Washington’s last days at Mount Vernon—he would not see his treasured estate again for more than six years—were hectic. Lund Washington was to be left in charge, and he met often with the owner to plan every last detail of the farm’s operations. Some sticky financial transactions also required his attention. And a plethora of visitors seemed to descend like locusts upon Washington and his wife just at this feverish moment when they most longed for privacy.54
One of the guests was Richard Henry Lee, Washington’s congressional colleague. He arrived on May 3 to accompany Washington to Philadelphia. That afternoon, bright and hot for so early in the spring, Washington and his company—Lee and his brother Thomas, and their old friend from the Virginia assembly, Charles Carter of King George County, together with Gates, who had lingered on—sat in the shade on the veranda, thankful for each breath of cooling breeze that drifted off the great river below. They talked, in all likelihood ruminating on political strategies and on military realities, on what Congress should do and might do.55
That night after dinner, with the callers shown to their rooms, George and Martha at last were alone to say their private goodbyes. They faced a long separation, probably one of several months, Washington thought. But he should be home by Christmas.56
The next morning was intolerably hot again, the oppressive stickiness of the air adding to the unpleasantness of parting. A hurried breakfast was completed, the carriage was loaded, and the teams secured to the car. Farewells again were said. Washington and Lee clambered inside, their body servants following. The driver was in his place.
Inside Washington’s baggage, just in case, were his military uniform and his sword.
PART TWO
5
Commander of America’s Army
“Imbarked on a tempestuous Ocean”
During the first Congress John Adams, who already had concluded that only force could secure American rights, lashed out at his timid colleagues who “Shudder at the Prospect of Blood.” As he rode from his home in Braintree, Massachusetts, to Philadelphia for the second Congress, all signs pointed to a transformation in the thinking of the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. Rhode Island was readying a force of fifteen hundred men to send to Massachusetts, he reported as he passed through that colony. When he got to Connecticut he found that colony mustering an army of six thousand. New York and New Jersey “are aroused,” he discovered as he continued on. When at last he arrived in Philadelphia he found militiamen training and parading in the streets.1 But what of Congress? Would congressmen from south of New England vote to assist their brethren? Would Congress provide men and supplies to wage war against Great Britain?
For weeks it was not clear which way Congress would lean. The more conservative congressmen, led by John Dickinson as much as anyone, were a powerful force. They desperately wanted to avoid hostilities, to once again petition the Crown in the forlorn hope that the monarch would break with his ministers and agree to the first Congress’s declaration of American rights. At the outset this faction seemed to have the upper hand. It secured passage of the “Olive Branch Petition,” another expression of colonial fealty, and when Adams suggested that France and Spain be sounded out for military assistance his proposal elicited looks of “horror, terror, and detestation.”2
But the momentum of events was running against this conservative faction. Congress had hardly been gaveled into session before it learned that New England militiamen, together with a paramilitary force from Vermont, had seized Fort Ticonderoga from a small British garrison. Then New York requested advice on how to treat the redcoats within its borders, and the New England colonies wished to know how supplies for their defense could be procured. Congress created two committees to study these thorny matters, and it appointed George Washington to chair each committee. The very act of naming this man to head the panels—a man who had not been named to a single committee at the first Congress—was indicative of the winds beginning to blow over Congress.3
Actually, Washington’s committees made the most modest recommendations. One panel cautioned New York against provocative behavior, although it did advise that colony to raise troops for six months’ service, a force that might keep open the lines of communication between New York City and the hinterland. As for supplies, the other panel simply proposed that New England alone supply the army that was drawn up before Boston.4
There was still another question. What of the army itself? Since that day in April when General Gage’s search-and-destroy force had retreated to Boston from Lexington and Concord, the British army had remained under siege within the city. All about Boston, in an arc from north of the town swinging around the western periphery and on to the south of the Neck, the thin strip of land that connected the city to the mainland, an army of nearly twenty thousand colonists had gathered, resolved to resist any attempt by the British to leave the city. It was an intercolonial army, but all the soldiers were New Englanders, and New England was fully aware that it could not stand alone. On June 2, almost a month after Congress had reconvened, Massachusetts asked the national legislature to take command of the New England army.
By then the Adamses, John and Samuel, believed they had the votes to win congressional approval for such a move. For weeks, over dinner and ale, they and their compatriots quietly had taken soundings, and they had discovered that a majority of the southern congressmen were ready for a national army—if its commander was a southerner. They also had learned that Virginia’s George Washington was their choice for the post, although a few delegates (including a Virginian, Edmund Pendleton) were “very cool about [his] Appointment.” Most of the opposition apparently was due less to reservations about Washington’s ability than to the fact that his selection would mean that the present commander, Artemas Ward of Massachusetts, would have to be dumped; some feared this would destroy morale in the army, and others worried that New Englanders would not serve under any commander save one from their own region.
