Washington watched nervously as the recruitment process dragged on at an agonizingly slow pace. On December 4 he reported that 5900 men had reenlisted. A week and a half later the figure stood at 7100, and by December 18 it had climbed to 8500. By year’s end about one-half the allotted slots in his army were filled. The remainder would have to consist of new recruits, men who would agree to enlist for only one year; Congress would authorize no other term of enlistment, apparently thinking, as did John Adams, that a hitch of any longer duration would entice only the “meanest, idlest, most intemperate and worthless” to offer their services.”58
The reluctance of New England yeoman and artisans to reenlist perplexed and frustrated Washington. To toil at a small farm plot in order to support a family was something he had never done. Nor had he ever experienced military service from the perspective of an enlisted man; there was no wine with the foot soldier’s evening meal, no cozy bed tucked under the roof of a warm, dry house. Myopically, Washington found their unwillingness to remain in the army incomprehensible. He described the conduct of those who would not stay on as “extraordinary and reprehensible,” as “Scandalous.” Once he even suggested that to demand pay for military service reflected “a dirty, mercenary spirit.” By no means was such an attitude unique to Washington. Spokesmen for the ruling elite never seemed to tire of trumpeting the virtue of self-sacrificing courage. But not everyone was so short-sighted. General Greene, for instance, told Washington that the union was too new to expect men to serve from sentiments of patriotism alone; besides, a cash bounty would enable recruiters to select only the cream of the crop, he naively added. Strangely, Washington did not find it incongruous that officers should be paid, and that fall he wrote Congress to ask that they be given a raise. In the meantime, he granted extra rations to his officers, in effect a modest pay raise since they could draw the cash equivalent instead of the rations. Before Christmas, Congress increased the pay of officers, while it cut the salary of enlisted men by nearly 25 percent.59
At times during that bleak autumn Washington wished he had not taken his post. Had he forseen what he would have to endure, he confessed to Reed, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command.” Within the week, however, he counseled a similarly dejected Schuyler not to resign. In time, he reasoned, “Order and Subordination will take [the] place of Confusion, and Command [will] be rendered more agreeable. —I have met with Difficulties of the same sort... but they must be borne with,” he went on. “The Cause we are engaged in is so just and righteous. . . .”60
By Christmas, Washington’s spirits had brightened. This was partly due to the arrival of Martha, together with Jackie and Nelly Custis, two weeks before the holiday. “Lady Washington,” as she was called at headquarters, had come by carriage from Virginia, stopping in Philadelphia to stay with—and to meet for the first time—Esther Reed. Upon reaching headquarters Martha discovered that she was treated with “great pomp as if I had been a very great some body,” but it was Vallance Gates, the adjutant general’s wife, who succeeded in raising eyebrows. She alighted from the carriage wearing a masculine English riding habit.61
Despite his brightened spirits, Washington still faced mountainous problems, not the least of which concerned the maintenance of the army’s health. Somehow, for instance, the men had to be kept warm and dry during the bitter New England winter. Incredibly, each day the army consumed 117 cords of wood, the yield of about four acres; supplies of this fuel already were growing scarce within the vicinity of the camp, meaning that green firewood now had to be transported several miles each day, often across icy or muddy roads. (The British, trapped in Boston, were in even worse shape in this regard, and they had begun to tear down wooden houses to obtain this precious commodity.) With the assistance of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which authorized the despoilation of Tory-owned property, Washington carefully organized the procurement of firewood, and the feared deficiencies did not materialize. The troops were fortunate, too, that it was a relatively mild winter. The season began ominously, with the first hard freeze occurring in mid-October and the initial snowfall striking just thirty days later, but generally the autumn was pleasant, though wet. Washington took no chances, however. He had some men in tents, others in handcrafted tentlike lodgings constructed of sails requisitioned from coastal villages; most of the soldiery lived in the barracks he had set the men to building while the weather still was balmy.62
While Washington took these steps, his army did not entirely escape the visitation of diseases. Indeed, the problem existed even before Washington arrived in Cambridge. Diarrhea, jaundice, arthritis, respiratory infections, and pleuritical disorders already had struck the camp before July. In the fall “autumnal fevers”—that generation’s terminology for such maladies as dysentery, malaria, and typhus—sortied into the encampment. By October nearly 15 percent of the soldiery were on sick call. Always the unhealthiest months in New England, this September and October witnessed the arrival of the riflemen from the South, men who brought along strange viruses to disseminate among the Yankee warriors; in addition, refugees from occupied Boston also transmitted diseases, and, in fact, the situation seemed so perilous at one point that an anxious Washington even convinced himself that General Howe was endeavoring to sow illnesses within his army by dispatching sickly civilians into his midst. To keep his army fit Washington decreed that any refugee behind American lines without a pass would be jailed, an especially drastic mode of quarantine. After mid-October the threat posed by disease abated, and by year’s end only about 7 percent of the soldiers were incapacitated by illness.63
