First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  But Washington’s accomplishments transcended luck. Essentially he understood this struggle. He knew what could win the war, as well as what might lose it. He could be cautious, resorting to the Fabian tactics that ran counter to his grain, retreating to preserve his army for another day, all the while protracting the conflict, buying time for war weariness to set in and eat away at Britain, time that would eventually induce America’s friends in Europe to intervene. But he could be—he longed to be—unpredictably daring as well. At Dorchester Heights and again at Trenton and Princeton, at Germantown and still again at Monmouth, he lashed out in hazardous undertakings that so bore the imprint of his militant, activist, venturesome character that it is difficult to conceive of many other high American officers even contemplating such steps. Indeed, he alone seems to have planned the Trenton-Princeton operations; he had to nudge his general officers repeatedly to gain their consent to act at Dorchester; he obtained their approval for the strike at Germantown through what amounted to outright trickery; and he acted at Monmouth despite almost everyone’s advice to remain inert. It was his nature to think in grandiose terms and to act in a daring manner. In fact, he was driven toward this behavior, for to act otherwise was to raise the specter of inadequacy and self-contempt. It was his good fortune to escape the blunders into which his temperament might have led him, but it was due to these same compelling drives that he had reaped for America its greatest victories in this war.

  The insecurities that led Washington to his quest for self-esteem, as well as to his venturesome proclivities, his remoteness, and his suspicious, distrusting nature were not always endearing qualities. Nor did they always serve him well. His search for self cohesion led him into clashes with good general officers, perhaps even to the ruination of men like Ward and Lee; it prompted him to tolerate a essential mediocrity such as Sullivan, while blinding him to the inexperience and failures of a lad like Lafayette, and it almost certainly influenced his negative reaction to the plan to invade Canada, a strategy with considerable potential merit. But at the same time his makeup helped him find daring and capable officers like Arnold and Wayne and Knox. Indeed, qualities that might have been deleterious in almost any other pursuit became virtues when exercised by the commander of an army, for his character steeled him for difficult decisions, drove him to action, and even isolated him, contributing to his larger-than-life aura.

  Lee and Hamilton saw the dark side of George Washington. But those who esteemed this man also were correct, for he exhibited many admirable qualities. He combined courage with diligence. The first came naturally, but industry and perseverence were traits that he had been compelled to learn in his long ascent from Ferry Farm. In many ways, as historian Bernard Mayo observed, he was a man of unexceptional endowments who through “human effort”—not by “mythic magic”—had attained one objective after another.26 Now, an amateur soldier confronted by a professional adversary, Washington once again called upon those strategies that always had served him so well. To compensate for his inexperience he studiously read the best military manuals. Realizing his own inadequacies, he sought and listened to advice. He worked hard, putting in one long day after another. He learned from his mistakes, and, above all, he learned the folly of indecision.

  Washington’s greatest asset, a French officer once noted, was his faculty for understanding “the art of making himself beloved.” Not only did Washington seem untainted by the corruptibility that his countrymen perceived as the inevitable accompaniment of royalty, but, even more, his actions seemed to manifest the greatest virtues of republicanism. Again, his refusal of a salary, his eschewing of a sumptuous life style, his sacrifice in the public cause, his willingness as commander to abide by the general will of his civilian governors, his very embodiment of what John Adams once called the “great, manly, warlike virtues” captured the popular imagination.27 He knew what was expected of him. His office, he once said, required that he behave with “the strictest rectitude, and most scrupulous exactness.” As usual in such matters he was correct. Perhaps, as some scholars have suggested, his grasp of what was required of him arose from some innate genius.28 Yet Washington was a man well practiced in the art of understanding others. At the core of his being lay the compelling drive that led to his search for self-enhancement, and all his life Washington had sought to learn the techniques that would facilitate his yearnings.

