American Crisis

by William M. Fowler Jr.

  Cannons boomed a thirteen-gun salute as Washington’s barge approached the shore at Albany. Abraham Ten Broeck, the mayor of the city, joined by scores of citizens stood at the river’s edge to greet Washington. A grand concourse of people accompanied the general from the river landing along State Street as the victorious general made his way toward city hall and an elegant dinner where the city’s most eminent citizens, including his good friend Philip Schuyler, offered congratulations and bountiful toasts. That evening Washington and dal Verme stayed with the Schuylers. The count, who had certainly seen his share of elegant homes, was impressed by Schuyler’s large brick mansion. It was, he noted, a “magnificent” home “situated on a hill,” surrounded by gardens and orchards, enjoying a “panoramic view” of the Hudson. It was the home of a “very rich man.”24

  For the next week Washington and his party toured the North. They visited Saratoga, the scene of General Horatio Gates’s great victory. It was there they encountered a party of more than two hundred American prisoners on their way home from Canada. At Fort Edward they disembarked and trekked the short portage to Fort William Henry at the southern tip of Lake George, where the party, now grown to nearly forty people, boarded waiting boats. Having set off late in the day, they camped for the night along the lakeshore. In the morning they continued north, passing down the narrow lake between magnificent highlands. Once ashore at the head of the lake, they rode the short distance to Fort Ticonderoga. Not wishing to risk venturing too close to enemy lines (officially the war still continued), the party set out on Lake Champlain but proceeded only as far north as Crown Point.

  On July 26 the travelers were back at the Schuylers’ but only for an overnight stay. In the morning they headed west along the Mohawk River. Washington had a passion for the “West.” Since his early days as a frontier surveyor trekking across the Alleghenies, he had been enthralled with the promise of western expansion. For more than two decades he had been speculating in western lands. On the other side of the mountains, he predicted, a “New Empire,” an American empire, would rise.25 Only the British, the Indians, and the mountains stood in the way.

  As a Virginian living on the Potomac, Washington needed no instruction on the importance of “inland navigation.”26 Before the war he had been one of the principal supporters of a canal through the Dismal Swamp linking Virginia and North Carolina. He was also fascinated by the possibility of a waterway via the Potomac that could tie that river with the Ohio Valley.27 Washington had a shrewd eye for real estate and was impressed by what he saw along the Mohawk. Dotted with farms and villages, the river snaked west, giving access to fertile lands. To be sure, there were rapids and other navigational obstacles, but as Clinton undoubtedly pointed out to him, for more than 150 years this route had been used by fur traders, Indians, and armies. With the war ending and settlers moving in, there was ample reason to build roads and canals to open these lands. Washington was certain that the Mohawk, like the Potomac, would link to the West.28 In near rhapsody he wrote to his friend the Marquis de Chastellux that as he had gazed along the river he was “struck with the … goodness of Providence which has dealt her favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them.”29 Not to let an opportunity pass, he made arrangements with Clinton to buy land along the Mohawk, eventually co-owning with his friend six thousand acres.30

  Fort Stanwix (Rome, New York) at the southern end of the Wood Creek portage was as far west as the party journeyed. From there they turned south down to Lake Otsego at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River and then east back to Albany.31 On August 5 Martha welcomed him home to Hasbrouck House. In nineteen days he had traveled more than 750 miles by horse and boat.32 He had passed through vast and fertile land laced by rivers, awaiting only the arrival of farmers to till the soil and settle villages. And beyond what he had seen personally on his brief trip, Washington knew that an even greater expanse of land awaited those who would dare push farther west to plow and plant. The promise of what lay ahead for the young nation lifted his spirits. But he was troubled as to who would lead America to take up the challenge. At headquarters a letter awaited him that did not bode well. “I have it in command from Congress,” wrote Elias Boudinot from Princeton, “that it is their pleasure that you should attend Congress at this place.”33

