Washington

by Ron Chernow

  Washington considered his army’s lack of gunpowder such a “profound secret” that, in early August, he would divulge it in person only to the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, not trusting the entire legislature with the news.34 Secrecy and deception were fast becoming essential aspects of his repertoire. Contributing to the depletion of gunpowder was the antic behavior of the trigger-happy Virginia riflemen, who loved to fire their weapons at random, exhausting the whole camp with the commotion. Without disclosing the real reason for his concern, Washington issued this general order: “It is with indignation and shame the general observes that, notwithstanding the repeated orders which have been given to prevent the firing of guns in and about camp . . . it is daily and hourly practiced.” 35 It was a magnificent bluff: Washington made it sound as if he were irate only at insubordination, not at the waste of precious ammunition.

  That August George Washington conducted a revealing exchange of letters with General Gage. Upon hearing that the British had taken American officers captured at Bunker Hill and clapped them into jails with common criminals, Washington flew into a rage. He was furious that American prisoners were being mistreated and that officers were being mingled with other prisoners. He protested that Gage had shown “no consideration . . . for those of the most respectable rank when languishing with wounds and sickness.” In demanding better treatment, Washington appealed to “the rights of humanity and claims of rank” and threatened to retaliate against British captives.36 Two days later Gage sent Washington a reply reeking of condescension. He recognized no rank among American prisoners, he conceded, “for I acknowledge no rank that is not derived from the king.” Then he pompously lectured the rebel chieftain: “Be temperate in political disquisition, give free operation to truth, and punish those who deceive and misrepresent and [then] not only the effects, but the causes of this unhappy conflict will be removed.”37

  The next day Washington, rising above pettiness, allowed British officers in captivity to walk about freely after they swore they wouldn’t try to escape. When he replied to Gage, he no longer hedged his words with a British superior. Now he could openly and indignantly defy the highest British officer and ventilate a lifetime of frustration. He started out by saying that British prisoners were being “treated with a tenderness due to fellow citizens and brethren.” Then he delivered his own stern lecture to Gage: “You affect, Sir, to despise all rank not derived from the same source with your own. I cannot conceive any more honorable than that which flows from the uncorrupted choice of a brave and free people—the purest source and original fountain of all power . . . I shall now, Sir, close my correspondence with you, perhaps forever. If your officers who are our prisoners receive a treatment from me different from what I wish[e]d to show them, they and you will remember the occasion of it.”38 This eloquent letter, brimful of passion, reflected both sides of George Washington. He appealed to the rights due to officers in an army, traditionally an aristocratic class among the British. At the same time, he issued a clarion appeal to natural rights as the source of all power, giving a ringing affirmation of American principles.

  Beneath the high-flown rhetoric, Washington’s private views were far more sober. During that troubled summer he wrestled with his ambivalence about the scruffy army he led. He wasn’t by nature or background an egalitarian person, and to Virginia confidants he poured forth his chagrin. To Richard Henry Lee, he bemoaned that it was impossible to get these New England soldiers to be heedless of danger “till the bayonet is pushed at their breasts” and blamed “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.”39 He was no more charitable toward their officers, telling cousin Lund, “I daresay the men would fight very well (if properly officered), although they are an exceeding dirty and nasty people.”40 Washington frowned upon these Puritan descendants as greedy, sanctimonious hypocrites, telling Joseph Reed that “there is no nation under the sun (that I ever came across) pay greater adoration to money than they do.”41

  For Washington, thoughts of Mount Vernon offered solace from wartime scenes in New England and became his favorite form of mental refreshment. Perhaps admitting that his absence from Virginia might be prolonged, he gave the faithful Lund a generous raise to manage the estate in his absence. Throughout the war Washington remained exceedingly attentive to doings at home, penning hundreds of lengthy letters to Lund, typically one a week. He retained a staggering amount of detailed information about Mount Vernon inside his compartmentalized mind and seemed able to visualize every square foot of the estate—every hedge, every fence, every pond, every meadow. Often exacting in his demands, he supervised the planting of crops, the purchase of land, and the moves and countermoves of lawsuits as if he had never left the plantation. Forever daydreaming about the future, he was determined to persist with renovations to his mansion started the year before. Writing as if he might return that winter, he told Lund to “quicken” the introduction of a new chimneypiece, “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.”42 Clearly Washington found psychological balm in these pleasing fantasies of a renovated Mount Vernon awaiting him when the war ended.

  Continuing to fret about Martha, the commander in chief was beset by sporadic fears that Lord Dunmore might abduct her. Then he dismissed such actions as unworthy of a gentleman. “I can hardly think that Lord Dunmore can act so low and unmanly a part as to think of seizing Mrs. Washington by way of revenge upon me,” he told Lund Washington in late August.43 Should Lund believe it necessary, however, he advised him to move both Martha and his personal papers to safety in Alexandria.