  Perhaps it would have been preferable for another man to have commanded the Continental army, but few contemporaries—and still fewer historians—would have hazarded that opinion. To swap Washington for an elderly Ward, an indolent Schuyler, a rustic Putnam, a temperamental and acerbic Lee hardly seems a bargain. What if Gates had supplanted Washington? He was ambitious, political, vain, and manipulative, but so was Washington. Gates also was more experienced militarily, he too was a good administrator, his compassion for his men was at least equal to that of Washington, and his commitment to the principles of the Revolution was above question. Thus, he was a reasonable candidate for the job, though we cannot know how Gates would have performed as the commander of the Continental army any more than we can know how Washington would have acted had he initially been appointed to serve under Gates.

  By 1778, Washington had lived up to his countrymen’s expectations, and by 1778 he had come to symbolize the Revolution, embodying the republican virtues of courage and selfless public service. On the other hand, his generalship was laudatory, but not brilliant. While his leadership had resulted in one extraordinary triumph (Trenton-Princeton), as well as one estimable maneuver that produced an apparent victory (Dorchester Heights), he was also largely responsible for one crushing defeat (Fort Washington). His daring almost led to another sensational victory at Germantown, but by the same token his risk-taking nearly had resulted in losses both in the New York and the Monmouth engagements, and his shoddy attention to military intelligence contributed to his army’s losses at Brandywine.

  By 1778, therefore, it is difficult to disagree with John Adams’s assessment. The Revolution was too big to hang on the performance of one man, he had told Dr. Rush. Washington’s contributions to the war effort were obvious and crucial, but Adams was correct to suggest that success or failure hinged on many men and many variables. Moreover, given his own genius at understanding the events of his time, Adams realized what many have been unable to accept: through the summer of 1778 Britain itself was more responsible for its own military woes than was any American leader.

  11

  The Forgotten Years, 1778–1780

  “I have almost ceased to hope”

  Washington had made the journey many times. Out of the rolling hills about Middlebrook, across the Delaware River, now a familiar friend, on through the undulating countryside of rural Pennsylvania, and into Philadelphia. This time he was traveling because Congress had called him to consider plans for the coming campaign. Washington must have felt good in December 1778—better, anyway, than he had at the same time the previous year when he had just taken his army into Valley Forge. France now was a belligerent, officially at war with Great Britain since the past spring, and there was talk that Spain, too, might soon enter the war. For the first time, moreover, Washington even indulged in the hope that the British army might abandon America, that “the enemys continuance among us” would end as the ministry opted to pull out in order to concentrate on fighting its traditional European foes.

  The commander reached Philadelphia about Christmas, the first time he had been in the capital since he had paraded through en route to the Brandywine Creek sixteen months before. Then the atmosphere had been grim, tense. Congressmen packing to leave as Howe neared the city had expected much of Washington, and—at least in Washington’s imagination—some were skulking and plotting to find another general to lead America’s forces. Now he discovered a much different spirit abroad in the city. The general was warmly received, feted each night at a sumptuous banquet, respected, deferred to as the warrior to whom the nation inextricably ha
d tethered its military fortunes.

  But as gratified as he must have been at his reception, Washington also discovered a new, disturbing aura round the capital. The war seemed a million miles away, remote from the lives of most Philadelphians. Nor was Philadelphia unique, and that was what concerned Washington. A “general lax of public virtue” seemed to have come over the land, he thought. Able leaders had deserted the public cause in the pursuit of private gain; in their stead power had passed to lesser men, politicos who often “horribly conducted” the affairs of state. He feared that venality and corruption had spread to a degree that imperiled the war effort, that the Revolution might collapse in a “general wreck,” the victim of “our own folly ... or perhaps of living in ease and tranquility.” In a sense, he came to think, America had reached its most serious crisis yet in this war, worse even than those black, uncertain weeks late in 1776 or the desperate days at Valley Forge. The nation’s very spirit seemed now to be “mouldering and sinking,” in danger of extirpation through the “idleness, dissipation and extravagence” of its citizenry and its leaders. Indeed, he felt Britain’s continued presence in this war was owing to these new circumstances. London had discovered new hope, he thought, an expectation based less on its chances for military victory than on its belief that America must collapse from war weariness, from its venal spirit, from its foundering, inflation-ridden economy. The commander comforted himself with the thought that in earlier dark moments “Providence has . . . taken us up when all other means and hope” had vanished.1 There was not much else that he could do.

