Mary Ball Washington

by Craig Shirley

  It continued, more emphatically: “We, my countrymen, are dutiful members of society; and the person who endeavours to rob us of our rights, they are the rebels, rebels to their country, and to the rights of human nature.” The italics were in the original.

  To the proposal freeing slaves, it said they’d been “flattered with their freedom,” but issued several warnings: first, what was to be done with those who weren’t able to fight? The condition left off the elderly, the young, the women, the sick. If a father managed to escape, then the “masters [would] be provoked to severity.” The proclamation, it said, “leaves by far the greater number at the mercy of an enraged and injured people.” Slaves were property, and if the governor declared they no longer were, then what gave him that right? Certainly not the slaveholding colonists, whose law about runaway slaves or servants had been passed on from common law. Further, the Gazette believed that the British Empire, not the colonists, were the real extremists in slavery. At the end of the war, what then would happen to the slaves who fled to the Loyalist cause? “They will give up the offending Negroes to the rigour of the laws they have broken, or sell them in the West Indies, where every year they sell many thousands of their miserable brethren, to perish either by the inclemency of the weather, or the cruelty of barbarous masters. . . . Be not then, ye Negroes, tempted by this proclamation to ruin yourselves.”27

  Though minuscule compared to the number of militiamen or rebels, escaped slaves who heard Dunmore’s promise enthusiastically joined for the Ethiopian Regiment, an easy task for Dunmore compared to the recruitment of other Loyalist regiments.28

  AS IF A FERVOR WASN’T YET SWEEPING THE COLONIES COME JANUARY 1776, IT would only increase with the publication of an anonymous author, whose work, titled Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, became the most widely publicized and read work in American history. Its author, Thomas Paine, unknown at the time, “was an English radical, in his late thirties, who had failed at virtually every job he ever tried,” as described by historian James Stokesbury.29 Time was making more converts to the colonist cause, but so was reason, as Paine had written.

  Common Sense was not subtle in its motive: independence from Great Britain, independence from the monarchy, establishing something new and different—a republican government. It was so radical that there were rumors half a year later both domestic and overseas that John Adams was the author.30

  Within a month of its initial publication, three editions had been printed. Extracts immediately hit the papers. The Virginia Gazette ran a relatively short one, from the pamphlet’s third section, “Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs,” where Paine wrote, “I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single [advantage] that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain. I repeat the challenge, not a single advantage is derived.” He argued that any crop, or export, that they had would have been just as valuable to other nations without the bureaucratic mess of England. Further—and this resonated with those who had lived through the French and Indian War—any English war affected the colonies in trade and economy. Worst of all, war wasn’t a one-and-done deal. There was no “war to end all wars,” or real calls for permanent peace. Paine argued just the opposite, that the culture behind England was inherently warlike. “Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace.”31

  A CURIOUS NOTE WAS MADE IN THE VIRGINIA GAZETTE ON JULY 12, 1776: IT was placed on the third page, in a single sentence: “The postmaster in Fredericksburg writes, as of last Wednesday, that, by a gentleman just arrived from Philadelphia, he had seen at an Evening Post of the 2d instant, which mentions that the Hon. the Continental Congress had that day declared the United Colonies free and independent states.”32 On July 2, the Continental Congress unanimously voted in favor of independence, a day that John Adams believed would be celebrated by subsequent American generations. Two days later, the Fourth of July, the inspired document was ratified. It opened,

  When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

  The document listed several dozen grievances, not against Parliament only, but against the king. It marked a turning point in American thought: all previous petitions, even a year earlier, believed the monarch to be the legitimate sovereign. It was Parliament and his ministers that were mucking things up.

  No more diplomacy here.

  The Declaration of Independence became a rallying cry, not just for the colonies but, as many believed, for all of humanity. Here, certain individual rights, created by God, trumped any human law.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR BECAME THE WAR OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, making it less a fight against oppression and more a fight for freedom. A fight for America. As if the rupture was not apparent enough, on June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress voted to create a thirteen-striped, thirteen-stared flag, a unifying flag among all the colonies. The stars were to be “representing a new constellation,” a new break from the Mother Country.33 The Union Jack was forever furled.

  The Declaration of Independence only divided and solidified party lines. The Revolution in general and the War of Independence in particular were fought by three camps: the Patriots, the British, and the Loyalists. All three groups had distinct advantages, disadvantages, ideologies, and backgrounds.

  The Patriots—or rebels, if you asked any loyal subject—had an offensive war to fight, to fight for freedom, for independence, for a cause. The army consisted of former militiamen, most of whom were equivalent to normal infantrymen in Europe. There were hardly any grenadiers of note, and light infantry were introduced in May 1776. Cavalry was effectively nonexistent. The congress had allowed Washington to raise a fighting force upward of 27,500 men for one year, a sizable army, but the lack of cavalry and the British blockades made even the simplest task nearly impossible. What was wished for and what came to be were quite different, as by January of 1778, only 8,200 men were enlisted in the army.

