by Ron Chernow
Jacky Custis left behind a murky legacy. Many years later his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who was born a year after George Washington rode off to war, told how her father would hoist her on a table and force her to sing indecent songs that he had taught her in order to divert his inebriated friends. “I was animated to exert myself to give him delight,” she wrote. “The servants in the passage would join their mirth and I, holding my head erect, would strut about the table to receive the praises of the company. My mother remonstrated in vain.” Because he had been denied a son, Jacky told his guests that little Elizabeth “must make fun for him until he had.”73 It would be hard to imagine a stepson more alien to George Washington.
FOLLOWING YORKTOWN, Washington had to deal with another troubled dimension of his life: his prickly seventy-three-year-old mother. After Jacky’s burial, he stopped by Fredericksburg to see her and learned that she had gone west on a trip to Frederick County with daughter Betty and ailing son-in-law Fielding Lewis. Mindful of her waspish comments about his financial neglect, Washington dropped off ten guineas before riding on to Mount Vernon. The poorly educated Mary sent him a thank-you letter in which she misspelled his name. This letter, full of self-pity, solicited more money: “My dear Georg I was truly unesy by Not being at hom when you went thru Fredriceksburg it was a onlucky thing for me now I am afraid I Never Shall have that pleasure agin I am soe very unwell this trip over the Mountins has almost kill’d me I gott the 2 five ginnes you was so kind to send me i am greatly obliged to you.”74 Now that George had bought her a house in Fredericksburg, she wanted one beyond the western mountains—“some little hous of my one if it is only twelve foot squar.” In a postscript, she asked to be remembered to Martha, then crossed out the words “I would have wrote to her but my reason has jis left me.”75 The world might be buzzing excitedly about Yorktown, but Mary Washington resolutely refused to congratulate her son or even mention the event. “When others congratulated her and were enthusiastic in [George’s praise],” wrote Washington Irving, “she listened in silence and would temperately reply that he had been a good son, and she believed he had done his duty as a man.”76 Neither did she extend condolences or refer to Jacky’s death. Mary Washington had always been a peevish, egocentric woman, but one suspects that some mild form of dementia may have set in by this point. The failure to mention Jacky Custis’s death suggests a lapse in short-term memory, and her allusion to her reason having “left” her indicates an awareness of impaired mental faculties.
When Washington attended a ball in Fredericksburg to honor the French and American officers who had fought valiantly at Yorktown, Mary was told that His Excellency was coming for the occasion. “His Excellency!” she snapped. “What nonsense!” 77 As during the French and Indian War, Mary seemed to regard her son’s long years of military service as a trick perpetrated to deprive her of his attention. Rumors of her Loyalist sympathies continued to make the rounds, and one French officer, the Count de Clermont-Crèvecoeur, was “amazed to be told that this lady, who must be over seventy, is one of the most rabid Tories.”78
George squired his aged mother to the Fredericksburg ball, the only occasion when we know for sure that the two appeared in public together. Perhaps George wanted to squelch rumors that he had abandoned his mother. Mary didn’t stay long at the dance. At nine o’clock she announced that “it was time for the old people to be at home” and left on her son’s arm.79 The ball was noteworthy as one of the last times that George Washington danced away the evening, displaying the graceful virility for which he was known. Before the decade was over, his body would become stiffer, his face worn and impassive, and history would forget the lithe, magnetic younger man who had led the Revolution.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Man of Moderation
FOR ALL WASHINGTON’S SKEPTICISM that the war had ended, his behavior that autumn and winter reflected an altered reality. He lingered at Mount Vernon for several weeks, consoling Martha and enjoying some much-needed rest. The man who had shuddered at the thought of prolonged separation from his restive army spent four leisurely winter months in Philadelphia, nestled in a town house on Third Street. From the moment he descended on the capital, Washington was lionized at every turn. Two artistic residents, Charles Willson Peale and Alexander Quesnay, unrolled giant transparent paintings of him in windows that, when lit from the back, projected his glowing vision into the night, showing laurel wreaths crowning his brow and an antique spear grasped in his hand as he crushed a British crown underfoot. The theater offered no surcease from his own omnipresent image. Washington attended a performance of The Temple of Minerva, perhaps the first serious American opera, only to hear the chorus thunder from the stage, “He comes, he comes, with conquest crowned./ Hail Columbia’s warlike son! / Hail the glorious Washington!”1
Washington was the honored guest at every gathering and admitted sheepishly to the Chevalier de Chastellux that his time was “divided between parties of pleasure and parties of business. The first, nearly of a sameness at all times and places in this infant country, is easily conceived . . . The second was only diversified by perplexities and could afford no entertainment.”2 Taking time to lobby the states, he urged them not to disband their regiments and asked Congress to renew its focus on pay and provisions to stifle any mutinous stirrings among his men.