  Even as he privately berated the New Englanders, Washington enjoyed a special wartime camaraderie with two who stood out amid the dearth of able officers. Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island was one of the first brigadier generals picked by Congress; having turned thirty-three that summer, he was the youngest general in the Continental Army. Tall and solidly built with striking blue eyes, full lips, and a long straight nose, Greene had been reared in a pious Quaker household by a prosperous father who owned an iron forge, a sawmill, and other businesses. Discouraged from reading anything except the Bible, he had received little schooling and missed a college education as much as Washington. “I lament the want of a liberal education,” he once wrote. “I feel the mist [of] ignorance to surround me.”44 To compensate for this failing, he became adept at self-improvement and devoured authors both ancient and modern, including Pope, Locke, Sterne, and Jonathan Swift.

  After his father died in 1770, Greene inherited his business but was shadowed by mishaps. Two years later one of the forges burned, and the following year he was barred from Quaker meetings, possibly because he patronized alehouses. In 1774 Greene married the exceptionally pretty Catharine “Caty” Littlefield, who was a dozen years younger and a preeminent belle of the Revolutionary era. As relations with Great Britain soured that year, Greene struggled to become that walking contradiction, “a fighting Quaker,” poring over military histories purchased in Henry Knox’s Boston bookstore. At that point his knowledge of war derived entirely from reading. Greene was an improbable candidate for military honors: handicapped by asthma, he walked with a limp, possibly from an early accident. When he joined a Rhode Island militia, he was heartbroken to be rejected as an officer because his men thought his limp detracted from their military appearance. “I confess it is my misfortune to limp a little,” he wrote, “but I did not conceive it to be so great.”45

  Nevertheless, within a year, by dint of dawn-to-dusk work habits, Greene emerged as general of the Rhode Island Army of Observation, leading to his promotion by the Continental Congress. Washington must have felt an instinctive sympathy for this young man restrained by handicaps and with a pretty and pregnant young wife. He also would have admired what Greene had done with the Rhode Island troops in Cambridge—they lived in “proper
tents . . . and looked like the regular camp of the enemy,” according to the Reverend William Emerson.46

  Nathanael Greene had other qualities that recommended him to the commander in chief. Like Washington, he despised profanity, gambling, and excessive drinking among his men. Like Washington, he was temperamental, hypersensitive to criticism, and chary of his reputation, and he craved recognition. As he slept in dusty blankets, tormented by asthma throughout the war, he had a plucky dedication to his work and proved a battlefield general firmly in the Washington mold, exposing himself fearlessly to enemy fire. Years later Washington described Greene as “a man of abilities, bravery and coolness. He has a comprehensive knowledge of our affairs and is a man of fortitude and resources.”47 Henry Knox paid tribute to his friend by saying that he “came to us the rawest, the most untutored being I ever met with” but within a year “was equal in military knowledge to any general officer in the army and very superior to most of them.”48 This tactful man, with his tremendous political intuitions, wound up as George Washington’s favorite general. When Washington was later asked who should replace him in case of an accident, he replied unhesitatingly, “General Greene.”49

  Washington’s other favorite officer was the warm, ebullient Henry Knox, who weighed almost three hundred pounds and was promoted to colonel of the Continental artillery that December. Like many overweight people, Knox walked in a slightly odd, pigeon-toed fashion, with his legs bowed outward and his paunch, big as a cannonball, bulging under his vest. Still, he dressed smartly and moved with an erect military carriage, cutting a fine figure despite his weight. From a shotgun accident while hunting in 1773, he had lost two fingers of his left hand, which he disguised by wrapping it in a handkerchief. Knox was genial and outgoing, savored food and drink, and enjoyed instant rapport with people. Good-humored and rubicund, with a ready laugh, he relished telling funny stories in his resonant voice while his blue eyes twinkled with merriment. There was something exceptionally winning about Henry Knox, and one French admirer concluded, “It is impossible to know [him] without esteeming him, or to see [him] without loving him.”50 For those who looked deeply, however, Henry Knox carried a private melancholy beneath all the hearty bonhomie.

  Born near Boston Harbor, Knox was the son of a failed shipmaster who deserted the family when Henry was nine, forcing him to drop out of Boston Latin Grammar School to support his mother and younger brother. He clerked in a Boston bookstore and took advantage of every spare moment to read, preferring military history and engineering. In 1771 the twenty-one-year-old Knox opened his own shop, the New London Book Store, which offered a “large and very elegant assortment” of imported works, as Knox claimed in an ad.51 He soaked up military knowledge from the British officers who frequented the shop. All the while he was becoming a convinced patriot. In the last advertisement he placed in the Boston Gazette, he announced the sale of an anti-British tract, “The Farmer Refuted,” an anonymous work written by a King’s College student in New York named Alexander Hamilton.

  Knox’s wife, Lucy Flucker, the daughter of a highborn Tory, was a bright, socially ambitious woman who excelled at chess and loved to gamble at cards. She had a girth to match her husband’s. Abigail Adams reported, “Her size is enormous; I am frightened when I look at her.”52 Perhaps because of her weight and high regard for fashion, Lucy Knox became something of a laughingstock in the Continental Army. Dr. Manasseh Cutler, an army chaplain, made Lucy sound like a ridiculous caricature out of Dickens, with her hair piled “up at least a foot high, much in the form of a churn bottom upward, and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form, covered with black gauze, which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is a large braid confined in a monstrous crooked comb.”53 The tall, outrageous hairstyle was actually the modish pouf newly popularized by Marie-Antoinette.

