Winter, more than British steel, was Washington’s cruelest enemy. At Valley Forge in 1777-78, half his force of 11,000 men died or deserted, and some of his most trusted officers plotted to replace him. In the winter of 1779-80, the harshest of the century, 1,200 log huts holding 12 men each were buried under 28 snowfalls at Jockey Hollow in northwestern New Jersey. As long as his men had to live and suffer outdoors, Washington refused to take refuge in a heated house. Each winter, wrapped in his blue revolutionary’s cape, he shivered in a white linen tent until the last private had a cabin to protect him.
After years of living on a limited diet, Washington also suffered ill health alongside his men. His teeth had caused him pain and embarrassment since his first extraction at age 22, after the Fort Necessity fiasco. By the 1770s, the Boston goldsmith, Paul Revere, was supplying him with porcelain dentures. Early in June 1781, British agents intercepted a secret message from Washington that had been sent to New York. “A day or two ago,” Washington wrote through the lines to his dentist, “I applied to you for a pair of pincers to fasten the wire of my teeth. I now wish you would send me one of your scrapers, as my teeth stand in need of cleaning.”
Washington frequently posed for portraits with his mouth packed with cotton wadding to fill out the contours of his face. Pierre Du Simitiere, a Swiss painter turned oral surgeon, supplied Washington with several sets of spring-operated dentures made from walrus tusks and hippopotamus teeth.
Morale became a worsening problem as the war ground to a stalemate in 1780. Mutiny and desertions increased, and Washington reacted harshly. Deserters were ordered “shot on sight.” A 40-foot-high gallows was built in camp as a reminder to wavering patriots. When 300 New Jersey troops mutinied, Washington had them draw lots to decide which three would be executed. Twelve others were chosen to form a firing squad. Two died before Washington reprieved the third.
The years of frustration began to wear on Washington. “One year rolls over another, and without some change, we are hastening to our ruin,” he wrote in June 1780. Change came. Five thousand French troops under Rochambeau at Newport, Rhode Island, were reinforced by a French fleet that bottled up the British in Chesapeake Bay. Washington, his Continentals, and the white-uniformed French soldiers quick-stepped southward. The years of drilling in camp and maneuvering in the field had provided ample practice. Now the Revolutionary Army strode confidently to box in the British at Yorktown. Washington personally touched the match that fired the first siege cannon. On October 17, 1781, the British surrendered. Red-coated, red-faced troops marched out with arms shouldered, flags furled, and bands playing, “The World Turned Upside Down.” The fighting was over.
But, as peace talks in Paris dragged on for nearly two years, Washington grew suspicious of the British. He wrote to James McHenry on August 15, 1782: “Tis plain their only aim is to gain time, that they may become more formidable at sea, form new alliances if possible - or disunite us. Be their object what it may, we, if wise, should push our preparations [for renewed fighting] with vigor for nothing will hasten peace more than to be in a condition for war.”
The prolonged impasse and Congress’ inability to pay his officers almost wrecked Washington’s army. As mutiny loomed at his Newburgh, New York, headquarters, only Washington’s clever appeal to emotion saved the Revolution. Taking out a letter to read, Washington stumbled and hesitated as he groped in his pocket for glasses that his closest friends had never seen the proud general wear. “Gentlemen, you must pardon me,” he said. “I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” The only sound in the room was the weeping of his comrades.
When peace finally came in 1783, Washington assembled his officers at Fraunces Tavern in New York City to say good-bye before he returned to Mount Vernon: “With a heart full of love, and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your later days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”
Washington went on: “I shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.” One by one, the generals filed up quietly and embraced Washington. And when they were done, he left, boarded a barge, and sailed away.
In November 1783, two months after the formal peace treaty was signed, Washington gave up his virtually dictatorial power, resigning his commission to Congress at Annapolis, Maryland, and returning to the neglected fields of Mount Vernon.
Washington lost half of his net worth in the Revolution. He refused to accept any pay for eight years as commander in chief, while footing his own expenses and feeding up to 16 hungry officers at every meal. He also paid in gold for a network of some 500 spies. When he submitted his expense account at war’s end, the Continental Congress quibbled over $8 before reimbursing him $100,000-plus in nearly worthless Continental dollars that had depreciated by 9,000 percent since 1776.
Shortly after the Revolution ended, Washington’s favorite, the Marquis de Lafayette, visited from Paris. Washington invited him to tour Washington’s western acreage. Lafayette, who was more interested in his own nationwide tour of adulation, declined. Good thing: He would have witnessed Washington haranguing threadbare tenants who couldn’t pay for the gristmill he had subsidized or their land rents, leading Washington to bring suit to evict them in the Fayette County, Pennsylvania, court.
