George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  Chapter 37

  The Long, Bumpy Victory Lap

  For three years after Monmouth, Washington warily watched the British Army in New York, but his troops fought only smaller encounters. The Continentals were too weak to mount an assault across waters controlled by the Royal Navy. The British had too few soldiers to attempt anything more than raids. Washington ached to do more. To win.

  In an “anguish of soul,” he wrote to his brother Jack in the summer of 1780: “I do lament that our fatal and accursed policy should bring the 6th of June upon us and not a single recruit to the army.” He condemned the American effort as one of “slumber and sleep when we should be diligent in preparation”:

  Pressed by irresistible necessity and when we can delay no longer—then [we] bring ourselves to the brink of destruction by expensive and temporary expedients. In a word, we have no system, and seem determined not to profit by experience. . . . Thus it is, one year rolls over another—and without some change—we are hastening to our ruin.1

  The British, driven from New England early in the war and now bottled up in New York, launched a new Southern strategy, invading Virginia behind the turncoat Benedict Arnold, while Lord Charles Cornwallis landed troops in South Carolina. When General Gates confronted Cornwallis with a combination of militia and army units, the legend of Saratoga evaporated. The British humiliated his army, while Gates’s flight from the battlefield did not end until he was 180 miles away. Through more bloody fighting, patched-together American forces led by Daniel Morgan and Nathanael Greene drained Cornwallis’s strength and led the aggressive Englishman deep into North Carolina, then to coastal Virginia in the summer of 1781.

  Cornwallis expected to meet his navy at Yorktown, but coordinated moves by Washington’s army with French troops and a French fleet left Cornwallis surrounded and hopeless. After a short siege and some sharp fighting, the British surrendered. With the loss of a second army in America—first at Saratoga, now at Yorktown—the British appetite for war dissolved. Peace talks began in early 1782.2

  Washington’s joy over Yorktown was punctured by the death of his stepson, Jack Custis. The twenty-seven-year-old first joined the army at Yorktown, where he contracted fever and died shortly after the surrender, leaving behind four children younger than six. Martha’s distress was, Washington wrote, “deep and solemn,” and he extended to her and Custis’s widow “every comfort in my power to afford them.” Washington himself, according to one witness, “was uncommonly affected at [Custis’s] death.”3

  For the first time during the war, Washington did not winter with his soldiers. After several weeks at Mount Vernon—his first extended stay there since 1775—he and Martha traveled to Philadelphia, where he marked his fiftieth birthday, an age neither his father nor three of his brothers had reached, and remained through the cold months. He no doubt welcomed the opportunity to escape the rigors of winter camp, but his decision to stay with Martha likely was connected to the death of her son, Jack. As when her daughter Patsy died, Washington made a point of staying close to Martha to help them both through a terrible grief.

  Some thought Washington looked older that winter, but he retained the ability to reassure. A French officer praised his calm, adding, “Everyone regards him as his friend and father.” Another observed, “He excites another sort of respect, which seems to spring from the sole idea that the safety of each person is attached to his person.”4

  Washington’s commitment to fight Britain was undiminished. “My greatest fear,” he wrote to Greene, “is that Congress . . . may think our work too nearly closed, and will fall into a state of languor and relaxation.” He prepared for an active campaign in 1782, but the fighting was over. The British recalled Clinton, the fifth general felled by the Virginian whom the British Army had refused to accept as an officer.5

  As peace approached, poorly supplied Continentals idled in camps near New York. Unpaid, their resentment grew. “The insults and neglects which the army have met with from the country,” a Connecticut officer wrote, “beggars all description. It must go no farther. [The soldiers] can bear it no longer.” Talk of mutiny spread.6

  In January 1781, troops near Morristown, New Jersey, had erupted when told their enlistments extended until the war’s end. Without pay for twelve months and in “a state of nakedness and famine,” they seized ammunition and cannons, killing an officer. Setting off for Philadelphia, where they intended to confront Congress, they were intercepted near Princeton and reached a settlement that discharged most of the mutineers from the army.7

  A second uprising came in the same month among troops in nearby Pompton Lakes. Washington sent five hundred men to restore order. After those mutineers surrendered, two were hanged.8

  Toward the end of 1782, soldier discontent again neared a crisis. Washington wrote to Congress’s secretary of war of the soldiers’ “total want of money, or the means of existing from one day to another.” He warned against discharging the army, “soured by penury and what they call the ingratitude of the public,” having “suffered every thing human nature is capable of enduring this side of death.” The soldiers must, Washington insisted, be paid.9

  The soldiers’ plight became entangled with the hope of a few powerful men in Philadelphia to use the threat of army mutiny to secure a congressional tax; revenue from that tax could be used to pay the soldiers and pay down the country’s debts. Under the Articles of Confederation, every state had to approve the tax, but such unanimity had never happened. Without tax revenue, Congress had to request funds from states that had limited revenues and their own war expenses to pay. Congress had received 5 percent of the amount it requisitioned from the states in 1781.