Washington also received a valuable education in finance from Robert Morris, who had raised money for the Continental cause on his own credit. Because the states had refused to collect their quota of taxes, Morris couldn’t service the sizable debt raised to finance the war. He warned that creditors “who trusted us in the hour of distress are defrauded” and that it was pure “madness” to “expect that foreigners will trust a government which has no credit with its own citizens.”3 To end Congress’s servile reliance on the states for money, Morris proposed that it have the right to collect customs duties, and the fight for this “impost”—the first form of federal taxation—became a rallying cry for proponents of an energetic central government.
After George and Martha Washington had enjoyed their fill of Philadelphia politics and society, they took up residence in late March on the Hudson River in their new headquarters in the town of Newburgh. They occupied a two-story stone farmhouse with a pitched roof and twin chimneys, which sat high atop a bare bluff on the Hudson at a dreamy bend in the river. The heart of the house was the parlor, which Washington turned into his dining room, an eccentric space claiming the odd distinction of having seven doors and one window.
While there, Washington approved one of the war’s most adventurous schemes: a plot to kidnap Prince William Henry, son of King George III, along with the British admiral Robert Digby, both now resident in New York. Washington worried that all the talk of peace would sap America’s will and act as a “fresh opiate to increase that stupor” into which the states had fallen, giving them an excuse to renege on taxes and fail to complete their battalions.4 The kidnapping of Prince William Henry might serve to dishearten George III. As we have seen, Washington had long been beguiled by kidnapping plans, having first approved one for Benedict Arnold, then another for Sir Henry Clinton, and the plan for Prince William Henry followed a similar script. On a dark, rainy night, a squad of thirty-six men, dressed up as sailors, would board four whaleboats on the Jersey shore of the Hudson and row across to Manhattan. They would disable British sentinels, then grab the prince and admiral in their riverfront quarters. With his penchant for espionage, Washington was minutely involved in mapping out the operation.
On March 28, 1782, Washington sent a sober set of instructions to Colonel Matthias Ogden, the operation commander, setting the tone for the abduction. His overriding concern was that the abducted dignitaries be treated respectfully, not manhandled like ruffians. “I am fully persuaded,” he wrote, “that it is unnecessary to caution you against offering insult or indignity to the persons of the prince or admiral . . . but it may not be amiss to press the propriety of a proper line of con
duct upon the party you command.”5 Washington knew that any abuse by the captors could translate into a propaganda victory for the British, yet in demanding gentlemanly treatment of the prisoners, he also betrayed some residual respect for royalty and rank. The plan was never carried out, and Washington was enraged at Ogden for snatching away his chance for a surprise victory. Many years later the U.S. minister to Great Britain showed Prince William Henry, now King William IV, Washington’s March 28 letter to Ogden. “I am obliged to General Washington for his humanity,” the king replied, “but I’m damned glad I did not give him an opportunity of exercising it towards me.”6
Despite Washington’s skepticism about British intentions, it was hard to discount the extraordinary upheaval that occurred in London in early 1782 when antiwar sentiment engulfed British politics and toppled Lord North’s ministry. In a spiteful mood, King George III reflected that it might be better if he lost America, since “knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its inhabitants that it may not be in the end an evil that they become aliens to this kingdom.”7 That spring the Crown recalled Sir Henry Clinton and replaced him with the commander of Canada, Sir Guy Carleton, a move that threw into relief Washington’s own amazing longevity as commander in chief. When Carleton tested Washington’s position with peace overtures, the latter dismissed them as more examples of British trickery.
