George Washington

by Stephen Brumwell

  In fact, Washington had lost all but one of his teeth by 1789, obliging him to resort to a set of ingenious but clumsy dentures: the upper jaw of this “dental apparatus” was carved entirely from the tusk of a “sea-horse,” or hippopotamus; the lower, made from the same material, was studded with human teeth. Created by John Greenwood of New York, himself a Revolutionary War veteran, it was, in the words of his grandson, “an uncouth and awkward affair” that pushed Washington’s lower lip forward.11 Washington was wearing these dentures when Stuart painted his initial Vaughan version. Yet for all its shortcomings, Greenwood’s “dental apparatus” was superior to the replacement set, likewise crafted from “sea-horse” ivory, that Washington wore briefly in 1796, at the very time he sat for Stuart’s even more popular and influential Athenaeum portrait. Indeed, in the last year of his life Washington wrote to Greenwood, assuring him: “I shall always prefer your services to that of any other, in the line of your present profession.”12

  Stuart’s unsparing realism not only captured the full indignity of those badly fitting false teeth but once again depicted an essentially static Washington, the solemn peacetime statesman with nothing left of the restless warrior spirit that had won him his prominence in the first place. Stuart readily acknowledged that Jean-Antoine Houdon’s bust of Washington, modeled from a life mask in 1785 in preparation for a full-length marble statue and before Washington lost his teeth, did not “suffer” from the “defect” in appearance revealed in his own painting.13 Ironically, however, it was Stuart’s image—which managed to be both a strikingly accurate record of his sitter in early 1796, while woefully misrepresenting his typical looks—that immediately eclipsed all previous portraits of Washington and was perpetuated in subsequent depictions of him.14 So successful was Stuart’s Athenaeum head that he even reproduced it upon a full-length portrait purporting to show Washington twenty years earlier, as he watched the British evacuating Boston in 1776.15

  Unsurprisingly, therefore, it is the prematurely aged, sedate, and “fatherly” Washington of Stuart’s acclaimed 1795 and 1796 portraits that modern-day Americans know best: from the dust jackets of countless books, from the colossal presidential lineup at Mount Rushmore, from postage stamps, and above all, from the dollar bills in their wallets.

  This book is about the George Washington that the artists so signally failed to capture, the feisty young frontier officer and the tough forty-something commander of the Continental Army, not the venerated elder statesman of the Republic, champing self-consciously on his hippo teeth. It examines Washington’s long and varied military career, tracing his evolution as a soldier and his changing attitude toward the waging of war. A central narrative anchored upon Washington’s own experience is combined with an analysis of the background influences that shaped his conduct as an officer; ironically, these indicate that Washington’s reliance upon English models of “gentlemanly” behavior and on British military organization were crucial in forging the army that won American independence and underpinned his own emergence as the most celebrated man of his age.

  As the literature relating to George Washington’s life and times is vast and ever expanding, the evidence considered here is necessarily selective. However, an effort has been made to consult a broad spectrum of published and archival material, ranging from the assessments of modern biographers and historians to the writings of Washington and his contemporaries. In particular, the massive project to publish Washington’s correspondence, begun by the University of Virginia Press on the bicentenary of the Declaration of American Independence in 1976 and still ongoing, has proved immensely valuable, not simply by presenting accurate texts of the documents themselves, but through extensive editorial notes.

  Aside from a brief sketch of his early life and military services in the French and Indian War, compiled to assist with a projected biography by his former aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel David Humphreys, nothing resembling an autobiography was ever written by Washington.16 That short memoir and other isolated instances when Washington revisited key episodes of his career—for instance, the Yorktown campaign of 1781—suggest that whatever insights such a work might have yielded into his notoriously “private” personality, its value as an historical narrative would likely have been compromised by a failing memory and a reluctance to face all the facts.17

  By contrast, many others whose lives interacted with Washington’s, particularly during the Revolutionary War, wrote memoirs in later life, and considerable use has been made of them here. Such reminiscences, often written decades after the events, must be used with caution, especially when distorted by hindsight or a self-serving agenda. Yet even works with such flaws can still preserve credible evidence. For example, when James Wilkinson published his Memoirs of My Own Times in 1816, his reputation had been blackened by persistent accusations of treasonable intrigue with Spain. Yet whatever his subsequent failings, Wilkinson had seen extensive service during the American War of Independence. His coherent narrative of the momentous Trenton-Princeton campaign of 1776–77 sheds much light on an episode for which the surviving contemporaneous sources are frustratingly patchy.

