by Ron Chernow
On Sunday, July 2, Washington arrived at Cambridge, Massachusetts, to assume control of the Continental Army, which had laid siege to Boston and the many redcoats bottled up inside the town. People in New England took the Sabbath seriously, and Washington respected religious observance, so on this historic day the stately Virginian made a quiet, unobtrusive entrance into the camp. The fledgling troops that had lined up on the parade ground to be inspected were dismissed when a steady daylong rain spoiled the reception, but Washington and Lee did meet with the officers’ corps that evening. The rain screened any clear view of the British troops in the distance. Nevertheless, in taking up his duties, George Washington had crossed the threshold into a new life.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Magnificent Bluff
ALTHOUGH GEORGE WASHINGTON had never attended college and regretted his lack of education, he moved into the Harvard Square home of college president Samuel Langdon, who retreated to a single room. Politicians and officers soon descended on Washington en masse, including the two New England generals Artemas Ward and Israel Putnam. By mid-July Washington had transferred to grander quarters on Brattle Street, occupying the three-story Georgian mansion of John Vassall, a rich Tory who had fled behind British lines in besieged Boston. The Vassalls had owned a slave family that remained in the house, and when Washington toured his new headquarters, he found a slave boy, Darby Vassall, swinging on the front gate. In a friendly manner, Washington expressed interest in taking him into his service, but Darby, imbued with the spirit of liberty, asked what his pay would be. At that interjection, Washington evidently lost interest. “General Washington was no gentleman,” Darby later said, “to expect a boy to work without wages.”1
By the time Washington and Charles Lee reviewed troops on the parade ground on July 3, the overcast skies had cleared and an effervescent mood filled the air. Twenty-one drummers and as many fife players treated the new generals to a full musical accompaniment as they inspected the New England soldiers. While some had muskets, many others toted primitive weapons, including tomahawks and knives lashed to poles. Despite these handicaps, Washington hoped the patriots could muster eighteen thousand men—at least, if one included the sick and absent—and enjoy a numerical superiority over British forces of no more than twelve thousand.
As Washington and Lee toured lengthy defensive fortifications being thrown up pell-mell to deter a British attack, they viewed the eerie reality of two armies, separated by scarcely more than a mile, enjoying panoramic, unobstructed views of each other. It was easy to make out British sentinels pacing on Bunker Hill. With some amazement, Washington told Richard Henry Lee that the British and Americans were “almost near enough to converse.”2 To Washington, it seemed that both sides had settled into an uneasy standoff.
On July 4 the Congress formally incorporated the state militias into the Continental Army, enabling Washington to issue general orders that would sound the signature themes of his tenure. This George Washington differed from the callow, sometimes grasping young colonel who had governed the Virginia Regiment and was narrowly absorbed in his career. From the outset, his official voice pulsated with high ideals. He tried to dissolve state differences into a new national identity, telling his men that the troops being raised from various colonies were “now the troops of the United Provinces of North America and it is hoped that all distinctions of colonies will be laid aside.”3
Always buffed and polished, with an elegant sword strapped to his side and silver spurs on his boots, Washington roamed all over the camp. “His Excellency was on horseback, in company with several other military gentlemen,” Dr. James Thacher wrote. “It was not difficult to distinguish him from the others; his personal appearance is truly noble and majestic.”4 A local diarist, Ezekiel Price, picked up reports on July 5 that “General Washington had visited the camps, and the soldiers were much pleased with him.”5 As at Mount Vernon, Washington rose at sunup to ride about the camp, lifting sagging spirits with his presence. Suddenly rejuvenated troops were happily digging trenches at four in the morning. “There is great overturning in the camp as to order and regularity,” said an impressed chaplain. “New lords, new laws.”6 A beefy former bookseller from Boston named Henry Knox stood in awe of Washington’s panache: “General Washington fills his place with vast ease and dignity and dispenses happiness around him.”7 An enthusiastic friend reported to John Adams that Washington “has in a manner inspired officers and soldiers with a taste for discipline and they go into it readily, as they all venerate and love the general.”8 His Excellency also left the ladies agog. “You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of George Washington,” Abigail Adams chided her husband, “but I thought the half was not told me. Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier, look agreeably blended in him.”9
