In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Like many men in their fifties, he was having increasing trouble making out the words on a written page. After trying on the spectacles of an assortment of friends and associates, he identified “the glass of such spectacles as suit my eyes” and sent the lenses to the noted astronomer and inventor David Rittenhouse in Philadelphia so that “he may know how to grind his crystals.” After close to eight years of being what he called “on the stretch,” Washington had visibly aged. In addition to his failing eyes and teeth, his once reddish hair was turning gray.

  In February 1783, matters among the officers of the Continental army were reaching a crisis. With the weather miserably cold, the officers, when not attending dancing classes in the newly built common building known as “the Temple,” had little to do but brood on what Washington called “the long and great sufferings of this army . . . unexampled in history” and wonder what Congress was going to do to set things right. A committee of three officers had been sent to Philadelphia back in December. Since the states refused to grant Congress the right to collect the taxes required to pay the army, the officers had asked that, at the very least, the delegates determine what was owed each of them for future reimbursement. But even this request was encountering resistance.

  By the end of the month Washington began to suspect that an effort was under way among the politicians in Philadelphia to create an alliance between the officers and the government’s creditors that might pressure the states into granting Congress the financial powers needed to pay off its debts. Using the army to intimidate the states into funding the federal government was, of course, a very dangerous game. “[W]hen once all confidence between the civil and military authority is lost,” Joseph Jones wrote to Washington on February 27, “by intemperate conduct or an assumption of improper power, especially by the military body, the Rubicon is passed and to retreat will be very difficult, from the fears and jealousies that will unavoidably subsist between the two bodies.”

  Washington wanted more than anything else to see Congress invested with the powers it needed to properly rule the country; he also recognized that the Continental army had been terribly mistreated. But he would never countenance using the military to force the hand of civil government. As proven by Caesar in Ancient Rome and Cromwell during the English Revolution, this was the first step on the road to dictatorship. Just the year before, a colonel in the Continental army had made the mistake of suggesting that Washington be named king of the United States. “[Y]ou could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable,” Washington had thundered back in response. “[B]anish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate . . . a sentiment of the like nature.” Instead of Caesar, he preferred the classical example of Cincinnatus, the Roman general who traded his sword for the quiet of his farm. As they all knew, Washington would never challenge the sovereignty of Congress.

  To circumvent their commander in chief, some officers were currently trying to, according to Joseph Jones, “lessen your popularity in the army in hopes ultimately the weight of your opposition will prove no obstacle to their ambitious designs.” Hamilton, whose contacts in the army were as good as anyone’s, reported that Washington’s “extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of asperity of temper, both of which were said to have increased of late, had contributed to the decline of his popularity.”

  This was not the first time Washington’s authority had been challenged. During the winter at Valley Forge, after the loss of Philadelphia to the British, there were delegates in Congress and officers in the Continental army who had begun to talk about replacing him with Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga. What was happening now in Newburgh, however, was far more serious, since it threatened the legitimacy of the country’s government. And as it so happened, Gates, whom Washington referred to as “the old leven,” had rejoined the army in Newburgh. It will never be known for certain how extensively Gates was involved in the plan to undermine the commander in chief; for his part, Washington believed that “under a mask of the most perfect dissimulation and apparent cordiality,” Gates was positioning himself (now that the hard work was done) to become the next leader of the Continental army.

  On March 10, an inflammatory address, penned by a member of Gates’s staff, began to circulate among the officers at Newburgh. The United States had proven to be, the anonymous author proclaimed, “a country that tramples upon your rights, disdains your cries and insults your distresses.” Only now, while they were still army officers, did they have the power to get their way. They must “assume a bolder tone” and “suspect the man who would advise to more moderation and longer forbearance.” In other words, they should not listen to Washington and remember “that in any political event, the army has its alternative.” The address ended with the suggestion that they meet the next day and come up with a plan.

  Washington’s response was immediate. The following morning he issued general orders declaring “his disapprobation of such disorderly proceedings.” Instead of meeting that day, they should gather four days later, at noon on Saturday, March 15. “After mature deliberation,” they would be in a better position to do the right thing—both for themselves and for their country. Horatio Gates would preside over the meeting and report to him afterward. Washington was clearly creating the expectation that with Gates running the meeting, the officers would be free to do as they pleased. But, as it turned out, Washington had no intention of allowing them to convene a meeting without him.

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  THE TEMPLE WAS a simple rectangular building with a stage and a lectern at one end. Soon after Gates began the meeting at noon, Washington arrived at the door and asked to be given the opportunity to speak. The unexpected appearance of the commander in chief at such an emotionally freighted moment had a riveting effect. According to Captain Samuel Shaw, “Every eye was fixed upon the illustrious man.”

