by Ron Chernow
From the beginning, Washington heeded a congressional directive that all major military engagements should be approved by a council of war. This committee structure gave a conservative bias to his plans, curbing his more daring impulses. At a war council on September 11, 1775, he presented a dramatic plan for an amphibious assault across Back Bay in flat-bottomed boats, telling the eight generals present that, with the element of surprise, such a plan “did not appear impractical, though hazardous.”7 It was roundly defeated by generals who worried that any delay might expose men to a massacre in an outgoing tide. Washington could be persuasive, able to bend men to his will. He “has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point, that if he was really not one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one,” observed Abigail Adams.8 But the vocal New England generals had no qualms about overruling Washington, and he abided, however grudgingly, by their decision. Before long Washington was to say that, had he anticipated the unending difficulties ahead, “all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston.”9
Despite his own hard-charging nature, Washington realized that, in view of the fragility of his army, it was sometimes better to miss a major opportunity than barge into a costly error. He once lectured the Marquis de Lafayette, “No rational person will condemn you for not fighting with the odds against [you] and while so much is depending on it, but all will censure a rash step if it is not attended with success.”10 The general strategy would develop into a war of attrition, with the major emphasis on preserving the Continental Army and stalling until it was in suitable condition to fight. To John Adams, Washington later summarized the dilatory strategy as one of “time, caution, and worrying the enemy until we could be better provided with arms and other means and had better disciplined troops to carry it on.”11 Washington was often likened to the Roman general Fabius, who held Hannibal at bay through a prudent strategy of dodging encounters that played to the enemy’s strength. Nevertheless this commonly cited analogy can easily be overstated, for Washington nursed fantasies throughout the war about fighting a grand climactic battle that would end the conflict with a single stroke.
In October Washington entertained a delegation of three congressmen, headed by Benjamin Franklin, who came to ponder military plans. Washington deplored the reliance on ephemeral New England volunteers. Hoping to graduate to a dependable professional army, he requested a new force of twenty thousand men, with enlistments lasting at least one year, a plan ratified by the politicians in Philadelphia. He sensed his visitors’ eagerness for a tremendous victory before the embattled British Army could be relieved by fresh troops in the spring. That October, after King George III declared the upstart colonies to be in a state of open rebellion, the Crown replaced General Thomas Gage—ridiculed as “Blundering Tom” by his men—with the formidable Major General William Howe.12 Washington knew that all hope for reconciliation with Great Britain had now been snuffed out. Prompted by his visitors, he convened a second war council on October 18, 1775, and informed his generals that he had received “an intimation from the Congress that an attack upon Boston, if practicable, was much desired.”13 Of the eight generals, only Nathanael Greene showed enthusiasm for an attack and then only if ten thousand troops could be safely landed in Boston.
That the British were prepared to unleash patent terror to smash patriotic confidence became self-evident on October 24, when word reached camp that four British vessels had arrived at Falmouth, Massachusetts; after warning the inhabitants to evacuate, they had incinerated more than three hundred houses. Profoundly shaken, Washington told General Schuyler that the perpetrators had acted “with every circumstance of cruelty and barbarity which revenge and malice would suggest.”14 For Washington, who saw the Revolution as an old-fashioned struggle between good and evil, the Falmouth conflagration was further “proof of the diabolical designs” of the leadership in London.15
Responding to the Falmouth atrocities, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted legislation permitting American privateers to patrol the coast. With the war having idled much of the New England merchant fleet, Washington obtained congressional approval to arm several vessels as privateers that could keep one-third of the value of any British ships captured. Before long six such ships, dubbed “George Washington’s Navy,” prowled the eastern seaboard, marking the birth of the U.S. Navy.16 Afraid they might operate like lawless pirate ships, Washington demanded impeccable behavior from these privateers. “Whatever prisoners you may take, you are to take with kindness and humanity as far as is consistent with your own safety,” he exhorted the captain of the first schooner fitted out.17 Washington’s spirits were buoyed in late November by the capture of the British brig Nancy, carrying a small bonanza of weaponry, including two thousand small arms, which Washington celebrated as an “instance of divine favor.”18 In an action that bespoke exceptional trust in twenty-five-year-old Henry Knox, Washington gave him vast discretionary power to rove through upstate New York and procure any artillery he could find at Fort Ticonderoga or elsewhere and haul it back to Massachusetts.