  But what about the military situation? What would Britain do? Never had his adversary’s intentions been more difficult to fathom. Had Washington been possessed of modern communications he would have had a better idea, for in the final days of 1778, at the very moment he was recording his morose thoughts in a letter to a friend in Virginia, British troops were landing far from Philadelphia—on the flat, sandy littoral of south Georgia, at the fifty-year-old city of Savannah. If the spirit and leadership of the Revolution had altered, its war was also about to change.

  Britain’s new solution to suppressing the rebellion, its southern strategy, had begun. Despairing ever of subduing New England, the war had been shifted south, to states that allegedly teemed with Loyalists. Clinton inaugurated the plan by sending an army of 3500 to Georgia, there to rendezvous with 2000 redcoats up from bases in Florida; simultaneously, he sent 5000 men to St. Lucia. Meanwhile, he waited with about 8000 men in New York. His diminutive force at Manhattan was too meager to do much with, but it was large enough to tie Washington’s hands. If the American general abandoned the cusp of New York to aid his southern brethern, Clinton could take his little army up the Hudson and, on the cheap, accomplish what Howe had failed to achieve in two bloody, frustrating summers. Washington’s war, therefore, had entered a very different phase, a period of protracted immobility.

  The commander could not have known it, but when he awakened that muggy June morning to find that Clinton had stolen away from Monmouth in the dead of the night he had inherited a new war. Given his inclination for action, this would be a frustrating period for Washington, although initially his disappointment stemmed more from missed opportunities than from a dearth of fighting. Early in July 1778, America witnessed the first visible fruits of the French alliance when a Gallic fleet of sixteen vessels carrying four thousand soldiers magestically glided up to Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Commanded by Vice Admiral Count d’Estaing, a favorite of Marie Antoinette’s, the flotilla arrived on July 11, six days after Clinton’s army had boarded transports bound for New York. A matter of a few days only had perhaps prevented Washington from trapping the British army on the Jersey coast. Nevertheless, if that opening was lost, Washington believed that a combined naval and land operation against New York was possible. But, no. D’Estaing’s pilots warned that the channel was too shallow for his vessels, and the French admiral instead turned for Rhode Island, hoping to cooperate with the American army stationed near Providence—the force that Washington had placed under General Sullivan back in March.

  Britain had seized Newport in December 1776. Situated near the southern tip of a ten-mile-long, ink-blot-shaped island in Narragansett Bay, the British navy apparently relished the spot as a good winter port, although, in truth, the installation had been of no real help to the redcoats. Now the British were faced with defending the base or relinquishing their one tiny toehold in New England, for Congress had instructed Washington to make a probe at taking Newport, by “which possession of a safe port may be gained.”

  The choice of a commander would be crucial. Sullivan had the post, but as the campaign loomed General Gates hinted that he coveted the assignment. Washington refused. He did not wish to remove “an officer of distinguished merit to gratify unjustly a doubtful friend,” or so Nathanael Greene said. The last portion of Greene’s analysis seems beyond dispute, but whatever Washington’s opinion of Sullivan he rushed Greene and Lafayette to Rhode Island to serve under him. Meanwhile, every New England state contributed militia units (commanded by John Hancock, of all people), and, by August, Sullivan’s force was one-third again as large as that of his adversary. Yet while the allies possessed manpower superiority, the British knew they could garner a larger fleet, one with 10 percent more guns than d’Estaing had. That advantage convinced the British to defend Newport.2