  He started with an apology, claiming that he had not originally planned to attend the meeting until a second anonymous address (which insisted that Washington’s general orders of March 11 had, in effect, sanctioned whatever the officers decided to do) made it necessary that he “avail himself of the present opportunity.” To do so with “the greater perspicuity,” he had prepared a speech, which with “the indulgence of his brother officers, he would take the liberty of reading to them.”

  “By an anonymous summons,” he began, “an attempt has been made to convene you together; how inconsistent with rules of propriety! How unmilitary! And how subversive of all order and discipline, let the good sense of the army decide.” Instead of appealing to “the reason and judgment of the army,” the author of the address had purposely sought to agitate their “feelings and passions.” This was a topic that Washington, who had spent his adult life attempting to curb his own volcanic temper, knew something about. To do what was right, instead of what felt good in the moment, they must all seek “cool, deliberative thinking and that composure of mind which is so necessary to give dignity and stability to measures.”

  What bothered him the most about the anonymous address was that its author had advised them “to suspect the man who shall recommend moderate measures.” This, of course, was a direct assault on both his integrity and his authority. “I spurn it,” he asserted, “as every man who regards that liberty and reveres that justice for which we contend undoubtedly must; for if men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter . . . , reason is of no use to us, the freedom of speech may be taken away and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.” By allowing someone to manipulate their emotions, the officers were, in effect, forfeiting their liberty. In the end, Washington was making a passionate argument for the primacy of reason and the danger of demagoguery.

  Ultimately, it was up to them. He did, however, want them to appreciate the extraordinary opportunity that circumstances had placed before them. By refusing the appeal of a writer who
would “overturn the liberties of our country, and . . . open the flood gates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood,” the officers would “give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue . . . and by the dignity of your conduct afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, ‘had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last state of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’”

  It was a magnificent rhetorical performance. But it was not enough. The officers gathered in this low, seventy-foot-long room remained sullen and unconvinced. Never before had Washington experienced the full, unmitigated displeasure of his officers. “On other occasions,” Samuel Shaw remembered, “he [had] been supported by the exertions of an army and the countenance of his friends; but in this he stood single and alone. There was no saying where the passions of an army, which were not a little inflamed, might lead. . . . Under these circumstances he appeared, not at the head of his troops, but as it were in opposition to them; and for a dreadful moment the interests of the army and its general seemed to be in competition!”

  Washington had one last communication he wanted to share with them: a letter from the Virginia delegate Joseph Jones that spoke to the support the officers had in Congress. He had read only a few sentences when he paused. He was evidently having trouble making out Jones’s handwriting. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my country.” No one in the room had ever seen him wearing glasses—a sign of human frailty that overwhelmed them. “There was something so natural,” Shaw recalled, “so unaffected, in this appeal, as rendered it superior to the most studied oratory; it forced its way to the heart, and you might see sensibility moisten every eye.”

  Once he had finished reading Jones’s letter, he left the building as quickly as he had entered it. In what must have been a prearranged sequence of motions, several officers sympathetic to his cause moved that a committee be elected to draft resolutions for Washington to forward to Congress. Soon Henry Knox and two others had produced a statement pledging the officers’ “unshaken confidence in the justice of Congress and their country” and requesting that Washington plead their case for them. The resolutions passed unanimously; even John Armstrong, the officer who had written the anonymous address, voted in support of the motion that branded his creation “infamous.”

  “I rejoice in the opportunities I have had,” Samuel Shaw later wrote, “of seeing this great man in a variety of situations—calm and intrepid where the battle raged, patient and persevering under the pressure of misfortune, moderate and possessing himself in the full career of victory. Great as these qualifications deservedly render him, he never appeared to me more truly so, than at the assembly [at Newburgh].” Washington, the North River captain, had succeeded in putting down the mutiny that might have destroyed the United States. As Thomas Jefferson wrote the following year, “the moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”

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  • • •

  THE SOLDIERS CALLED IT “George Washington’s watch chain”: the huge links of iron that stretched across the Hudson at West Point to prevent British ships from sailing up the river. Every autumn since 1778 the chain was taken up, and every spring, once the ice had cleared, it was laid down again. In the spring of 1783 the soldiers stationed at West Point were placing bets on what was going to happen to the chain. “[F]or the putting down or the keeping up of the chain was,” according to Sergeant Joseph Plumb Martin, “the criterion by which we were to judge of war or peace.” There were still plenty of British soldiers stationed in New York and elsewhere, as well as prisoners of war and loyalists who would need to be evacuated, but before that could happen, peace must be declared. As it turned out, the chain (sections of which can still be seen on the grounds of West Point) was never again laid across the Hudson.