For all the favorable assessments, Washington, as a newcomer from Virginia, confronted pervasive Yankee suspicions, and he, in turn, was inwardly revolted by the alien world he surveyed daily in Cambridge. With little tolerance for error and scant patience for disorder, he was surrounded by an unruly, vociferous mass of men who didn’t take well to orders. At this point, he never dreamed that these shabby men would someday show prodigious courage or that he would grow to love them. Soon he squawked to his brother Sam that he had “found a numerous army of provincials under very little command, discipline, or order.”10 Two months later, a shrill note entering his letter, he protested to John Hancock that “licentious-ness and every kind of disorder triumphantly reign.”11 Two people seemed to coexist inside George Washington’s breast. One was the political militant who mouthed republican slogans; this Washington thought his troops would fight better if motivated by patriotic ideals. The other, schooled in the British military system, believed devoutly in top-down discipline and rank as necessary to a well-run army. This Washington was also the Virginia planter who felt little in common with the scruffy plebeians around him.
Washington expressed dismay that many New England militias elected their own officers, choosing farmers, artisans, or storekeepers. It bothered him that egalitarian officers fraternized with their men, joined them in line for food, and even gave them shaves. In disbelief, he wrote to one Virginian that the Massachusetts officers “are nearly of the same kidney with the privates.”12 To Patrick Henry, Washington worried aloud about “the soldier and officer being too nearly on a level. Discipline and subordination add life and vigor to military movements.”13 In part, Washington had an old-fashioned faith in military hierarchy as likely to produce the most efficient army. He often evinced a partiality for wellborn officers, as if he wanted to transfer the hierarchy of civilian life intact into the army. As he once observed about choosing officers, “The first rule . . . is to determine whether the candidate is truly a gentleman, whether he has a genuine sense of honor and a reputation to risk.”14 At one point, while arguing for better pay for officers, Washington warned John Hancock that only such a move would “induce gentlemen and men of character to engage and till the bulk of your officers are composed of such persons . . . you have little to expect of them.”15 However much Washington theoretically preferred having his social peers as fellow officers, however, he would compile an outstanding record of advancing officers who lacked such pedigrees.
During his first month in Cambridge, to differentiate the army’s upper echelons, Washington ordered field officers to sport red or pink cockades in their hats, captains yellow or buff, and subordinate officers green. It upset Washington when sentinels stopped generals because they didn’t recognize them. He decreed a light blue sash for himself, a pink one for major and brigadier generals, and a green one for his aides-de-camp. It says much about Washington’s evolution during the war that he emphasized these distinctions much less as the war progressed. “His uniform is exactly like that of his soldiers,” a French officer noted four years later. “Formerly, on solemn occasions, that is to say on days of battle, he wore a large blue sash, but he has given up that unrepu
blican distinction.”16
Even as he introduced distinctions between officers and their men, he struggled to obliterate differences among the states to forge a national army. When he arrived in Cambridge, there was no army as such, only a mosaic of New England militias, wearing a medley of homemade hats, shoes, and other clothing. A fervent nationalist, Washington wanted to eliminate regiments based on geography at a time when militias were identified with states—a visionary suggestion that was promptly rejected. As he later wrote, “In the early stages of this war, I used every means in my power to destroy all kind of state distinctions and labored to have every part and parcel of the army considered as continental.”17 Because of a shortage of wool, once imported from Great Britain, Washington planned to issue ten thousand linen hunting shirts, such as those used in the French and Indian War, creating a makeshift national uniform. But there wasn’t enough tow cloth, and he had to settle for the motley array of costumes worn by state militias. Washington also argued futilely that the Congress should appoint officers instead of provisional governments. This proposal was vetoed since it clashed with republican ideology, which romanticized militias as superior to standing armies, a dilemma that was to bedevil him throughout the war.
