You Never Forget Your First
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7. “From George Washington to Robert Cary & Company.”
8. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Under Their Vine and Fig Tree: Travels through America in 1797–1799, 1805 with Some Further Account of Life in New Jersey (Elizabeth, NJ: The Grassman Publishing Company, Inc., 1965), 100. Of course, this was not a legal marriage. Perhaps a ceremony had taken place, and while Washington sought to keep families together—largely so they would procreate, which increased his wealth—he did, on occasion, sell or separate them.
9. In the introduction to “The 1619 Project” at The New York Times (August 14, 2019), Nikole Hannah-Jones describes Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello as a “forced-labor camp.”
10. “To George Washington from Anthony Whitting, 16 January 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-12-02-0005. “From George Washington to Anthony Whitting, 20 January 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-12-02-0013.
11. Mary V. Thompson, “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), 247–258. Thompson is the foremost living George Washington scholar, and has published several books and many essays on him and Mount Vernon, where she has worked for decades. This book is her most recent, and the most exhaustive study of Washington and slavery in existence.
12. At one point, he described plans to drain the Dismal Swamp south of the Chesapeake and use the Potomac canal for commerce, all in an effort to ship produce farther west.
13. “From George Washington to George Mason, 5 April 1769,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 8, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-08-02-0132.
14. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, George Washington (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004), 17.
15. “From George Washington to Robert Cary & Company, 20 August 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 26, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-08-02-0248-0001.
16. “From George Washington to Bryan Fairfax, 20 July 1774,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed March 2, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0081.
CHAPTER 8: “THE SHACKLES OF SLAVERY”
1. “From George Washington to Bryan Fairfax, 20 July 1774,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed March 2, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0081.
2. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, George Washington (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004), 22.
3. “From George Washington to George William Fairfax, 10–15 June 1774,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed June 7, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0067.
4. The Works of Samuel Johnson, (Troy, NY: Pafraets & Company, 1913) vol. 14, 93–144.
5. “Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 29 May 1775,” Massachusetts Historical Society, accessed October 8, 2017, www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17750529ja&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fletters_1774_1777.php.
6. Thomas Cushing to James Bowdoin, 21 June 1775, in Bowdoin and Temple Papers in Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 6th ser., 9: 384–385.
7. Noemie Emery, Washington: A Biography (London: Cassell, 1977), 179.
8. “From George Washington to George William Fairfax, 31 May 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 5, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0281.
9. “From George Washington to Martha Washington, 18 June 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed August 6, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-01-02-0003.
PART II: GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON'S AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, George Washington (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004), 27.
2. Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 74.
CHAPTER 9: HARDBALL WITH THE HOWE BROTHERS
1. Mark Mayo Boatner III, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York: David McKay Co., Inc., 1966), 798.
2. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 98.
3. George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin, eds., Rebels & Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1987), 156. Also see Sir John Barrow, The Life of Richard Earl Howe, K.G. (London: John Murray, 1838).
4. “From George Washington to John Hancock, 9 February 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 10, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-03-02-0201.
5. The patriots got muskets and wool from privateering, capturing supplies (like at Fort Ticonderoga), and trading with the French and other European nations. Food and provisions were readily available to the patriots, especially early in the war. For the most part, the British were waiting on these basic necessities to ship from England.
6. Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, 846.
7. Ambrose Serle, July 14, 1776, quoted in Edward H. Tatum, Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, Secretary to Lord Howe, 1776–1778 (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1940), 33.
8. “General Orders, 11 March 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed June 13, 2018, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-03-02-0326.
9. Carlos E. Godfrey, The Commander-in-Chief’s Guard: Revolutionary War (Washington, D.C.: Stevenson-Smith Company, 1904), 20.
10. Henry Knox to Lucy Knox, July 22, 1776, in Scheer and Rankin, Rebels & Redcoats, 157.
11. Scheer and Rankin, Rebels & Redcoats, 158.
12. “From George Washington to John Hancock, 14 July 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed March 21, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-05-02-0218.
13. “From Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, 2 June 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed June 16, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-0174.
14. For more, see Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown Publishers, 2017), 152.
15. Large-scale exchanges of prisoners would later become impossible, and both sides would be stuck with a constant swell of prisoners. The British would break first, however, at least in the local ranks, when officers on the ground negotiated release without ever mentioning the crown—an expedient way to maintain their government’s official position while still decreasing the number of prisoners under their guard.