  On April 19, which happened to be the anniversary of the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, Washington’s general orders announced the conclusion of the war. “Nothing now remains,” the orders read, “but for the actors of this mighty scene to preserve a perfect, unvarying consistency of character through the very last act; to close the drama with applause; and to retire from the military theatre with the same approbation of angels and men which have crowned all their former virtuous actions.” So that the soldiers could “drink perpetual peace, independence and happiness to the United States of America,” Washington ordered that “an extra ration of liquor . . . be issued to every man.”

  But for Martin and his comrades in arms, the news was bittersweet. “We had lived together as a family of brothers for several years . . . ; had shared with each other the hardships, dangers, and sufferings incident to a soldier’s life; had sympathized with each other in trouble and sickness. . . . And now we were to be . . . parted forever, as unconditionally separated as though the grave lay between. . . . Ah! It was a serious time.”

  Making it all the harder was the knowledge that they had nothing to show for their years of service to their country. “Starved, ragged, and meager,” they were about to return to civilian life in far worse shape than when they had joined the army. “All that they could do,” Martin wrote, “was to make a virtue of necessity and face the threatening evils with the same resolution and fortitude that they had for so long a time faced the enemy in the field.” Finally on June 11, their captain handed out furloughs granting them permission to go home. “When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers,” Martin remembered, “they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses.”

  A total of about 200,000 Americans had served in the war, but that did not mean the rest of the country of about 3 million would show them any gratitude or respect. Americans in 1783 were desperate to put the trauma of the Revolution behind them, and these broken and penniless soldiers were a daily reminder of what they preferred to forget. “What scornful looks and hard words have I experienced,” Martin wrote forty-seven years later. “I hope I shall one day find land enough to lay my bones.”

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  • • •

  THAT SPRING WASHINGTON received a letter from Lafayette, who had long since returned to France. Now that peace was looking like a certainty, he had a “wild scheme” to propose: the two of them should buy a small plantation together and “try the experiment to free the Negroes and use them only as tenants. Such an example as yours might render it a general practice.” Lafayette’s time in Virginia had given him a firsthand knowledge of the horrifying realities of southern slavery. He still loved Washington like a father, but something needed to be done to ensure that the promise of the Declaration of Independence—“liberty and justice for all”—applied to all Americans, no matter what their skin color. For as Lafayette later claimed, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.”

  Washington praised his friend for the “benevolence of your heart,” while insisting that he would be “happy to join you in so laudable a work.” That did not prevent him, however, from pursuing a policy that was diametrically opposed to the one proposed by Lafayette. The preliminary peace treaty between America and Britain included an article insisting on the return of any slaves who had sought refuge with the British. Just as had occurred at Yorktown, slave catchers had begun to descend on British-held New York. Unlike at Yorktown, however, the former slaves had an advocate in British general Carleton.

  In May, Washington met with Sir Guy on the banks of the Hudson to discuss the specifics of the British evacuation. By this time, Washington had received inquiries from his slaveholding friends in Virginia about how best to reclaim their property, and he wanted to
make sure Carleton was enforcing the relevant article in the treaty. According to Chief Justice William Smith, who was part of the British delegation, Washington “delivered himself without animation, with great slowness, and a low tone of voice.” It was obviously an awkward moment for the American commander, especially when Carleton insisted that Britain’s commitment to the loyalists must be kept “with all colors.” Any former slave who had spent a year or more with the British was given a certificate that protected him or her from capture. Already, one Harry Washington, formerly of Mount Vernon, had sailed along with 132 emancipated blacks for Nova Scotia. When Washington learned that Carleton had already begun transporting loyalists and free African Americans to Canada, he blurted out, “Already embarked!” In the end, Washington was powerless to prevent Carleton from pursing his liberal interpretation of the peace accord, and in the months ahead, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4000 former slaves would secure their freedom by escaping from New York on British ships.

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  • • •

  BEING A PLANTER FROM VIRGINIA, Washington continued to view enslaved Africans as property; he had no such local prejudices when it came to what he called “the Union.” As the commander in chief of the Continental army, he had kept his views on the matter private, but now, as he prepared to resign his commission to Congress and become, once again, a private citizen, he felt it time to make his views public because, he wrote in a Circular to the States, “it is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse.”

  From Washington’s perspective, the fate of the country depended on a strong central government. “[W]hatever measures have a tendency to dissolve the Union,” he asserted, “ought to be considered as hostile to the liberty and independence of America. . . . We . . . may find by our own unhappy experience that there is a natural and necessary progression, from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny; and that arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused.” It was a brilliant summation of his thought up until that time, but it was not, for the most part, well received. “The murmur is free and general,” the Virginian Edmund Randolph wrote that summer, “against what is called the unsolicited obtrusion of his advice.”