by Flora Fraser
A guest on another occasion was more easily satisfied. “The dinner was good, but everything was quite plain,” George Bennet, an Englishman, recorded; “we all sat on camp-stools and there was nothing to be seen about his [Washington’s] house, but what every officer in the army might likewise have in his—Mrs. W was as plain, easy, and affable as he was, and one would have thought from the familiarity which prevailed there, that he saw a respectable private gentleman dining at the Head of his own Family.”
At Newburgh Washington continued to hold to the position that he had expressed to his former aide, Robert Hanson Harrison, the previous November: “one thing we are sure of and that is, that the only certain way to obtain Peace is to be prepared for War.” In London, Lord North’s government had fallen that March. The ministers who succeeded him favored an end to the expensive war with America, the king’s wishes notwithstanding. Peace negotiations of an informal kind ensued in Paris between the British, the Americans, and the French. Washington maintained his offensive stance, writing in early May 1782 to John Hancock, “No Nation ever suffered in Treaty by preparing, even in the moment of Negotiation, most vigorously for the Field.” A letter arrived in Newburgh a few days later from Sir Guy Carleton, who had succeeded Sir Henry Clinton at New York. He announced that he was “joined with Admiral Digby in the commission of peace,” but news, inconsistent with that declaration, followed. British admiral Rodney had fought and defeated de Grasse off Guadeloupe in the West Indies. Washington continued to propitiate de La Luzerne in Philadelphia and consult with Rochambeau, still in Virginia with the French troops.
Reports of the birth of a dauphin to Queen Marie Antoinette in Paris offered Washington an opportunity to honor the French nation. In late May the Washingtons were joined at an elegant dinner by five hundred officers and their wives, and gentlemen of standing in the locality with their ladies. As evening fell, thirteen cannons fired a feu de joie to general approval, and Washington led off the dancing with Lucy Knox. Notice of these rude rejoicings on the Hudson may not have reached the dauphin’s sire and his ministers at Versailles, but Washington continued to stress to anyone with any influence at that place of power that the war could not be won without French naval superiority.
In the second week of July, Martha left Washington at Newburgh to return home. George Augustine, Washington’s namesake and soldier son of his younger brother Charles, had been suffering from an intermittent fever. He was to recuperate at Mount Vernon, and Martha and he made the journey south together. She had written in wonder, on her way to the siege of Boston, that she was treated everywhere as though she were a great personage. Now she thought nothing of the honors she received everywhere on the road. Prints of Washington, against a background of cannons, drums, and flags, and of Martha, garlanded with flowers, had been recently published at Boston. They served to increase the crowds who turned out to applaud either one of the celebrated couple when they passed. At Mount Vernon, a home she reached on July 19, she was safe from crowds and official entertainment.
Though Martha was never an enthusiast for civic receptions, she was as eager as her husband to propitiate French officers. Soon after her return home, she invited one of them, the Comte de Custine-Sarreck, who was in the district with his regiment, to dine with “some officers” of his choice. The French officers, ten in number, appear to have admired the widowed Nelly Calvert Custis quite as much as the gardens and grounds. De Custine-Sarreck, owner of a celebrated porcelain factory in Niderviller in northeastern France, presented his hostess with a tea and coffee service, decorated with her husband’s monogram and emblems of glory. A proud Virginia matron, Martha might have been stung by the character that another of the French officers gave her: “a woman of about fifty years of age; she is small and fat, her appearance is respectable. She was dressed very plainly and her manners were simple in all respects.” The Washingtons were prepared to overlook any such condescension if the French would remain their allies.
Washington counted on Martha, at Mount Vernon, to offer hospitality to many in return for aid rendered him. He entrusted a letter for her later this year to a young Rhode Islander: “My dearest, if this letter should ever reach your hands, it will be presented by Mr Brown, Son of a Gentleman of that name in Rhode Island, from whom I have received civilities, & to whom, or his connections, I could wish to make returns.” Merchant John Brown had played a leading role in patriot agitation before the war. “As he [James] has thoughts of going into Virginia I recommend him to your notice & attention. I am most sincerely & affectionately—Yrs Go: Washington.” Brown did not, in the end, visit Martha, but the letter may serve as representative of many others that have not survived.