16. Hoock, 168. As Hoock notes, “America’s commander in chief was framing his version of the war while he was fighting it.”
17. The ongoing conflict in Afghanistan is the longest.
CHAPTER 10: THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION
1. Palmer testimony can be found in PCC, 53: “Papers and Affidavits Related to the Plunderings, Burnings, and Ravages Committed by the British, 1775–84,” fol. 29–40, NARA M247.
2. I interviewed Holger Hoock about Abigail Palmer for Lenny. Alexis Coe, “How Rape Was Used as a Weapon During the Revolutionary War,” Lenny, July 25, 2017, www.lennyletter.com/story/how-rape-was-used-as-a-weapon-during-the-revolutionary-war.
3. Francis, Lord Rawdon to his uncle Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, August 4, 1776, in Francis Bickley, ed., Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1934), 179.
4. “From George Washington to William Livingston, 3 March 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 19, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-08-02-0524.
5. PCC, 53: “Papers and Affidavits Related
to the Plunderings, Burnings, and Ravages Committed by the British, 1775–84,” fol. 29–40, NARA M247.
6. “Reporting on the Revolutionary War,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed April 9, 2017, www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-revolutionary-war/reporting-the-revolutionary-war-an-interview-with-todd-andrlik/.
7. Washington Irving, The Life and Times of Washington (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1876), 219. The poem’s publication did them both a service. Along with the benefits it provided Washington, it revived Wheatley’s fame and fortune for a while, which had waned. (Her fame lasted until she married John Peters, an improvident, slackard freeman, and dropped into obscurity.)
8. “From George Washington to Major General John Sullivan, 31 May 1779,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed February 20, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0661.
9. David Hackett Fisher, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 438. At the time, the thirteen figures in the boat were a show of diversity: The man in the Balmoral bonnet may have been a Scottish immigrant; the man in the big hat, a farmer from Pennsylvania. The soldier, Lieutenant James Monroe, carried the American flag while Washington—his solid legs spread confidently, his sword prominently placed—kept his eyes on the Jersey Shore.
CHAPTER 11: GEORGE WASHINGTON, AGENT 711
1. “To George Washington from John Jay, 19 November 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed August 19, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-18-02-0218.
2. “From George Washington to Elias Boudinot, 3 May 1779,” Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0267.
3. It was likely made of tannic acid. See Alexander Rose, Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring (New York: Bantam Books, 2006), 106–111, 310–312.
4. “From George Washington to Major General William Heath, 5 September 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed August 11, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-06-02-0181.
5. On any other day, Hale may have been given some kind of performative trial, but the British needed a patriot to publicly pay for the Great New York Fire of 1776, when Trinity Church and nearly six hundred houses had been burned to the ground. Hale had nothing to do with it, but not long after Robert Rogers (a master tracker and hunter who had been serving the British since the French and Indian War) delivered him as the fall man, he had a noose fixed around his neck. Hale’s hasty execution and utter failure as a spy should have guaranteed his obscurity in favor of so many other heroes and martyrs, but his alleged last words are still well-known today: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”
6. “From George Washington to Robert Morris, 30 December 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed July 10, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-07-02-0382.
7. Our knowledge of what followed should be far less, but Washington was a poor spymaster in at least one regard: He didn’t always destroy the evidence. His staff made copies of most of his letters, and at the end of the war those letters were boxed up with the rest of his papers and sent to the Library of Congress. Any researcher can request the hundreds of letters, written under aliases.
8. For more information, see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961).
9. “Lafayette’s Testimonial to James Armistead Lafayette,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed February 20, 2018, www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-revolutionary-war/spying-and-espionage/american-spies-of-the-revolution/lafayettes-testimonial-to-james-armistead-lafayette/.
10. “From George Washington to Elias Boudinot, 3 May 1779,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed November 3, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-20-02-0267. They would not have called themselves “occupied,” since it was a British territory, for some time. Tallmadge’s older brother, William, was taken prisoner in the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and was “literally starved to death.” If the war hadn’t been personal as much as political before then, it certainly was after.
11. Though Tallmadge viewed the whole raid, thwarted by weather, as a failure, Washington encouraged him, writing, “Tho’ you have not met with that success you deserved & probably would have obtained had the Enterprize proceeded, yet I cannot but think your whole conduct in the affair was such as ought to entitle you still more to my confidence & esteem. . . . Another time you will have less opposition from the Winds & Weather; & success will amply compensate you for this little disappointment.” “From George Washington to Benjamin Tallmadge, 10 December 1782,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed July 12, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-10171. [This is an Early Access document from PGW. It is not an authoritative final version.]
