by Ron Chernow
In mid-January Washington complained that his army had no money, no powder, no cache of arms, no engineers, not even a tent for his own use in a field campaign. He sounded a note of sleepless despair, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, saying that he experienced “many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep.”47 A man who hated failure, Washington again mused about whether he had erred in accepting the top command: “I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulder and entered the ranks or . . . had retir[e]d to the back country and lived in a wigwam.”48 The British were feeling cocky about their prospects. At Faneuil Hall in Boston that January, enemy officers roared with delight at a farce entitled The Blockade, supposedly written by General John Burgoyne, which mocked Washington as a bumbling general in a big floppy wig, flailing about with a rusty sword.
At midday on January 1, 1776, the atmosphere of the conflict abruptly lurched toward total war when Lord Dunmore torched Norfolk, Virginia. The fleet under his command pounded the town with cannonballs for seven hours, and the blackened ruins smoked for days. “Thus was destroyed,” wrote John Marshall, “the most populous and flourishing town in Virginia.”49 This conflagration banished any lingering traces of Anglophilia that Washington retained. He hoped the Norfolk holocaust would unite the country “against a nation which seems to be lost to every sense of virtue and those feelings which distinguish a civilized people from the most barbarous savages.”50
The conflict sharpened further on January 10, 1776, with the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a landmark pamphlet that galvanized the colonies to seek outright independence. The thirty-eight-year-old Paine was a brilliant if abrasive personality who had arrived in Philadelphia two years before after a checkered career as a corset maker and shopkeeper in England. While many colonists clung to the fairy tale of George III as a benign father figure in thrall to a wicked ministry, Paine bluntly demolished these illusions, dubbing the king “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”51 Within three months Paine’s astonishing work had sold 150,000 copies in a country of only three million people. Beyond its quotable prose, Common Sense benefited from perfect timing. It appeared just as Americans digested news of the Norfolk horror as well as George III’s October speech to Parliament in which he denounced the rebels as traitors and threatened to send foreign mercenaries to vanquish them. The historian Bernard Bailyn has noted that “one had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence,” but Paine’s work—“slapdash as it is, rambling as it is, crude as it is”—produced that magical effect.52
Common Sense was just the fillip needed by a demoralized Continental Army. In a letter to Washington, General Charles Lee pronounced the pamphlet “a masterly, irresistible performance” and said he had become a complete convert to independence. 53 From Virginia, Fielding Lewis, Washington’s brother-in-law, informed him that talk of independence was rapidly gaining ground and that “most of those who have read the pamphlet Common Sense say it’s unanswerable.”54 Although ignorant at first of the author’s identity, Washington instantly grasped the work’s significance. “A few more of such flaming arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk,” he told Joseph Reed, “added to the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contain[e]d (in the pamphlet) Common Sense, will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation.”55 Once his identity became known, Paine endeared himself to the troops by donating proceeds from his pamphlet to purchase woolen mittens for them. Within a year he was traveling as an aide-de-camp to Nathanael Greene and formed a close relationship with Washington. Even after the war Washington remained solicitous about Paine’s impoverished state, inquiring of James Madison, “Can nothing be done in our assembly for poor Paine? Must the merits and services of Common Sense continue to glide down the stream of time, unrewarded by this country?”56
WHILE GEORGE WASHINGTON TRIED GALLANTLY to hold his army together that winter, Martha was displaying her own brand of valor. Starting in June 1775, both Washingtons were borne on a powerful tide that would whirl them along for the rest of their lives. Unlike her husband, Martha wasn’t naturally courageous, but she was a determined woman who could will herself to rise to the occasion. To aid her husband, she conquered whatever fears or anxieties might have kept her from his side. For more than eight years of war, she would exhibit the fierce loyalty of a Spartan wife, a trial that she endured from a combination of wifely duty and outright patriotism.
Despite fears that Lord Dunmore might abduct her from Mount Vernon, Martha had refused to move to the small town house that the Washingtons owned in Alexandria. Washington dwelled on this possibility in so many letters that it got Martha’s attention, and she escaped to visit Jacky and Nelly in Maryland or stayed with her sister Anna Maria in New Kent County. Washington worried incessantly about her. “I could wish that my friends would endeavor to make the heavy and lonesome hours of my wife pass of[f] as smoothly as possible, for her situation gives me many a painful moment,” he confessed to brother Samuel that fall.57 Although he wrote weekly letters to Martha, many were opened en route by “scoundrel postmasters,” as he styled them, and others never arrived at all. 58 Such postal lapses, besides isolating Martha, would have made Washington more guarded in communicating his thoughts.
In mid-October Washington concluded that he wouldn’t be able to return to Mount Vernon that winter and invited Martha to join him in Cambridge. He knew that the biting chill of a New England fall would make the trip perilous and extremely uncomfortable, telling brother Jack, “I have laid a state of the difficulties . . . which must attend the journey before her and left it to her own choice.”59 With her nerves stretched taut, Martha kept postponing the trip, even though delay only increased the likelihood of heavy snow. If not born for heroics, Martha always heeded the summons of duty when her husband called.
