His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  The American Revolution was the central event in Washington’s life, the crucible for his development as a mature man, a prominent statesman, and a national hero. And while zealous students of the Civil War might contest the claim, the movement that Washington found himself heading was also the most consequential event in American history, the crucible within which the political personality of the United States took shape. In effect, the character of the man and the character of the nation congealed and grew together during an extended moment of eight years. Washington was not clairvoyant about history’s next destination. But he did realize from the start that, wherever history was headed, he and America were going there together.

  With only a few exceptions—his conferences with the Continental Congress, and his stopover at Mount Vernon on the way to Yorktown in the fall of 1781—Washington spent the entire war in the field with the Continental army. He was not, by any standard, a military genius. He lost more battles than he won; indeed, he lost more battles than any victorious general in modern history. Moreover, his defeats were frequently a function of his own overconfident and aggressive personality, especially during the early stages of the war, when he escaped to fight another day only because the British generals opposing him seemed choked with the kind of caution that, given his resources, Washington should have adopted as his own strategy. But in addition to being fortunate in his adversaries, he was blessed with personal qualities that counted most in a protracted war. He was composed, indefatigable, and able to learn from his mistakes. He was convinced that he was on the side of destiny—or, in more arrogant moments, sure that destiny was on his side. Even his critics acknowledged that he could not be bribed, corrupted, or compromised. Based on his bravery during several battles, he apparently believed he could not be killed. Despite all his mistakes, events seemed to align themselves with his own instincts. He began the war at the siege of Boston determined to deliver a decisive blow against more disciplined and battle-tested British regulars. He ended it at the siege of Yorktown doing precisely that.

  One incident near the end of the war provides a clue to the transformation in his character wrought by the intense experience of serving so long as the singular embodiment of commitment to the cause. In 1781, Lund Washington reported that a British warship had anchored in the Potomac near Mount Vernon, presumably with orders to ravage Washington’s estate. When the British captain offered assurances that he harbored no hostile intentions, Lund sent out a boatload of provisions to express his gratitude for the captain’s admirable restraint. When Washington learned of this incident he berated Lund: “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my House, and laid the Plantation in ruins.” The estate he had spent so long building now paled in comparison to the reputation earned as the primal symbol of American independence. Lund Washington was protecting the interest of the foxhunting Virginia squire who had gone off to war. But that man, Washington was at pains to explain, had grown into something else.1

  CAMBRIDGE PREVIEWS

  THE STORY of the siege of Boston can be told in one sentence: Washington’s makeshift army kept more than ten thousand British troops bottled up in the city for over nine months, at which point the British sailed away to Halifax. Less a battle than a marathon staring match, the conflict exposed the anomalous political circumstance created by the Continental Congress, which was prepared to initiate a war a full year before it was ready to declare American independence. Although Washington subsequently claimed that he knew by the early fall of 1775 that George III was determined to pursue a military rather than political solution to the imperial crisis, he went along with prevalent fiction that the British garrison in Boston contained “Ministerial Troops,” meaning that they did not represent the king’s wishes so much as the policy of his evil and misguided ministers. And although he eventually expressed his frustration with the moderate faction in the Continental Congress, who were “still feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation,” Washington also recognized that the radical faction, led by John Adams, needed to exhaust all the diplomatic alternatives and patiently wait for public opinion outside New England to mobilize around the novel notion of American independence.2

  But if the siege of Boston was more an anomalous preliminary than the main event, it was also Washington’s debut as commander in chief. Here, for the first time, he encountered the logistical challenges he would face during the ensuing years of the war. He met many of the men who would comprise his general staff for the duration. And here he demonstrated both the strategic instincts and the leadership skills that would sustain him, and sometimes lead him astray, until the glorious end. The Cambridge encampment, then, was a preview of some tumultuous coming attractions.