But John Adams, the prime mover in this shadowy work, was more worried about New England’s present dearth of aid. What better way was there to nationalize the struggle than to appoint a southerner as commander of the army? Besides, Adams, a most sagacious judge of men, was enthusiastic about Washington. Quiet, temperate, earnest, reserved, prudent, yet with an air of toughness about him, the Virginian seemed like the kind of man one could trust with such a burdensome responsibility; he seemed the very embodiment of those values that Adams long had prized, that he had sought to foster and to display. Adams had nothing against Ward, and he may not have even believed that Washington was a more capable soldier. It was just that Ward had to be sacrificed for the general good. So, quietly and with some effort Adams worked in private for Washington’s appointment for nearly two weeks, talking and arguing primarily with others from New England. Meanwhile, Washington, who knew full well what was going on, discarded his civilian garments for his old buff and blue uniform of the Virginia Regiment, a not so subtle way of indicating his ardor for the command post.5
The decision to go with Washington was made sometime during the second week of June, and on June 14, a hot, sticky morning, John Adams was the first congressman to be recognized by the presiding officer. Not a very good orator, the short, stout New Englander nevertheless made a speech. The gist of his address was that the army before Boston must be nationalized by the addition of troops from outside New England. Then, after pausing for a moment, he recommended that General Ward be replaced; he had in mind a man “among Us and very well known to all of Us, a Gentleman whose Skill and Experience as an Officer, whose independent fortune, great Talents and excellent universal Character [will] command the Approbation of all America”—Colonel George Washington. John Hancock, who earlier had been elected president of the body, had presumed Adams was speaking of him. When Adams instead mentioned Washington, Hancock’s face suddenly was contorted with rage; nor did Samuel Adams’s second to his cousin’s motion “soften the President’s Phisiognomy a
t all,” John Adams recalled years later.6
Washington fled the room the moment his name was mentioned, leaving Congress free to express its feelings. In all likelihood the issue was never in doubt, but the debate was fierce and protracted. After several hours of arguing it was clear that a consensus existed for Washington, although it was equally clear that Congress was deeply divided. At length the managers of the floor fight called for an adjournment until “pains [could be] taken out of doors” to procure a unanimous vote. The other portion of Adams’s motion had relatively smooth sailing, and on that day Congress transformed the army at Boston into a continental force, resolving that six companies of riflemen, two each from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, be added to the new Continental army. Congress also named Washington to chair a committee of five to prepare articles of war for the regulation of the American army, in itself virtually an act that indicated it soon would confirm him to head that army.7
The following day, while Washington sketched a preliminary draft of the military code in the privacy of his apartment, Congress resumed its fight over the choice of the commander of the army. During the night some of the dissidents had been won over to Washington, but not all the congressmen were in his corner, and the debate continued, sometimes acrimoniously, throughout most of the day. Finally, late in the afternoon some of Washington’s friends hurried to his quarters with word of the vote. He was now General Washington, they told him, commander in chief of the Continental army.
That night one congressman after another wrote home, breaking the news of Washington’s selection and explaining their decision. More than anything else they stressed the virtues of his character, pointing to qualities like modesty, amiability, bravery, generosity, sobriety, and to his long record of military experience. These attributes, they predicted, made Washington the kind of man that “youth [can] look up to . . . as a pattern to form themselves by....” But behind the rhetoric was a hard-headed pragmatism. The cause required someone from south of New England. Whom else could Congress have selected? Philip Schuyler of New York had about as much experience as Washington and he too was a congressman, yet his active support for the resistance movement had been muted, and since he had not been a delegate to the first Congress he was not as well known as the Virginian. Horatio Gates, Charles Lee, and Richard Montgomery (living now in New York) were ex-British army officers, but that fact was as much a demerit as a virtue in the minds of congressmen contemplating war with Britain. Beyond those men there was no one else with Washington’s military background. Thus, as Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut reported, Congress “Esteem[ed] him well Adapted to please A New England Army and much better Suited to the Temper & Genius of our People than any other Gent. not brought up in that Part of the Country.”8