  It was an uphill battle.

  The early Continental Army did not even have a simple uniform for its soldiers to wear. Originally it was the brown of the New England militia. In 1779, the infantry was ordered to be dressed in dark blue, with customizations by each state.

  Good weapons, likewise, were hard to come by. Musket balls and powder that each infantryman had were subject to rain and bad weather, rendering them useless. Artillery and cannon were inferior as well in both quality and quantity. Inferior as it was, the cannon was instrumental in the struggle for independence. General Henry Knox was one of the few notable—and exceptional—men who handled the cannon with pride, at battles like Boston, Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth.34

  That uphill battle was looking more and more like a mountain. By the end of the war, it was estimated that about 150,000 men enlisted in the Continental Army, with an additional 145,000 in the militias, representing about 10 percent of the colonial population.35 While that was sizable, it took more than numbers to win a war.

  The British Army, experienced in foreign and overseas battles, had the advantage in nearly every respect. They had organization and efficiency. Their uniforms were tight and striking, the famous red looking like a tidal wave of blood across the valleys as men marched to battle. They had been called since the 1740s both “Bloody Backs” and “Lobster Backs,” partly due to their uniform but also for their liberal use of the whip against criminal offenders. Men were coerced to join, and often soldiers themselves were criminals, offered freedom in
return for their service. If that didn’t work, then get them drunk and have them “agree” to enlist.36

  The redcoats were formidable, and they had better weapons, including the sixty-year-old flintlock musket known as “Brown Bess,” weighing fourteen pounds with a forty-two-or-so-inch barrel. It was accurate and deadly, to boot; one British colonel, George Hanger, wrote that it could “strike the figure of a man at 80 yards; it may be even at a hundred.” Any more distance would sacrifice accuracy, and Hanger wrote that at two hundred meters, “You may as well fire at the moon.”37

  Foreign mercenaries assisted the British Army, only adding more power behind the already deadly force: about thirty thousand Germans fought for British control, the largest of which came from Hesse-Cassel.38

  Finally, the Loyalists, that sort of mixed blend of American and British: American in culture, but British at heart. Their other label, the Tories, was perhaps uttered by rebels with disgust, the term going back a century. With all the demands that England and Parliament and the king had made on the colonists, they thought rebellion would foment. However, that certainly didn’t mean a declaration of independence from the Crown was necessary.

  Their beliefs were just as intellectual and just as philosophical as the Patriots’, they thought. The divine right of kings had been a historical norm for centuries. God Himself anointed kings as rulers of nations, so to go against the rightful king would be to go against the Supreme Being.

  Further, what would it really change? Liberty and individuality—if they were common among all peoples, as the rebels said, then should not they be common under a king? “You have taken some pains to prove,” wrote “A. W. Farmer” (in reality, the bishop of Connecticut, Samuel Seabury), “what would readily have been granted you—that liberty is a very good thing, and slavery a very bad thing. But then I must think that liberty under a King, Lords and Commons is as good as liberty under a republican Congress: And that slavery under a republican Congress is as bad, at least, as slavery under a King, Lords and Commons: And upon the whole, that liberty under the supreme authority and protection of Great-Britain, is infinitely preferable to slavery under an American Congress.” He continued, writing, “Man in a state of nature may be considered perfectly free from all restraints of law and government: and then the weak must submit to the strong. From such a state, I confess, I have a violent aversion.”39

  The Loyalists were always a part of the Revolution, just as much as the rebels. The first corps was formed in Massachusetts, in the fall of 1774, of about three hundred men. The actual fighters, a small percentage of the greater Loyalist cause, were almost unwelcomed in the war by both sides. Rebels, clearly, thought of them as traitors. The British, however, thought them ineffective, inferior to the professional British Army. The Tories’ call to fight was delayed by Parliament, and when it was approved, the results were ultimately disappointing in both number and deed.40

  SO WHERE DID ALL THE WOMEN GO?

  Martha was left alone; Mary was left alone; so many wives and daughters and mothers and sisters were left alone, waiting to hear of their husbands’ or fathers’ or sons’ or brothers’ situation. If the men did not die from a musket or cannon, then they died of disease. In February 1777, camped at Morristown in New Jersey, Washington wrote that the smallpox that hit the soldiers—which he had been inoculated against due to exposure decades earlier in Barbados—was so great and sweeping, “we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy.”41 Further, smallpox was only one disease of many. Dysentery and generally poor health conditions led to the spread of infection and illness. The enemy was often the least of their concerns.

  Though women did not take an active role in fighting, their role behind the scenes was just as vital. “Yes, Ladies. You have it in your power more than all your committees and Congresses, to strike the stroke, and make the hills and plains of America clap their hands,” wrote William Tennent III of South Carolina.42 One woman named Molly Pitcher was said to have participated in the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778, though her participation was believed to be more legend than truth.

