TWENTY-THREE
Goodbye to War
(1775–1783)
On April 18, 1783, Washington’s general orders announced “the cessation of hostilities between the United States of America and the King of Great Britain.” Although the peace treaty had not been signed, the armistice, so Washington continued, “opens the prospect to a more splendid scene, and, like another morning star, promises the approach of a brighter day than hath hitherto illuminated the western hemisphere.” He congratulated the troops on “the dignified part they have been called to act (under the smiles of Providence) on the stage of human affairs; for happy, thrice happy, shall they be pronounced hereafter who have contributed anything, who have performed the meanest office in erecting this stupendous fabric of Freedom and Empire on the broad basis of Independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of human nature and establish an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions.”
Although Washington’s praises comprised civilians as well as soldiers, he did not feel warmly towards the financiers who had, as he came increasingly to realize, played a major part in the efforts to induce the army to dictate to the civilian governments. He wrote Hamilton, angrily, “The army … is a dangerous instrument to play with.” In his appeals to Congress, and through Congress to the nation, that what was owed to the army should be paid, he made no reference to the debts owed the financiers. But concerning his fellow soldiers he was emotional. If they were forced “to wade through the vile mire of despondency and owe ‘the miserable remnant of that life to charity which has hitherto been spent in honor,’ then I shall have learned what ingratitude is; then I shall have realized a tale which will embitter every moment of my future life.”
As lesser verbal artillery gave no indication of ameliorating the situation, Washington decided to send to the states a circular letter which would dig deep into the political fundamentals of the problem. He justified thus stepping out of his military role, and also endowed his words with a special solemnity, by announcing that this was his farewell to public life. Once the final peace permitted him to return to Mount Vernon, he would never again “take any share in public business.”
Privately, Washington was already urging such a constitutional convention as would not be convened until five years and much history had passed by. He yearned for a new “federal constitution” which would cut the power of the states down to dealing with primarily local problems. But he realized that this was too radical a suggestion to be included in the circular letter that came to be known as “Washington’s Legacy.” In this document, he only urged that the Articles of Confederation be interpreted and extended to create a central government adequate to obvious needs. Unless this were achieved, the Americans might “find by our own unhappy experience that there is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny.”
Until the armistice was followed by a final treaty, peace was not official. However, Congress decided to send home all of the army except a small force to watch the British troops who were awaiting in New York the final peace. Congress passed resolutions directed at keeping the released soldiers from departing penniless, but resolutions buy nothing and there was no money available. As they prepared to depart with empty pockets, the officers expressed great bitterness at having allowed themselves to be bamboozled by Washington: they canceled a farewell dinner at which he was to be guest of honor. “The sensibility,” Washington wrote, “occasioned by a parting scene under such peculiar circumstances will not admit of description.”
Despite his yearning to get back to Mount Vernon, Washington decided that his duty would not permit him to abandon the remnant of his army who remained encamped on the Hudson. He had to “wear away,” as he wrote, seven months of “this distressing tedium.” Some relaxation was supplied by a trip around the northern frontier, where he examined the sites of battles he had not commanded; and a period of attending on Congress, during which he made recommendations for a peacetime military establishment which that powerless legislature was too debilitated to enact.
After the definitive peace had been signed, the British announced that they would evacuate New York on November 25, 1783. For once, Washington was willing to take part in a triumphal procession. However, the parade was ridiculously delayed because the British had, in a final mocking gesture, left their flag flying over Fort George with the halyards cut and the pole greased. Not until an ingenious sailor had mounted the pole and substituted an American flag could Washington consummate victory by advancing down the streets. It was as sad an occasion as a joyful one, for the city was desolate and battered, the few inhabitants who came out to cheer were thin and strained. There was a further wait until the British fleet finally sailed out of the harbor. Then Washington ordered a boat to take him across the Hudson to New Jersey. But first he would say farewell to the few officers still in service and to any others residing in the vicinity.
The assurances Washington had given his officers, during that stormy meeting at Newburgh, that they would receive what was due them had, despite his own best efforts, come to nothing. He approached this last parting with a sad and anxious heart. The small group of men who turned as he came in the door of the room at Fraunces Tavern saw that their general’s face was working with strong emotion. He walked over to the table where a collation was laid, tried to eat, but failed. He filled a glass of wine and motioned for the decanters to go around. As the officers saw his hand shake and his lip tremble, the bitterness in their hearts was drowned by love. The men who had fought so hard with Washington and suffered so deeply found tears in their eyes. With tears streaming down his own face, Washington embraced each separately, and then, the height of emotion having become unbearable, walked out of the room.
