The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  Provisions at West Point—which Washington caustically named “this happy spot”—in the summer were in short supply. Having invited ladies to dine at headquarters on August 16, he begged Dr. John Cochran, surgeon general of the army, to warn his wife, who would be of the party, that the plates off which they would eat, once tin, were now “iron,” from constant use. Nor would the meal be lavish. There was generally “a ham (sometimes a shoulder) of bacon, to grace the head of the table,” he wrote, and “a piece of roast” to adorn the foot. It was probable, Washington conceded, that the cook would have “a mind to cut a figure” and offer beefsteak pies or dishes of crabs. But this menial had recently chanced upon the discovery that “apples will make pies” and, “amidst the violence of his efforts,” might substitute fruit for meat. If the commander’s humor was heavy, his hospitality in trying circumstances could not be faulted.

  While she was at Middlebrook in March, Martha had told Jacky and Nelly that it was “from the southward” that they expected news. In October disastrous intelligence from Savannah reached Washington at West Point. D’Estaing and his fleet—with a French general and troops on board—had appeared in late September off the coast of Georgia. In the expectation that the French admiral would head north, Congress urged the “middle and eastern States” to furnish Washington and the foreign fleet and army with “men and provisions.” D’Estaing, however, turned his ships toward Savannah. American general Benjamin Lincoln hurried from Charleston to join him. On October 9 they made a joint assault on the British lines, which failed miserably, and in the wake of the disaster the French fleet and army withdrew once more to the West Indies. All thought of a joint attack with Washington on New York was now in abeyance, and Lincoln returned to Charleston.

  Martha, resident in Virginia, was reliant on correspondence with her husband at headquarters in the north for firm news of campaigns in other southern states as well for accounts of his own travails. Erroneous reports in the Virginia Gazette of the campaign in the south raised others’ hopes. Jacky wrote to Washington on October 7, two days before the disastrous attempt on Savannah, to congratulate him on the Comte d’Estaing’s “important success in Georgia,” declaring himself “very sanguine in my expectations of a glorious close to the war this campaign, and in seeing you in Fairfax this winter.”

  Martha no doubt was a good deal less sanguine. Besides, there were troubles at Mount Vernon that summer and autumn to oppress her. A long drought in northern Virginia engendered a poor harvest at the plantation, and the finances of the estate were less than sound. Following Williamsburg legislation designed to cure the currency crisis, Washington was offered in his absence by debtors a shilling or even sixpence in the pound. Furthermore, a British proclamation in June had offered the slaves of “rebels” everywhere their freedom and even land, should they cross to the enemy lines. A good many slaves were not slow to seek their liberty. Though none had as yet fled Mount Vernon, the Virginia Gazette was crowded with advertisements from other plantation owners giving details of runaways.

  News from Europe trickled through to Washington at West Point. He learned in October that, following “improvident delay” in Congress, applications for “clothing and military stores” had been dispatched to the French government only in the late summer. It was to be hoped that Laurens’s son John, now secretary to Benjamin Franklin, minister plenipotentiary at the court of Versailles, could expedite the applications. The earliest that these foreign cargoes could arrive was the following January or February. Henry Laurens asked, “Can the several [American] states supply the necessary wants and in proper time for saving our brave fellow citizens from another Valley Forge scene?”

  John Adams had left Paris for London, with orders to initiate negotiations for treaties of peace and commerce with Britain, should that government recognize the United States as “sovereign, free and independent.” No great expectations of success attended Adams’s embassy. Its aim was to persuade Europe that the United States were fighting a defensive and just war.

  Don Juan de Miralles, for his part, sent Washington an enormous sea tortoise and lemons from Havana, and confirmation of reports that Spain had declared war against England. John Jay, who had ceded his place as president of Congress to Samuel Huntington of Connecticut so as to negotiate with Madrid, would, with luck, persuade the Spanish government to come into the American war as well. Washington, thanking de Miralles on October 16 for the intelligence and for the gifts, was sure that his wife would receive “with gratitude and pleasure” Don Juan’s compliments, which he would convey in his next letter to her: “you stand high in her estimation.”