  Events of enduring significance occurred before Washington arrived at Cambridge. On June 17, 1775, about 2,200 British troops made three frontal assaults on New England militia units entrenched on Breed’s Hill. Later misnamed the Battle of Bunker Hill, the fight was a tactical victory for the British, but at the frightful cost of more than one thousand casualties, nearly half the attacking force. When word of the battle reached London, several British officers observed caustically that a few more such victories and the entire British army would be annihilated. On the American side, Bunker Hill was regarded as a great moral triumph that reinforced the lesson of Lexington and Concord; namely, that militia volunteers fighting for a cause they freely embraced could defeat disciplined British mercenaries. Several newspaper stories made the connection between Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela and Bunker Hill, which seemed to suggest that the very man who had once rescued the redcoats could now lead inspired American amateurs to a quick and easy victory by mobilizing their superior virtue against plodding professionals.3

  Two seductive illusions were converging here. The first was the perennial belief harbored by both sides at the start of most wars that the conflict would be short. The second, which became the central myth of American military history, was that militia volunteers fighting for principle made better soldiers than trained professionals. Washington was not completely immune to the first illusion, though his version of a quick American victory depended on the willingness of Commander Gage’s replacement, General William Howe, to commit his force in a decisive battle outside Boston, in a repeat of the Bunker Hill scenario, which would then prompt the king’s ministers to propose acceptable terms for peace. Neither Howe nor the British ministry was prepared to cooperate along these lines, and since the only acceptable peace terms on the American side—independence of Parliament’s authority—was at this stage non-negotiable on the British side, even Washington’s narrow hope had no realistic prospects.4

  Washington was thoroughly immune to the second illusion about the innate superiority of militia. Based on his earlier experience as commander of the Virginia Regiment, reinforced by what he witnessed on a day-to-day basis at his Cambridge encampment, he became convinced that an army of short-term volunteers, no matter how dedicated to the cause, could not win the war. “To expect then the same service from Raw, and undisciplined Recruits as from Veteran Soldiers,” he explained, “is to expect what never did, and perhaps never will happen.” His convictions on this score only deepened and hardened over the years, but from the start he believed that militia were only peripheral supplements to the hard core, which needed to be a professional army of disciplined troops who, like him, signed on for the duration. His model, in effect, was the British army. This, of course, was richly ironic, since opposition to a standing army had been a major source of colonial protest during the prewar years. To those who insisted that a militia army was more compatible with revolutionary principles, Washington was brutally frank: those principles can only flourish, he insisted, if we win the war, and that can only happen with an army of regulars.5

  Another significant development occurred on his way to Cambridge, an event less conspicuous than the
Battle of Bunker Hill but with even more far-reaching implications. Both the New York and the Massachusetts legislatures wrote congratulatory letters addressed to “His Excellency,” which soon became his official designation for the remainder of the war. To be sure, “His Excellency” is not quite the same thing as “His Majesty,” but throughout the summer and fall of 1775, even as delegates to the Continental Congress struggled to sustain the fiction that George III remained a friend to American liberty, poets and balladeers were already replacing the British George with an American version of the same name.6

  In October 1775, the African-born slave and poet Phillis Wheatley sent Washington her lyrical tribute, which concluded: “A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine / With gold unfading, Washington! Be thine.” (Washington wrote Wheatley to express his thanks, the only occasion in his correspondence when he directly addressed a slave.) The public disavowal of George III that Tom Paine launched with Common Sense in January 1776, and that Thomas Jefferson then made official in the Declaration of Independence the following July, destroyed George III as the singular symbol of authority for American subjects in the British Empire. The obvious, indeed the only personal replacement as the new symbol of authority for American citizens in the nascent yet-to-be-named nation, was Washington. Unlike European monarchs, the source of his authority was neither biological nor spiritual (i.e., divine right), but rather the purity of his revolutionary credentials. He was not an accident of blood; he had chosen and had been chosen. When General Gage questioned the legitimacy of his rank, Washington responded in a letter that was widely circulated in the American press: “You affect, Sir, to despise all Rank not derived from the same Source with your own. I cannot conceive any more honourable, than that which flows from that uncorrupted Choice of a brave and free People—the purest Source & original Fountain of all Power.”7

  This new semi-royal status fit in the grooves of his own personality and proved an enduring asset as important politically as the Custis inheritance had been economically. The man who was obsessed with control was now the designated sovereign of the American Revolution. The man who could not bear to have his motives or personal integrity questioned was assured that he enjoyed more trust than any American alive. The British would change commanding general four times; Washington was forever. Certain deficiencies in his character—aloofness, a formality that virtually precluded intimacy—were now regarded as essential by-products of his special status, indeed expressions of his inherent dignity. And the man who had bristled at the presumptive condescension of British officers and officials was now in charge of the military instrument designed to obliterate the British army and all vestiges of British power in North America. In sum, his new status as “His Excellency” gave him the starring role in a historical drama that seemed tailor-made for him.