Landowners made up 95 percent of the population in the cashless, post-Revolutionary War slump. Like others, Washington tried to sell or rent his acreage. Bartering for virtually everything he needed, he swapped fish caught in the Potomac River for shingles, planks, nails, and rum for the field hands at harvest time.
Washington abandoned tobacco planting and raised wheat that he sold to neighbors to feed their slaves. He earned cash from those sales and from breeding fees on the mules he introduced to America because they ate less than horses. He used the cash to pay imported English weavers to turn the flax he raised into linen clothing for his workers, white and black, and to pay his taxes. He allowed his slaves to keep muskets to hunt for small game.
Nearly four years would pass before he returned to public life. Elected a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, he was chosen its president by unanimous vote. Seeking a solution to the lingering economic crisis, Washington reluctantly agreed to preside, but he had to borrow the cash from his neighbor, George Mason, to get to Philadelphia and to stay there for four months.
Washington’s presence unmistakably signaled that he favored a strong federal government. But when the convention ended, he refused to discuss the new Constitution. Always aware of his enormous influence, he insisted on remaining neutral until it was ratified. Washington was the obvious and unanimous choice as the country’s first president in 1789, carrying every state and all 69 electors.
As he prepared to leave his beloved Mount Vernon and drive to his inauguration in New York City, George Washington dashed off letters to close friends and relatives. He had not sought the presidency, preferring after 15 years of warfare to retire and tend his Potomac acres. To Henry Knox, his old comrade-in-arms, he wrote, “My movements to the chair of government will be accompanied with feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.” But Washington had more than an abiding sense of civic duty drawing him back into public life: He was broke.
To his favorite nephew, George Augustine Washington, he confided in writing on March 31 what many of his old friends already knew: “Necessity (if [his unanimous election] had not happened) would have forced me into (frugality) as my means are not adequate to the expense at which I have lived since my retirement to what is called private life.” In other words, he needed the job.
Washington proved to be a cautious, pragmatic president, more chief magistrate than chief executive. He delegated little real power to his handpicked cabinet. Just as he had done as a general, he solicited the opinions of his department heads, then made all the important decisions himself. However, he stood behind his cabine
t officers. He believed that his role was to invent the presidency, its style and traditions. Simple, formal appearance was his preference and he chose to be called not “your excellency” or “your high-mightiness,” as some proposed, but, rather, just “Mr. President.”
The dignity of the office was paramount, though, and when he went out even for a carriage ride, it was in a six-horse-drawn state carriage. Yet he rejected living in an opulent mansion in downtown Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the United States, choosing instead a more modest stone house in suburban Germantown, Pennsylvania.
His most important decision may have been to limit his own tenure to two terms. Term limits were not specified in the Constitution. He had intended only one term but returned for a second when it became clear that the government could collapse from infighting between his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and the political parties forming around them. But he imposed a two-term limit on himself, establishing a tradition that held until 1940 and is now enshrined in the Constitution. Among the other important precedents Washington set was to ignore seniority and to search widely for new, younger appointees to the Supreme Court.
As president, the former general was an off-again, on-again man of peace. He immediately made peace with the Spanish in Florida by signing the Treaty of New York in 1789. In 1791, as commander in chief, he sent forces under General Arthur St. Clair to subdue Native Americans resisting white settlement in the Northwest Territory. When St. Clair was defeated, Washington sent one of his most aggressive Revolutionary War generals, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, who crushed the natives at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. He also called out a large militia force when western Pennsylvania farmers, protesting Hamilton’s imposition of an excise tax, staged the short-lived Whiskey Rebellion. Personally inspecting the troops, he harshly denounced the rebels, yet when the uprising collapsed without bloodshed, he pardoned the two ringleaders who had been condemned to death.
As Washington aged and his health deteriorated, he longed for Mount Vernon. He had a tumor removed from his hip his first year in office and nearly died of pneumonia the second. Surprised by increasing criticism of his policies during his second term, he resented the nay-saying.
While his government officially held to a strictly neutral stance in the European wars of the 1790s, the bulk of American trade was still with the British. Ironically, the man who had led the rebellion against the British now followed Hamilton’s advice and sided more and more with the British against his old ally, the French. Washington was alarmed by the French Revolution as it devolved into terror. For five years, his dear friend Lafayette was held in jail while thousands of French aristocrats were guillotined. Washington repeatedly sent his own money to help Lafayette’s wife and children and to prevent their beheading.
When Washington came to power in 1789, Americans were singing “God save great Washington” to the tune of “God save our gracious King” (today, it’s the tune for “My Country ’tis of Thee”). But by 1793, a Philadelphia newspaper was calling him “a man in his political dotage,” a “supercilious tyrant” who was “debauching the nation.” While most Americans were much more respectful, the criticism intensified with the Jay Treaty, a pact with Britain that was credited with fending off another war.