In New York State, Washington was uncertain what to do, and vexed by his own indecision. Following the surrender at Yorktown, the British appeared to have abandoned offensive war in their former colonies. Further, in August 1782 they evacuated Savannah. With Congress, the state assemblies, and the rest of America, Washington guessed as best as he could at the intentions of the London government. The American peace commissioners at Versailles seemed to have no better understanding of their British counterparts’ strategy. Hope mingled with uncertainty. Adverse weather conditions forced the commander-in-chief in October to seek early winter quarters in Newburgh once more for the army currently under canvas elsewhere. He told Nathanael Greene on the seventeenth: “despairing of seeing my home this Winter, I am now writing to her [Mrs. Washington] to make her annual visit.”
George Augustine was still invalid at Mount Vernon. In his place Dr. David Stuart, Scottish émigré and Alexandria physician, escorted Martha north. Other wives, too, made arrangements to join their husbands in the familiar setting of Newburgh, Lucy Knox and Betsy Gates among them. Horatio Gates wrote: “upon talking with The General [Washington], I have sent for Mrs Gates to keep me from Freezing this Winter.…Mrs Washington is, I understand, upon the road.”
Washington had the satisfaction of knowing that the army was better organized, disciplined, and clothed now than it had ever been. He inspected the regiments closely and regularly. He—and Knox and Gates with him—were aware that the field officers were much agitated. No arrangements were yet in place for half-pay, the usual reward for military service, should peace come swiftly and, with it, the disbandment of the army. Despite all Washington’s urging, Congress, absorbed in sifting intelligence from across the Atlantic, was reluctant to turn its attention to this issue. Every new development that seemed to tend toward a peace disturbed the officers at Newburgh, fearing to go without reward for their services. Rochambeau and Chastellux departed America late in the year to unite in joint operations with the Spanish army in Santo Domingo against the British. In January 1783 news came that the British had evacuated Charleston. Washington called Greene’s forces north. Though he longed to strike against New York, the one remaining British stronghold, the protracted peace negotiations at Versailles might yet succeed and render such plans irrelevant.
Railing in February at the “rugged and dreary mountains” that formed his immediate view at Newburgh, the American commander worked daily with the “family,” continuing to press on Congress the need for half-pay for officers. “The temper of the army is much soured,” he had written to Virginia delegate Joseph Jones the previous December, “and has become more irritable than at any period since the commencement of the war.” Practical as ever, Martha looked ahead to the spring and summer. Washington ordered in January, at her request, six yards of “very fine Jacanet Muslin,” one and a half yards wide. In March she presented Henry Knox with two “hairnets”—to confine his queue, or pigtail. She would have sent them long before, she wrote, “but for want of tape, which was necessary to finish them and which was not obtained till yesterday.”
The disaffection that Knox and Washington feared came to a head that month. An anonymous paper circulated among the field officers, suggesting that if the war continued, the army as a whole should desert and inhabit some unnamed wilde
rness. If a peace were brokered, the army should instead refuse to lay down its arms. Following swift intervention by Washington, representatives of each regiment met on the fifteenth in the Temple, a large hall in the cantonment. More pacific measures to secure the half-pay the officers sought, it was hoped, might there be agreed. Washington entered the hall and spoke for a few minutes. He begged the sullen officers not to take any measures that would “lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained.” Urging patience, he began to read aloud a recent letter from Joseph Jones. It detailed obstacles that lay in the way of meeting the army’s due claims. Washington stumbled over the sentences, or at least affected so to do. Reaching into his pocket, he took out spectacles and put them on, saying: “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”
This remark, as much as Jones’s explanations that Washington then read, had a salutary effect on the mood of the assembled officers. The government of the United States and its commander-in-chief survived this challenge to their authority. Such rhetorical devices could not be essayed twice. A letter from Lafayette at Cadiz of February 5 reached Newburgh two months later, anticipating official intelligence crossing the Atlantic to America. Preliminary articles of peace had been signed at Versailles on January 20 by Britain, France, and Spain, making operative an earlier pact of November 1782 between the British Crown and the United States. Though peace treaties between the different combatants were yet to be signed, Britain had announced the cessation of hostilities on February 4.