Washington left New York on December 4. His trip to Annapolis, where Congress was meeting, was clogged by crowds who wished to do him honor. The ceremony before Congress during which he returned his commission, was again wet with tears. Then, after almost nine years of service, he was free. As he rode up the circular drive to Mount Vernon, there were candles in the windows. Martha stood in the doorway. It was Christmas Eve.
Debates have raged concerning Washington’s ability as a soldier. Writers have contended that he was so incompetent that he would have been defeated by any other human beings except the dullards the British sent against him. He has been described as an equal of Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon. The debate has overlooked the fact that Washington was never really a soldier. He was a civilian in arms.
Civilians had always seemed more important to him than soldiers. However, since there was a war, an army was an essential instrument. It should guard and preserve the population to the greatest extent it could. To repel that civilian discouragement which could foster a wavering of loyalty to the cause, the soldiers should seek an impressive record. (Washington often helped the record along with inaccurate dispatches.) Washington further realized that a war won primarily by the force of public opinion would of necessity be a war of attrition, a very long war. He yearned for military victories that would cut the process short. But he knew that victories involving brutality against civilians and thus achieved at the expense of public opinion, would, in fact, be defeats.
Washington’s belief that the war was more basically a civilian than a military conflict was underlined by chronology. From his assumption of the command to the last battle he led against the main British army was almost exactly three years. From the Battle of Monmouth to the final departure of the British army was four and a half. The second period contained, of course, the largely French-engineered victory at Yorktown. Yet Cornwallis’s surrender was not in essence a much more serious defeat than Burgoyne’s, and the conditions that had made it possible evaporated with the departure of the French fleet so completely that there was no reason for the British to believe that this enemy triumph could ever be repeated. They would have regarded Yorktown as no more than an unfortunate check were they not
being gravely defeated on more important battlefields. They came to realize the utter hopelessness of conquering a people who had become united against them. Washington’s role in fostering this unity had been great.
Washington entered the contest almost as entirely untrained in sophisticated warfare as were his troops. The British and Hessians were very well trained. Until Washington got over fighting European regulars in the conventional manner, the Continental Army went down to defeat after defeat. The break came with Trenton and Princeton, when Washington made use of the particular qualities of dedicated soldiers who would march quickly in the face of any hardship; would fight with brilliance individually if not so well in formation; and exist on nonexistent supplies. These qualities were particularly suited to American economic and political disorganization, which made the loss of even the national capital not crippling, and to the American terrain, which encouraged guerrilla warfare and made formal battles easy to avoid.
Being practically without schooling, Washington had always taught himself from experience. He learned the lessons of the American war all the more readily because he had no conventional lessons to unlearn. The British and the Hessians, on the other hand, suffered the confusion common to acknowledged experts when their expertise ceases to function. Instead of seeking new solutions, they felt they were up against something inexplicable and became increasingly timid. Back in London, another foreseeable reaction took place: If an expert does not deliver as he should, you replace him with another who is expected to apply the accepted rules more effectively. Washington survived four British commanders in chief.
Long before the end of the war, Washington had become much more effective than any of his military opponents. But this did not mean that what he had taught himself would have made him a great general on the battlefields of Europe. Evolved not from theory but from dealing with specific problems, his preeminence was achieved through a Darwinian adaptation to environment. It was the triumph of a man who knows how to learn, not in the narrow sense of studying other people’s conceptions, but in the transcendent sense of making a synthesis from the totality of experience.
Among the legacies of the Revolution to the new nation, the most widely recognized and admired was a man: George Washington. He had no rivals. When the war ended, not a single officer was really powerful in the army who had not been elevated and trained by the Commander in Chief—and who was not loyal to him. In the civilian sphere no individual had national stature comparable with Washington’s. The General had more than any political figure served as the nation’s chief executive. Yet no continuation of leadership figured in his happy imaginings.
Washington’s completing touch to the mansion house at Mount Vernon: the Dove of Peace weathervane installed in 1787 (Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)
“At length, my dear Marquis,” Washington wrote Lafayette, “I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, and under the shadow of my own vine and my own fig tree. Free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments which the soldier who is ever in pursuit of fame; the statesman whose watchful days and sleepless nights are spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of his own, perhaps the ruin of other countries (as if this globe was insufficient for all); and the courtier who is always watching the countenance of his prince, in hopes of catching a gracious smile, can have very little conception. I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all, and this, my dear friend, being the order of my march, I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Pleasures at Home
(1783–1787)
After his return to Mount Vernon, Washington wrote that he felt “as I conceive a wearied traveler must do, who after treading many a painful step with a heavy burden on his shoulders is eased … and from his housetop is looking back and tracing with a grateful eye the meanders by which he escaped the quicksands and mires which lay in his way, and into which none but the all-powerful guide and disposer of human events could have prevented his falling.”