At last, on November 16, 1775, the diminutive Martha Washington piled into her carriage and left Mount Vernon, accompanied by Jacky and Nelly, nephew George W. Lewis, and Elizabeth Gates, wife of General Horatio Gates. She traveled luxuriously, her clothing packed in elegant leather trunks studded with brass nails. She brought along five household slaves tricked out in the livery of Mount Vernon. On this arduous northward journey, Martha discovered her sudden elevation in the world and that she had left obscurity behind forever; henceforth fame would be her constant companion. When she reached Philadelphia, she was greeted by a military escort and was mystified by the fuss made over her. She had passed through the city, she observed in amazement, “in as great pomp as if I had been a very great somebody. ”60 The church bells pealed when she reached Newark, and at Elizabethtown a light horse cavalry trotted beside her, providing an honorary escort. Nevertheless, for a woman who dreaded water, the constant ferry crossings must have been an ordeal, and to bump along six hundred miles of rutted roads in frigid weather must have tested even the faithful Martha. She expressed her stoic credo thus: “I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy in whatever situation I may be.” 61
Historians often note that Martha Washington spent each winter of the war with her husband, leaving before fighting resumed in the spring, but this bland statement doesn’t quite capture the scope of her sacrifice. Mount Vernon curator Mary Thompson has computed that Martha spent between 52 and 54 months with her husband in a war that would drag on for 103 months; in other words, she spent about half the war with the Continental Army.62 At a minimum she stayed two or three months each winter, but some stays lengthened to seven, eight, or even nine months, until she jokingly referred to herself as “the great perambulator.”63 Because Washington couldn’t afford to abandon his army, Martha’s willingness to join him was of inestimable value. Due to his delicate position in the war, he had to keep his emotions bottled up. He couldn’t afford to show weakness or indecision and needed a wife to whom he could reveal his frustrations.
The secretive Washington also had an acute need for male confidants to whom he could unbosom himself completely. He had enjoyed “unbounded confidence” in his closest aide, Joseph Reed, before the latter went off to Philadelphia in late October to attend his law practice and didn’t return to Cambridge.64 Distraught, Washington deemed Reed’s services “too important to be lost” and tried to coax him into returning.65 Chained to his desk with correspondence, Washington saw himself turning willy-nilly into a bureaucrat. He needed a surrogate who was not only a good scribe but could intuit the responses he himself would write. “At present my time is so much taken up at my desk that I am obliged to neglect many other essential parts of my duty,” he pleaded to Reed. “It is absolutely necessary therefore for me to have persons that can think for me as well as execute orders.”66 Not until the advent of Alexander Hamilton and other proficient aides was Washington finally liberated from his clerical labors.
On December 11, 1775, Martha Washington arrived in Cambridge, not having seen her husband since May. To bedraggled soldiers in the wintry camp, her appearance in the glamorous coach with a slave retinue must have seemed unreal and resplendent. Lady Washington, as she was known in an incongruously aristocratic touch, was still comparatively young at forty-four. Yet when Charles Willson Peale painted her the following year, he noted something matronly in the face, plus a seriousness in her direct, unaffected gaze. When she joined her husband at the imposing Vassall mansion, she was thrust into a busy, working atmosphere. Here Washington mapped strategy, held war councils, and conducted his voluminous correspondence with Congress. Washington’s aides also slept in the house, with several crammed into a single room, while the general commandeered one drawing room as his office. He soon pressed Jacky Custis into service as a messenger. A dozen servants, several of them slaves, waited on officers, and the staff even included a tailor and a French cook. Among the household staff was a free black woman, Margaret Thomas, who worked as a seamstress and entered into a love affair with Billy Lee. Possibly because of this, Thomas seemed to irritate Washington, who wished that he would “see her no more,” but he retained her on the payroll, possibly for Billy, who came to consider himself married to her.67
In this crowded house, George and Martha Washington would have found privacy hard to come by. Washington made a bid for conjugal privacy by ordering a curtained four-poster bed before his wife’s arrival. Despite these concessions to gentility, nothing could mask the stark reality of a military camp. By the end of December, as the British continued firing shells from Boston, Martha had trouble coping with the tension. If the men were inured to these intrusions, they were awful new realities to her. “I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun,” she wrote to her friend Elizabeth Ramsay. “. . . To me that never see anything of war, the preparations are very terrible indeed. But I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.”68 Since Washington had segregated his military from his home life, this was Martha’s first exposure to war, and she showed real gumption in facing down her fears. The image of her as a small, grandmotherly woman overlooks the fortitude that made her a natural mate for Washington.