Cautious for so long, Washington could at last dwell on an end to war. Peace would signal a return to Mount Vernon. He and Martha could once more resume the characters of private individuals. Writing to the marquis on April 5, Washington’s thoughts were all of his future retirement. Once the treaties were ratified, he would promise the United States aid only “as far as it can be rendered in the private walks of life.” His mind, he wrote, would at last be “unbent.” He would endeavour to “glide down the stream of life ’till I come to that abyss, from whence no traveller is permitted to return.”
A few days earlier George had been in an energetic frame of mind when denouncing the Articles of Confederation, the framework for government in America for much of the war. He wrote to Alexander Hamilton: “No Man in the United States is, or can be more deeply impressed with the necessity of a reform in our present Confederation than myself…to the defects thereof, & want of Powers in Congress may justly be ascribed the prolongation of the War, & consequently the Expences occasioned by it.” These impassioned words were not those of a man whose mind would be easily “unbent,” or who would succeed in gliding down any stream.
22
Peace on the Hudson, 1783
“I now see the Port opening to which I have been steering.”
On APRIL 18, 1783, Washington ordered “the Cessation of Hostilities.” The British truce was to be proclaimed at Newburgh the next day, on the anniversary of the actions at Lexington and Concord. Only after a “general peace”—a lasting peace treaty—was signed and ratified, he stressed, would the British forces sail for home, and the American army be disbanded. It would, however, be “ingratitude,” he remarked, not to rejoice now, “on such a happy day, a day which is the harbinger of Peace, a day which compleats the eighth year of the war.” He ordered, in celebration of the proclamation, “An extra Ration of Liquor, to be issued to every man tomorrow, to drink Perpetual Peace, Independence and Happiness, to the United States of America.”
The initial exultation in camp at the prospect of peace faded. The mood among the “war men”—so Washington termed the soldiery still enlisted—grew ugly. They made no distinction between the “cessation of hostilities” proclaimed and a binding peace and were vociferous in their demand for their discharge—with back pay. On April 22, Washington told Alexander Hamilton that he had lately increased the guard to prevent rioting. Officers met with “Insults” when attempting to hold the fractious, homeward-looking men to their duty. Two days later he wrote to aide Tench Tilghman, “I can scarcely form an idea at this moment, when I shall be able to leave this place; the distresses of the Army for want of money—the embarrassments of Congress—and the conseqt delays, and disappointments on all sides, encompass me with difficulties.” He envisaged himself, not without justice, as a helmsman in national waters: “as I now see the Port opening to which I have been steering, I shall persevere till I have gained admittance.” He pressed Congress to send a committee to camp with the aim of settling all accounts and releasing most of the army early.
As summer succeeded spring on the upper Hudson, aides like Tilghman, tired of the clerking and copying that constituted their days at headquarters, were on extended furloughs or had left the army to try their luck in political or civilian life. Washington turned to Martha on several occasions in the spring to make fair copies of letters he sent out to army colleagues, to Congress, and to the states. In July she worked with him to make a fair copy of his expenditures on a recent journey, but she was not always fit for secretarial service, as an old complaint recurred. “Mrs Washington enjoys an incompetent share of health,” the general wrote to George William Fairfax on July 10. “Billious Fevers & Cholic’s attack her very often, & reduce her low. At this moment she is but barely recovering from one of them.”