12. James Rivington, an editor at the Royal Gazette, is also believed to have passed on vital information contributing to Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.
13. “Culper Spy Ring Code,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, accessed February 22, 2018, www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-sources-2/article/culper-spy-ring-code/. [Original source: George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741–1799, Library of Congress, Series 4: General Correspondence, 1697–1799.]
14. “General George Washington Issues Orders to the Famed Culper Spy Ring Through His Spy Master,” Raab Collection, accessed January 15, 2017, www.raabcollection.com/presidential-autographs/washington-spy.
15. Washington had been relying on misinformation since the beginning, scaring Loyalist neighbors and redcoats alike with massive exaggerations of patriot forces, their movements, numbers, and even attacks. He learned that lesson early on, when he took command in Cambridge at the outset of the war and discovered that the three hundred barrels of gunpowder in reserve there had been sent to Bunker Hill. Only thirty-two barrels remained—nine rounds per soldier. Supposedly too stunned to speak for half an hour, Washington then sent men to Boston to spread rumors that they had more than eighteen hundred barrels.
16. Washington was willing to try almost anything, so long as it was honorable, and that included relying on women for intelligence. One of them was Lydia Darragh, a Quaker midwife in Philadelphia. The Tories considered her innocuous enough that they used her house as a “council chamber,” never suspecting that she spent hours lying on the floor above eavesdropping through the wooden boards as they discussed their battle plans. Darragh’s husband would write out her dispatches in shorthand notes, which they then hid in large, cloth-covered buttons sewn onto her fourteen-year-old son’s clothes. He would be relieved of them the next time he visited his brother, a lieutenant in the Continental Army. That’s how Washington’s army came to ambush the British at Valley Forge. They showed up shortly before Christmas 1777, assuming the tired and hungry colonists would be easy prey, and there were Washington’s men, lying in wait with cannons loaded and muskets at the ready. Darragh escaped without suspicion. An interrogator told her he wouldn’t bother to ask her when she went to bed, “because I know you retire each night exactly at nine.” Thomas Fleming, “George Washington, Spymaster,” American Heritage, February/March 2000, www.americanheritage.com/george-washington-spymaster.
17. An earlier version of this appeared in The Washington Post. Alexis Coe, “What Drove Benedict Arnold to Give Up the Patriot Cause and Turn Treasonous?” The Washington Post, July 13, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/what-drove-benedict-arnold-to-give-up-the-patriot-cause-and-turn-treasonous/2018/07/13/0dbb97c6-6b47-11e8-bea7-c8eb28bc52b1_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.30cf5974b0db.
18. Washington receives much sympathy from historians over the loss of his father and how it deprived him of a carefree boyhood, yet Arnold’s early tale of woe—he was yanked out of boarding school when hi
s alcoholic father’s business collapsed and forced to give up his education for an apprenticeship—has more often been cited as the origin of his personal bitterness. Perhaps it’s a fair point. Arnold bragged about his beautiful wife’s prowess in bed and complained constantly about everything else, calling his doctors in Albany “ignorant pretenders” and politicians far worse.
19. “General Orders, 6 April 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 11, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-01375 [inactive]. [This is an Early Access document from PGW. It is not an authoritative final version.]
20. “From George Washington to William Heath, 21 March 1781,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed April 8, 2017, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-05145. [This is an Early Access document from PGW. It is not an authoritative final version.]
21. Quoted in James Thomas Flexner, The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John André (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 304.
22. Washington put Townsend and others on furlough for a few months, just in case, but all ultimately returned to their posts. They were never caught. Sam Roberts, “War of Secrets; Spy History 101: America’s Intelligence Quotient,” The New York Times, September 8, 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/weekinreview/war-of-secrets-spy-history-101-america-s-intelligence-quotient.html.
23. Quoted in James Kirby Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 428. See also Peter Force, American Archives: Consisting of a Collection of Authentick Records, State Papers, Debates, and Letters and Other Notices of Publick Affairs, the Whole Forming a Documentary History of the Origin and Progress of the North American Colonies; of the Causes and Accomplishment of the American Revolution; and of the Constitution of Government for the United States, to the Final Ratification Thereof, Library of Congress, vol. 5: 1273.