Few would ever provide a more succinct description of Washington’s particular hold on men.
BORN IN TIDEWATER VIRGINIA on February 11, 1732 (by the Old Style calendar), George Washington was the great-grandson of John Washington, who had emigrated from Northampton, England, in 1657. His father, Augustine Washington, was a tobacco planter also known for his “noble appearance and manly proportions.” His mother, Mary Bell, was widowed when Washington was eleven. Because of the family’s reduced circumstances, he had had little education—only seven or eight years of schooling by private tutor, no training in Latin or Greek or law, as had so many prominent Virginia patriots—and, as those close to him knew, he was self-conscious about this.
By steady application he had learned to write in a clear, strong hand and to express himself on paper with force and clarity. He learned to dance—Virginians loved to dance and he was no exception—and he learned to comport himself in the elaborately polite society of the day with perfect manners and polish. (Of the 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation that he had laboriously copied down as a boy, Rule Number One read: “Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those who are present.”) He enjoyed parties and particularly the company of attractive women. As would be said of British officers, he “liked his glass, his lass, his game of cards,” though gambling never became the obsession it was for so many of his counterparts on the British side.
The great teacher for Washington was experience. At age sixteen, he had set out to make his way in the world, as a surveyor’s apprentice on an expedition into the wilderness of western Virginia, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and as years passed he spent more time in the backcountry beyond the Blue Ridge than all but a few from the Tidewater. In addition, surveying proved highly remunerative.
In 1753, at twenty, he had been sent by the governor of Virginia to the wilds of western Pennsylvania, to challenge French claims to the Allegheny River valley, and publication of his diary of the venture, The Journal of Major George Washington, made his daring and resourcefulness known throughout the colonies and in Europe. A year later, on his first command, inexperience and poor judgment led to his famous encounter with French troops and Indians at Great Meadows, in the same remote corner of western Pennsylvania—the small, bloody backwoods incident, and first defeat for Washington, that set in motion the conflict that ultimately involved much of the world.
“I heard the bullets whistle; and believe me there is something charming in the sound,” he had written in a letter printed later in the London Magazine, which could be taken as the bravado of a callow youth, but, as he had found, he was one of those rare few who, under fire, were without fear.
As a provincial officer fighting with the British army during General Edward Braddock’s defeat in western Pennsylvania, he had shown conspicuous courage under fire and a marked ability for leadership. If, as a young officer, he seemed at times flagrantly, unattractively ambitious, he had long since overcome that. In 1759, spurned in his desire for a royal commission, he had “retired” at age twenty-seven to the life of a Virginia planter and, that same year, married Martha Dandridge Custis of Williamsburg, an attractive, extremely wealthy widow with two children, to whom he gave full devotion. The children, John Parke Custis and Patsy, were treated quite as though they were his own. Indeed, one of the worst tragedies of Washington’s life had been the death of seventeen-year-old Patsy of an epileptic fit in 1773.
Like other planters of the Tidewater, Washington embraced a life very like that of the English gentry. English by ancestry, he was, in dress, manner, and his favorite pastimes, as close to being an English country gentleman as was possible for an American of the day, and intentionally. His handsome green coach with its brass fittings and leather lining had been custom built in England to his specifications. He ordered his clothes from England, and only the finest English wools and linens and latest fashions would do. He wore English boots, English shoes, and Morocco leather slippers, all made to order for him in London. The books on his shelves, including the military treatises, were published in London. The very glass in the windows through which he viewed his domain was imported English glass.
Only the year before taking command at Cambridge, Washington had commenced an ambitious expansion of his Virginia home, Mount Vernon, which, when completed, would double its size. He was adding a library and building a two-story dining room, or banquet hall, suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. He was a builder by nature. He had a passion for architecture and landscape design, and Mount Vernon was his creation, everything done to his own ideas and plans. How extremely important all this was to him and the pleasure he drew from it, few people ever understood.
He had an abiding dislike of disorder and cared intensely about every detail—wallpaper, paint color, ceiling ornaments—and insisted on perfection. He hated to be away from the project. Even at the distance of Cambridge, with all that weighed on his mind, he worried that things were not being handled as he wished at Mount Vernon and filled pages of instruction for his manager, Lund Washington.
I wish you would quicken Lanphire and Sears [the carpenters] about the dining room chimney piece (to be executed as mentioned in one of my last letters) as I could wish to have that end of the house completely finished before I return. I wish you had done the end of the new kitchen next the garden, as also the old kitchen, with rusticated boards; however, as it is not, I would have the corners done so in the manner of our new church…. What have you done with the well? Is that walled up? Have you any acc[oun]ts of the painter?
