The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Without clothes, shoes, or socks, the men froze on watch; “feet and legs turned black with frostbite, and often had to be amputated,” Lafayette reported.82 Without soap, they suffered constantly from a rash they called “the itch” or “the scab.”83 Without blankets, many must “set up all Night by fires, instead of taking comfortable rest in a natural way,” Washington wrote.84 And as typhus, dysentery, and pneumonia raged through camp, they died and died—one man in seven, versus one in thirty slain fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.85 Some probably lie in the vast mass grave under Philadelphia’s Washington Square, where a monument reads, most truly, “Beneath this stone rests a soldier of Washington’s army who died to give you liberty.”

  THE THREE YEARS of waiting had their ups as well as downs, though the ups meant less bad, never good. However grimly February 1778 began, though, it ended on an upswing. Lady Washington, as the soldiers called Martha, arrived to spend the winter in camp—as she did the following winters—brightening her husband’s mood and inspiriting the troops by her tireless care, as she led officers’ wives in knitting them socks and making them clothes, visiting the sick, and “giving all the comforts to them in her power,” one observer reported—making her rounds through camp with the quiet resolution “of the Roman matrons of whom I had read so much,” another remarked. Later that month, food started trickling in, too, and by spring Washington felt relieved enough to let his junior officers stage a play—Addison’s Cato, of course.86

  At the end of February, an amazing apparition materialized at Valley Forge and turned waiting into a whirlwind of activity. Magnificently theatrical in a golden waistcoat and gold-lapelled coat shimmering with stars and medals, a greyhound at his heels, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a humbly born Prussian infantryman who had risen to captain, served on Frederick the Great’s staff, and won the title freiherr from an impecunious princeling, now seized America’s opportunity to reinvent oneself and presented himself to Washington, perhaps merely through a mistranslation, as a lieutenant general. He straightaway fell to training the troops and improving sanitation, starting by moving latrines and dead horses away from cooking areas. Whatever might have been fake about the baron, his military know-how was real, and, despite his rudimentary English—which at first extended not much further than “Goddamn!”—he fascinated, entertained, and inspired the men, who enthusiastically performed endless drills and learned his state-of-the-art techniques and maneuvers. With the “trappings of his horse, the enormous holsters of his pistols, his large size, and strikingly martial aspect,” one of his soldier-pupils wrote, he “seemed to me a perfect personification of Mars.” And Steuben, once he got over his shock at the nakedness of the soldiers and even officers, and had begun to clean up the filth and disorder, began to appreciate with an equally fascinated affection the “genius of this nation” compared with Europe. In Europe, he wrote, “You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it, but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason you ought to do that,’ and then he does it.”87

  During that same pivotal February, American diplomats Benjamin Franklin, Arthur Lee, and Silas Deane concluded an alliance with France, which recognized the independence of the United States. When Washington heard of the epochal pact in late April, he declared May 5 a day of thanksgiving to “the Almighty ruler of the Universe” for “raising us up a powerful Friend among the Princes of the Earth to establish our liberty and Independence up[on] lasting foundations.” Human ingenuity conjured up wine, spirits, and meat, and 1,500 officers and their wives sat down at outdoor tables and gave thanks indeed.88

  AT THAT MOMENT, what the army was waiting for also began to change. Until then, Washington had watched to see what the redcoats would do. He soon got a dramatic answer. Lord North, the prime minister, fired William Howe as commander in chief—someone had to take the blame for Saratoga—and replaced him with the reluctant Sir Henry Clinton, who’d lived in New York as a boy when his aristocrat father was royal governor, and who repeatedly begged the king to let him come home to his “motherless babes,” after his beloved wife had died giving birth to the fifth.89 Instead, Clinton was to move the army from Philadelphia to New York, a British diplomat’s Patriot laundress told Washington. But Washington didn’t grasp that the new Franco-American alliance had sparked a radical strategic shift in London that prompted Clinton’s northward march. The ministry, viewing the raw materials of the West Indies and the southern states as Britain’s principal transatlantic interests, gave up on New England and the mid-Atlantic and envisioned an American empire that would extend from Canada down the trans-Appalachian West—which British-allied Indians would control—through the southern states and then to the sugar isles, now under French naval threat. So the war would move south, where Clinton would redeploy a third of his troops once he got them to New York.And Washington would now wait to see what France would do.90