What went through Washington’s mind during the evening of this most momentous day of his life is not known. His diary entry that night was no less mundane than for any other day: “Clear, and Cooler than Yesterday. Dined at Burn’s in the Field. Spent the Eveng. on a Committee.” Remembering the “Virginia Centinel,” he was aware that his actions in such an exposed position could invite criticism. He even melodramatically told Patrick Henry that he expected his service to cause “the ruin of my reputation.”9 If he paused to think of what had transpired to bring him to this point, was he candid enough—or of sufficient philosophical bent—to recognize the role played by sheer luck? Though not reared in the highest stratum of Virginia society, he had had the good fortune to be born into the planter class and to parents who saw that he received some education. By the luck of the draw Lawrence had married into a rich and powerful family, thus giving George access to their influence; then, in fairly rapid succession, not only did Lawrence die at an early age, but so did his only surviving child. A middling surveyor at age sixteen, Washington had become the virtual scion of Lord Fairfax as well as the master of Mount Vernon before he was thirty. He had been lucky in other ways too, having survived several brushes with death. Smallpox felled him, twice he was struck down by camp diseases, and two years after his marriage he again fell dangerously ill. He had not only lived through each malady but recovered from each with no permanent damage. He had also escaped unhurt in his fight with Jumonville and in the attack upon Fort Necessity and, miraculously, had survived that horrible day on the Monongahela when Braddock and half his army perished. By happenstance, moreover, Washington was the right age when the French and Indian War erupted, old enough to be a soldier, but not so old as to be encumbered with a family or with physical infirmities. In retrospect he had been fortunate that Dinwiddie and Braddock, Shirley and Loudoun had been unable or unwilling to make him a British officer, and he was even luckier that his Uncle Joseph Ball had counseled against letting him join the British navy. In addition, as historian Douglas Southall Freeman observed, Washington might not have been considered for the commander’s post by the second Congress had he not attended the first Congress, for his colleagues had gotten to know him, at least as much as one could become familiar with Washington in the space of a few weeks. And, finally, by chance not only was he healthy in 1775, he looked as men thought a soldier should—big, strong, robust, agile, hard.
It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that luck alone had led Washington to this moment. Other young men must have longed to soldier but had never gone to war; surely, too, other young men with similar social and educational deficiencies failed to work as assiduously as did Washington to overcome their shortcomings. Whatever the reason for his appointment as Virginia’s commander in 1755, moreover, he had passed the test of responsibility and he was remembered as a good soldier. Washington had taken it upon himself, furthermore, to play an active role in the protest movement, at least from 1769 onward. Thus, although luck did play a role in the selection of Washington to command the Continental army, his lifelong yearning for recognition was of crucial importance too. And so was his vision, which extended outward to an incredible degree. Where others were content with their lot, or assumed that their ascent was impossible, Washington always seemed to believe that nothing was impossible. And once he fixed his sight on a goal he pursued it with a vigor and tenacity, almost a ruthlessness, that set him apart from most men. It was this steely resolve that most distinguished Washington from others. No obstacle, no limitation seemed too great to be overcome. So he went where others would never have dared to tread in quest of wealth and status and power, and once he gained each he wanted still more. His cravings, his resourcefulness, his uncanny ability to understand men and circumstances had brought Washington to this moment of opportunity, and those qualities in his character that made danger and struggle seem alluring compelled him to reach out for it.
On the night of his appointment, after dinner, he consulted Edmund Pendleton for assistance in drafting the acceptance speech he would have to make the following morning. He also asked Pendleton to prepare his will. That he should have turned to Pendleton was in keeping with his personality. He really required no help in the preparation of his brief remarks, and there were other lawyers among the Virginia delegates with whom he was closer. But in availing himself of the counsel of the man who had opposed his selection, Washington sought to convert Pendleton into his staunch supporter. After he left his colleague, Washington worked with his committee on the formulation of the articles of war. Only Schuyler among the other committee members had been a soldier, so those two probably wrote most of the draft. (The committee issued its report a day or two later, though Congress did not adopt the articles until a week after Washington had departed for Boston.) At the moment, however, what most interested Washington was the selection of the other officers, and while he was anxious to see that both Lee and Gates were among those chosen, he had not forgotten the lingering ill effects that had resulted from his battle with Dinwiddie to name his subordinate officers twenty years before. Still, he believed he needed these two experienced soldiers, and he was prepared to push to assure their selection.10
The following mornin
g the busy legislators made short work of the ceremony endowing Washington with his new post. Congress offered the command, and he accepted it with a brief and modest speech, one that was memorable only because he announced that he would refuse a salary, settling merely for compensation for his expenses. It was a matter of honor, he said, for he did “not wish to make any proffit” from his post. His commission came with a grant of extraordinary power. He was vested with “full power and authority” to act as he deemed necessary for the welfare of the united colonists. But he hardly was above the law. His conduct was to be guided “in every respect by the rules and discipline of war,” and, what is more, he was explicitly admonished to be “careful in executing the great trust” bestowed in him.11
Congress spent the remainder of the day wrangling over both the suitable number of generalships to create and the appropriate pay for these positions. By evening it was agreed that two major generals, an adjutant general, and five brigadier generals would be named. Then came the difficult part—filling the new positions.12
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