by Alexis Coe
WASHINGTON’S LIFEGUARDS: “CONQUER OR DIE”
On March 11, 1776, during the siege of Boston, Washington issued a “General Order to Colonels or Commanding Officers,” in which he asked them to select four men. Washington had a very specific vision for his personal guards, down to their height:
His Excellency depends upon the Colonels for good Men, such as they can recommend for their sobriety, honesty, and good behavior; he wishes them to be from five feet, eight Inches high, to five feet, ten Inches; handsomely and well made, and as there is nothing in his eyes more desirable, than Cleanliness in a Soldier, he desires that particular attention may be made, in the choice of such men, as are neat, and spruce.8
Washington put Caleb Gibbs, of the 14th Massachusetts Continental Regiment, in charge of the new unit, which he called “My Guards.” Soldiers called them “His Excellency’s Guard” and “Washington’s Body Guard,” but most of his men called them “the Life Guards.” They dressed in blue and buff uniforms with leather helmets bearing a white plume. Gibbs had the buttons on his uniform engraved with “USA”—the first known record of the abbreviation.
Under the motto “Conquer or Die,” Gibbs trained his men to protect Washington, as well as the army’s cash and official papers. They foiled at least one assassination attempt, fought in battles, and performed military demonstrations. They were mostly furloughed after Yorktown, but their last mission was one of the most important—ensuring that the six wagons filled with Washington’s belongings and official war records reached Mount Vernon.9
Paterson likely knew that nothing would come from the meeting, but he seemed happy to take it. In a letter to his wife, Lucy, Knox reported that Paterson stood before Washington “as if he was before something supernatural.” He described a reverent scene in which “Every other word was ‘May it please your Excellency,’ ‘If your Excellency so please’ . . . ” But Paterson had nothing new to offer except flattery. “Etc.,” he argued unconvincingly, meant “everything,” a sign of Howe’s esteem for his American colleague. Washington could not abide this contention. What’s more, he told Paterson, “the Americans had not offended, and therefore they needed no pardon.”10 If peace between two coequal nations wasn’t on the table, there was nothing more to discuss.
Still, Paterson lingered, hoping for a message he could take back to the Howe brothers. Washington replied, smolderingly, “My particular compliments to both.”11 That swagger, from the leader of a far inferior, ill-trained army facing the greatest military power in the world, was all Washington. He’d lacked a cool head when he’d fought for the British, but in the seventeen years since he’d grown into a statesman.
Washington then sent a letter to John Hancock, explaining why he’d dug in his heels. “I deemed It a duty to my Country and my appointment,” he wrote, “to insist upon that respect.”12 This wasn’t about superficial decorum. It was about what the United States of America was willing to put up for negotiation, and that emphatically did not include its independence—or the laws of war.
SIDESTEPPING THE RULES OF WAR
Captive soldiers, according to the rules of war, were meant to be treated like one’s own—fed, housed, and cared for, at the expense of the army to whom they belonged—and violations of these rules made for good propaganda. When Washington heard Lieutenant William Martin and six of his men had been brutally hacked to death after they injured a couple of Hessian mercenaries, he ordered Martin’s mutilated body be cleaned and exhibited for all to see. John Robert Shaw, a seventeen-year-old British soldier who rode to the Hessians’ rescue and witnessed the subsequent killing of Martin’s men, wrote that “the shrieks and screams of the helpless victims whom our saved fellow soldiers were butchering, were sufficient to have melted into compassion the heart of a Turk or a Tartar.” He saw some “having their arms cut off, and others with their bowels hanging out crying for mercy.” One patriot escaped, with the redcoats on his heels and a bayonet sticking out of his arm. He made it to a Continental Army camp in Paramus, New Jersey. “It is evident,” Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s aide at the time, wrote to New York Congressman John Jay, “that the most wanton and unnecessary cruelty must have been given him when utterly out of a condition to resist.” That story ended up in the patriot newspapers, with harrowing details about how Martin had asked for quarter (clemency or mercy) and instead received “a most barbarous butchery.”13 And if Washington had not already made his point clear—to the Americans as much as the British—he had Martin’s corpse placed in a cloth-covered casket and delivered to enemy headquarters. He included a note condemning the killers’ “spirit of wanton cruelty.”14
If America was not a sovereign nation, its soldiers were “rebels,” which meant the British didn’t have to follow established rules on the treatment of prisoners. They’d answer to no one but themselves.15
Washington’s insistence on being addressed by his title reminds us that he could be a brilliant tactician, but his strategic and intellectual victories off the battlefield have been totally overshadowed by his military triumphs during the Revolution. He won the war, but he didn’t do it with sheer force alone.16 He couldn’t have.
If Washington had tried to match the Howe brothers in experience or armed forces, the war would not have been the second longest in American history.17 There likely wouldn’t be an American history. To pigeonhole him as a military leader is to underestimate how much the fledgling government needed Washington as a diplomat and political strategist. His ability to manage large-scale combat while also running spy rings and shadow and propaganda campaigns in enemy-occupied areas is a significant—and often overlooked—part of the Revolutionary War.