Nobody would have found the camp’s vile sanitary conditions more repellent than did the fastidious Washington. The open latrines emitted a potent stench, and it was a challenge to coax soldiers into using them. One orderly book complained that they left “excrement about the fields perniciously.”18 Having experienced firsthand the epidemics that can decimate armies, Washington urged officers to keep their men clean, tend their latrines, and forbid fishing in freshwater ponds, “as there may be danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.”19 Washington must also have recoiled at the queer collection of improvised tents. Of these outlandish dwellings, the Reverend William Emerson said, “Some are made of boards, some of sail-cloth, and some partly of one and partly of the other. Others are made of stone and turf and others again of birch and other brush . . . others are curiously wrought with doors and windows done with wreaths . . . in the manner of a basket.”20 The troops lacked running water, and their filthy, tattered appearance excited disgust among onlookers, causing Loyalist Benjamin Thompson to say that Washington’s army was “the most wretchedly clothed, and as dirty a set of mortals as ever disgraced the name of a soldier.”21 Some men were half naked, their clothing having been slashed at Bunker Hill. Small wonder that Washington groaned that his life was “one continued round of annoyance and fatigue.”22
Maintaining unity among the men proved a perpetual struggle. In late July the New England troops were startled by the arrival of a rustic contingent of Virginia riflemen, led by Captain Daniel Morgan, who had trudged six hundred miles to join the fray. The rifles they carried were longer than muskets and could be fired with far more accuracy, but they took longer to load in combat. Army cook Israel Trask remembered how soldiers from Marblehead, Massachusetts, outfitted in round jackets and fishermen’s trousers, derided the Virginians with their fringed linen shirts, leggings, and tomahawks. Months later, on a snowy day, as the Virginians toured Harvard College, the Marblehead soldiers began to taunt and toss snowballs at them. Before too long, said Trask,a fierce struggle commenced with biting and gouging on the one part, and knockdown on the other part with as much apparent fury as the most deadly enemy could create. Reinforced by their friends, in less than five minutes, more than a thousand combatants were on the field, struggling for the mastery. At this juncture General Washington made his appearance, whether by accident or design I never knew. I only saw him and his colored servant [Billy Lee], both mounted. With the spring of a deer, he leaped from his saddle, threw the reins of his bridle into the hands of his servant, and rushed into the thickest of the melee, with an iron grip seized two tall, brawny, athletic, savage-looking riflemen by the throat, keeping them at arm’s length, alternately shaking and talking to them. In this position the eye of the belligerents caught sight of the general. Its effect on them was instantaneous flight at the top of their speed in all directions from the scene of the conflict. Less than fifteen minutes time had elapsed from the commencement of the row before the general and his two criminals were the only occupants of the field of action. Here bloodshed, imprisonment, trials by court-martial were happily prevented and hostile feelings between the different corps of the army extinguished by the physical and mental energies timely exerted by one individual.23
One notes how swiftly the fearless Washington displayed derring-do. In dealing with troublemakers, he meted out harsh punishments, including having them ride the wooden horse, an ordeal in which the offender sat on the sharp wooden rail of a sawhorse, his hands bound behind his back and heavy weights anchored to his feet to heighten the pain. One also notes in the anecdote the conspicuous presence of Billy Lee, who remained steadfastly at Washington’s side throughout the Revolution.