  Similarly, a lengthy interval between events and their recording does not mean that such memoirs should automatically be discounted as unreliable. Elisha Bostwick was age eighty-three when he finally chronicled his services in the Continental Army nearly sixty years earlier. Despite all that had happened since, Bostwick had clearly never forgotten much of what he had seen in 1775 and 1776. As he observed: “Upon a retrospective view of the scenes of my past life, none are so clear and bright in my memory as those transactions of the Revolutionary War which I was a witness to and in which I took a part.” At the Battle of White Plains, on October 28, 1776, when Bostwick was a lieutenant in the 7th Connecticut Regiment, he saw a British cannonball smash its way through four men standing nearby: in 1833, he could still recall the soldiers’ names and the horrific nature of their individual wounds, adding: “Oh! What a sight that was to see, within a distance of six rods those men with their legs and arms and guns and packs all in a heap.” That such a shocking shambles should remain etched upon a man’s memory is unsurprising, but Bostwick retained an equally clear recollection of another, very different episode. After the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777, when he was escorting British prisoners to Peekskill in the Hudson Valley, his party bedded down in a barn. At “about midnight when all was still,” one of the prisoners, a Scottish Highlander, stood and sung a ballad that Bostwick remembered as “The Gypsy Laddie.” Looking back at the close of his own life, Bostwick wrote: “The tune was of a plaintive cast and I always retained it and sung it to my children, but that must die with me.”18 Old Elisha need not have worried: the haunting song he heard that night in 1777, also known as “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies,” is as popular today as it ever was, providing a link between Washington’s world and our own.

  George Washington’s active military experience fell into two distinct phases separated by a long interlude in which he retired from soldiering to follow the life of a gentleman farmer and politician. During the first phase, Washington was a soldier of the king, often fighting alongside units of the British Army but failing in his quest to secure a Crown commission in a regular regiment; during the second, he led the armed struggle against the same military institution that had apparently spurned him, seeking to exploit all that he had earlier learned of its strengths and weaknesses. This book reflects that pattern, giving due weight to both phases. It argues that whatever else he might have been—surveyor, farmer, politician, elder statesman—and despite appearances, George Washington was first and foremost a soldier; his colossal status rested upon the twin pillars of his character, the gentleman and the warrior.

  Note: To ease readability, in quoted material all eighteenth-century spellings, capitalizations, and abbreviations have been modernized. Where necessary, punctuation has been slightly amended, taking care to preserve the precise meaning of the quotation.


  1

  Finding a Path

  George Washington’s American roots were planted in the wake of the bitter civil wars that racked the British Isles during the mid-seventeenth century. This confrontation between Crown and Parliament, between “Cavaliers” and “Roundheads,” was the modern world’s first “revolution”: in 1649, it cost the stubborn Charles I his head and led to the establishment of a short-lived republic, or Commonwealth, under his nemesis, the formidable Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.