All the while, however, Washington had prayed that his army would be spared an outbreak of smallpox, a foe that he regarded as “his most dangerous Enemy.” Luck was with him. The disease made only a mild appearance. Of course, Washington’s good fortune was not due entirely to luck. He had shrunk from requiring that his troops be inoculated, lest that preventive measure might actually instigate an epidemic, but he did take other steps. He sealed entree to his army to all civilians coming from infected areas, isolated those afflicted with the illness, sought to maintain proper hygienic practices within the camp, and even ordered that all letters from Boston be dipped in vinegar before they could be perused. The commander also supported the formation of an army medical corps, and by late in July Congress had more or less complied.64
The state of the medical art still was so primitive, however, that a citizenry or soldiery in the grip of an epidemic was in great peril. Only a few—probably less than one hundred of approximately thirty-five hundred—American physicians had any formal training. Some of these men had studied in Europe at Leyden or Utrecht, but most were graduates of the University of Edinburgh. The great majority of practicioners had studied only as apprentices, and some had no training whatsoever. However they came to hang out a shingle, most doctors employed one of two treatments both for those diseases they could identify and for those that remained undetermined. They relied either on the humoral theory (bleeding, sweating, or purging the victims) or the tension thesis (which dictated the use of stimulants and narcotics, principally the derivatives of simple herb plants and of minerals). Surgery had not progressed beyond amputation, the extraction of teeth, and the treatment of wounds.65 While Washington would not have shared today’s reservations about the medical practices of his age, he knew full well that if his army was stricken by disease his doctors would shepherd precious few of the unfortunates through their trial.
Cheered by the recent recruiting successes, the generally good health of his army, and the blithe mood at headquarters, Washington radiated an increased optimism by year’s end. In his exuberance, he even told Congress that he soon expected to receive word of an American victory in Canada.66 On that score, however, the commander was quite wrong.
General Montgomery had indeed reached Quebec, but not until the terrible Canadian winter had struck. He arrived, too, with an army depleted by disease. Bu
t Montgomery’s force was in better shape than that commanded by Benedict Arnold, with which it rendezvoused early in December. Arnold’s little legion had just completed a six-weeks’ trek through the Maine and Canadian wilderness, a journey of almost unrelenting suffering. To no avail, the two American commanders threw up an immediate siege of the tiny British garrison overlooking the St. Lawrence. By month’s end, the enlistments of most of their men due to expire within a few days, Montgomery and Arnold faced a Hobson’s choice: attack Quebec, or lift the siege and retreat. They chose to storm the garrison, a gamble that quickly failed. In the first moments of the assault Montgomery was killed. Minutes later Arnold was wounded, hit in the leg by a ricocheting musket ball. He fell, rose and tried to continue, fell again, was carried forward a few steps, then, faint from shock and the loss of blood, was conveyed to the rear. The fate of the two leaders extinguished whatever spark remained in the troops. The attack began to fizzle, and before sunrise the shooting had ended.67
At the close of 1775 General Washington had every reason to be pleased with his performance. His errors—indiscretions really—were born of frustration, and they were both forgiveable and inconsequential. His pronouncements about the people of New England would have been better left unsaid. His venemous assault on those citizen-soldiers who refused to reenlist was short-sighted, purely and simply. His disapproval of the militiamen may not have been fair, but many of his fellow officers shared his views.
In some ways Washington had merely continued to do what General Ward had been doing, for he too maintained the siege of Boston without introducing any dramatically new strategic moves. But, in fact, he had done much more. He had displayed a certain flair for administration and organization, and the army was the better for it. He had toiled to produce better officers, he had sought to transform a motley band of patriots into something approaching an army; he had ascertained what supplies he did and did not have and had carefully, tenderly prodded Congress and the New England governments to remedy the deficiencies he uncovered. Not surprisingly for a man who had watched Virginia’s armies suffer for lack of neighborly assistance, he thought in broad, national terms, pushing always to make this war a truly continental effort. The assault on Canada that he concocted was a bold and imaginative stroke, and that he had begun a navy revealed both his creativity and his intuitive understanding of the kind of war this was to be. Washington had drawn on his command experience—and perhaps on his recollection of his own history of sufferings from camp ills—to see that his army remained generally healthy. Finally, Washington had set a good example. He had remained with his army, industriously at work, maintaining a low profile and winning good will by his sober and resolute conduct in the face of multitudinous problems. Mature and self-confident, he had avoided the kind of behavior that had proved such a source of trouble to him on the frontier of Virginia.
