In the Hurricane's Eye

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Throughout the final years of the war, the states had operated, for the most part, independently. Accustomed to going their own way, the states—along with the American people—saw no immediate need for a strong central government, especially in the giddy euphoria surrounding the end of the conflict. Before constructive change could occur, conditions in America must get frighteningly worse. “Like young heirs come a little premature perhaps to a large inheritance,” Washington wrote to his former neighbor George Fairfax, “it is more than probable they will riot for a while; but in this if it should happen, tho’ it is a circumstance which is to be lamented . . . , [it] will work its own cure, as there is virtue at the bottom.” They did not want to hear what he had to say at this point, but Washington still had faith in the American people.

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  THAT SPRING CONGRESS once again let him down. The expectation had been that the government would settle the officers’ accounts while providing them with the token amount of three months’ pay before they left the service. But even these trifling measures proved impossible. Inevitably the officers (like the enlisted men) felt betrayed—not only by their country but by their commander in chief, who had encouraged them to trust Congress. When Washington invited the officers to a farewell dinner, they spurned the invitation, “declaring they thought the present period more adapted to sorrow than mirth.” It was “a parting scene,” he wrote bitterly to the president of Congress, that “will not admit of description.”

  Soon after, the Congressional delegates received what more than a few Continental officers viewed as their deserved comeuppance. In June, some disgruntled soldiers stationed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, marched on Philadelphia demanding their back pay. Washington was ultimately forced to send fifteen hundred soldiers to put down the mutiny, and Congress decided that for reasons of safety, it must relocate to Princeton, New Jersey. Caught between the hostility of his own officers and the desperate demands of a Congress reduced to an embarrassing caricature of its former self, Washington needed, more than anything else, a vacation. For a few weeks at least, the country would be left to its own, however inadequate, devices.

  In July, he and New York governor George Clinton (who also happened to be a brigadier general in the Continental army) loaded some provisions and gear into a boat and headed up the Hudson for a two-week tour of the region Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold had made famous. Not only did they explore the battlefields of Saratoga, as well as Lake George and the southern portion of Lake Champlain, they ventured up the Mohawk River to Fort Stanwix, which Arnold had saved from a British siege in the weeks before the victory at Saratoga. Instead of the tangled legacies of the two men Washington may have despised more than any others on the planet, it was the wonder and potential of the American wilderness that seized his imagination. “I could not help taking a more contemplative and extensive view of the vast inland navigation of these United States,” he wrote to Chastellux, “and could not but be struck with the immense diffusion and importance of it; and with the goodness of that Providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand. . . . I shall not rest contented ’till I have explored the Western Country, and traversed those lands (or great part of them) which have given bounds to a new empire.”

  Washington might have looked forward to a triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe, where he would have been the object of unprecedented praise and adulation. Instead he yearned only to explore the wilderness of his adventurous youth. He dreamed, he wrote to Lafayette, of venturing up the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, then down the Mississippi to New Orleans and Florida and finally home. “A great tour this, you will say. Probably it may take place nowhere but in imagination. . . . If it should be realized, there would be nothing wanting to make it perfectly agreeable but your company.” And so, while Lafayette imagined joining him in the experiment that freed America of slavery, Washington fantasized about exploring the west. As he was well aware, many of the region’s native inhabitants had been drawn into the bloody fighting that had raged throughout this distant portion of the country during the Revolution. So as to prevent future violence, he recommended to Congress that “a boundary line be drawn between them and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our people from hunting or settling.” But as he no doubt suspected, no measure could easily constrain the insatiable lust of the American people for land.

  With the end of his tour of duty fast approaching, Washington devoted considerable time to settling his accounts. Back in 1775, he had volunteered to serve without pay as long as Congress covered his expenses. He ultimately submitted a bill for £8422 (roughly $1.2 million in today’s dollars). Washington was disappointed by how low the figure turned out to be, but unlike what had happened to his fellow officers, Congress agreed to pay the requested amount.

  Even more important to Washington was the vast number of official papers chronicling his eight years as commander in chief. He might not want to be crowned king, but he did want to be remembered. Two years before, he had commissioned Richard Varick, who had been on Benedict Arnold’s staff, to organize his war correspondence into what proved to be twenty-eight different volumes. By the fall of 1783, it was time to pack up the books and send them to Mount Vernon. “I am fully convinced,” he wrote to Varick in appreciation, “that neither the present age nor posterity will consider the time and labor which have been employed in accomplishing it, unprofitably spent.” And since Varick had completed the job before the end of the war, what became one of the essential building blocks of Washington’s future legacy had been created at the public expense.