  This era of protracted bloodshed, dislocation, and upheaval saw sporadic emigration across the Atlantic to England’s existing North American outposts—the colonies composing New England, strung along Massachusetts Bay, and to the south, Virginia and Maryland on the Chesapeake. The fact that both of George Washington’s great-grandfathers settled in Virginia in the decade before the restoration of Charles II in 1660 has led to the suggestion that they were part of a distinctive “Cavalier” migration to that colony, involving loyal supporters of the ousted Stuarts who were out of step with the triumphant Cromwellian regime and keen to rebuild their fortunes among like-minded exiles overseas.1

  It is by no means certain that George Washington’s ancestors fit the “Cavalier” profile. On the maternal side, considerable confusion clouds the fundamental political allegiance of William Ball, who reached Virginia in 1657, the year before Cromwell’s death, and settled in Lancaster County.2 By 1677, he held the rank of major in the county militia, a responsibility that suggests previous military experience. But while genealogists maintain that William fought for the Royalists at the pivotal English Civil War battles of Marston Moor in 1644 and Naseby in the following year, this is hard to reconcile with their accompanying claim that he had soldiered “under Fairfax.” If this was true, then William’s loyalties must have been radically different from what tradition maintains: Sir Thomas Fairfax was the outstanding Parliamentarian general of the civil wars, beating Prince Rupert at Marston Moor and commanding the New Model Army that crushed King Charles at Naseby.

  The Royalist credentials of John Washington are slightly stronger, although he was scarcely some swashbuckling bravo. By a remarkable coincidence, like William Ball, he, too, arrived in Virginia in 1657, coming over as a ship’s mate. John had been obliged to go to sea some years earlier after his father, the Reverend Lawrence Washington, was expelled from his living in the pro-Roundhead eastern county of Essex, allegedly for drunkenness, a trait for which the puritanical Parliamentarians had little tolerance. The reverend’s disgrace entailed a sharp drop in wealth and status for the family, but in Virginia John set about restoring both.3

  John Washington was perhaps twenty-five years old when he first made landfall in what was already known as “the Old Dominion.” That term reflected Virginia’s status as England’s first American colony, established by a band of adventurers at Jamestown back in 1607, thirteen years before the more sober Pilgrim Fathers made landfall and founded Plymouth Colony to the north.

  In the half century since its foundation, Virginia had experienced mixed fortunes. A last-ditch attempt by the local Powhatan Indians to eject the invaders in 1622 had almost succeeded in wiping out the colonists, while diseases along the unhealthy James River, where the first settlement had been established, had exerted a slower, but no less damaging, attrition. Despite such hazards, and the barrier to natural growth posed by an overwhelmingly male population, the colony had survived, and by the time Washington’s English ancestors arrived, it was becoming a more stable society, based upon a single, lucrative cash crop: tobacco.

  Both Virginia’s expanding population and the increasing profitability of the tobacco harvest resulted from the same factor, a steady influx of unfree laborers. These were not yet the black African slaves with whom Virginia was to become so closely associated, but poor whites, indentured servants who received their sea passage from England in exchange for several years of unpaid toil for tobacco planters before finally earning their freedom and the chance to farm land of their own. During the course of the seventeenth century, it has been estimated, more than three-quarters of the 120,000 English emigrants to the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Virginia and its neighbor Maryland, which was founded in 1634, were bound servants.4

  English emigration reached a peak between 1630 and 1660, the period within which Washington’s forebears set foot in Virginia. Significantly, neither of them were indentured servants, but free men, members of the minor gentry or solidly respectable yeoman class, with enough capital to invest in their own ventures. Settling at midcentury, both John Washington and William Ball also reached the Old Dominion after it had weathered its stormy infancy and offered opportunity to men of substance and ambition. Free immigrants like them would dominate the future economic and social life of the Chesapeake, founding dynasties that yielded the region’s political leadership.

  Thanks to a good marriage to Anne Pope, John Washington prospered in a modest fashion. Exploiting the opportunities offered by the New World, he became a justice of the peace and also acquired responsibilities in local government and the military. It was as a colonel of militia that John Washington became embroiled in a controversial episode that would resonate into the lifetime of his great-grandson.

  Although the last embers of Powhatan resistance had been stamped out during a brutal war fought between 1644 and 1646, the steady expansion of settlement inevitably sparked fresh friction with neighboring tribes. In 1675, a party of militia sent to chastise Doeg Indians who had killed a settler in a dispute over straying hogs ended up slaying fourteen friendly Susquehannocks by mistake. As tit-for-tat violence escalated, Colonel John Washington was placed in command of militia from Rappahannock and ordered to bring the Susquehannocks to heel.