He should have felt quite good about things, and, in fact, at year’s end he did seem buoyant: “Search the vast volumes of history through, and I much question whether a case similar to ours is to be found,” he jubilantly told Reed. For more than half a year, he said, the American army had faced up to “the flower of the British army,” even disbanding one force and creating another in their presence. It was a breathtaking feat. But then, as if reality suddenly intruded upon his optimism, he added: “How it will end, God in his great goodness will direct. I am thankful for his protection to this time.”68
6
At the Brink
To “run all risques”
The “French & Spaniards do not seem inclined to furnish us with military stores,” Francis Lightfoot Lee of Virginia grieved in the last half of January 1776. “Their politics,” he continued, “plainly tend to drive us to extremity, that we may be forced to break off all connection with G.B. and join with them, which they know nothing but hard necessity can ever effect.”1
Hard necessity! The colonists were learning just how difficult this war would be. Within recent weeks the port towns of Falmouth, Maine, and Norfolk in Virginia had been destroyed by royal warships, and in Virginia the governor, Lord Dunmore, had promised freedom to all slaves who fled behind British lines. Moreover, the new year brought word of Montgomery’s death and the American failure at Quebec. Those tidings arrived on the heels of the text of King George III’s address at the opening of Parliament, a speech that seemed to strike like a sledgehammer blow, for the monarch had spoken in bellicose tones, threatening even to hire foreign mercenaries to assist in the suppression of the colonial uprising. General Washington was angered by the remarks, but he also was confident that the king’s words of “rancor and resentment” would drive Congress toward independence and toward seeking foreign assistance.2 But if the monarch’s message did not have that effect, perhaps Common Sense would move the Congress.
Washington received a copy of Thomas Paine’s brilliant tract a few days after its publication early in January. The general rejoiced at its call for independence. The pamphlet expounded “unanswerable reasoning,” he thought, and one way or another he must have made certain that the troops heard Paine’s ideas, especially his notion that America could win this war. Common Sense was like a brief stimulant for Washington, for although his army was warm and well victualed—better off than the British army in Boston in this initial winter of the war—he otherwise was laden with worries. The recruitment of his new army proceeded, but at an agonizingly languid pace; in fact, such contradictory reports reached his desk from his field officers that he was not even certain how many men were under arms. In addition, if the Continental army possessed adequate supplies of food and wood, it was woefully short of powder, and there was a need for blankets and clothing as well. An arms deficiency also emerged suddenly in January, the result of poor administration at headquarters. The commanders simply failed to confiscate the weapons of the soldiers who left the service in December, realizing too late—when only about one hundred firearms were left in store—that many of the men had departed together with their newly appropriated, government-issued muskets. To compound matters the army’s treasury was depleted, so that the purchase of arms and tents (for which the high command anticipated a need when the army took the field in the spring) was out of the question. “How to get furnished I know not,” Washington lamented to Reed. “The reflection on my situation, and that of this army, produces many an uneasy hour when all around me . . . are wrapped in sleep,” the general confided.3
To these worries was added the grim news from Canada, tidings which reached his desk about mid-January. Washington immediately called a council of war, to which he invited not only his generals but some members of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Augmentation of the army in Canada was the first pressing issue. The officers advised against pruning any more troops from the army besieging Boston, but they recommended that Washington urge Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut each to raise a regiment to dispatch to the north. Washington agreed, and he implemented the decision without consulting Congress. Only later did he inform the legislators of his action, adding: “do me the justice to believe that, my intentions were good, if my judgment has erred.”4
While Washington was concerned that Congress might question his prudence in this matter, he knew full well that others—those he sardonically called “chimney corner heroes”—doubted his resolve because he had not assaulted Howe’s beleaguered army. Through Reed, who had taken leave of the army during the previous autumn to return to Philadelphia, Washington knew that some of the “wise ones,” as he and his young friend quite privately referred to the congressmen, were unhappy with his passiveness. That realization, together with the news of the debacle at Quebec, plunged Washington into a melancholy and sullen temper. His mood swing can be discerned in two letters to Reed, missives written ten days apart in January 1776. The commander was cautiously upbeat and even self-congratulatory in his initial letter, but in his second he spoke of his mistake in taking the command and seemed to harbor a morose presentiment of f
ailure, even speaking of retiring to the backcountry, there to live out his life in a wigwam.5
Some may have seen Washington as dilatory, but in fact no one was more eager than he to strike at Howe. The backstairs questioning of his strategy perhaps played a role in his yearning to act, although he hardly needed any prodding, for he had not extinguished that impetuous streak that at times had caused him grief two decades before as a frontier warrior. After all, this was the man who had preferred to fight rather than back off at Fort Necessity, who had spoken of the sweet sound of the bullets whizzing by his head, who had chafed under Dinwiddie’s defensive policies during the French and Indian War. Those qualities that led an observant painter like Stuart to think of him as a man whose features were redolent of “the most ungovernable passions” and to dub him the most fierce man among savages did at times seem to govern Washington. This barbarous undercurrent was not his most pleasant side, a fact that Washington himself realized well enough so that he struggled to keep these dark emotions reined in. But the ferocity was there nonetheless, and it was one of the elements that separated Washington from other men—and that made him the daring and remorseless soldier that he was. The situation, he had said, required that he “run all risques.” Yet, he did not make such a statement as a mere rhetorical flourish. It reflected his deep inner sensibilities, and the emotions that lay behind that succinct comment revealed him to be a warrior of the kind that his adversaries could not discover to command their own armies in this war.6
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