Washington was called a “political hypocrite” for favoring the policies of the Federalist Hamilton, who saw cities, banks, a stock market, and industry as America’s future, rather than Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian society. At a 1793 cabinet meeting he called the Democratic-Republican journalist Philip Freneau a “rascal” who should be silenced. The clash led to Jefferson’s resignation as Secretary of State.
Washington raged at the Democratic-Republican societies that supported Jefferson and eventually became the basis of a second political party. He took their criticism personally and considered the Democratic-Republicans irresponsible and evil. Washington’s increasing hostility to changing political views prompted Jefferson to write, “I think he feels those things more than any other person.”
An indignant Washington gave up on winning support from the new Democratic-Republicans. “You could as soon scrub the blackamoor white,” he wrote, “as to change the principles of a professed Democrat.”
Nevertheless, Washington remained the most popular man in America and could have won re-election to a third term had he not refused it. But he did not consider himself indispensable. Just after his sixty-fifth birthday, he left Philadelphia and rode south to Mount Vernon for the last time. There, he happily took over managing his farms. He spent long days in the saddle, offering hospitality to hundreds of visitors and writing hundreds of letters now that he felt free to speak his mind.
When the threat of war with Napoleon’s France loomed in 1798, his successor as president, John Quincy Adams, called Washington back into command to raise an army. Washington was miffed that Adams appointed him without first consulting him, yet he agreed to go off to war again “with as much reluctance,” he wrote, as he would go “to the tomb of my ancestors.” Fortunately, no war developed, and Washington was free to continue his routines at Mount Vernon.
Then, on December 13, 1799, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, George Washington caught a cold. He had a chill and strep throat. The doctor was called. He bled him, as was the custom at the time, and then called in two consultants, who bled him again and again. Washington grew weaker. He refused the advice of the younger doctor, who warned against the bleedings and urged a tracheotomy. But Washington deferred to the senior men.
At 10 o’clock the next night, on December 14, 1799, at age 67, he died. He was as much a victim of his belief in authority as he was of eighteenth-century medicine. The combination proved more deadly than all the bullets and all the plots that had been aimed at him during nearly half a century as America’s most admired leader.
In his will, Washington bemoaned his failure to achieve a personal ambition – to found a national university to avert the regional strife that would lead ultimately to the American Civil War. He granted freedom to his slaves upon the death of Martha, his wife of 40 years, and he provided annuities for their lifelong support when she was gone.
At his funeral, George Washington was eulogized as “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” He is entombed on his beloved Mount Vernon estate on the banks of the Potomac not far from the nation’s capital city named after him.
Questions for Thought and Discussion
How was George Washington’s background unlike that of most other colonial Americans? How was it similar?
Why was Washington chosen as the country’s first president? Was his election a wise choice?
Why was Washington’s decision not to run for a third term as president so significant?
Should Washington be remembered as a hero, or simply as an important figure in the founding of the United States? Explain your conclusion.
Suggested Readings
Cunliffe, Marcus. George Washington: Man and Monument. (Boston, Massachusetts: Little Brown & Company, 1960).
Ferling, John E. The First of Men: A Life of George Washington. (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).
Knollenberg, Bernhard. George Washington: The Virginia Period, 1732-75. (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1964).
Longniore, Paul K. The Invention of George Washington. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988).
Randall, Willard Sterne. George Washington: A Life. (New York, New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1997).
Smith, Richard Norton. Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. (Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).
Wall, Charles Cecil. George Washington: Citizen Soldier. (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1980).
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
After a successful career as an investigative journalist, Willard Sterne Randall pursued advanced studies in history at Princet
on University. Biographer of Benjamin and William Franklin, of Benedict Arnold, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Ethan Allen, he has taught American history at John Cabot University in Rome and at the University of Vermont and Champlain College, where he was Distinguished Scholar in History and a Professor. He is a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and American Heritage.
Nancy Nahra, award-winning poet, has published numerous articles in scholarly journals in history and the humanities both in the United States and England. With Willard Sterne Randall she has co-authored four volumes of history and biography. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Colby College in Maine, she holds an M.A. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Princeton. She has studied and been a tutor at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. She has taught literature and language courses in French and in English literature, as well as Latin classics in translation at the University of Vermont and later at John Cabot University in Rome, where she holds a permanent appointment as Visiting Professor of Humanities after being Poet in Residence there. Most recently at Champlain College in Vermont, she was Professor of Humanities and also served as Coordinator for Humanities.
George Washington: First In War And Peace Page 2