Second only to his passion for architecture and landscape design was a love of the theater, which again was quite characteristic of Virginians. He had seen his first known theatrical production at age nineteen on a trip with his older brother to Barbados. It was the first and only time Washington had ever been beyond American shores and the place where he was “strongly attacked” by smallpox. Later, at Williamsburg, as a member of the Virginia legislature, he had attended the theater regularly. During a visit to Annapolis, he recorded going to “the play” four nights out of five. In New York later he attended the theater seven times and saw his first production of Hamlet.
But of all the theatrical productions he had seen it was Cato, by the English author Joseph Addison, the most popular play of the time, that Washington loved best. One line in particular he was to think of or quote frequently in his role now as commander-in-chief: “’Tis not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”
Though Washington was often said to be the richest man in America, he probably did not rank among the ten richest. He was very wealthy, nonetheless, and in large part because of his marriage to Martha Custis. His wealth was in land, upwards of 54,000 acres, including some 8,000 acres at Mount Vernon, another 4,000 acres in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nearly all of which he had acquired for speculation. In addition, he owned more than one hundred slaves, another measure of great wealth, whose labors made possible his whole way of life.
In a popular English novel of the day, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, Tobias Smollett wrote that to be a country gentleman one was “obliged to keep horses, hounds, carriages, with suitable numbers of servants, and maintain an elegant table for the entertainment of his neighbors.” It could have been a description of life at Mount Vernon, with the difference that the servants were black slaves.
Among the Virginia gentry who had taken up fox hunting with an exuberance no less than to be found on the country estates of England, Washington stood out. Thomas Jefferson considered him “the best horseman of his age.” That Washington was known to hunt up to seven hours straight, riding as close to the hounds as possible, “leaping fences, and going extremely quick,” and always to the end, to be in on the kill, was considered not only a measure of his love of the chase and his exceptional physical stamina, but also of his uncommon, unrelenting determination.
Billy Lee, the b
ody servant, rode with him, rode like the wind by all accounts, and no less fearlessly than his master.
“Found a fox in Mr. Phil Alexander’s island which was lost after a chase of seven hours,” Washington recorded in his diary at the end of one winter day in 1772, but he did not give up, as shown in his entry for the day following: “Found a fox in the same place again which was killed at the end of 6 hours.”
An English sporting writer of a later era would describe fox hunting as “the image of war without its guilt and only half its danger.” In some years, according to Washington’s own records, the days he devoted to fox hunting added up to a month. He kept precise account of exactly how long each chase lasted, to the minute. Again, he was a man who loved precision in everything.
Stories were told of extraordinary feats of strength—how, for example, Washington had thrown a stone from the bed of a stream to the top of Virginia’s famous Natural Bridge, a height of 215 feet. The Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale, who had been a guest at Mount Vernon in 1772 while painting Washington’s portrait, described how he and several other young men were on the lawn throwing an iron bar for sport, when Washington appeared and, without bothering to remove his coat, took a turn, throwing it “far, very far beyond our utmost limit.”
Washington’s wealth and way of life, like his physique and horsemanship, were of great importance to large numbers of the men he led and among many in Congress. The feeling was that if he, George Washington, who had so much, was willing to risk “his all,” however daunting the odds, then who were they to equivocate. That he was also serving without pay was widely taken as further evidence of the genuineness of his commitment.
There were, to be sure, those in the ranks and among the local populace who had little fondness for Virginia planters and their high-and-mighty airs, or who saw stunning incongruity in the cause of liberty being led by a slavemaster.
It was also a matter of record that Washington had been retired from military life for fifteen years, during which he had not even drilled a militia company. His only prior experience had been in backwoods warfare—a very different kind of warfare—and most notably in the Braddock campaign of 1755, which had been a disaster. He was by no means an experienced commander. He had never led an army in battle, never before commanded anything larger than a regiment. And never had he directed a siege.
Washington was quite aware of his limitations. In formal acceptance of the new command, on June 16, 1775, standing at his place in Congress, he had addressed John Hancock:
I am truly sensible of the high honor done me in this appointment, yet I feel great distress from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important trust. However, as the Congress desire i[t], I will enter upon the momentous duty, and exert every power I possess in their service and for the support of the glorious Cause.
He knew he might not succeed, and he gave Congress fair warning:
But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in the room that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I [am] honored with.
To his wife Martha he wrote that “far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity…. it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service….”
Yet he had attended Congress in his splendid blue and buff uniform, conspicuously signaling a readiness to take command. If he saw the responsibility as too great for his ability, it was because he had a realistic idea of how immense that responsibility would be. For such a trust, to lead an undisciplined, poorly armed volunteer force of farmers and tradesmen against the best-trained, best-equipped, most formidable military force on earth—and with so much riding on the outcome—was, in reality, more than any man was qualified for.