  Boudinot’s summons annoyed Washington. The president did not explain why Congress needed to see him. Furthermore he was tired from his western trip, and his wife was ill. Given that the war was ending, he had anticipated only one more move: home to Virginia. Congress was asking him to disrupt his life and move to Princeton. Why, he asked his friend James McHenry, who was then sitting in Congress, should he suffer “the inconvenience of a removal for so small a distance, and a new establishment of a Household which must be formed in consequence of breaking up the menial part of my family here?”34 For his own well-being, as well as for that of the army, the general believed his place was at headquarters.35

  Boudinot and McHenry scrambled to assuage Washington and convince him that he was needed in Princeton. The members of Congress had been debating the need for a permanent military establishment. They were desperate “to get the Sunshine of the Generals name … to a peace establishment” which had encountered heavy opposition in the Congress from those who saw in the proposal a nationalist plot aimed at weakening the states.36 To assure the commander in chief that Congress also cared for his well-being, McHenry told him that they were anxious to get him “out of a disagreeable situation, to one less disagreeable.”37 Boudinot promised him a fine home and furniture, and Congress offered a monument: “Resolved That an equestrian statue of General Washington, be erected at the place where the residence of Congress shall be established.” For this purpose the impecunious Congress would spare no expense.

  That the statue be of bronze: The General to be represented in a Roman dress, holding a truncheon in his right hand in the other hand bearing a wreath of laurel, [and his head encircled with a laurel wreath]. The statue to be supported by a marble pedestal, on the four faces of which are to be represented, in basso relieve, the four principal events of the war, in which General Washington commanded in person, viz. The evacuation of Boston—the capture of the Hessians at Trenton—[the Battle of Princeton]—the action of Monmouth, and the surrender of York. On the upper part of the front of the pedestal, to be engraved as follows: The United States in Congress assembled ordered this statue to be erected in the year of the Lord 1783, in honor of George Washington, Esquire the illustrious Commander in Chief of their the [sic] Armies [of the United States of America], during the war which vindicated and secured their Liberty, Sovereignty and Independence.

  Recognizing that no artist in America could execute the commission properly, Congress ordered the “Minister of the United States at the Court of Versailles” to find “the best artist in Paris [Europe]” to prepare this monument and that the Secretary also send “the best face and person of General Washington that can be procured, for the purpose of executing the above statue.”38

  Flattery worked. After allowing a few days for Martha to recover from her most recent bout of illness, on August 18 the Washingtons set off for Princeton. Accompanied by his aides Trumbull, Humphreys, and Walker, along with a small mounted guard and servants, they made their way south, stopping at Tappan, Hackensack, Acquackanonk Ferry, Elizabethtown, and Brunswick. The group arrived in Princeton on the twenty-third, to be welcomed by the townspeople and the “President and Faculty of the College” with a grand “display of colours and the firing of 13 cannon.”39 Tired from their journey, the Washingtons paused in Princeton only long enough to acknowledge their kind reception. The general and his wife, whose health had improved only slightly, were anxious to settle in the place Congress had secured for them.

  Their new home, Rockingham, was in the nearby village of Rocky Hill, about four miles out of Princeton on the main road. It was the property of the widow Margaret Berrien.40 The sight of the villag
e conjured up pleasant memories. His last visit to the area was in January 1777, following his victories at Trenton and Princeton, when he had marched his army through the village to winter quarters at Morristown. Next to the elegant Vassall House in Cambridge, where they had lived during the siege of Boston, the Berrien mansion was the finest home they had enjoyed during the entire war. Rockingham was a “very healthy and finely situated farm.” Set in 320 acres of “meadows and woodland,” the house contained “upwards of twenty rooms of different kinds, including a kitchen very conveniently contrived” as well as “a large dining room, a tea room and a dressing room, with genteel furniture in each.”41 Outbuildings included “a good barn, and stables, coach house, granary and fowl house, all painted.”42 The scene brought memories of Mount Vernon.