For Washington, 1782 was taken up with matters possessing more symbolic than military meaning. The most vexing involved the treatment of prisoners, and none caused more controversy than the case of Captain Joshua Huddy, a member of the New Jersey militia. In April 1782 the British had captured Huddy at Toms River and handed him over to a civilian Tory group, the Associated Loyalists, who placed him in the custody of Captain Richard Lippincott. In a brutal act of reprisal, Lippincott decided to punish Huddy for the death of a Loyalist partisan named Philip White, who had been captured and executed by American militiamen after he killed one of his captors. Huddy was strung up from a tree with a note fastened to his chest that read “Up Goes Huddy for Philip White,” along with threats of further retribution.8 Going through the motions of justice, Sir Henry Clinton subjected Captain Lippincott to a court-martial, which exonerated him on the ground that he had merely obeyed orders. This caused a furor on the American side because those orders had emanated from none other than William Franklin, the estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin Franklin.
Aghast that the perpetrator of such a “horrid deed” was freed, Washington ordered Brigadier General Moses Hazen to choose by lot a British officer to be executed in retaliation for Captain Huddy. Palpably torn by this decision, Washington instructed Hazen that “every possible tenderness that is consistent with the security . . . should be shown to the person whose unfortunate lot it may be to suffer.”9 The person selected at random to die powerfully enlisted his captors’ sympathy. Captain Charles Asgill of the First British Regiment of Foot was only nineteen and of distinguished parentage; his father, a former lord mayor of London, had been a Whig sympathetic to American grievances. Making the decision still more agonizing was that Asgill had been captured at Yorktown, where Washington had guaranteed the safety of prisoners in the articles of capitulation. A conflicted Washington admitted that Captain Asgill was a young man “of humor and sentiment” and that his plight engendered the “keenest anguish.”10
The projected execution blossomed into a cause célèbre as protests flooded in to Washington from abroad. Congress approved the execution, and public opinion overwhelmingly favored it. The brouhaha reawakened memories of the Major André affair and enlisted some of the same partisans. Evidently, some coolness still existed between Hamilton and Washington, for Hamilton protested the execution via Henry Knox rather than directly to Washington. Of the scheduled hanging, Hamilton insisted that “a sacrifice of this kind is entirely repugnant to the genius of the age we live in and is without example in modern history . . . It is a deliberate sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty and must be condemned.”11
Still haunted by André’s execution, Washington didn’t care to execute another sensitive young British officer and protested to one general that “while my duty calls me to make this decisive determination, humanity dictates a fear for the unfortunate offering and inclines me to say that I most devoutly wish his life may be saved . . . but it must be effected by the British commander-in-chief.”12 Interestingly enough, the unsentimental Benjamin Franklin favored a tough, uncompromising stand. “If the English refuse to deliver up or punish this murderer,” he wrote, “it is saying that they choose to preserve him rather than Captain Asgill.”13 Aware that he might be the target of patriotic reprisals, William Franklin fled to London.
In the end Washington handled the matter shrewdly and temporized instead of rushing to judgment. In an unexpected development, Lady Asgill pleaded her son’s case so eloquently at the court of Versailles that the king had his foreign minister request mercy for Captain Asgill. That November Congress obliged France by passing a resolution that granted clemency to the young British captain. It was a neat solution to a ticklish dilemma: Captain Asgill would be released at the behest of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Undoubtedly with enormous relief, Washington issued a pass that would take Captain Asgill to New York, thus ending the affair. He had dealt with it the way he would with many controversies during his presidency: by letting them simmer instead of bringing them to a premature boil.