  Three men at the center of congressional finances aimed to use the soldiers’ discontent to secure approval of a tax. Each was a Washington ally: Robert Morris, superintendent of finance; his deputy, Gouverneur Morris; and New York delegate Alexander Hamilton. Peace, they feared, would further reduce the prospects for a national tax, but the threat of an army mutiny might frighten the states into approving one.10 Their strategy might bring “convulsion,” Gouverneur Morris admitted, but it would “terminate in giving to government the power without which government is but a name.” It was a high-risk ploy, also a cynical one.11

  By December 1782, troops stationed in Newburgh, New York, appointed a committee of officers to present their grievances to Congress. Their petition warned that the soldiers’ “uneasiness . . . is great and dangerous,” that their “hardships are exceedingly disproportionate to those of any other citizens of America,” but that “shadows have been offered to us while the substance has been gleaned by others.” Washington, having badgered Congress to pay the army, stood apart from the appeal but raised no hand to stop it. If the mission failed, one officer wrote, “I dread the consequences.”12

  In addition to back pay, the officers demanded that Congress allow the “commutation” of the promised pensions—in effect, converting them to lump-sum payments that equaled five years’ pay. The officers knew that Congress lacked money to pay either pensions or the commutation amounts, but they hoped to sell to speculators the government promise of a lump-sum payment. Delay in meeting their demands, the soldiers warned, “may have fatal effects.”13

  Congress debated the tax and soldier-pay issues through January, finally punting them to Robert Morris, as superintendent of finance. Morris kicked the issue back to Congress by secretly submitting his resignation, to be effective in future months. His deputy, Gouverneur Morris, warned General Henry Knox in Newburgh that after peace, Congress “will wish to get rid of you and then they will see you starve rather than pay a six penny tax.”14 On February 11, news arrived that King George III had announced preliminary peace terms. Congress greeted the news with “great joy,” but noted “the impossibility of discharging the arrears and claims of the army.”15

  The financial men had to act quickly. Hamilton sent an ellipt
ical letter to Washington, noting the dilemma: Peace would destroy any incentive to pay the soldiers; when the army realized it would never be paid, the soldiers might not stay “within the bounds of moderation.” In that event, Hamilton observed, Washington could “bring order perhaps even good, out of confusion.” Without detailing the scheme, Hamilton had warned Washington that a crisis was coming and that Washington might play a key role in resolving it.16

  The financial men then revealed Robert Morris’s impending resignation, dialing up the pressure on Congress. They also sought support from the army’s senior officers. Washington walked a careful line, repelling an overture to join the scheme, yet not obstructing it. The plotters turned to Horatio Gates, now second-in-command at Newburgh despite the Conway Cabal and his debacle in South Carolina. Gates threw in with the financial men, never revealing to Washington that he had.17

  The opening move came in early March, when an incendiary address circulated among the soldiers in the Newburgh camp. Drafted by a Gates aide, it denounced the nation “that tramples upon your rights, disdains your cries, and insults your distresses.” For its crescendo, the address proclaimed that “the army has its alternatives.” If peace came, the army could refuse to disband; if war resumed, the army could “retire to some unsettled country, [and] smile in your turn,” leaving the country at the mercy of the British. The document summoned a meeting for Tuesday, March 11, to discuss redress of soldier grievances.18

  Washington immediately canceled the March 11 session, but scheduled another meeting four days later to hear the report of the officers who were negotiating with Congress over pay. He also reported the events to Robert Morris and Hamilton, expressing his suspicion that they were behind this “very mysterious . . . business” and urging them to resolve the situation peacefully.19

  Before the rescheduled meeting, a second anonymous address circulated at Newburgh. It audaciously claimed that Washington supported those who had called the initial meeting.20

  Washington was caught between Congress, the financial men, and the soldiers. He detested the mistreatment of his army, yet he could not abide mutiny and had always honored the supremacy of Congress. An army that turns on its own countrymen is no army, but merely armed men. He had to make the officers see that the anonymous addresses would lead them into “a gulf of civil horror.”21

  Gates presided over the meeting in the camp’s “Temple of Virtue,” built as a chapel and also used as a dancing academy. A lectern stood at one end of its largest room. The officers sat on log benches.22

  Washington arrived after the meeting came to order. He strode to the lectern, impeccably uniformed yet visibly agitated. After Gates conceded the floor, Washington stood, as one officer wrote later, “single and alone”; he spoke “not at the head of his troops, but as it were in opposition to them; and for a dreadful moment the interests of the army and its general seemed to be in competition.”23

  Reading from a text, Washington first claimed the army’s loyalty as “the constant companion and witness of your distresses.” He turned to the first anonymous address, which called on the army to remain in uniform if peace prevailed, and to refuse to fight if war resumed. He denounced “this dreadful alternative of either deserting our country in the extremest hour of her distress, or turning our arms against it.” Washington raised simple, powerful questions: “What can this writer have in view[?] . . . Can he be a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country?” Washington implored the officers to do nothing that would “lessen the dignity and sully the glory” they had earned.24

  Uncertain whether he had moved his listeners, Washington said he would read from a letter from a congressional delegate. In the emotion of the moment, he stumbled over its opening passage. He reached to his pocket for spectacles he had recently acquired, apologizing that he had “grown gray in their service, and now found himself growing blind.”

