His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  While Washington was sending a detachment of his army to the west, the British were sending a much larger force to the south. Eventually he realized that the New York garrison, which he regarded as the nucleus of British power on the continent, was becoming a launching site for a full-scale campaign in the Carolinas; as he put it, “the operations in the Southern States do not resemble a transient incursion, but a serious conquest.” Many Americans had presumed that the triumph at Saratoga marked the beginning of the end, but the British ministry had decided that it was merely the end of the beginning. Instead of withdrawing, the British had redoubled their efforts, replacing the troops lost at Saratoga and then adding another army of equivalent size in order to mount an invasion of the highly vulnerable American South.26

  THE NADIR

  IF BRITAIN’S southern strategy surprised Washington, the resourcefulness of its war machine terrified him. “While we have been either slumbering and sleeping or disputing upon trifles,” he lamented, the British had mobilized “the whole strength and resources of the Kingdom . . . against us.” His dream of a Franco-American conquest of New York now had to compete with a nightmare in which the war did not end in one climactic battle, but in a grinding competition between war-making institutions in which his side was outgunned, outspent, and outlasted. “In modern wars the longest purse may chiefly determine the event,” he lamented, and “their system of public credit is such that it is capable of greater exertions than any other nation.” Up until now, when Washington thought about the importance of virtue as a source for patriotic commitment, he thought in personal terms: the courage of soldiers advancing against a British artillery position; the silent sacrifices of half-naked troops trudging through the snow at Valley Forge; his own decision to risk everything to serve a cause he believed in. Another more impersonal version of virtue now began to circulate in his thinking, a version not dependent on sheer willpower but rather on institutions capable of delivering resources. If the essence of personal virtue was bravery, the essence of institutional virtue was fiscal responsibility. And if the latter version of virtue determined the current contest, Washington acknowledged that “my feelings upon the subject are painful,” for he was saddled with a fiscal system that seemed designed to produce, as he put it, only “false hopes and temporary expedients.”27

  His initial understanding of the political liabilities afflicting the Continental Congress, like his initial understanding of virtue, emphasized personal failures of will. The best men, he told Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, preferred to serve in the state governments, where they could “slumber or sleep at home . . . while the common interests of America are mouldering and sinking into irretrievable . . . ruin.” While the second-tier delegates in the Continental Congress dithered over trifling issues, where were the first-tier leaders from Virginia?: “Where is Mason, Wythe, Jefferson, Nicholas, Pendleton, Nelson and another [i.e., Harrison] I could name?” Why was the Congress failing to prosecute profiteers and “forestallers” (hoarders who jacked up the prices of supplies needed by the army), who were obviously “pests of society,” all of whom ought to be “hung in Gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman?” How could a responsible group of legislators allow the currency to become a standing joke—not worth a Continental—and the inflation to spiral to such heights that “a rat, in the shape of a Horse, is not to be bought at this time for less than £200?” Given any semblance of equivalent resources, he was prepared to take on the British army and promise victory. But the failure of political leadership at the national level, which had permitted inflation, corruption, and broken promises to become “an epidemical disease,” meant that sheer indifference had become a more formidable enemy “infinitely more to be dreaded than the whole force of G. Britain.” It was beyond belief, he confided to an old Virginia friend, to watch America’s best prospects become “over cast and clouded by a host of infamous harpies, who to acquire a little pelf, would involve this great Continent in inextricable ruin.”28

  The real problem, which Washington came to recognize only gradually, was less personal than structural, not so much a lack of will as a deep-rooted suspicion of government power that severely limited the authority of the Continental Congress. Parliament and the British ministry could impose taxes and raise armies because they possessed the sovereign power to speak for the British nation. During the early months of the war the Continental Congress had assumed emergency powers of equivalent authority, which rendered possible the creation of the Continental army and Washington’s appointment to head it. But by behaving as a national legislature, an American version of Parliament, the Congress made itself vulnerable to the same criticism that the colonies had directed at Parliament itself. The central impulse of the American Revolution had been a deep aversion to legislation, especially taxes, emanating from any consolidated government in a faraway place beyond the direct control and supervision of the citizens affected. From the perspective of Virginia and Massachusetts, the delegates gathered in Philadelphia were distant creatures who could not tax them any more than could the House of Commons in London. And since voting in the Continental Congress had always been by state—one state, one vote—it could not plausibly claim to represent fairly or fully accurately the American population as a whole. The Articles of Confederation, officially adopted in 1781, accurately embodied the same one-vote principle and did not create, or intend to create, a unified American nation but rather a confederation of sovereign states.