  In late August, Congress requested that he come to Princeton for some final consultation as commander in chief. He and Martha took up residence in nearby Rocky Hill. Washington appears to have enjoyed this fall idyll in New Jersey, during which he had the opportunity to personally congratulate Nathanael Greene on his successes in the south. In one of the few recorded instances in which Washington is known to have told a joke, he responded to the president of Congress’s claim that financial superintendent Robert Morris “had his hands full” with the quip, “I wish he had his pockets full.”

  By early November, Congress had received word that the final draft of the peace agreement between Britain and America had been signed. Washington decided it was time to issue his “Farewell Orders” to the army, even though more than two-thirds of its soldiers had already returned home. What they had accomplished, he insisted, was “little short of a standing miracle.” What he took most pride in was how “men who came from different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed, by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other, [had] instantly become but one patriotic band of brothers.” The army was, in other words, what the United States might one day become under the leadership of a strong central government.

  On November 4, just two days after issuing his farewell orders, Washington learned that without consulting him, Congress had adjourned more than a week ahead of schedule. What’s more, he wrote to Alexander Hamilton, they had done so “without bringing the peace establishment or any of the many other pressing matters to a decision.” Once again, he had to step into the void and bring the war to its ultimate conclusion.

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  NOT UNTIL NOVEMBER 25, 1783, did the British succeed in getting all the soldiers, loyalists, and freed ex-slaves loaded into the awaiting fleet of transports and naval vessels. A total of almost 33,000 people (not counting the soldiers and sailors) had left New York, making it what has been called “the largest movement of ships and people in the history of the British Empire.” The United States had won its independence, but thousands of Americans had decided they must live elsewhere.

  Washington entered the city on his gray horse Nelson with his traveling companion, Governor Clinton, at his side. They were followed by a long line of soldiers, politicians, and prominent citizens marching eight
in a row. The British had expected New York to erupt in violence on the Rebels’ return, but there was not a mob to be seen. “These Americans . . . are a curious original people,” a British officer observed, “they know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them.”

  Those who had not seen New York since the beginning of the war were appalled by the filth and disrepair. A fire had broken out soon after the British took the city in 1776, destroying close to a third of downtown, and nothing had been done to repair the damage. People still lived in tents and shacks in this fire-blackened portion of Manhattan. Many of the public buildings had been converted into prisons, holes hacked into the floors for the disposal of human waste. Worst of all were the prison ships anchored just across the East River in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay, where an estimated 10,000 American prisoners had died in conditions of unimaginable squalor.

  For the British, who never earned back the loyalty of the vast majority of their former colonists, New York represented the great lost opportunity of the war. If Sir Henry Clinton had reinstated civil government and encouraged the loyalists to begin rebuilding the city, he might have transformed Manhattan into a vibrant example of how the British Empire could restore peace, order, and English liberty throughout war-torn America. Instead he turned the city into a patriot killing ground. The New York historian Edwin Burrows has estimated that as many as 32,000 Americans had been imprisoned in and around New York. Of those, as many as 18,000 died. Since a total of about 35,800 Americans died in the War of Independence, this means that approximately half those deaths occurred in the environs of Manhattan. The New Englanders had Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and the Siege of Boston. The southerners had a long list of brutal battles, including Camden, King’s Mountain, and Guilford Courthouse. But no portion of the United States had witnessed more death than New York.

  A greased flagpole made it more difficult than it might otherwise have been to replace the British flag with the stars and stripes, but soon the American standard was flying over the city for the first time. For the next eight days, Washington attended to both public and private matters, shopping for silverware and teapots for Mount Vernon and making sure that several key spies in patriot service, such as the printer James Rivington (who appears to have secured the copy of the royal navy’s signal book that had been sent to Admiral de Grasse), were compensated for the considerable risks they had taken during the war.

  Washington held out hope of returning to Mount Vernon by Christmas. But first he had to resign his commission to Congress, which had relocated to Annapolis. To keep to his schedule, he determined to leave New York on Thursday, December 4, after a final meeting with his officers at Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street.

  They convened at noon on the second floor. By that point, the malcontents had long since left for home. The forty or so officers in the room that afternoon were unwavering in their regard for the commander in chief. They’d all taken their seats by the time Washington entered the room, his face betraying an emotion that the young cavalry officer and spy chief Benjamin Tallmadge described as “too strong to be concealed.”

  The officers ate in what Tallmadge remembered as “almost breathless silence” until Washington filled his glass with wine and turned to face them. “With a heart full of love and gratitude,” he said, “I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.” Once they had downed their glasses of wine, he continued. “I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand.”