Often dismayed by his men, Washington never tired in his efforts at moral improvement. Not just a citizen-soldier, he was a citizen-statesman who wanted his troops to uphold high standards of conduct. He wished them to be more than superb soldiers: they should set an example for patriots everywhere. In general orders to his troops, he articulated their ideals and scolded their vices almost daily. Even in the chaos of war, amid the squalor of an army camp, George Washington evinced unflagging belief in civilized conduct.
With the possible exception of gambling, no moral failing made Washington more apoplectic than alcohol abuse. Just as he had faulted Mount Vernon employees for excessive drinking, he grew vigilant about bibulous generals. In a “Memorandum on General Officers” that he later drew up as president, he recorded the demerits of each general and in almost every case commented on his drinking habits. He faulted one as “rather addicted to ease and pleasure—and no enemy it is said to the bottle,” while another “by report is addicted to drinking.”19 The chief dilemma in curbing alcohol consumption was that strong drink fortified the spirits of troops. As Washington told John Hancock, the “benefits arising from moderate use of liquor have been experienced in all armies and are not to be disputed.”20 It was hard to keep drinking within bounds, however, especially when tavern keepers rushed to slake the thirst of idle men. Washington meted out dozens of lashes to those found guilty of drunkenness and began regulating purveyors of liquor.
As part of his campaign for personal improvement, Washington encouraged his men to attend divine service, being careful to project an ecumenical spirit. When troops were about to celebrate Pope’s Day in early November—the colonial equivalent of Guy Fawkes Day—Washington learned of plans to burn the pope in effigy. Hoping to draw French Catholics in Canada to the patriotic side, he chastised his men for being “so void of common sense as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this juncture.”21 Early on Washington recognized that both armies competed for the loyalty of a wavering civilian population, and he held his men accountable for behavior on and off the battlefield, admonishing them that robbing local gardens would be “punished without mercy.”22 He approved a sentence for one man “to receive thirty-nine lashes upon his bare back” merely for stealing a cheese.23 During the summer heat he allowed men to go swimming, then was horrified to learn they were “running naked upon the [Cambridge] Bridge, whilst passengers and even ladies of the first fashion in the neighborhood are passing over it.”24 In such general orders, one hears echoes of the decorous planter from Virginia, especially when it pertained to elegant members of the opposite sex.
In the fall of 1775 Washington banked enormous hope on an invasion of Canada led by General Richard Montgomery and Colonel Benedict Arnold. Washington feared that, if Canada remained in British hands, it would always represent a potential threat on th
e northern border. As Arnold led an expeditionary force through the Maine wilderness, it was slowed by heavy rains, swollen streams, and fierce rapids. Starving troops devoured soap and candles and gnawed on boiled moccasins. After braving inhospitable wilds, the detachment reached the walled city of Quebec in early December for a rendezvous with General Montgomery. Arnold’s feat astonished Washington, who expressed jubilation over the “enterprising and persevering spirit” of the redoubtable colonel.25 As he informed General Schuyler, “The merit of this gentleman is certainly great and I heartily wish that fortune may distinguish him as one of her favorites.”26 Washington was so supremely confident that Montgomery and Arnold would prevail at Quebec that he even asked them to forward blankets, clothing, and other military stores captured in the conquered city.