  It was a wise decision, for the Franco-American operation soon proved a fiasco. Before it could act, the French fleet was immobilized—nearly wrecked, in fact—by a large Atlantic storm. Sullivan was left ensconced on an island, his army dwindling rapidly as militiamen deserted in droves. By the end of August Sullivan was left with an army about one-half the size of the redcoat force now in Newport, and he hurriedly withdrew to the mainland, an operation that might not have succeeded had the British moved quickly to stop him.3 Indeed, Clinton soon appeared to be no more anxious for a fight than Howe had been. For a time he contemplated a coup de main against Boston, knowing that the French fleet was penned up in its harbor, having limped there for repairs. Washington spent several days in “an awkward and disagreeable state of suspense,” but ultimately Clinton overcame his sudden urge for action. Instead, he further divided his army, dispatching even more men to St. Lucia and the South. For the last time the British command had contemplated its four-year-old dream of a major offensive into the northern states.4

  The British soon were busy in the South, however, and with seemingly favorable results. At year’s end, 1778, British and Hessian troops, accompanied for the first time in this war by Loyalist regiments, landed in Georgia, sloshing ashore through a coastal rice field a few miles from Savannah. Before sunset of that day Savannah was back in Great Britain’s grasp. The Americans lost more than 550 men in the engagement, as well as over 70 precious cannon and artillery pieces. British losses were just 7 dead and 19 wounded.5

  Following this auspicious beginning, British operations soon returned to a more normal gait. During the entirety of 1779 Britain’s most substantive acquisition in the South was Augusta, an important little outpost on the Savannah River. The redcoats, however, did repulse a Franco-American attempt to recover Savannah, once again inflicting heavy losses. But, as General Washington understood, the British victory was of little real significance. The “Enemy’s invasion of Georgia, and possession of its capitol,” he predicted, will “add some thing to their supplies” but it “will contribute very little to the brilliancy of their arms.”6

  Nevertheless, General Washington waited with “impatience and anxiety” for word of “the effectual deliverance of the Southern States,” only to receive instead the customary tidings of failure.7 Yet if the operation to retake Savannah was a disappointment, 1779 brought some small accomplishments in the North, and even greater success might have occurred had Washington been capable of overcoming his antipathy toward Gates.

  Late in the summer of 1778 Congress once again raised the possibility of another Canadian expediti
on, a scheme whose principal proponents continued to be Gates and his New England friends. A thrust into Canada was not without potential merit. The advocates of the plan believed the “iruption” could kill three birds with one stone: this vast domain, with its fisheries and fur trade, could be acquired for the United States; the expulsion of the British would bring peace to the nation’s smoldering frontiers in the northwest, for Great Britain clearly was the chief arms supplier of the western Loyalists and Native Americans; finally, the invasion of Canada would divert Britain from its own invasion of the South, thus leaving the armies to fight on someone else’s soil. Nor were Gates and his congressional friends the only advocates of such a venture. Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s envoys in Paris, drew up a battle plan for such an undertaking, urging a Franco-American operation that would feature a three-pronged attack from western Pennsylvania across to the Massachusetts boundary, followed by campaigns against Quebec and Halifax.8

  But Washington chose to use his influence to thwart such a course. His objections were reasonable, but it is difficult to believe that the fact of Gates’s support for such a campaign did not contribute to his own demurral. The commander argued that so long as Britain held New York and Rhode Island, America would lack the manpower for the operation. While the acquisition of Canada was desirable, he went on, it was not crucial to the war effort, and a military setback in that region could decimate American morale. Moreover, the very factors that had stymied American efforts in Canada in 1775 and 1776—manpower and material shortages, the lack of an American fleet, the vastness of the country—would work against success this time as well. Finally, he added, he did not quite trust the French, whom, he feared, might seek to use American men to regain their old imperial possession. Washington carried the issue. Congress mulled over his thoughts, then vetoed the project.9