  Knox first met Washington and Lee on July 16, when they rode out to Roxbury to appraise the breastworks Knox had helped to engineer. “When they viewed the works,” Knox told Lucy, “they expressed the greatest pleasure and surprise at their situation and apparent utility, to say nothing of the plan, which did not escape their praise.”54 Before long, Washington and Knox formed a bond of fraternal trust. Washington liked Knox’s imagination, candor, and enterprise and the way he shot cannon with his own hands. In artillery matters Washington trusted Knox’s judgment implicitly. In turn, Henry Knox rewarded Washington with unconditional devotion and delighted in calling him “Your Excellency,” which some saw as a little too fawning. Even later on, amid widespread grumbling about Washington’s military missteps, the loyal Knox never breathed a syllable of criticism. After the war Knox thanked Washington and expressed his “affection and gratitude to you for the innumerable instances of your kindness and attention to me.”55 In the ultimate tribute to Knox, Washington later told John Adams, “I can say with truth, there is no man in the United States with whom I have been in habits of greater intimacy; no one whom I have loved more sincerely; nor any for whom I have had a greater friendship.”56

  It says much about Washington’s leadership style that he searched outside the ranks of professional soldiers and gave scope to talented newcomers—a meritocratic bent that clashed with his aristocratic background and grew more pronounced with time. With Greene and Knox, he encouraged two aspiring young men who bore psychological scars from their childhood. He boosted their courage and made them believe in themselves. This effort, of course, was driven by necessity: Washington had to deal with a chronic shortage of good generals, something Knox himself recognized in 1776 when he wrote that “there is a radical evil in our army—the lack of officers . . . the bulk of the officers of the army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men, who might make tolerable soldiers, but are bad officers.”57 In the end, the generals who succeeded in the Continental Army weren’t grizzled veterans, such as Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, but young, homegrown officers who were quite daring and stayed loyal to George Washington.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Land of Freedom

  FORSOMEONE of George Washington’s vigorous nature, nothing disturbed him more than the charge that he had proved timid when he possessed the high ground of Prospect Hill, Cambridge, and Roxbury, with General Gage’s troops pinned down below inside Boston. “The commencement of [Washington’s] command was the commencement of inactivity,” wrote Thomas Paine after he later turned into a waspish critic of Washington’s leadership. “If we may judge from the resistance at Concord and afterwards at Bunker Hill, there was a spirit of enterprise at that time, which the presence of Mr. Washington chilled into cold defense.”1

  The reality was that during the siege of Boston George Washington was restless and all too eager to pounce. Fond of crisp decisions, he wanted to be done with this devilish stalemate and return to Mount Vernon. As he insisted to brother John, “The inactive state we lie in is exceedingly disagreeable.”2 The caution for which he was legendary struggled against a strong, nearly reckless streak in his nature. As the British lobbed bombs futilely over the American camp—one soldier said “sometimes from two to six at a time could be seen in the air overhead, looking like moving stars in the heavens”—Washington felt powerless to retaliate.3 “It would not be prudent in me to attempt a measure which would necessarily bring on a consumption of all the ammunition we have, thereby leaving the army at the mercy of the enemy,” he explained to Richard Henry Lee. So dire was the gunpowder shortage that spears were distributed to save ammunition, and Washington concluded that he couldn’t afford the big, bold action he desired: “I know by not doing it that I shall stand in a very unfavorable light in the opinion of those who expect much and will find little done . . . [S] uch, however, is the fate of all those who are obliged to act the part I do.”4

  Washington frequently had Billy Lee remove his mahogany and brass spyglass from its handsome leather case so he could engage in surveillance of his adversary. He discerned signs of a British desperation at least equal to his own. The enemy was hollowing ou
t much of Boston, stripping wooden houses for firewood and removing combustible materials that might erupt in flames should the patriots attack. Washington received a much clearer picture of both British and American fortifications when the young John Trumbull crept through high grass on his belly to sketch some maps. The son of Connecticut’s governor, the Harvard-educated Trumbull had exceptional talent as an artist despite a childhood injury that deprived him of sight in one eye, and he was destined to become the chief visual chronicler of the American Revolution. Enthralled by his accurate maps, Washington enlisted Trumbull as an aide-de-camp.

  Fearing the onset of the New England winter, with an army short of both clothing and blankets, Washington hoped to strike a telling blow in the autumn. It would be expensive to build winter barracks for so many men, and he would have to chop down a forest of firewood to keep them warm. A minor mutiny among Pennsylvania riflemen on September 10 only fed Washington’s sense of urgency. As Connecticut and Rhode Island enlistments expired with the new year, he feared a total dissolution of his army. “The paymaster has not a single dollar in hand,” he told John Hancock, predicting that without money “the army must absolutely break up.”5 He gnashed his teeth over inexperienced militia soldiers, “dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life” and “unaccustomed to the din of arms,” and doubted they could stand up to British regulars, the best trained and equipped army in the world.6