  From the start, they all realized sacrifices had to be made. Not just of their husbands, but of themselves as well. “Our ALL is at stake,” wrote one Philadelphia woman to a Boston officer, soon after the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, “and we are called upon by every tie that is dear and sacred, to exert the spirit that Heaven has given us in this righteous struggle for LIBERTY.”43 Man, woman, child, or elderly—all had to sacrifice. They were susceptible to the horrors of war, yet were still an important rallying cry for independence in all the colonies.

  A simple look through documents of the day confirms this.

  Before the war, back in 1774, the women of Pennsylvania were asked by their neighbor Virginians to boycott tea in support of the colonies.44

  The second publisher to print the newly signed Declaration of Independence was a woman. Mary Katherine Goddard of Baltimore, Maryland, took an unusual role for that time period. She was the first female publisher in the colonies as well as the first female postmaster. She took the opportunity to print, with the permission of the congress, the Declaration with all typed signatories. At the bottom of the newspaper, at the place for the owner of the printing, she placed her own name.45

  In September 1776, closer to home for Mary and Martha, the Virginia Gazette ran a short letter from Anne Terrel of Bedford County “to the LADIES whose husbands are in the continental army.” It urged their support for the war. Terrel wrote, “I am not only willing to bear the absence of my dear husband for a short time, but am almost ready to start up with sword in hand to fight by his side in so glorious a cause. But let us support ourselves under the absence of our husbands as well as we can.” This included, she noted, making their own cloth and material, without the need for British trade.

  “Let the tyrants of Great Britain see that the American Ladies have both ingenuity and industry,” she wrote.46

  Among the many ways to boycott and increase American-made manufacturing was through “spinning bees,” to create fiber for clothes and other material. It was “almost an extension of their household work,” but for a cause greater than their home or plantation, wrote one historian.47 One pamphlet by Esther Reed of Philadelphia from June 1780, titled “The Sentiments of an American Woman,” asked the colonial women to be like “the heroines of antiquity.” Funds were also raised by organizations of women for the army, which were much needed.48

  Despite Terrel’s call for domestic support of their husbands, some women took more active parts in the war itself. Some had agency beyond staying at home. In April 1777 near Woodbridge, New Jersey, an unnamed woman, noticing a drunken Hessian soldier away from his regiment, went home, dressed as a man, and, with a gun, successfully took him prisoner and delivered him to a nearby Continental patrol.49

  The women were on both sides of the fight, of course. In Philadelphia in 1779, a warning about “the wives of so many of the most notorious of the British emissaries” went out, suspecting them of espionage, “sending all the intelligence in their power, and receiving and propagating their poisonous, erroneous, wicked falsehoods here.”50 Three Virginian women that same year were captured near Suffolk, Virginia, and forced onto British ships, including “one of whom was on the point of being married.”51 It was unknown if they ever were returned; rape was common, a fear all too real for some, even those as young as ten years of age.52 The British treated prisoners of war in the most terrible manner—women included.

  THE MOOD OF THE COLONIES WAS TENSE. WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA, LONG held to be remote from the booming population moving west, was no longer a viable capital city. With the James River to the south and the York River to the north, it was easily accessible by any invading British ship. At the urging of Thomas Jefferson, then governor, in 1779, the legislature agreed to move the capital away. After much bickering and debate about whether the new seat of state government should be Fredericksburg, Charlottesville, St
aunton, or some other area, it was finally agreed in the spring of 1780 to move the capital to Richmond, founded some forty years earlier and some forty-five miles to the northwest, more inland and more secure—and closer to Mary’s Fredericksburg.53

  WAR CHANGED MEN. TO BE IN BATTLES AND LEAD OTHERS THROUGH SLEEPLESS nights, military strategies to shrink the inevitable loss of life, to kill others who are trying to kill you. To see the carnage, the blood, the gore, the severed legs and arms, the bullet and cannon wounds that tore into men’s chests and skulls, leaving nothing but pulp in their wake. To see plagues and hunger and sickness among people, not by the dozens but by the hundreds, if not thousands. That can change a person, physically, mentally, spiritually. It can age that person beyond the years that he lived.

  So did it change George, the veteran?

  One man, writing in the London Chronicle on July 22, 1780, wrote that Washington “is a tall, well-made man, rather large-boned, and has a genteel address. His features are manly and bold; his eyes of a bluish cast and very lively; his hair a deep brown; his face rather large, and marked with the smallpox; his complexion sunburned, and without much color. His countenance sensible, composed, and thoughtful. There is a remarkable air of dignity about him, with a striking degree of gracefulness. He has an excellent understanding, without much quickness; is strictly just, vigilant, and generous; an affectionate husband, a faithful friend, a father to the deserving soldier; gentle in his manners, in temper reserved; a total stranger to religious prejudices; in morals irreproachable; and never known to exceed the bounds of the most rigid temperance. In a word, all his friends and acquaintances allow that no man ever united in his own person a more perfect alliance of the virtues of a philosopher with the talents of a general. Candor, sincerity, affability, and simplicity seem to be the striking features of his character; and, when occasion offers, the power of displaying the most determined bravery and independence of spirit.”54