  Martha had good reason to fear “another Valley Forge scene.” But she was set on joining her husband, wherever he might settle for the winter, and eager to travel, as Washington noted in a letter to John Mitchell, “before the roads get bad and weather severe.” He asked Mitchell to hire “lodgings in some genteel (but not a common boarding) house in Philadelphia.” By the end of the month, Mitchell had secured apartments at “the late Mr. Israel Pemberton’s house”—Clarke Hall—which included “a handsome front parlour, a good bed chamber, kitchen and rooms for servants.” On November 10, Washington told an officer in Fredericksburg, Virginia, that Martha was setting out “immediately” for the north. Jacky and Nelly must fend for themselves and Lund take pains to ensure that no slave escaped to an alluring enemy. Though Martha exchanged the privacy and comfort of her Virginia home for what would no doubt be, in due course, rude lodgings and severe weather at headquarters, she did not hesitate. It was enough that her husband counted on her coming. The assiduous Mitchell promised her “some of the best tea, sugar, coffee, etc” while she stopped at “Mr Pemberton’s house” in Philadelphia, and volunteered that he and his wife would do all “to render her accommodations convenient and agreeable.”

  While still at West Point in late October, Washington took the decision to concentrate most of the army at Morristown, New Jersey. He knew the locality well from when he, Martha, and the “family” had occupied the tavern on the town green in the spring of 1777. The countryside would be a source of flour, among other essentials, though its price was exorbitant—now at £60 a hundredweight. The army was weakened, following the recent dispatch of regiments to reinforce Lincoln’s southern army, and few new recruits were coming in to replace those whose enlistment was concluded. News that a large-scale embarkation was in preparation at New York, its likely object Charleston, forced Washington to consider sending a “further reinforcement to the southward.” On October 30 he wrote to Greene, who was already at Morristown, that the quartermaster general was to lay out the ground at “the position back of Mr Kemble’s”—a wood known as Jockey Hollow, in the vicinity of Morristown. Given the likely future reduction of forces already weakened, it was now incumbent on the army, he advised, to “seek a more remote position than we would otherwise have done.” Six hundred acres of timber at Jockey Hollow, in his estimation, would furnish log cabins to accommodate all. He ended by asking Greene to order him a late dinner the following day, when he would reach the township. He understood that headquarters were to be at Mrs. Ford’s.

  Just as Mr. Wallace had done at Middlebrook, so the widowed Mrs. Ford remained in her home, a mile or so east of the township, after it became headquarters for the army in the north. There was only one kitchen to accommodate both Ford domestics, who served their mistress and her two children, and army servants as well as cooks. An ancillary kitchen was begun, but the logs cut for it lay fallow on the ground. Winter came early this year to New Jersey, and there was little labor to be spared for the provision of such amenities.

  Washington himself arrived on a day that the gathered regiments had suffered a “very severe storm of hail and snow all day.” Two weeks later army surgeon James Thacher wrote that snow on the ground at Jockey Hollow—“this wilderness…where we are to build log huts for winter quarters”—was “about two feet deep.” The lack of shoes, blankets, tents, and wagons—a
ll long the subject of correspondence between Washington and Greene, on the one hand, and Congress and the states on the other—was much felt. Drillmaster von Steuben was later to write of the New York brigade in particular: “they exhibited the most shocking picture of misery I have ever seen, scarce a man having the wherewithal to cover his nakedness, and a great number very bad with the itch [scabies].”

  Many officers as well as men slept on “brushwood thrown together” on the frozen ground. In mid-December Washington addressed the governors of the former middle colonies—New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania—in strong terms. Unless aid was given swiftly, he warned them, “there is every appearance that the army will infallibly disband within a fortnight.” Supplies came fitfully if at all. Washington was to tell Philip Schuyler later that the soldiers ate “every kind of horse food but hay.” The horses peeled bark off trees for sustenance. There were further snowstorms on the sixteenth and eighteenth and again on the twenty-eighth. The freezing conditions did not abate.