  Henry Knox was the closest to Washington, and when he turned in his direction, the commander in chief took him by the hand, and with tears streaming down their faces, they embraced. “In the same affectionate manner,” Tallmadge remembered, “every officer in the room marched up to, kissed, and parted with his General-in-Chief.” Here, at long last, the true, almost frightening intensity of Washington’s buried emotional life had been revealed. “It was indeed too affecting to be of long continuance,” Tallmadge wrote, “for tears of deep sensibility filled every eye—and the heart seemed too full, that it was ready to burst from its wonted abode.”

  It was soon time for Washington to leave. A corps of light infantry escorted him to Whitehall, where a barge was tied to the dock. “We all followed in mournful silence to the wharf,” Tallmadge recalled, “where a prodigious crowd had assembled.” As soon as he had taken a seat and the twenty-two oarsmen began to row, Washington turned, waved his hat, and “bid us a silent adieu.”

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  NOT UNTIL DECEMBER 23, by which time Congress had managed to assemble a quorum of just twenty legislators, did Washington stride into the statehouse in Annapolis. The galleries were packed with people; among the crowd, interestingly enough, was Horatio Gates. Another Washington antagonist, Thomas Mifflin, one of the leading members of the Conway Cabal, was now president of Congress. When Washington stood to make his speech, his right hand trembled so badly that he had to hold it with his left. “Having now finished the work assigned me,” he read, “I retire from the great theatre of action; and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my commission and make my leave of all the employments of public life.”

  By the end of 1783, the United States was a façade of a country—a collection of squabbling states with the barest window dressing of a federal government. Washington might have looked at the assembly of mostly second- and third-rate politicians now in control of the country and convinced himself he must do something about it. But he had had enough. He wanted to go home. When told by the American-born painter Benjamin West that Washington planned to retire to his farm after the war, King George III said, “[I]f he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

  Washington had long since learned that greatness was attained not by insisting on what was right for oneself but by doing what was right for others. As he had written to Admiral de Grasse, “[A] great mind knows how to make personal sacrifices to secure an important general good.” He also understood that this required a leader to attend to the countless, largely unappreciated details that made something as complicated as an army (or a nation) work. “I have undergone more than most men are aware of,” he wrote to Richard Henry Lee in 1777, “to harmonize so many discordant parts.” Washington could be forbidding and remote, but there was also a surprising gentleness about him that instilled a remarkable sense of loyalty in just about everyone (with some notable exceptions) who had the privilege to serve under him. Perhaps Abigail Adams put it best: “He possesses a dignity that forbids familiarity, mixed with an easy affability that creates love and reverence.”

  Greatness, Washington realized, was ultimately determined by that sternest and cruelest of judges: posterity. By insisting that “it is our duty to make the best of our misfortunes and not to suffer passion to interfere with our interest and the public good,” he was acting on what he had called in the summer of 1781 “the great scale.” Now, two years later, it was time for him as military commander to step aside. For this republican experiment to succeed, the young country’s next hesitant steps must be made without him.

  It was an approximately fifty-mile ride from Annapolis to Mount Vernon. Over the course of the last eight years Washington had slept in 280 different houses, but this time he was headed home. Accompanying him were his enslaved manservant Billy Lee and his two aides, David Humphreys and Benjamin Walker. By the evening of the following day, Christmas Eve, they had Mount Vernon in sight.

  Washington had spent the Revolution trying to convince an army and a nation that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the future was theirs. Now that the future had finally arrived, there was no place he’d rather be than here, at his beloved Mount Vernon, on a hill overlooking a river, almost two hundred miles from the open sea.

 
EPILOGUE

  AFTERMATH

  Enough. Launching my yawl no more for fairyland, I stick to the piazza.

  —HERMAN MELVILLE,

  “The Piazza” (1856)

  SIX YEARS AFTER THE CONCLUSION of the Revolutionary War, France was gripped by its own revolution with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. By then, George Washington had begun his first term as president, an office created by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, less than a year after an insurrection of farmers in western Massachusetts, known as Shays’s Rebellion, helped bring mounting concerns about the weakness of the country’s federal government to a crisis point.

  As president, Washington prevented the country from becoming embroiled in the mounting hostilities among Britain, France, and Spain while deftly handling a tax-related insurrection in western Pennsylvania known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Throughout the eight years of his presidency, the American electorate became increasingly polarized into two political factions: the Federalists—generally well-to-do merchants and landowners whose international sympathies lay with Britain and who subscribed to the financial policies promulgated by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton—and the Democratic Republicans—primarily farmers and plantation owners who sided with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in his enthusiasm for the French Revolution and his distrust of Hamilton’s efforts to create a strong federal bank, policies that would ultimately make the War of 1812 an inevitability during the administration of Jefferson’s ideological soulmate James Madison.