Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (50 page)

Congress ignored this request for money to enable officers to reenter civilian life with at least some ease. It also failed to make good on its promise of pensions by not establishing the institutions and procedures to make its promise reality. But whatever it resolved to do, or hoped to do, ran up against a disabling fact: Congress could not tax, and action to give it such power through a tariff on imported goods failed. Even Virginia failed to approve giving such power to Congress.

Whatever the financial circumstances of officers and men, it was necessary to bid them farewell as he left the army. In November, almost two months before he delivered his resignation to Congress, he marked his own departure with a “Farewell Address to the Armies of the United States.”
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The emotional power of this statement arises from the history of the Revolution, reconstructed by Washington in terms that recognize the sacrifices made by the officers and men. He does not mention Trenton or Yorktown, or the glory of the victories there; his admiration is for the courage of his troops and their long-standing devotion, despite the pain and suffering they endured, including “the extremes of hunger and nakedness.” Who, he asks, “could imagine that the most violent local prejudices [held initially by these soldiers] would cease so soon, and that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed, by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers.”

There was little doubt that Washington loved his soldiers, and wished the best for them; nor was there doubt that he felt uncertain about their conduct when they reentered the world of civilians, that point, as he said, when they exchanged “military character” for “that of a citizen.” The transition, he knew, would not be eased greatly by a generous Congress, but he still hoped that the states would enable it to pay its debts, “so that the Officers and Soldiers may expect considerable assistance in recommencing their civil occupations from the
sums due to them from the public, which must and will most inevitably be paid.” There was no promise in these words and no certainty, but there was honesty and hope for social stability in a time of great uncertainty.
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Early in his address to the army, Washington had invoked the “interpositions of Providence” as the underlying circumstance that led to success in the Revolution. At the end he offered “his prayers to the God of Armies” on behalf of his soldiers. Whatever he could do for his men “has been done,” and as he retired from service, he appealed for “heaven’s favours” on their behalf. It was a complicated farewell—one part gratitude, another part forecast of a cloudy future, but a future that might yield its “blessings” to men rightfully disposed. Washington’s hope was that these soldiers would remember the past eight years, which had brought them honor—and the commitment to keep the nation free and to make it great. It was a gracious farewell, and in places an expression of hope qualified by doubts.

Only a parting from Congress remained to be done as the year came to a close. Washington, a quiet and modest man, was one who knew the value of ceremony. To leave his command, he had only to write Congress with his resignation. Such a course, he recognized, would serve neither his needs nor the nation’s. To discover what Congress wanted, he wrote Thomas Mifflin, its president, and received an answer indicating that Congress wished to receive his resignation on December 23. Washington had arrived on December 19 in Annapolis, where Congress was meeting. In the next two or three days, preparations were made for his appearance before Congress. The preparations fell to a committee led by Thomas Jefferson and rounded out by Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and James McHenry of Maryland. Washington’s appearance before Congress was the great event of the occasion, but it was not the only one he made. On Monday, December 22, Congress gave a public dinner in his honor, an event that, according to attendee Dr. James Tilton, drew some two to three hundred gentlemen. Tilton described it in a private letter as happy and satisfying, saying that the “usual number of 13 toasts [were] drank, besides one given afterwards by the general …‘Competent powers to congress for general purposes.’ ” His forthcoming retirement had not dulled Washington’s sense of the important. He also proved his thoughtfulness in the ball that followed, organized by the governor
of Maryland, by “dancing every set that all the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him, or as it has since been handsomely expressed,
get a touch of him
.”
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The proceedings the next day replaced the high spirits of the ball with high seriousness in Washington’s speech and President Mifflin’s response. At noon, Washington entered the room where Congress sat, the galleries packed with Annapolis gentry. He was seated and then invited by Mifflin to speak. This proved difficult for him; Washington’s feeling as he spoke almost stopped his voice. The hand in which he held his speech shook as he forced out the words, and when he began the praise of his aides, his military family, he had to hold it with both hands. His deepest feeling, however, emerged as he commended “the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them, to his holy keeping.” At this point he seems to have been almost unable to continue, but then he ended with “an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

Jefferson had read Washington’s speech before it was delivered and wrote a response for President Mifflin that included a sentence that indicated clearly that Congress recognized the general’s high regard for civilian supremacy in a republic. “You have,” he told Washington, “conducted the great military contest with wisdom and fortitude invariably regarding the rights of civil power through all disasters and changes.”
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Jefferson, who wrote Mifflin’s statement, understood Washington far better than did this president of Congress. Washington had demonstrated throughout the war his commitment to civilian supremacy in the American republic. His convictions about the relationship of the army to Congress remained firm and clear, never wavering in the face of appeals that he take matters into his own hands and, in effect, exercise the powers of a king or dictator. Such action on his part, or the army’s, would be giving up the meaning of the Revolution, a surrender he would not accede to, as he explained to his officers at Newburgh. He made his belief in civilian control even clearer virtually every day, in the way he dealt with Congress. There was no question of yielding
power to them—he had never claimed such power; he was the servant of the American people and of Congress, nothing less and nothing more.

All the time that he served as commander of the Continental Army, he was in fact also the leader of the Revolution. His unspoken and undefined responsibilities in this role transcended those of his assignment as commander in chief, and he became, as the war developed, a symbol of the freedom the young republic embodied. He was the political leader of the Revolution, though he drafted no legislation and signed no laws. But if he failed, it was widely understood, the Revolution failed.