  But he wasn’t letting the redcoats leave Philadelphia scot-free. He led his Steuben-honed army after Clinton’s 10,000 men and caught them near a crossroads called Monmouth Court House (now Freehold, New Jersey) on June 27. He ordered Charles Lee, just back from British captivity, to attack with 5,000 troops in the morning, while Lafayette would lead another thousand, and he himself 6,000 more. When he arrived around noon on a day so hot that his men had peeled off their shirts and his beautiful white horse finally dropped dead beneath him, he found Lee’s men in headlong retreat after a bungled attack, and Lee himself riding after them, his dogs panting behind. Furious, Washington swore as no one had heard him swear before or since. “What is the meaning of this, sir?” the General demanded. A flustered Lee blamed the troops. “You damned poltroon, you never tried them,” Washington raged.

  Ordering General Anthony Wayne to hold off the approaching British main force, Washington galloped after the fleeing Americans to rally them by dauntless charisma. His whole “bearing,” his “calm and deportment,” inspired “the highest degree of enthusiasm,” Lafayette marveled. Quelling the panic by his “coolness and firmness,” said Hamilton, Washington asked the men if they’d stand and fight. Three thunderous cheers said they would, and they followed him back into ferocious battle beneath the blazing sun, maneuvering with disciplined professionalism against an entire British army, while Washington “directed the whole with the skill of a master workman,” according to Hamilton. The British retreated as the merciless sun began to sink, and Washington resolved to follow them in the morning. Taking a leaf from his playbook, however, Generals Clinton and Cornwallis showily ignited sparkling campfires as they slunk away in the night, ending the war’s last full-scale battle in the North. Washington boasted about fighting the king’s army to a draw and driving it off, but in his heart he had yearned for a decisive rout.91

  AS WASHINGTON watched and waited, he also thought and talked, trying to make sense of the world-changing whirlwind he struggled to direct. In his 1778–79 winter camp in Middlebrook, New Jersey—where, learning from Valley Forge, he had dispersed his troops, decreed healthier barracks, imposed Steuben’s Prussian hygiene, and issued warm, French-supplied uniforms—his soldiers still stayed hungry in the midst of bountiful farmland. As at Valley Forge, American farmers sold produce to the British for hard money rather than to their own countrymen for ever-depreciating paper.

  Coolly realistic, Washington understood why. People “may talk of patriotism; they may draw a few examples from ancient story, of great achievements performed by its influence; but whoever builds upon it, as a sufficient Basis for conducting a long and bloody War, will find themselves deceived in the end,” he wrote. “We must take the passions of Men as Nature has given them,” and though “I do not mean to exclude altogether the Idea of Patriotism,” nevertheless it “must be aided by a prospect of Interest or some reward.”92 Since suppliers want to profit from their labors and need to be paid in money that’s worth something, he warned on the way to Middlebrook, the army can’t keep fighting if inflation vaporizes the value of America’s currency
.93

  All through 1779, the inflation worsened: in January, you could exchange eight paper Continental dollars, which Congress had begun to print in 1775, for a dollar of specie; in October, it took thirty; in December, forty-two.94 Washington grasped personally why no one wanted dollars, as opposed to British pounds. In August 1779, he wrote his cousin Lund how heartsick he felt when people who owed him money offered to pay in paper dollars worth only sixpence or a shilling instead of £1. Someone who bought six hundred acres from him “in the most valuable part of Virginia, that ought to have been pd. for before the money began to depreciate; nay years before the War,” Washington complained, now wants to pay the debt in currency that today is worth no more than a year’s salary for “a common Miller.” Would Lund please “consult Men of honor, honesty, and firm attachment to the cause” as to what they think is the proper course? If “sacrificing my whole Estate would effect any valuable purpose I would not hesitate one moment in doing it. [B]ut my submitting to matters of this kind unless it is done so by others, is no more than a drop in the bucket, in fact it is not serving the public but enriching individuals and countenancing dishonesty.” Already, the “fear of injuring by any example of mine the credit of our paper currency if I attempted to discriminate between the real and nominal value of Paper money” has cost dearly—and there’s a limit.95