Even as Washington sent this request, Schuyler sat down to write a somber message, announcing General Montgomery’s death in a shattering defeat at Quebec. “I wish I had no occasion to send my dear general this melancholy account,” wrote Schuyler.27 Moreover a musket ball had torn a jagged slash below Arnold’s knee, the first of two major leg injuries that scarred him with a permanent limp. The Quebec catastrophe was a severe setback for Washington, whose first strategic plan had misfired. The defeat also confirmed his worst fears that inexperienced troops would lose their nerve and flee in panic. For Washington, the disaster underscored the danger of relying on men with short enlistments; had Montgomery not labored under that restriction, he believed, he might have continued a blockade of Quebec and averted disaster. Arnold’s bravery, meanwhile, fostered an image, later hard to eradicate, of an officer who was dedicated root and branch to the cause and who acted courageously on his own initiative.
IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE REVOLUTION, George Washington endured a Sisyphean nightmare of whipping raw recruits into shape, only to see them melt away when their one-year enlistments expired. Officers were reduced to drill sergeants training soldiers in rudimentary warfare, then lost them once they learned to fight. For Washington, the failure to create a permanent army early in the war was the original sin from which the patriots almost never recovered. Of the pernicious effect of short-term enlistments, he later wrote, “It may easily be shown that all the misfortunes we have met with in the military line are to be attributed to this cause.”28 Washington faced the grim prospect that on January 1, 1776, the bulk of his army would simply vanish.
Forced to deal with human nature as it was, Washington didn’t rely on revolutionary fervor alone to win the war: he knew he had to cater to economic self-interest as well. This aim was complicated by the fact that some states offered higher bounties for enlistment in their militias. The soldiers exploited this system by dropping out of one unit, then popping up in another to collect a new bounty, a ruse so pervasive that Washington said disputes about it could have engrossed all his time.29 Instead of raising bounties to attract new recruits, Washington would have preferred a draft, but it ran afoul of republican resistance to anything resembling a standing army.
By late November, as snow blanketed the American camp, Washington’s spirits drooped along with the temperature. He felt himself sinking in a quicksand from which he might never escape. “No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means to extricate himself from them,” he confided to his brother Jack.30 By the end of November, a paltry 3,500 men had agreed to stay with the dwindling army. In a confidential letter to Joseph Reed, Washington succumbed to black despair, railing against the mercenary spirit of the New Englanders as they haggled for more money, better clothes, and more furloughs before reenlisting. The vehemence of his anguish belies the image of a cool, unemotional Washington. “Could I have foreseen what I have and am like to experience,” he told Reed, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command,” he said with a touch of melodrama.31
As he mulled over various schemes to strengthen his frail army, Washington wrestled with the vexed question of whether to accept blacks into the Continental Army, not as an instrument of social policy but as a matter of stark military necessity. Many people were struck, not always favorably, by the prevalence of black soldiers in Cambridge. Captain Alexander Graydon of Pennsylvania sniffed that the “number of Negroes . . . had a disagreeable, degrading effect.”32 In contrast, General John Thomas of Massachusetts told John Adams, “We have some Negroes, but I look upon them in general [as] equally serviceable with other men . . . many of them have proved themselves brave.”33
During the summer Washington pretty much dismissed blacks as riffraff, halting the enlistment of “any deserter from the ministerial army, nor any stroller, negro, or vagabond.”34 For a large southern slaveholder, the idea of arming blacks stirred up uncomfortable fantasies of slave revolts. But Washington had to reckon with the tolerance of his New England men, who had accepted blacks as stout-hearted comrades at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. A black man, Peter Salem, had fought so heroically at Bunker Hill that he had been brought to Washington’s attention. Nonetheless at an October war council, Washington and his generals voted unanimously “to reject all slaves and by a great majority to reject Negroes altogether.”35 A month later Washington made this exclusionary policy explicit: “Neither Negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men unfit to endure the fatigues of the campaign are to be enlisted.”36 By lumping healthy black soldiers with boys and old men, Washington insinuated that they were inferior and could be counted on only as a last resort.