  Washington had given little thought to these political questions before the war. His revolutionary convictions, to be sure, included a staunch rejection of Parliament’s power over the colonies. But the core of his hostility to British power had been rooted in questions of control rather than an aversion to political power per se, in the fact that it was British more than it was power. Personally, he despised the British presumptions of superiority that rendered him a mere subject. Politically, he believed that only an independent America could wrest control of the untapped riches west of the Alleghenies from London nabobs. He had left more finely tuned arguments about the proper configuration and character of an indigenous American government to others.

  In 1780 he decided that he could no longer afford to remain silent. Although there were a few glimmerings before that date, he had been reluctant to express his opinions, lest in so doing he violate the near-sacred principle of civilian control. In 1777 he began the practice of sending routine Circulars to the States requesting money, supplies, and fresh recruits, his implicit recognition that ultimate power over these essentials lay with the state governments. By 1780 his growing sense of desperation pushed him over the edge as he became an outspoken advocate for expanded powers at the national level. “Certain I am,” he informed one Virginia delegate in the Congress, “that unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone; unless they are vested with powers by the several States competent to the great purposes of War, or assume them as a matter of right . . . that our Cause is lost. We can no longer drudge on in the old way. I see one head gradually changing into thirteen.” The Congress needed to do more than recommend; it needed to dictate. “In a word,” he complained, “our measures are not under the influence and direction of one council, but thirteen, each of which is actuated by local views and politics.” If the Congress failed to expand its mandate and become a true national government, he warned, “it will be madness in us, to think of prosecuting the War.”29

  These were controversial conclusions about what the American Revolution must come to mean if it were to succeed. They were not destined to receive a full hearing until later, after the war had been won. Washington had reached them earlier than most precisely because he did not believe the war could be won unless they were immediately implemented. And in typical fashion, his thinking was not driven by theoretical arguments about republican government but by the harsh realities of war he faced as commander in chief, which by 1780 had come to resemble a more painful and protracted version
of Valley Forge.

  In January, for example, as two fully equipped British regiments prepared to embark from New York for South Carolina, sixty troops in the Massachusetts line had not been paid for a year and had not eaten in four days. Half the men had no shoes, but were intending to walk home because they had long since eaten their horses. Down in New Jersey, where the countryside had been picked clean after four years of foraging, Washington was forced to order a general confiscation of cattle and grain from the local farmers, noting that the choice was between stealing or starving: “We must assume the odious character of plunderers instead of the protectors of the people.” No one could be sure about the current size of the Continental army—the best guess was around ten thousand—because many enlistments ended with the new year, creating what Washington described as a forever fluctuating force “constantly sliding from under us as a pedestal of Ice would do from a Statue in a Summers day.” And no matter what the official rolls claimed, the number of starved, sick, and shoeless soldiers was so large that, as Washington put it, “there is greater disproportion between the total number, and the men fit for duty . . . than in any army in the world.” Even if the long-awaited French fleet magically appeared off Long Island, Washington estimated that he had only about half the troops necessary under his direct command to conduct a successful siege of New York.30

  Over the ensuing months, what was already a dangerous situation became truly desperate. The winter encampment at Morristown in 1780 was more deplorably difficult than Valley Forge, with deaths and desertions reducing Washington’s army to about eight thousand, of which fully one-third were not fit for duty. In the summer Washington learned of two major British victories in the South. Despite heroic efforts by its defenders, Charleston fell victim to British naval supremacy, the entire American garrison of over five thousand taken prisoner. Then Gates’s army, recently sent south by the Congress with Washington’s grudging endorsement of Gates’s choice, was wholly routed at Camden. Washington tried to put the best face on these catastrophes, claiming that British naval supremacy had probably made Charleston indefensible, and that Gates’s futile attempt to repeat his Saratoga triumph by relying heavily on militia only demonstrated the folly of that celebrated but misguided tactic. In October, Washington recommended sending Greene, his most trusted general, to take charge of the surviving remnants of the army in the south. He confessed to Greene that it was probably an impossible mission, like sending one of the “forlorn hope” squads into battle and near-certain death.31

  The fall brought more bad news, this time from a direction Washington least expected it. In August he had sent Benedict Arnold to command the garrison at West Point, which Washington regarded as the linchpin of the Hudson corridor and therefore the most strategic location in the entire northern theater. On September 25 he wrote Greene that “Transactions of a most interesting nature and such as will astonish you have just been discovered.” Arnold, it turned out, had for several months been negotiating with the British for a substantial bribe in return for delivering West Point into their hands. The plot was exposed at the last moment and almost by chance when Arnold’s British contact, Major John André, was stopped and searched by local militia. Arnold himself got word of his exposure in the nick of time and escaped down the river to New York, where he was instantly welcomed into the British army. André was tried and convicted as a spy. Despite pleas from several of his aides, including Hamilton, that André be executed by firing squad as befits a soldier, Washington ordered that he be hanged as a spy. He was not in a sentimental or generous mood.