  Joining forces with Maryland militia, Washington’s men blockaded a Susquehannock stronghold on the northern bank of the Potomac at Piscataway Creek. Five Indian chiefs emerged to parley with the besiegers. They denied responsibility for recent killings of colonists, blaming the bloodshed on Seneca warriors raiding from the north. But the Virginians remained unconvinced: several Susquehannocks had been apprehended close to where settlers had been murdered and were found in incriminating possession of the victims’ clothing. In consequence, the five chiefs were summarily executed, clubbed to death in cold blood. Whether this retribution was exacted by Colonel Washington and his Virginians or the Marylanders remains unclear; when the killings drew the wrath of Virginia’s governor, Sir William Berkeley, each party blamed the other. Whatever his precise role in that brutal episode, John Washington’s ruthlessness and his notorious hunger for Indian land were remembered by the Susquehannocks themselves and perpetuated in the grim soubriquet they apparently gave to him: “Caunotocarious”—variously rendered as “town taker,” or the more sinister “devourer of villages.”5

  By his death in 1677, the unscrupulous but determined John Washington had been able to accumulate a respectable estate of 5,700 acres, leaving most of it to his eldest son, Lawrence. As an attorney, Lawrence handled the interests of London merchants trading with Virginia’s tobacco producers. He also continued his father’s efforts to embed the family within Virginia’s establishment, marrying Mildred Warner, whose father was one of the King’s Council, which advised the colony’s royally appointed governor. But Lawrence lacked John’s restless energy and insatiable appetite for land: when he died in 1698, aged just thirty-nine, he had augmented his inheritance by barely a few hundred acres. Lawrence also left a widow and three children, John, Mildred, and Augustine.

  The second son, Augustine, who was just three when his father died, was to become George Washington’s father. Given his ranking in the family pecking order, Augustine’s share of the Washington fortune was small. Yet he, too, lost no time in building upon it. In 1715, he married Jane Butler, whose own inheritance gave them another 1,700 acres of land. Augustine gradually bolstered this core, buying a farm on the south bank of the Potomac River, between Bridges Creek and Popes Creek, and later building a
house there. Erected at a cost of 5,000 pounds of tobacco, it was a substantial brick-built mansion that emulated the far more imposing homes of Virginia’s great planters.

  Like his father, Augustine prospered in an unspectacular fashion, methodically acquiring property and the status that went with it: he built a gristmill on Popes Creek and became a justice of the peace, church warden, and sheriff. And he added more land, including a 2,500-acre tract farther up the Potomac, where Little Hunting Creek emptied into the broad, sluggish river. This was bought from his sister, Mildred, and had been her inheritance. Quite literally, Augustine had other irons in the fire: he was active in the development of iron ore and smelting. He and Jane had three children—Lawrence, Augustine, and Jane—and they seemed set for a happy and prosperous future together. But in May 1730, when Augustine was thirty-five, he returned from a business trip to England to learn that his wife had been dead for six months.

  Now a widower with three children on his hands and a home and business to oversee, Augustine acted swiftly in finding Jane’s replacement. His choice, Mary Ball, was the only child of Joseph Ball—the son of Major William Ball—and the much younger Mary Johnson. Mary Ball’s father had died at the age of sixty-one, when she was only three. Like the first Washingtons in Virginia, the Balls had prospered in a slow but steady way, and Joseph was able to leave his daughter 400 acres of land, plus three slaves and some livestock. A final bequest—“the feathers in the kitchen loft to be put into a bed”—is a reminder of the humble aspirations of Virginians below the strata of the wealthiest planters.6 Mary’s mother married again, was widowed once more, and died when Mary was just twelve, leaving her orphaned but in possession of yet more land and property. Allied to her role as helpmeet, this made her a worthwhile catch for Augustine Washington.