Washington had long visualized that on his retirement his public career would sink to a source of happy meditation, which would include the knowledge that his countrymen were grateful to him and recognized that he had served them well. Otherwise, everything would be as it had been before the Revolution, when he had been content as a successful planter and neighborhood patriarch.
Yet the man who had for so long been concerned with mighty affairs could not at first relax into the stillness with which he was surrounded. Through the plantation air there came to the physical giant such premonitions of death as he had never felt on the battlefields. “Those trees,” George Washington wrote in a vein of poetry not usually accorded to his legend, “which my hands have planted … by their rapid growth, at once indicate a knowledge of my declination and their disposition to spread their mantles over me before I go hence to return no more. For this, their gratitude, I will nurture them while I stay.” To Lafayette he added that he came from “a short-lived family, and might soon expect to be entombed in the dreary mansions of my fathers.… But I will not repine: I have had my day.”
Often, when he looked downriver at nighttime and saw darkness where there had been lights, he felt a particularly poignant sense of loss. Belvoir, the mansion of his former friends and patrons, the Fairfaxes, and particularly of his youthful love Sally, had been burned. Although he yearned to have Sally and her husband, who were residing in England, come back, more than a year passed before he could find the fortitude to ride the short, familiar distance to determine the actual condition of their deserted property. Some walls and a chimney still stood, but “the whole are, or very soon will be, a heap of ruins.… When I viewed them, when I considered that the happiest moments of my life had been spent there; when I could not trace a room in the house (now all rubbish) that did not bring to my mind the recollection of pleasing scenes, I was obliged to fly from them with painful sensations, and sorrowing for the contrast.”
Washington’s defense against melancholy remained movement. As soon as the initial exhaustion of war passed from him, he burst into multitudinous action. He assumed simultaneously the roles of expansive host, family and neighborhood patriarch, farmer, agricultural experimenter, landscape architect, interior decorator, merchandiser, landlord, exploiter of western lands, builder of roads and canals.
Mount Vernon had irrevocably become with his return more than a private house. Not only was it the habitat of the most conspicuous actor in the most conspicuous contemporary event of the Western world, but, since Congress was now altogether secondary to the state governments, the United States had no national capitol to vie with Washington’s home as the most prestigious building in the nation. People flowed up the driveway in a flood, and, the nearest inn being several hours’ ride away, Washington felt obliged to house many visitors over at least one night.
He rarely wrote any of his old military companions without including an invitation to Mount Vernon. Strangers appeared with letters, those from Europe often gimlet-eyed with a desire to describe Washington and his way of life in travel books. There were unexpected visitors of obvious importance, and others who had no auspices but whom Washington considered it inhospitable to turn away. When a military-appearing Frenchman marched in with high claims and no papers, Washington suspected (history reveals correctly) that the visitor was an impostor but he nonetheless entertained him for two nights.
Artists came eager to take likenesses of the world’s most famous man: they could make and sell innumerable copies. Since Washington hated to sit still and was embarrassed at being stared at, serving the painters was unpleasant enough. The sculptors were worse: part of their technique was to make “life mask
s” by smearing plaster over Washington’s features and allowing it to harden as the hero lay flat on his back and breathed through tubes place in his nostrils. Believing that “to encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country,” Washington was docile.
Washington, indeed, felt a responsibility towards anyone who came to him. This was well exemplified when a ragged New Englander with a wild face appeared and announced himself as “John Fitch, Inventor of Steamboats.” As Fitch contended that he alone knew how to make boats move against wind and current, he saw on Washington’s face “some agitations of mind that was not expressed.” He stopped in mid-speech to ask whether his plans competed with the schemes of a Virginia boatbuilder named James Rumsey. Washington knew that Rumsey was also speculating on the possibilities of using steam—but he had promised to keep Rumsey’s confidences secret.
Fitch had no claim on Washington and was clearly not a gentleman. The obvious move was to be evasive and then see the uninvited caller to the door. But this Washington could not do. He went into another room and puzzled to work out some way that he could satisfy Fitch without betraying Rumsey. When he finally concluded that there was no way, he loaded the intruder with invitations to stay for dinner, to spend the night. But Fitch departed in a fury and for the rest of his life expressed hatred for Washington.
Mount Vernon had a large resident population. The Washingtons had taken in, on John Parke Custis’s death, Martha’s two youngest grandchildren: George Washington Parke Custis (Little Washington) and Eleanor Parke Custis (Nelly). Martha absorbed herself in their activities and welfare with an intensity which made her husband all the more painfully conscious that he had no children of his own. Relations of both Martha’s and George’s stayed for months or years because it was convenient, because they were sick or poor. Extending into Washington’s Presidency was his concern that his niece Harriot (whose father, Samuel Washington, had died bankrupt) would ruin her best clothes either by wearing them perpetually or by wadding them up in a pile on the floor.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 20