  Worried that victory would turn on “whose Finances (theirs or ours) is most likely to fail,” he had traveled to Philadelphia just before Christmas 1778 to prod Congress to solve the country’s most “momentous concerns”—“a great and accumulated debt; ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit (which in their consequences is the want of every thing).”96 What he saw horrified him. Profiteers who bought up goods to sell when the scarcity they helped create boosted prices were running the country—along with crooks who sold contraband, spoiled, or adulterated goods. “Speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seems to have got the better of every other consideration” in the minds of legislators sunk in “idleness, dissipation and extravagance.” Congressmen struck him as a flock of second-raters who cared less about the common weal than about high living at extravagant parties, costing £300 or even £400 and hosted by swindling war profiteers bent on wheedling more government business from their gullible guests—and all this “while a great part of the Officers of [the] Army from absolute necessity are quitting the Service and the more virtuous few rather than do this are sinking by sure degrees into beggery and want.” Washington earnestly wished that the states would send their ablest, most energetic citizens—by compulsion, if need be—to replace such lightweight legislators, so “that public abuses should be corrected, and an entire reformation worked.”97 Otherwise, as the British often jeer, “we shall be our own conquerers.”98

  That’s how Washington interpreted the enemy’s passivity during the 1779 fighting season: while American troops took the British forts at Stony Point on the Hudson and Paulus Hook (now Jersey City), and slaughtered Britain’s Indian allies, the British stood by, apparently “placing their whole dependance in the depreciation of our money, and the wretched management of our finances.”99 With ample reason. Soon after the Americans went into winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey, at the end of 1779, conditions sank to a Valley Forge depth of desperation. Inflation grew so severe that “a waggon load of money will scarcely purchase a waggon load of provision,” Washington wrote, and with money worthless, many farmers, still unpaid for what they’d already supplied, had grown only what their families could eat.100 Those who did have something to sell couldn’t get to Washington’s camp, buried in drifts twelve feet deep after a four-day blizzard in January 1780 and twenty-seven more snowstorms thereafter, while that winter’s freakish cold froze New York Harbor hard enough to bear cannon.101 Soldiers would go “five or Six days together without Bread, then as many without Meat, and once or twice, two or three without either,” Washington wrote.102 They ate dogs, tree bark, and ruined shoes (roasted). Mourned Nathanael Greene: “A Country, once overflowing with plenty, are now suffering an Army employed for the defense of every thing that is dear and valuable, to perish for want of food.”103

  During these three long winters, Washington pondered the army’s plight with such brilliant aides as Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette, fatherless youths who had joined his military “family” in 1777 and whom the childless commander loved; John Laurens (son of president of Congress Henry Laurens); and Tench Tilghman, who all lived crammed together in tight quarters next to their chief, dining with him every midday—in the worst of times off a single tin plate, and waited on, Washington wrote, by a servant “indecently and most shamefully naked.”104 The talk, at least, was nourishing; and from these high-powered seminars, as well as from “long thinking, close application, and strict observation,” Washington refined into a sophisticated political and economic worldview the conclusions he’d drawn from his French and Indian War experience, when he’d requisitioned supplies at swordpoint and yearned for a colonial union and a strong executive.105