For Washington, more than any American leader in or out of Congress, by his actions and example, held together the political structure that constituted the United States. Several of his officers came to proclaim this fact through their insistence that the army was the Revolution and Washington its leader. It was the institution—despite its failures and, at times, its weakness—that held together, demonstrating to the enemy that American independence possessed a reality that could not be crushed. Had Washington not persevered in the service of the cause he called “glorious,” the Revolution would have given way to slow collapse. None of the Americans around him in the army, the Congress, or the states commanded the moral force he embodied. Success in maintaining the American effort would not have been achieved without him.

He succeeded in large part because he understood that the Revolution represented a rare opportunity—something quite new, in fact—to lead a people in defense of principles long honored in conceptions of liberty, stifled or suppressed elsewhere in the world. He did not fully sense the possibilities, or the range, of political liberty when the war began in 1775; nor did anyone else in or out of Congress. The war itself called out his best efforts and stiffened his resolve to honor the ideals proclaimed in the great state papers issued in the early years of resistance, culminating in the Declaration of Independence.

In assessing his performance in conventional military terms—his thought on strategy, his tactical capabilities and action, and his administrative record throughout the war—the basic comparison has to be with his British enemy. Washington’s strategic sense proved to be of a very high order. He saw early on that, because of the disparity in
military strength, the wisest course for his army lay in fighting a war of attrition. Such a war would not yield outright military defeat of the British, but, pursued with care, it held promise of wearing them out until they were willing to accept American independence. If the likelihood of defeating the British army on the battlefield was slim, or nonexistent, the Americans still had to fight—attrition did not mean avoidance of the enemy.

Washington knew much about the British army: It was not large, but its level of competence had been high for many years. Its leaders in the 1770s and after were not brilliant, but Gage, the Howe brothers, Clinton, and Cornwallis were able professionals. British regiments were better than competent; their men and field-grade officers were skillful. Perhaps the greatest advantage the British had was their navy. Washington assumed from the beginning of the war that naval power—not just the weight of shipboard guns, but the capacity for moving and supplying troops—was of great importance. He faced a European country of surpassing naval experience and power.

In contrast to the British military, the Americans had to summon an army from nothing, and putting it together had to be done repeatedly. Had knowledge existed of how to create an army from nothing, the American task still would have been daunting, for the will to give up old allegiances to provinces and to adopt fresh ways of dealing with the world as it existed was not strong. Washington supplied much that was missing in political will and in insight. But the underlying circumstances of the new nation, divided and uncertain of how to proceed, and fearful of a standing or professional army, dogged his action throughout the entire war. He, with the unreliable assistance of the states, created an army, only to see it dissolve, many times. He responded by pulling it together again and again, including not just its regiments of infantry but its logistical services as well. He began as commander with an army outside Boston that was little more than a collection of town and county militias. There were virtually no structure, procedures, regulations, or army-wide logistical and other organizations in support. A body of officers experienced in military organization and in combat was also lacking. The creation of an army while conducting military operations had few precedents and had to be done during a siege and, later, under the most pressing kinds of fighting.

Despite the persistence of the underlying circumstances of a weak
central authority, he fought his way through using what was available to hold off superior forces in almost every battle. Only at Yorktown did he go into battle with a favorable hand. When his army’s prospects were at their bleakest, as in December 1776, he seized control at Trenton and Princeton—not because his army was stronger, but because he had imagination and daring. He also demonstrated that he knew how to run a battle and in the process to inspire an army and a nation. His and his army’s fortunes had desperate moments after these brilliant attacks, but they sustained Washington’s vision and his hold on the Revolution. Whatever the course of the military conflict, he insisted on a policy of attrition, and his strategy under all sorts of circumstances remained steady.

That the American conception of civil supremacy remained firm even when the army seemed the only reliable institution in the war—and its commander the center of authority—owed more to Washington, a general, than to anything else. War, he knew, could dissolve the claims of the civilian world to ultimate authority. Such claims in America were hardly more than a wish in the dark days of the war. Washington made the claims a reality. His thought indeed amounted to a form of constitutionalism. Here, on this matter of the people and the army, he insisted that the people’s voice should be loudest.

Washington’s imagination—his conception of what freedom meant in a free nation—is sometimes overlooked in the certitude of his physical bravery. He was a general, after all; he fought and he overcame enormous obstacles. But he also possessed a grand imagination, a vision of his new country. That vision, often a daring instrument, set him apart and made him the great leader of the Revolution.

Epilogue

Return to Virginia

Washington had not been home a month when he described himself to Chastellux as “a private citizen of America, on the banks of the Potowmac; where under my own Vine & my own Fig Tree—free from the bustle of a camp & the intrigues of a Court, I shall view the busy world, ‘in the calm lights of mild philosophy.’ ” The quotation was from Addison’s
Cato
, long a favorite and an understandable choice for a literary expression that, he hoped, would characterize the substance of his retirement. This comment to Chastellux followed a formula he had devised to explain his private thought to friends who were not intimates—he had few intimates—and, though revealing, did not expose much of what he really felt. More of his innerness took form in his letters to Lafayette at the beginning of February, but even in these letters, he did not wander far from the stoic stance he almost always assumed in explaining himself. To Lafayette he evoked the soldier-statesman-courtier he claimed not to be. Such men, he said, acted roles in life far from the one he aspired to, one in which he had renounced “public employments” in favor of “retireing within myself.” He was now a man who envied no one, but was determined to be “pleased with all” and moving “gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my Fathers.”
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