As Washington examined his army with care, he was dismayed to find no more than 14,500 men fit for service—far fewer than the 20,000 fighting Yankees he had expected to find. This, the first of many unpleasant surprises, meant that he had to be an expert bluffer, pretending to a military strength he didn’t possess. In confidence, he told James Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, “Your own prudence will suggest the necessity of secrecy on this subject, as we have the utmost reason to think the enemy suppose our numbers much greater than they are—an error which is not [in] our interest to remove.”24
If Washington had taken away one lesson from the French and Indian War, it was the need for a compact defense. It therefore irked him that he had to maintain a vast defensive perimeter of breastworks and trenches stretching for eight or nine miles. On the other hand, he feared the psychological blow if he retreated from fortifications so laboriously constructed. He also had to contend with a grave gunpowder shortage. At first he was told that he had 308 barrels of powder, only to learn from Brigadier General John Sullivan that the actual number was 36, a risible nine rounds per man. When he conveyed this stunning news to Washington, Sullivan recalled, the general “did not utter a word for half an hour.”25 Washington realized how easily his army could be wiped out and was slightly mystified why the British didn’t attack. He looked increasingly frazzled and careworn. “I pity our good general,” wrote one observer, “who has a greater burden on his shoulders and more difficulties to struggle with than I think should fall to the share of so good a man.”26
Washington was thrust into a terrible dilemma: he couldn’t defend his own performance without citing the deficiencies of men, munitions, and supplies, but that would alert the enemy to his weaknesses. He had to swallow his doubts and appear the picture of confidence, making him more tight-lipped in his public pronouncements, if more vehement in private. An accomplished actor, he learned to exploit liberally the “gift of silence” that John Adams cited as one of his cardinal strengths. For the rest of his life, Washington remained the prisoner of roles that forced him into secrecy and evasion, accentuating an already reticent personality. His reserve was further reinforced by a view of military leadership that frowned on camaraderie. Abigail Adams made the insightful comment that Washington “has a dignity which forbids familiarity, mixed with an easy affability which creates love and reverence.”27 Washington’s officers admired him, but with the slightest touch of fear. “The dignity of his presence,” wrote Timothy Pickering, “large and manly, increased by steady, firm, and grave countenance and an unusual share of reserve, forbidding all familiarity, excited no little reverence in his presence.”28 Washington’s public role threw up an invisible barrier that prevented true intimacy with all but a select handful of friends and family members.
HAVING HAD FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE with smallpox, Washington was farsighted in his efforts to stem its spread among the troops through inoculation. By the time he arrived in Cambridge, General Ward had established a smallpox hospital in a secluded spot west of town and ordered daily inspections of his
men for symptoms. “We shall continue the utmost vigilance against this most dangerous enemy,” Washington vowed to Hancock, and he diligently quarantined soldiers who exhibited the first signs of the disease.29
In the fall of 1775, when smallpox surfaced in British-occupied Boston, Washington grew alarmed that it might be spread to his own men. “The smallpox is in every part of Boston,” he informed Joseph Reed in mid-December. “The soldiers there who have never had it are, we are told, under inoculation . . . If we escape the smallpox in this camp and the country round about, it will be miraculous.”30 When General Howe herded 300 destitute Bostonians, riddled with disease, onto boats and dumped them near American lines, Washington feared that they carried smallpox; he sent them humanitarian provisions while carefully insulating them from his troops. After a second wave of 150 sickly Bostonians was expelled, Washington grew convinced that Howe had stooped to using smallpox as a “weapon of defense” against his army.31 By January 1777 he ordered Dr. William Shippen to inoculate every soldier who had never had the disease. “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure,” he wrote, “for should the disorder infect the army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence, we should have more to dread from it than the sword of the enemy.”32 This enlightened decision was as important as any military measure Washington adopted during the war.
Meanwhile, in early August 1775, Washington grappled with the grave problem of a gunpowder shortage. To protect his troops, he circulated the fiction that he possessed eighteen hundred barrels of powder—an early American case of a successful disinformation campaign. In giving the go-ahead to a Rhode Island plan to send ships to the Caribbean in order to seize powder stored in Bermuda, he noted that “enterprises which appear chimerical” often succeed because they are unexpected.33 This statement offers a key insight into Washington’s military thinking—his belief that wildly audacious moves sometimes work because they seem too preposterous for the enemy to credit. As it turned out, General Gage had already removed the Bermuda gunpowder as a precaution.