Observers noted the companionable relationship between George and Martha Washington. As Nathanael Greene informed his wife, “Mrs. Washington is excessive fond of the General and he of her . . . They are happy in each other.”69 Mercy Warren saw how Martha’s gentle affability could “soften the hours of private life or . . . sweeten the cares of the hero and smooth the rugged pains of war.”70 Washington seemed more relaxed in Martha’s presence, and they loved to share a humorous moment. One day eighteen-year-old Joseph White went to receive orders from Washington. He had adopted the fictitious rank of an officer, and Washington immediately detected the imposture. “Pray, sir, what officer are you?” he asked. The young man claimed to be an assistant adjutant in the artillery regiment. “Indeed,” responded Washington, “you are very young to do that duty.” “I told him I was young,” White recalled, “but was growing older every day.” He said that Washington had “turned his face to his wife and both smiled.”71
Long a wealthy woman, Martha adapted to the austere camp life and looked askance on lavish consumption. Soon after her arrival, she was invited to a fancy dress ball at a local tavern, which local radicals protested as inappropriate in wartime. Four representatives met with her and requested that she boycott the event. One recalled that Martha reacted with “great politeness” and sent her “best compliments” to the protesters, assuring them “that their sentiments on this occasion were perfectly agreeable unto her own.”72 The ball was canceled on the spot. While Martha Washington could have ducked the issue, saying she would consult her husband, she showed confidence in her judgment and ingratiated herself to the men. At first Washington balked at Martha’s suggestion that they celebrate their Twelfth Night anniversary, but he finally submitted and allowed a gala celebration to be held. Before long Martha took out her needles and was knitting stockings for the soldiers.
Since Washington had a good deal of entertaining to do, Martha oversaw the social side of headquarters. For morning visits, she offered oranges and wine to guests and heartier fare for midafternoon meals. At these gatherings, Washington experienced relief from his burdensome labors and enjoyed his favorite Madeira wine combined with the camaraderie of several pretty young women. A particular favorite was the fetching Caty Greene, wife of Nathanael. Washington’s fondness for the young brunette was only enhanced that February when she gave birth to a boy christened George Washington Greene. A woman of stunning good looks, the sociable Caty was coy and high-spirited. Henry Knox dismissed her as superficial, but Washington didn’t seem to care. Even as local gossips whispered about her flirting with the commander in chief, he seemed enchanted by her company and teased her good-naturedly about her “Quaker-preacher” husband.73 Inasmuch as Martha was fond of the younger woman, Caty could hardly have enjoyed an illicit romance with the general.
It is testimony to Martha’s social versatility that she won over women who were far more intellectual than she. Mercy Otis Warren, a prolific bluestocking who wrote poems, plays, and histories, called on Martha, and they immediately became fast friends. As Warren reported to Abigail Adams, “I took a ride to Cambridge and waited on Mrs. Washington at 11 o’clock, where I was receiv[e]d with that politeness and respect shown in a first interview among the well bred and with the ease and cordiality of friendship of a much earlier date.”74 Washington knew the shortcomings of Martha’s education, and when she corresponded with intellectual women such as Mercy Warren, he or a secretary would draft her replies. There’s no evidence that Martha objected to this practice and may even have felt that it spared her embarrassment.
During the long Cambridge winter, the Washingtons perceived the mythical stature that the hopeful populace was foisting upon them. A man named Levi Allen wrote to Washington, hailing him as “our political father,” and in 1778 an almanac described him as the “father of his country.”75 A couple called the Andersons named their twins George and Martha, while three ships were christened for the general’s wife. A town in western Massachusetts renamed itself Washington. In January 1776 Washington set eyes on a fictitious engraving of himself, printed in London, by an artist who falsely claimed to have based it on an actual sitting with him. With wry amusement, Washington noted drily that the artist had created “a very formidable figure of the Commander in Chief, giving him a sufficient portion of terror in his countenance.”76
By far the most sparkling tribute came from the pen of a young woman, Phillis Wheatley, who resided in Boston and honored Washington with a flattering ode mailed to him in late October 1775. In polished couplets reminiscent of Alexander Pope, she burnished Washington’s image: “Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side, / Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide. / A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, / With gold unfading, Washington! Be thine.” The youthful poetess lauded America as “the land of freedom’s heaven-de
fended race!” which was the more remarkable given that Phillis Wheatley was a twenty-two-year-old slave.77 Seized in Africa at age seven or eight, she had been sold to John Wheatley, a Boston tailor, as a personal slave for his wife. The Wheatleys recognized the girl’s gifted nature, schooled her in Scriptures and ancient classics, and allowed her to live with the family. In 1773 she published in London a collection of verse, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The frontispiece showed an arresting picture of Wheatley in which her personality leaps out. She looks smart and self-assured, with her chin supported by her fingers and her quill poised above the page as she stares coolly into the distance. The volume made her the most celebrated black person in America.
Not until mid-December did Wheatley’s poem come to Washington’s attention, and he didn’t find time to reply until late February. His cordial, respectful letter is little short of astonishing for a large Virginia slave owner replying to a young woman in bondage. This was the same Washington who had recently reviled Lord Dunmore as diabolical for promising freedom to defecting slaves. Washington started his note by saying that he should have replied sooner. “But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay and plead my excuse for the seeming, but not real, neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the elegant lines you enclosed. And however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical talents.”78 He concluded with an invitation: “If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favour[e]d by the Muses and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am with great respect your obed[ien]t humble servant.”79 This is the sort of exquisite letter that, once upon a time, Washington might have reserved for the eyes of a duchess. Few incidents in the early days of the war suggest how powerfully Revolutionary ideals were transforming George Washington as his reaction to Phillis Wheatley.