  Congress set Tuesday the twenty-sixth as the day for Washington to attend. Lest they be overwhelmed by the presence of the commander in chief, the members set forth a careful protocol aimed at preserving their dignity in the presence of so great a personality. Accordingly, at noon the doors swung open to the college library, where the members had gathered. All were seated, grouped as usual by state. They did not rise as the commander in chief entered. Washington took a place at the right hand of President Boudinot, who, according to Secretary Thomson, had “heightened his seat [with] a large folio to give him an elevation above the rest.”43

  The moment was brief. The president acknowledged Washington’s role in the “success of a war” but then in a somewhat awkward comment noted, “Your Retreats have been marked with Circumstances not less honourable to your military Character than those which have distinguished your Victories.”44 Perhaps from his “elevated” position Boudinot was seeking to remind the audience that Washington had lost more battles in the Revolution than he had won.

  The general replied by giving thanks to “the wisdom and unanimity of our national councils, the firmness of our citizens and the patience and bravery of our troops.” He concluded his brief remarks by informing the members that as soon as either peace was formally declared or the British left New York, “I shall ask permission to retire to the peaceful shade of private life.” His message was clear: once his job as commander in chief was completed, the general had no intention of lingering about to help Congress deal with postwar political issues. In less than fifteen minutes the entire event was over. Washington returned to Rockingham.

  Waiting had become the principal activity for Congress and the general. Congress could barely make a quorum, and at Washington’s headquarters, where once in the heady days of the war one hundred or more letters, orders, and dispatches passed across the desks of several busy aides, by mid-September the number was in single digits. Most of the correspondence had to do with affairs at West Point, where Knox was in command, and pension-hungry officers who were seeking confirmation of their wartime service.45 At the request of Congress the general did prepare two reports, the first addressing “Indian Affairs” and the second “Observations on a Peace Establishment.”46

  Central to the new republic’s relations with Indians was the question of land. On this matter Washington had no illusions. On one side were “Land Jobbers, Speculators and Monopolizers.” By their “unrestrained conduct” conniving and cheating the Indians, these “avaricious Men” were an “embarrassment of Government” and bound to cause “a great deal of Bloodshed.” Indians, however, were not blameless. Many of them had taken “up the Hatchet against us,” Washington noted, “but as we prefer Peace to a state of Warfare, as we consider them as a deluded People,” they had to be convinced “that their true Interest and safety must now depend upon our friendship. As the Country is large enough to contain us all and as we are disposed to be kind to them, and to partake of their Trade, we will draw from these considerations and from motives of comp[assion] draw a veil over what is past.” Washington’s solution: “a boundary line between them and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our People from Hunting or Settling.”47

  Washington’s second brief report concerned the “Peace Establishment.” In May he had delivered a lengthy and detailed analysis of his views on the nation’s military requirement. Later, after Congress had virtually ignored all that he wrote, he described this effort as “a hasty production.”48 That was clearly not the case for he made very specific recommendations concerning the establishment of a regular army, organizing the militia, establishing arsenals, and even creating “Academies.”49 Given the persistent impecuniousness of Congress, Washington realized that there was little or no chance that anything he had recommended would be enacted. Being asked now to respond to changes in a plan that he doubted would ever be implemented seemed a meaningless exercise not worth a great deal of time, hence the short answer in which he simply reiterated what he had written previously.

  Washington’s focus was on going home, and for that he needed money. Like everyone else’s, his accounts with Congress were hopelessly in arrears. He pleaded with Robert Morris to use his influence to secure reimbursement for the personal funds he had laid out eight years before at Boston. He needed the money, he told Morris, so that he and his wife, “hearing that Goods were under par in Philadelphia,” might “purchase some Articles” for the “Estate.”50 Other Mount Vernon matters were on his mind as well, particularly the matter of the grand dining room.