  America was bursting with resources, he knew, but Congress lacked the power to mobilize them to supply the army. The nation would have to “give more energy to Government” by making Congress “the supreme controuling power of the united States,” fully vested with powers to levy taxes and contract loans. Sure, Americans will resist new taxes, for “a commercial and free people, little accustomed to heavy burthens, pressed by impositions of a new and odious kind, . . . may imagine, they have only exchanged one tyranny for another”—but needs must. And loans will be easy to repay: Congress can sell America’s vast tracts of valuable state-owned land, he wrote, and “the advantages of every kind we possess for commerce, insure to this country a rapid advancement in population and prosperity.” By repaying its debts and keeping its currency sound, Washington believed, America would keep its credit strong.106

  Amid the Morristown snows, Washington weighed how the counterpoise of financial power might play out in the Revolution. “In modern wars,” he wrote, “the longest purse must chiefly determine the event.” Here France and Spain (which was helping America secretly with money and joined France in the war in 1779) might seem to have the edge—but not for long. If the war kept on, Versailles would have to tax beyond the level the French could endure, and then “France makes war on ruinous terms,” Washington wrote prophetically: for to raise revenue to pay France’s huge war debts in 1789, Louis XVI had to convene the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years, lighting the fuse that detonated the French Revolution. Spain, Washington cautioned, famously “derives great wealth from her mines” in South America, but it was less than people thought, and waning. More important, what really constitutes the wealth of nations? “Commerce and industry are the best mines of a nation; both of which are wanting to her,” concluded Washington, whose economic thought had, like Hamilton’s, outgrown both mercantilism and agricultural sentimentality. Commercial Britain, by contrast, should be America’s model, Washington thought; it was a rich and prospering country, with a sound system of public credit that made it mighty in war.107

  Making matters worse for America, the national belief that a standing army is dangerous to liberty results in a military system that only an Eastern Nabob could afford. Raising a new army every year costs ten times as much as a permanent force, since new arrivals and veterans about to leave can’t fight but still need to be fed. Nor can such an army ever be as efficient a fighting force as “a permanent body of Men, under good organization and military discipline.” Perhaps prejudice against a standing army might make sense in peacetime, especially in countries that hire mercenaries. But to reject a permanent army in wartime, when the soldiers “are Citizens having all the Ties, and interests of Citizens,” makes no sense.108

  During the war, in other words, Washington thought his way to federalism, long before a Federalist Party existed. He believed in a strong central government, supreme over the states; a strong fi
nancial system on the British model, with taxes to fund its debt; a flourishing commerce to create prosperity (and to train seamen for a powerful navy, which would in turn protect shipping); and a strong military. And most officers came out of the experience of the Revolution with the same views.109

  AS HE WAITED for the French to act, Washington became a proto-Federalist in foreign policy too. “[H]atred of England may carry some into an excess of Confidence in France,” he wrote, again prophetically, given the strife over revolutionary France that racked 1790s America; “but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.”110 Certainly George Washington’s personal experience bore out the maxim, since his French allies, over whom he was nominally supreme commander, treated him with a ceremonious politeness just short of satire, agreeing with him effusively though insincerely, while keeping him in the dark as to their intentions for months on end, and carrying out their own program on their own schedule. John Adams, then a minister to France, had the same experience. “We get nothing,” he complained. “They communicate nothing.”111

  Of course dismay struck the French when their fleet arrived in American waters in July 1778 and they first saw the American army, poor, unprofessional, and small. “I have never seen a more laughable spectacle,” a French officer sneered at what he took to be “tailors and apothecaries” playing soldier. “They were mounted on bad nags and looked like a flock of ducks in cross belts.” The tough, battle-scarred Comte de Rochambeau, who arrived as commanding general of the French forces in America in July 1780, advised his government: “Do not depend on these people nor upon their means; they have neither money nor credit; their means of resistance are only momentary and called forth when they are attacked in their own houses.”112 And the Americans felt their penury with shame. “A Military Man has the same turn to sociability as a person in Civil life; he conceives himself equally called upon to live up to his rank; and his pride is hurt when circumstans. restrain him,” the emulative Washington wrote late in the war. “Only conceive then, the mortification they (even the Genl. Officers) must suffer when they cannot invite a French Officer . . . to a better repast than stinking Whiskey (and not always that) and a bit of Beef without Vegitables.”113