But he knew also that someone had to take command, and however impossible the task and the odds, he knew he was better suited than any of the others Congress might have in mind.
Without question, Congress had made the right choice, and not the least of reasons was political. As a Virginian, Washington represented the richest, most populous of the thirteen colonies. He himself had had years of political experience in the Virginia legislature and as a member of the Continental Congress. It was as one of them that the members of Congress knew him best and respected him, not as a general. He knew the ways of politics and factious politicians. He understood how the system worked. For all the delays and frustrations, however severe the tests of patience he was to suffer in his dealings with them and the system, he never forgot that Congress held the ultimate power, that he, the commander-in-chief, was the servant of some fifty-six delegates who, in far-off Philadelphia, unlike Parliament, met in secrecy.
III
IN THE FIRST DAYS OF SEPTEMBER, Washington began drawing up plans for two bold moves.
He had decided to carry the war into Canada with a surprise attack on the British at Quebec. A thousand men from the ranks longing for action volunteered at once. Led by an aggressive Connecticut colonel named Benedict Arnold, they were to advance on Quebec across the Maine wilderness, taking a northeastern route up the Kennebec River. Hastily conceived, this “secret expedition” was based on too little knowledge of the terrain, but in small units the men began marching off for Newburyport, north of Boston, from where they would sail by sloop and schooner to the mouth of the Kennebec.
He felt he could detach a thousand troops this way, Washington informed Congress, because he had concluded, from intelligence gathered from spies and British deserters, that the enemy in Boston had no intention of launching an attack until they were reinforced.
His second plan was to end the waiting and strike at Boston, which, it was understood, could mean destruction of the town. British defenses were formidable. In fact, defenses on both sides had been strengthened to the point where many believed neither army would dare attack the other. Also, a siege by definition required a great deal of prolonged standing still and waiting. But standing still and waiting were not the way to win a war, and not in Washington’s nature.
“The inactive state we lie in is exceedingly disagreeable,” he had confided to his brother John. He wanted a “speedy finish,” to fight and be done with it. “No danger is to be considered when put in competition with the magnitude of the cause,” he had asserted earlier in a letter to the governor of Rhode Island.
According to his instructions from Congress, he was to take no action of consequence until advising with his council of war, and thus a meeting was scheduled for the morning of September 11, “to know,” he informed his generals, “whether in your judgments, we cannot make a successful attack upon the troops in Boston, by means of boats.”
On September 10, mutiny broke out among the Pennsylvania riflemen, after several of the worst troublemakers had been confined to the guardhouse. Though the mutiny was put down at once by General Greene and a large detachment of Rhode Island troops, it only added to the sense of an army coming apart, and Washington was visibly shaken.
The council of war convened in his office as scheduled the next morning—three major generals, including the venerable Israel Putnam, and four brigadiers. All were New Englanders but one, Major General Charles Lee, who was Washington’s second-in-command and the only professional soldier present. A former British officer and veteran of the French and Indian War, Lee, like Washington, had fought in the ill-fated Braddock campaign and later settled in Virginia. He was a spare, odd-looking man with a long, hooked nose and dark, bony face. Rough in manner, rough of speech, he had nothing of Washington’s dignity. Even in uniform he looked perpetually unkempt.
Lee might have been a character out of an English novel, such were his eccentricities and colorful past. He had once been married to an Indian woman, the dau
ghter of a Seneca chief. He had served gallantly with the British army in Spain, and as aide-de-camp to the King of Poland. Like Frederick the Great, he made a flamboyant show of his love for dogs, keeping two or three with him most of the time. A New Hampshire clergyman, Jeremy Belknap, after dining with the general in Cambridge, thought him “an odd genius…a great sloven, wretchedly profane, and a great admirer of dogs, one of them a native of Pomerania, which I should have taken for a bear had I seen him in the woods.”
Lee was also self-assured, highly opinionated, moody, and ill-tempered (his Indian name was Boiling Water), and he was thought by many to have the best military mind of any of the generals, a view he openly shared. Washington considered him “the first officer in military knowledge and experience we have in the whole army,” and it was at Washington’s specific request that Congress had made Lee second-in-command.
Whatever opinions Lee had of Washington, he kept to himself, except to remark that he thought the appellation “Excellency” perfectly absurd.
In striking contrast to Lee was Major General Artemus Ward, a heavy-set, pious-looking Massachusetts farmer, storekeeper, justice of the peace, and veteran of the French and Indian War, who had had overall command of the siege of Boston prior to Washington’s arrival. Ward was considered “a good man, a thorough New England man,” though uninspiring. General Lee privately called him a “fat, old church warden” with “no acquaintance whatever with military matters.” But if unspectacular, Ward was competent, thoughtful, and not without good sense, as time would show.
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