  Before he left for war Washington had begun the construction of a large room encompassing the entire north side of the mansion.51 He hoped to have it reach up two full stories and decorated with some of the finest Adam-style wall painting, then the rage in England.

  For this scale of entertaining the Washingtons would need appropriate ware. Through his agent Daniel Parker in New York City, he ordered several dozen “Plates, Butter boats, Dishes and Tureens,” accompanied by six dozen “Wine and Beer glasses exactly like those which Mr. Fraunces brought to Orange Town.”52 Such elegant china and glass needed to be graced with the finest fare, and so Parker was also instructed to inquire after a German cook. Soon to be a farmer again, Washington sought to recruit a miller/cooper for his mill “Stone, large and commodious.”53

  In the midst of these domestic concerns Washington received a visitor. Anxious to send “the best face” of the general to Paris for the equestrian statue, Congress hired Joseph Wright to execute a painting of the general as well as to fashion a plaster cast of his face. Wright, a famous artist best known as an “eccentric modeler of wax heads,” had studied at the Royal Academy under Benjamin West, and most recently had been in Paris, where he had finished several portraits of Franklin.54 Wright was now armed with a letter from the secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson, describing the young man as “an Artist skilled in taking Busts,” and asking that the general permit him “to try his talents.”55

  Washington agreed to sit, and over the next few weeks, while he languished at Rockingham, he gave the artist considerable access. Wright prepared both a painting and a bust. He executed the painting on a “small wooden panel, just the right size and durability to survive the packing and shipping to Paris. Washington later described the painting as “a better likeness of me, than any other painter has done.”56

  Having completed the portrait, Wright next turned to the bust.57 Although he had posed several times for portraits, this was Washington’s first experience being modeled in plaster; it was not pleasant. According to Washington, in an account recorded later by Elkanah Watson, Wright

  oiled my features over; and placing me flat on my back, upon a cot, proceeded to daub my face with the plaster. Whilst in this ludicrous attitude, Mrs. Washington entered the room; and seeing my face thus overspread with the plaster, involuntarily exclaimed. Her cry excited in me a disposition to smile, which gave my mouth a slight twist, or compression of the lips that is now observable in the bust which Wright afterward made.58

  A few days after Wright began his work at Rockingham, the Washingtons had an occasion to plan a grand soiree to celebrate the Morrises’ visit to Princeton. On September 6 a large
number of guests (too many to fit in the house) gathered under a large “Marquis … tent taken from the British.” Servants bustled about setting tables with fine china and silver cups. With the Morrises, the general and his lady held the places of honor, joined by the president of Congress on their left and the French minister Luzerne to the right. Scattered about at the other tables were “all the present members [of Congress], Chaplains and great officers.”59

  Among the guests was the irascible Rhode Islander David Howell, whose extreme states’ rights position and general disdain for Congress made him one of the most unpopular people in the body. Despite his politics, however, Howell had a fondness for Washington that bordered on fawning admiration. “No honor short of those, which the Deity vindicates to himself, can be too great for Genl Washington.”60 Howell had first met Washington when as a young Rhode Island militia officer he marched with his regiment to the siege of Boston. He remembered the general from those days as “contracted, pensive,” giving an air of “deep thought [and] much care.” Soon to be freed of the terrible burden of war and command, “the Generals [sic] front was uncommonly open and pleasant.” He moved among his guests with “a pleasant smile, sparkling vivacity of wit and humour.” Howell went on to note that in a moment of conversation President Boudinot noted with concern that “Mr. Morris had his hands full, The General replied at the same Instant—He wished he had his POCKETS full too.” A certain lightheartedness prevailed. When Richard Peters, a Pennsylvania congressman, noted that the fancy silver cups from which they were drinking were crafted by a silversmith who had turned Quaker, Washington rejoined that “he wished he had been a Quaker preacher before he had made the cups,” suggesting that then they might have been simpler and cost him less.61