CHAPTER 10
The Court of Public Opinion
In 1777, a “great number of soldiers belonging to the British Army” went to Edmund Palmer’s Pennsylvania farm and demanded to “speak to” his thirteen-year-old granddaughter, Abigail Palmer. There was no reason to allow it. Aside from her unfortunate proximity to a British encampment, Abigail played no role in the hostilities. Edmund refused.
A soldier “dragged her in the back room and she screamed.” Abigail kept screaming, though they threatened to “knock her eyes out if she did not hold her tongue.” More soldiers came and went. Her grandfather pleaded that they not “use a girl of that age after that manner,” but they did, for three days.
Mary Phillips, Abigail’s pregnant aunt, was also raped by the redcoats. So were the Cain sisters, who were visiting the Palmer farm. When fifteen-year-old Elizabeth and seventeen-year-old Sarah resisted, the soldiers threatened to run bayonets through their hearts, or poison them, or “kill the family & fire the house & barn.” They took the youngest girls, Abigail and Elizabeth, “into the same room where they ravished them both,” then brought them back to camp.1 There, they were repeatedly raped by more soldiers until their pleas fell on a sympathetic ear, and they were returned to Palmer’s farm.2
REPORTING SEXUAL ASSAULT
In early America—as, indeed, in later America—victims rarely reported a sexual assault. During peacetime, the public humiliation and blame that such an accusation was guaranteed to bring the woman and her family was a strong deterrent. War introduced further obstacles. The aggressor might be an enemy soldier traveling through town, a stranger the victim could not identify. Even if she could, would it matter to the man’s commanding officer?
While few letters on the subject of sexual violence have survived, those that can be found in the archives are disturbingly consistent. In one example, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, an aide-de-camp to British general Sir Henry Clinton, wrote to his uncle:
A girl of this island made a complaint the other day to Lord Percy of her being deflowered, as she said, by some grenadiers. Lord Percy asked her how she knew them to be grenadiers, as it happened in the dark. “Oh, good God,” cried she, “they could be nothing else, and if your Lordship will examine I
am sure you will find it so.”
Throughout the letter, he marvels at the virile redcoats, whose American victims “are so little accustomed to these vigorous methods that they don’t bear them with the proper resignation.”3
Washington let it be known that he wanted horrific stories “on the subject of the Enemy’s brutality” collected and sent to him. “[I]t is expected that humanity and tenderness to women and children will distinguish brave Americans, contending for liberty, from infamous mercenary ravagers, whether British or Hessians,” Washington wrote in 1777 to William Livingston, the governor of New Jersey.4 Accounts about the “infamous mercenary ravagers” were then pieced together and printed in congressional reports, placed with no less care or intention than troops on the battlefield.5 And at a time when there were no real war correspondents, those dispatches from the front—or, as in the Palmer farm case, from men like Jared Saxton, a justice of the peace in western New Jersey—were of great interest to newspapers throughout the country.
Their circulation numbers were small, and they rarely contained more than four pages, but their reach was enormous—and the propaganda they disseminated was integral to the success of the Revolution. They were read aloud in meeting houses, coffee shops, and taverns. Washington got his hands on as many editions as he could—requesting they be sent from other cities and that visitors bring them to him—and studied them carefully. He even talked Congress into funding the New Jersey Journal, over which he could exert total editorial control, spreading stories about American good deeds and British evil. Benjamin Rush, a prominent physician who served briefly as surgeon general, described these newspapers as “equal to at least two regiments.”6
In lieu of putting one man on trial, accounts like Abigail Palmer’s managed to put the enemy on trial, for the world to judge. While the British Army did occasionally court-martial and even execute rapists, they did so inconsistently enough that American propagandists could easily portray the morality of the British Empire as deficient all around; they could no more be trusted to keep American wives and daughters safe than they could anything else.
* * *
White Americans’ enthusiasm for liberty and “humanity and tenderness” was mostly reserved for people who shared their skin color. They had no plans to abolish slavery. That left them vulnerable to the British, who’d promised freedom for slaves who fought for the crown. Washington, who owned several hundred people himself, recognized the power of the pledge—not only in the reality it promised but also in what it signified to the rest of the world. A weapon he needed to ward off criticism arrived just in time, in 1776, right after he had been appointed commander in chief. That was when Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved poet who’d been named after the boat that brought her from West Africa to Boston, wrote an affecting ode in praise of the Revolution. The final stanza was dedicated “To His Excellency George Washington.”
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.