The French partnership, however useful most of the time, was awkward at others, requiring Washington to pay homage to the French monarchy even as Americans fought against King George III. In the spring of 1782, when Louis XVI had a male heir, Washington was duty-bound to celebrate “the auspicious birth of a dauphin” and hope divine providence would “shed its choicest blessings upon the King of France and his royal consorts and favor them with a long, happy, and glorious reign.”14 Having fought for independence, Americans still had no idea what sort of government would emerge in the aftermath of a successful war. Thus far the new nation had no real executive branch, just a few departments; no independent judiciary; and only an ineffectual Congress. For most Americans, the idea of royalty was still anathema. On the other hand, at least a few Americans feared chaos and touted monarchy as a possible way to fill the dangerous vacuum of executive power.
On May 22, 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola of the Continental Army had the effrontery to suggest to Washington that he reign as America’s first monarch. He sent him a seven-page diatribe, citing “the weakness of republics” and the Continental Army’s privations at the hands of a feckless Congress, then conjured up a benevolent monarchy with Washington seated splendidly on the throne. “Some people have so connected the ideas of tyranny and monarchy as to find it very difficult to separate them . . . but if all other things are once adjusted, I believe strong arguments might be produced for admitting the title of king.”15
While he had roundly berated congressional ineptitude, Washington had never entertained the idea of a monarchy and was left to wonder whether Nicola was the instrument of a covert army faction that favored a king. His reply, sent the same day, fairly breathed with horror. What makes the letter so impressive is its finality—this serpent must be killed in the egg: “Be assured, sir, no occurrence in the course of the war has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the army as you have expressed and [that] I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity.”16 He didn’t dare tell a soul about Nicola’s letter, he said, lest it contaminate men’s minds: “I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country. If I am not deceived in the knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable . . . Let me conjure you then, if you have any regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind.”17 Washington set such store by this momen
tous letter that, for the only time in the war, he demanded proof from his aides that his response was sealed and posted. Stunned, Nicola stammered out three replies in as many days, offering apologies for broaching the taboo subject.
During the summer of 1782 Washington showed his willingness to accept recognition of a more democratic sort when the newly incorporated Washington College was named in his honor in Chestertown, Maryland. Washington seldom allowed the use of his name, suggesting that he was flattered by this distinction. “I am much indebted for the honor conferred on me by giving my name to the college at Chester,” he wrote to the Reverend William Smith, the school’s first president, a Scottish Anglican clergyman. Washington donated fifty guineas to the school—promptly used to purchase optical instruments—and also served on its board.18 Always regretting his own lack of a college education, Washington had surrounded himself with college-educated men, and his patronage of Washington College was perhaps a final way of wiping away that ancient stigma. In 1789 he received an honorary degree from the school.
At times during this uneventful year, Washington sent halfhearted letters to Rochambeau, proposing operations against New York or Charleston—suggestions that came to naught. Suspecting a British ploy, Washington scoffed at rumors of a negotiated peace in the offing and grew especially vigilant after Admiral Rodney defeated de Grasse in the Caribbean in April, sending London into a delirium of joy. Even when official word came in August from the British command in New York that peace talks had been opened in Paris, Washington still couldn’t conquer his ingrained suspicion. “That the King will push the war as long as the nation will find men or money admits not of a doubt in my mind,” he said flatly.19 A thoroughgoing skeptic in foreign policy, Washington denigrated the British as devoid of idealism and driven only by pride and self-interest. Before setting aside arms, he wanted nothing less than “an absolute, unequivocal admission of American independence,” he told Thomas Paine.20 After all these years of war, Washington was still a hot-blooded militant and railed against “the persevering obstinacy of the king, the wickedness of his ministry and the haughty pride” of the British nation.21 Such moral fervor had sustained him during the prolonged conflict.