shed moment in American history, opening the way for approximately five thousand blacks to serve in the Continental Army, making it the most integrated American fighting force before the Vietnam War. At various times, blacks would make up anywhere from 6 to 12 percent of Washington’s army.
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Already the Revolutionary War was proving a laboratory for new ideas that operated outside the confines of the slavery system. Everyone felt the new force of liberty in whose name the colonists fought and recognized the flagrant contradiction of slavery. It was fitting that 1775 witnessed the formation of the first antislavery society in Philadelphia.

 

 

ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1775 Cambridge was gripped by freezing temperatures and covered with a foot of snow, only deepening Washington’s gloom. So frigid was the weather that sentries had to be replaced hourly. With trees leveled in every direction for firewood, the Continental Army inhabited a bleak, denuded landscape. As soldiers left for home in droves, not enough remained to man the redoubts, leaving glaring gaps in the defensive lines. Washington took the high road in calling for reenlistments, but General Charles Lee couldn’t govern his temper. As one soldier recorded in his diary, “We was ordered to form a hollow square and General Lee came in and the first words was, ‘Men I do not know what to call you; [you] are the worst of all creatures,’ and [he] flung and cursed and swore at us.”
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By contrast, Washington appealed to the New Englanders’ honor, saying that “should any accident happen to them before the new army gets greater strength, they not only fix eternal disgrace upon themselves as soldiers, but inevitable ruin perhaps upon their country and families.”
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