  The remark was “so natural, so unaffected,” recalled one officer, that “it forced its way to the heart.” Truculent officers melted. “Sensibility moisten[ed] every eye.” After he read the letter, Washington left. In his wake, the officer reported, “every doubt was dispelled, and the tide of patriotism rolled again in its wonted course.”25

  The power of that moment had come when Washington’s mask of command, earned through eight years of hard service, slipped and revealed the man underneath. In that quiet reference to his own physical decline, he acknowledged the burdens they shared. After all our sacrifices, he told them, after all that our brothers-in-arms have sacrificed, do not throw away your honor. He delivered the message with the impeccable timing of a veteran actor, a man who felt the impact of words and gestures. He reclaimed the officers’ hearts.

  They affirmed Washington’s message not only with their tears but with their prompt adoption of resolutions that rejected the anonymous addresses “with disdain” and “abhorrence.” They pledged their confidence that Congress would not send them home unpaid. A situation careening toward mutiny, which could have upended the tottering government in Philadelphia or undermined the peace with Britain, was saved.26

  Facing down the mutiny was that rarest of political moments: Washington stood before hostile men and changed their minds. Even Patrick Henry, the orator of the age, never did that. Henry inspired his supporters and infuriated his opponents; he did not convert. One analogy might be Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which persuades the Roman crowd that the slain Caesar was a hero, not a villain. But Shakespeare imagined that scene.

  Washington’s stature grew. He embodied the Revolution’s moral power. Three days after the meeting in the Temple of Virtue, he pleaded with Congress not to abandon the army’s officers to “grow old in poverty, wretchedness, and contempt.” Should that be permitted, he added, “then shall I have learned what ingratitude is, then shall I have realized a tale which will embitter every moment of my future life.”27

  A few days after receiving his letter, Congress agreed to the commutation of the officers’ pensions.28

  * * *

  After the risk of mutiny receded, Washington cast no recriminations against Gates or the Morrises or Hamilton. The war was ending. It was no time to reopen wounds. The financial men and Gates had been patriots; the nation would need their talents. Their minds had erred, not their hearts. They made the sort of mistakes that Washington had made when young, but now made rarely. That gift of judgment, steeped in the moral obligations that come with possessing power, allowed him to inspire a nation.29

  After ratifying the preliminary peace treaty, Congress on April 19 proclaimed the war over; it was the eighth anniversary of Lexington and Concord. The peace, Washington wrote, “has filled my mind with inexpressible satisfaction.” Yet uncomfortable duties lay before him.30

  He had to negotiate the return of prisoners and those slaves who sought freedom with the departing British. Several Mount Vernon slaves were among them. Prisoner exchanges went forward, but the British would not relinquish the former slaves.31

  Washington despised the prospect of sending soldiers home without pay, which he feared “will drive every man of honor and sensibility to the extremest horrors of despair.” He demanded that Congress calculate the pay due for each man’s service and pay at least three months of it. Congress did not do it. Washington asked the states to provide funds. They sent little. By late May, unwilling to retain soldiers no longer needed, Congress ordered Washington to send them home, paid or unpaid.32

  That shabby treatment triggered a final mutiny. Pennsylvania troops in Philadelphia submitted demands to congressional delegates, then were joined by disaffected soldiers from Lancaster. They surrounded the State House as congressional delegates worried how to respond to their intimidating presence. Neither state nor congressional officials could meet their demands. After passing through the jeering mutineers, the delegates relocated to Princeton. The mutiny collapsed when word arrived that Wash
ington had dispatched troops from Newburgh.33

  The men remaining at Newburgh were just as outraged. “We have punished some severely,” one general wrote, which made them “more quiet, but not the less dangerous.” He feared “some secret machinations of the soldiery burst[ing] upon us like a clap of thunder.”34

  To provide three months’ departure pay, Robert Morris agreed to sign personal notes to be distributed as money. Morris signed his name more than six thousand times on notes called “Bobs,” which ranged from five to one hundred dollars. Many soldiers left before the Bobs arrived. Each man also was entitled to a certificate specifying how much the government owed him. Most sold the certificates to speculators to pay for clothes and their journey home. Washington ordered that they could take their muskets with them.35

  “Starved, ragged and meagre,” one veteran recalled, with “not a cent to help themselves with,” the soldiers left in twos or threes. The lack of ceremony and paltry compensation tore their feelings. A Connecticut man spoke for all: “When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses.”36

  Washington shared his men’s sadness. He now, as he had predicted, had “learned what ingratitude is.” Some officers tried to mount a farewell dinner, but too many of them, one related, “thought the present period more adapted to sorrow than to mirth” and faced the “wretchedness and distress” of peacetime: “They wished to move from their present situation as quietly as possible.”37

  The commander in chief, however, could not leave until the British evacuated New York City, which took seven more months. With few soldiers to command, Washington turned to personal matters long neglected. To assist with “some teeth which are very troublesome to me,” he searched for a French dentist of good reputation. He toured upstate New York with Governor George Clinton. Vacant land for sale still worked on him like catnip. He and Clinton acquired a parcel in Saratoga Springs.38