  The army did not disband. The soldiers continued to fell the oak and walnut trees around them. The log cabins multiplied, offering reprieve from the bitter conditions to more and more men who had been sleeping on the ground or under canvas. On December 29, despite the snowstorm the previous day, Washington wrote that the work was “nearly completed.” The warmth and shelter of the huts were of inestimable value in raising morale, though so much else was wanting. Once again it seemed, the army had endured and survived.

  Before Martha’s arrival, Washington had paid £15 “for a band of music” to play at headquarters on Christmas Day. On the last day of the old year, she arrived at Mrs. Ford’s. Twelfth Night—January 6, 1780—would see the twenty-first anniversary of the couple’s wedding. In the short interval between New Year’s Eve and that date, calamity again descended on the camp. A prolonged and violent snowstorm, during the night of January 3, left the ground four feet and in some places six feet deep in snow. Several officers still under canvas had their marquees “torn asunder and blown down” over their heads. “Some of the soldiers were actually covered while in their tents and buried like sheep” beneath the enveloping powder, wrote Dr. Thacher. Blankets, baggage, stores had to be dug out. Roads within and outside the camp were impassable, not only rendering wagons useless but also cutting off Jockey Hollow from Morristown, headquarters, and supply routes. “For six or eight days it has been so extremely cold, that there was no living abroad,” wrote General Greene, during the days that succeeded the storm. The freezing conditions continued. Officers and men alike, Washington told Schuyler on January 30, were “five or six days without bread, at other times as many days without meat, and once or twice two or three days without either.”

  The crisis was little less acute where the men’s clothing was concerned. Many of them did their duty in the snow without benefit of shoes or stockings. Even breeches were sometimes lacking, a captain in Stark’s Brigade writing, on February 6, of “many a good lad with nothing to cover him from his hips to his toes save his blanket.” The ravages of the smallpox epidemic at Morristown in the spring of 1777, the cries of “No bread, no soldier” at Valley Forge—where at least the winter had been largely mild—were expunged from the minds of veterans as the conditions continued. There appeared no sign, though the weeks and months passed, of a thaw. Washington was to remark in March: “The oldest people now living in this country do not remember so hard a winter.” An attempt in mid-January to take advantage of the freeze, cross the ice at Amboy over to Staten Island, and attack British troops failed dismally. The enemy had got word of the intended assault and repelled the Americans.

  For once Martha failed to lift her husband’s spirits. Washington was hard-pressed and irritable, and the conditions at the crowded Ford house were hardly conducive to repose and ease. He complained to Greene on January 22, “I have been at my present quarters since the 1st. day of Decr. and have not a Kitchen to Cook a Dinner in, altho’ the Logs have been put together some considerable time by my own Guard; nor is there a place at this moment in which a servant can lodge with the smallest degree of comfort. Eighteen belonging to my family and all Mrs Ford’s are crowded together in her Kitchen and scarce one of them able to speak for the colds they have caught.”

  He had been unusually curt and dismissive two days earlier in response to a letter from Jacky the previous month, requesting a deferral of the annuity payable on January 1. An offer to pay him in “paper money” elicited the response that his stepson might as well pay him in old newspapers and almanacs. If, as Jacky complained, he had been “unfortunate” in his crops, Washington was sorry for it. The debt “may lie till my wants, or your convenience, is greater,” he conceded. As Jacky may have calculated in making his request, there were matters of more urgency to occupy the commander than what was due him from his wayward stepson.

  Washington’s anxieties about the men in Jockey Hollow as well as about the southern campaign communicated themselves to Martha. For once she was to admit a kind of defeat, following her return to Mount Vernon, in a letter of July 18 to her brother-in-law Burwell Bassett: “we were sorry that we did not see you at the camp. There was not much pleasure there [from] the distress of the army and other difficulties, though I did not know the cause. The poor General was so unhappy that it distressed me exceedingly.” Washington thanked Robert Morris in Philadelphia at the beginning of February for a promised gift of wine: “Should it arrive in good order, I shall be able to give my friends a glass of such as I could wish.” If Morris himself should do him “the favour to partake of it” at Morristown, he would be most happy. On such red-letter days as a visit from a friend, Washington informed the financier, he felt the want of good wine. Otherwise, he wrote dourly, he had long resolved to be content with grog, “should it even be made of North East rum, and drunk out of a wooden bowl, as the case has been.”