On November 7 Lord Dunmore announced that slaves or indentured servants who had fled from their rebel masters could join his Royal Ethiopian Regiment and win their freedom. Eight hundred slaves soon flocked to his banner and were clad in British uniforms with the motto “Liberty to Slaves” stitched across them.37 For the first wave of escapees, such liberty proved deceptive: many died of smallpox on ships cruising Virginia’s rivers. In early December Lund Washington informed the commander in chief of the “dreaded proclamation” and conjectured that, while white indentured servants at Mount Vernon might be tempted to escape, he didn’t worry about the slaves. Washington already loathed Lord Dunmore, having recently observed that if “one of our bullets a[i]med for him, the world would be happily rid of a monster.”38 Outraged by his slave proclamation, he warned Richard Henry Lee that if “that man is not crushed before spring, he will become the most formidable enemy America has.”39 In an odd twist of self-serving logic, Washington branded Dunmore an “arch traitor to the rights of humanity.”40
Whatever his personal trepidation as a slave owner, Washington knew he couldn’t afford to cast off able-bodied men, even if they happened to be black. The Revolution forced him to contemplate thoughts that would have seemed unthinkable a year earlier. Even as he fumed about Lord Dunmore, in late December 1775 he dashed off a letter to John Hancock stating that “it has been represented to me that the free Negroes who have served in this army are very much dissatisfied at being discarded. As it is to be apprehended that they may seek employ in the ministerial army, I have presumed to depart from the resolution respecting them and have given licence for their being enlisted.”41 Two weeks later the Congress ratified this extraordinary decision and allowed free blacks to reenlist. Plainly Washington had acted under duress. He urgently needed more men before enlistments expired at year’s end and feared that black soldiers might defect to the British. At the same time, he was forced to recognize the competence of black soldiers. Whatever his motivations, it was a water-shed moment in American history, opening the way for approximately five thousand blacks to serve in the Continental Army, making it the most integrated American fighting force before the Vietnam War. At various times, blacks would make up anywhere from 6 to 12 percent of Washington’s army.42 Already the Revolutionary War was proving a laboratory for new ideas that operated outside the confines of the slavery system. Everyone felt the new force of liberty in whose name the colonists fought and recognized the flagrant contradiction of slavery. It was fitting that 1775 witnessed
the formation of the first antislavery society in Philadelphia.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1775 Cambridge was gripped by freezing temperatures and covered with a foot of snow, only deepening Washington’s gloom. So frigid was the weather that sentries had to be replaced hourly. With trees leveled in every direction for firewood, the Continental Army inhabited a bleak, denuded landscape. As soldiers left for home in droves, not enough remained to man the redoubts, leaving glaring gaps in the defensive lines. Washington took the high road in calling for reenlistments, but General Charles Lee couldn’t govern his temper. As one soldier recorded in his diary, “We was ordered to form a hollow square and General Lee came in and the first words was, ‘Men I do not know what to call you; [you] are the worst of all creatures,’ and [he] flung and cursed and swore at us.”43 By contrast, Washington appealed to the New Englanders’ honor, saying that “should any accident happen to them before the new army gets greater strength, they not only fix eternal disgrace upon themselves as soldiers, but inevitable ruin perhaps upon their country and families.”44
As the year ended, only 9,650 men had signed up for the new army, less than half the number envisioned by Congress and scarcely a resounding affirmation of the patriotic spirit. Still, Washington struck an upbeat tone in his New Year’s Day message, noting the official start of a genuine Continental Army: “This day giving commencement to the new army, which in every point of view is entirely continental . . . His Excellency hopes that the importance of the great cause we are engaged in will be deeply impressed upon every man’s mind.”45 To start the new year with a fresh slate, Washington pardoned all offenders from the old army. In truth, it was an anxious interval for the commander in chief, who again hid his weakness. As one army was dismissed and another assembled in its place, the British could see thousands of soldiers leaving and might be tempted to take advantage of the situation. As he waited with bated breath, Washington told Hancock confidentially, “It is not in the pages of history perhaps to furnish a case like ours; to maintain a post within musket shot of the enemy for six months together, without [powder] and at the same time to disband one army and recruit another within that distance of twenty odd British regiments.”46