Washington had been drawing up an account, to submit to Congress, of his wife’s “travelling expenses, in coming to and returning from my winter quarters annually.” He had previously paid these from his “private purse,” with money that Martha had brought to headquarters from home. At the beginning of the war he had not thought, he wrote in an appendix to the account, to make what must “at first view…wear the complexion of a private charge” into a public one, but with the passage of years, owing to the “embarrassed situation” of national affairs, he had been obliged “continually to postpone (to no small detriment of my private interest) the visit I every year contemplated to make my family.” He had ended by judging Martha’s travels to headquarters “Ladys Lawful,” the term he employed for public charges. He billed Congress for £1,064 1s 0d. Martha had been a dauntless adventurer. Some of the dwellings where she had joined her husband—the Vassall house at Cambridge, Richmond Hill in Manhattan—had been capacious and elegant. The Ford house at Morristown had been well appointed. More often than not—at Valley Forge, at Middlebrook, and in Newburgh, where they now resided—the Washingtons’ quarters were cramped and confined. Visitors slept in parlors, aides slept four to a room. Tin and pewter were dull on the dinner table, and there were stools for seats. Though she referred readily to the fatigue of her long and uncomfortable journeys, Martha never complained of conditions she endured in camp.
Washington wrote to his brother John Augustine, on June 15: “I wait here with much impatience, the arrival of the Definitive Treaty; this event will put a period not only to my Military Service, but also to my public life.” To while away the time, he had asked for histories of Charles XII and Peter the Great, and “Wildman on Trees” to be sent to him. He was as fractious and homesick now as any of the “war men.” Lund at Mount Vernon received a reprimand, on the eleventh, for failing to gather rents from his cousin’s tenants in the West: “you seem to have had an unconquerable aversion to going from home.” Washington shrank from the outcome of this neglect: “worse than going home to empty coffers, and expensive living, I shall be encumbered with debt.”
Though Martha might have returned home earlier to prepare Mount Vernon for peacetime occupation, she remained with Washington at Newburgh through the summer. In June, George sent off, on her account, to a merchant in Philadelphia, for a piece of stuff to be matched. Mrs. Washington, he wrote, required “three yards of black silk like the enclosed; it is to repair old gowns, and consequently must be like them.” She would make and mend till she got home. He himself, in the same letter, wanted “for the purpose of Transporting my Books of record and Papers with safety…Six strong hair
Trunks well clasped and with good Locks.”
By the end of July Congress had adopted measures that Washington had advocated to calm the agitation at Newburgh, and a large part of the army had been disbanded. Washington was now called by Congress to Nassau Hall, Princeton, where the peripatetic body was in session to advise on the establishment of a permanent army. He had already set out his ideas on the subject in a lengthy memorandum and had hoped to proceed directly from Newburgh to Mount Vernon, once news of the “general peace” came. Yielding to the pleas of delegates, he declared himself, as ever, the servant of Congress. He took up residence with a small suite in a house they selected to serve as headquarters at Rocky Hill, some four miles from Princeton. After an interval Martha followed.
The army on the Hudson was now for others to manage. Life at Rocky Hill, in the placid Millstone River valley, was pleasant. A kind of holiday atmosphere ensued. It was an easy journey when Washington rode into Princeton to report to Congress. Delegates and Princeton dignitaries, anxious to savor the hospitality of the celebrated commander, rode out to this agreeable headquarters.
A young artist, William Dunlap, lodging nearby, spent days producing an indifferent crayon portrait of the commander. He later reflected: “I was quite at home in every respect at head-quarters. To breakfast and dine day after day with the general and Mrs Washington, and members of congress, and [be] noticed as the young painter, was delicious.” Martha too gave the young man a sitting. A more distinguished artist, Joseph Wright, also came calling. He had been commissioned by Congress to produce an equestrian statue of the commander-in-chief for the national government’s eventual home, wherever that should be. Some favored Philadelphia, while others thought of New York. (The project of the statue ultimately failed.) The portrait in oils that Wright made was thought by many who knew the American commander well to be extremely realistic. It shows a man who had, to use the general’s own words, “gone gray” in his country’s service.