  Martha joined him in grateful thanks for the Morrises’ offer of hospitality, Washington added, should they this winter visit Philadelphia. For once, the Virginian who had, before the war, frequented dinners, balls, assemblies, and race meetings—and enjoyed the best of wine—was to the fore. Washington admitted to an inclination for “relaxation of this kind” and “social enjoyments.” But he brought himself up sharply. Public duty and private pleasure being “at variance,” he continued, “I have little expectation of indulging in the latter while I am under ties of the former. Perhaps,” he ended on a dismal note, “when the one ceases, I may be incapable of the other.”

  A visit to Philadelphia with Martha might, in fact, have increased his distress and certainly would have taxed her wardrobe, elegant though it was. While the men at Jockey Hollow wanted for food and clothes, in early March New Jersey delegate John Fell commented on the dissipation and extravagance in the city as “beyond conception.” He added, “The dress of the ladies in paying their visits is quite equal to the dress of the ladies that I have seen in the boxes in the playhouses in London, and their dress in general even along the streets resembles in a great degree the actresses on the stage.”

  Washington, nevertheless, knew the value of a good appearance. Late in March he ordered Mitchell to procure him a new chariot for four horses: “please to have my arms and crest properly disposed of on the chariot. I send them for this purpose.” Though, in Boston, George III’s coat of arms was torn from the State House, Washington, like many other Americans, continued to appreciate some aspects of his English heritage. Just over a week later he added: “it may not be amiss to ornament the mouldings with a light airy gilding.” The harness too should be ornamented. “The pocket money which Mrs Washington has, and some I can borrow here,” he wrote, would cover the costs, until specie from Lund Washington arrived.

  Though Martha had an “unhappy” husband to comfort, she remained a consummate hostess. She took an interest, moreover, in all the military “family,” and she amused them when she named a tomcat “Hamilton.” Her husband’s young aide from the West Indies was notab
ly amorous. This February, however, the taming of Alexander Hamilton ensued. Philip Schuyler’s daughter Betsy came to stay in Morristown with her aunt and uncle, Gertrude and John Cochran. Miss Schuyler was an heiress, which was necessary, as Hamilton had no means or expectations. She was also pretty and intelligent. The Washingtons, when dining with the Cochrans, watched the romance develop with an indulgent eye. Martha on one occasion sent Betsy “some nice powder” in return for “very pretty” cuffs which she had received, and for which she was much obliged. Philip Schuyler, persuaded by Washington’s high opinion of his aide, and perhaps by Hamilton’s oratory when he requested Betsy’s hand in marriage, agreed in April to an engagement.

  Entertainment of a more public kind occupied the Washingtons and the “family” at headquarters on one occasion. Thirty-five subscribers, Washington heading the list, sponsored a series of assemblies, held at Arnold’s tavern on the green. Quartermaster General Nathanael Greene wrote to Joseph Reed on February 29: “From this apparent ease, I suppose it is thought we must be in happy circumstances. I wish it was so, but, alas, it is not.” The currency was worthless, forage scarce, and ammunition lacking. “We have been so poor in camp for a fortnight, that we could not forward the public dispatches, for want of cash to support the expresses.” Nevertheless, the freezing conditions and consequent difficulties that had absorbed so much of Washington’s attention by degrees eased. Finally, the hard winter gave way to spring.

  The grand parade at Jockey Hollow was clear of snow when the Chevalier de La Luzerne, new French envoy to the United States, visited headquarters in the latter part of April. Every effort was made to show him that the American army was an ally worth supporting. He was accorded, on his entry into camp on the nineteenth, full military honors and was treated thereafter to a battery of parades and cannon salutes. He was to be the guest of honor at a grand review to be held on the twenty-fourth. Though the parlous state of supplies and provisions was not hidden from him, de La Luzerne praised to Washington “the good order and discipline of the troops.” He expressed himself in a letter to the French government as convinced “more than ever, of the very great advantage which the republic derives” from the services of its commander-in-chief.