  In addition to creating the most notorious traitor in American history, the incident intensified Washington’s fears that the sacrifices made by his officers’ corps over the past three years, and the virtuous code they embodied, had both reached the breaking point. After all, if Arnold could sell out, the prospects were dim indeed. Though modern biographers have concluded that Arnold’s treachery was more predictable and prosaic (that is, a matter of money), at the time Arnold seemed to symbolize the crumbling of an ideal and the collapsing of the cause.32

  Events in January 1781 seemed to confirm this end-of-the-road reading. A large delegation of one thousand troops from the Pennsylvania line, who had not been paid in over a year and had no winter clothes, decided to march on the Continental Congress brandishing several artillery pieces. Two officers who attempted to stop them were shot down. The mutineers made a point of declaring that they were not traitors (“We are not Arnolds”), but rather dedicated soldiers fed up with broken promises. A second mutiny occurred three weeks later in the New Jersey line, this time the mutineers threatening to march on the state capital at Trenton with similar grievances. The first group was persuaded to turn back without further incident. But Washington ordered his officers to make an example of the second group, who were surrounded by six hundred loyal troops, then required to watch as the two leaders of the mutiny were executed on the spot.33

  It was the lowest point of the dip. The British army was victorious in the south, and the Continental army was on the verge of dissolution in the north. And, rather incredibly it seemed to Washington, the Continental Congress claimed to be powerless to reverse the course by providing revenue. (To complete this depressing picture, the main French fleet was still cruising in the West Indies.) Whether one thought that the British were winning the war or the Americans were losing it, the end result was the same for Washington. Having pledged his life, his fortune, and his honor, he was about to lose them all. He told John Laurens that “our present force (which is but the remnant of an Army) cannot be kept together this Campaign” and the once glorious cause was now “suspended in the Balle; not from choice but from hard and absolute necessity.”34

  STRANGE VICTORY

  WHEN WASHINGTON SPOKE of “a concatenation of causes,” he was referring to the jagged course of the war as he experienced it. But it was a characterization that applied with special intensity to the last seven months of the conflict, which began in April 1781 with the American army and economy in disarray, and ended in October at Yorktown with a devastating British defeat that struck the British ministry “like a ball in the breast,” as one witness reported, ending both the ministry itself and the bulk of the British Empire in North America. It was as if a spirited but overmatched boxer, reeling and about to collapse from exhaustion, stepped forward in the final round to deliver a knockout punch.35

  How did it happen? The story begins with a series of double-edged developments that seemed to offer hope and then snatch it away, all in one motion. On the political front, after five years of haggling, the states finally managed to ratify the Articles of Confederation, thereby providing a constitutional foundation for that new entity called the United States of America. But the operative term remained “confederation,” because sovereignty resided in the states rather than their union. The establishment of a new frame of government did permit long-overdue administrative reform, primarily a quasi-cabinet system creating secretaries of finance, war, and foreign affairs that presumably would provide greater coherence in managing the war effort. But as Robert Morris, the new secretary of finance, told Washington, the coffers of the government remained an empty cavern, or more accurately a large bottle of red ink, because the state delegations refused to approve new taxes. If one looked for financial relief to rescue the army from dissolution, Philadelphia was less promising than Paris, where Benjamin Franklin was attempting to arrange a French loan.

  A French army of six thousand troops commanded by Count Rochambeau, a battle-scarred veteran of the European theater, had landed in Rhode Island the previous summer. But the force remained encamped at Newport throughout the following year as Washington and Rochambeau corresponded and met in three conferences to negotiate its deployment. Washington remained convinced that the only worthwhile target was the British garrison at New York. But that target required naval supremacy for any chance of success and—the problem of the missing French fleet again—Rochambeau
refused to commit his troops as long as British ships controlled the Atlantic. Finally, in May 1781, at a conference in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the deadlock was broken when Rochambeau agreed to move his troops overland to link up with Washington outside New York. While the union of the French and American armies buoyed Washington’s hopes for fulfillment of his New York dream, the failure of the states to meet their troop levies left his own army pitifully small—he expressed embarrassment when Rochambeau arrived and saw how undermanned and poorly equipped they were—so until fresh troops arrived in sufficient numbers, New York remained impregnable.36

  Finally, news from the southern theater took a turn for both the better and the worse. On the better side, Washington learned in February 1781 that Daniel Morgan’s riflemen had combined with local militia to inflict a stunning defeat on Cornwallis’s troops at Cowpens. Then word arrived that Greene, though vastly outnumbered, was working his customary magic as the ultimate American Fabius, inflicting heavy losses with hit-and-run tactics that historians would eventually describe as the most brilliantly conducted campaign of the war. In one of the few full-scale battles, at Guilford Court House in March, Greene’s army abandoned the field only after leaving it littered with a quarter of Cornwallis’s troops dead or wounded.37