Washington wasted no time exploiting the poem for political purposes. He included it in a letter to Colonel Joseph Reed on February 10, 1776, writing that he had considered publishing Wheatley’s poem “With a view of doing justice to her great poetical Genius,” but feared it would look vain. Reed took the not-so-subtle hint and promptly sent her ode out to editors, who published it widely.7
Just as Wheatley’s support reassured colonists, news of Indian oppression was essential to Washington’s hearts-and-minds campaign throughout the colonies. At times, the crown had made peace treaties with the Indians that curtailed westward expansion, and the colonists saw themselves as the victims. In an attempt to reassure them, and with the full support of Congress, Washington undertook a campaign of genocide against the Six Nations, the northeast Iroquois confederacy. On May 31, 1779, he allocated a third of his army to General John Sullivan, writing:
The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.8
When the press reported the attacks, they did so with high praise for Washington. The news was so well received, Benjamin Franklin and Marquis de Lafayette set about developing a series of prints to teach children about the kind of Indian-British-Loyalist inhumanity that necessitated such a response.
* * *
The most powerful and enduring story from the Revolution, however, was Washington’s crossing the Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776. Rain, hail, and snow fell on Washington and his men, and ice floes blocked their path, but they landed safely and marched straight to Trenton, New Jersey, successfully assaulting the Hessian encampment there and securing victory. None of Washington’s struggles “fixed itself on my mind so indelibly as the crossing of the Delaware,” wrote Abraham Lincoln, the man who saved the union Washington won, four score and a few years later. Lincoln added, “I am exceedingly anxious that the object they fought for—liberty, and the Union and Constitution they formed—shall be perpetual.”
And so was the image of that Christmas night, recorded seventy-five years later in Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. The painting’s inaccuracies abound—the flag Monroe carries has yet to be introduced, the ice is much too thick—but it hardly matters.9 Leutze managed to capture a certain against-all-odds spirit, which seemed to persuade the world that America was born righteous, so Washington along with it.
CHAPTER 11
George Washington, Agent 711
We shall remain absolutely silent on the Subject,” John Jay, incoming president of the Second Continental Congress, wrote to Washington in 1778.1 Jay couldn’t get him what he was looking for—“a liquid which nothing but a counter liquor (rubbed over the paper afterwards) can make legible”—but his brother could.2 Sir James Jay, a physician in New York, had developed a “sympathetic stain” for secret correspondence.
Washington called the invisible ink “medicine” and advised those he supplied with it to write “on the blank leaves of a pamphlet . . . a common pocket book, or on the blank leaves at each end of registers, almanacs, or any publication or book of small value.” Scraps of paper were easier to come by than the ink: Sir James refused to disclose his recipe to anyone, including his brother.3
“Much will depend on early Intelligence, and meeting the Enemy before they can Intrench,” Washington had written to William Heath, a general in the Continental Army, on September 5, 1776.4 When it came to spying, the Americans lagged too far behind their enemy. The crown had centuries of experience in espionage, as it did in warfare, but Washington had the means to play catch-up in only one realm.
* * *
Good spies are hard to come by. The job attracts risk-takers, fabulists, escapists, idealists, adventurers, and worse. Early American history is littered with the names of men who swiftly learned they lacked the instinct or constitution for espionage. Perhaps the best known is Nathan Hale, who ventured into British-occupied Long Island in September 1776 with no training, no handler, no safe house, and no extraction plan. He was promptly caught.5
Washington needed better operatives in the field, and that wouldn’t come cheap. There were plenty of Continental soldiers contemplating rebellion over missing back pay and want of provisions, but that didn’t stop him from requesting funds for spies. On December 30, 1776, Washington wrote to Robert Morris, the financier of the war, “We have the greatest Occasion at present for hard Money, to pay a certain set of People who are of particular use to us.”6 But he wasn’t after the kind of cash the Continental Congress printed. American currency would incriminate the spies if they were caught with it, and that was assuming they even wanted it; the new money was unstable, in large part because the Bri
tish printed millions of counterfeit bills during the war. Ultimately Morris sent Washington forty-one Spanish dollars, two English crowns, ten shillings, and two sixpence.7
JAMES ARMISTEAD LAFAYETTE
Not all operatives worked for money alone. James Armistead Lafayette, a double agent, moved among the British with relative ease—as did the tens of thousands of other slaves who became Loyalists in hopes of freedom. Lafayette was so successful, he managed to get close to Benedict Arnold after his defection.
Benjamin Quarles, a scholar of African American history, estimates that the British evacuated four thousand slaves from Savannah, six thousand from Charleston, and four thousand from New York after the war, but cautions “these figures are a bit low.” The British likely “carried away” another five thousand people before the surrender at Yorktown, and an unknown number left with the French.8 Lafayette was not among them. He remained in America, still enslaved and considered three-fifths of a person. In 1782, Virginia, where Lafayette was from, passed a manumission act allowing any slave to be emancipated by his owner. When the man who enslaved Lafayette made no move to free him, he made it himself. With the following testimonial from Marquis de Lafayette, he submitted a Manumission Petition to the Virginia General Assembly on November 30, 1786.9