  On the other hand, the political and even psychological ramifications of his public role did require some personal adjustments. In August 1775 he made several critical comments about the lack of discipline in the New England militia units under his command and described New Englanders in general as “an exceedingly dirty & nasty people.” As a mere Virginia planter such expressions of regional prejudice would have been unexceptional. But as the symbolic spokesman for what were still being called “the United Colonies,” the comments created political firestorms in both the Massachusetts legislature and the Continental Congress. When Joseph Reed, a Philadelphia lawyer who served briefly as Washington’s most trusted aide-de-camp, apprised him of the hostile reaction, Washington expressed his regrets for the indiscretion: “I will endeavor at a reformation, as I can assure you my dear Reed that I wish to walk in such a Line as will give most general Satisfaction.” By nature a reserved and self-contained personality, Washington was discovering that his new public obligation to be all things to all men required him to suppress even the smallest residue of private opinion that might otherwise leak out. Several months later, when Reed reported that the gossip machines in the Continental Congress continued to produce whisperings about regional prejudice against New England, Washington again vowed “to make my conduct coincide with the wishes of Mankind as far as I can consistently.” But it was not easy, even for him, to extinguish completely his personal thoughts and feelings. “I have often thought,” he complained to Reed, “how much happier I should have been, if, instead of accepting of a command under such Circumstances I had taken my Musket upon my Shoulder & enterd the Ranks, or . . . had retir’d to the back Country, and livd in a Wig-wam.”8

  Even within what he called “my family,” Washington needed to remain circumspect, because his family meant the staff and aides-de-camp at his headquarters. We know that Billy Lee, his mulatto servant, accompanied him on foot and on horseback at all times, brushed his hair and tied it in a queue every morning, but no record of their conversations has survived. We know that Martha joined him at Cambridge in January 1776, as she would at winter quarters during all subsequent campaigns, but their correspondence, which almost surely contained the fullest expression of personal opinion Washington allowed himself, for that very reason were destroyed after he died. The bulk of his correspondence during the war years, so vast in volume and officious in tone that modern-day readers risk mental paralysis, was written by his aides-de-camp. It is therefore the expression of an official, composite personality, usually speaking a platitudinous version of revolutionary rhetoric. For example, here are the General Orders for February 27, 1776, when Washington was contemplating a surprise attack on the British defenses: “it is a noble Cause we are engaged in, it is the Cause of virtue and mankind, every temporal advantage and comfort to us, and our posterity, depends upon the Vigour of our exertions; in short, Freedom or Slavery must be the result of our conduct, there can therefore be no greater Inducement to men to behave well.” The inflated rhetoric concluded with the more candid warning that anyone attempting to retreat or desert “will be instantly shot down.”9

  Aware of his own limited formal education, Washington selected college graduates who were “Pen-men” as aides, whose facility with language assured that the grammar and syntax of his correspondence was worthy of “His Excellency.” His most trusted aides—Joseph Reed was the first, followed by Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens later in the war—became surrogate sons who enjoyed direct access to the general in after-dinner sessions, when Washington liked to encourage conversation as he ate nuts and drank a glass of Madeira. Part extended family and part court, these favored aides traded influence for total loyalty. “It is absolutely necessary therefore, for me to have persons that can think for me,” Washington explained, “as well as execute Orders.” The price for what he called his “unbounded confidence” was their equally unbounded service to his reputation. It was understood as a matter of honor that they would write no revealing memoirs after the war, and none of them did.

  His other “family” was the cast of senior officers that assembled around him during the siege of Boston. Twenty-eight generals eventually served under Washington in the Continental army over the course of the war. Almost half of them were present at Cambridge in 1775–76. A full accounting of even that smaller group, interesting though it may be, would carry us down twisting side roads and astray of our proper objective, which is Washington himself. Four of Washington’s chief lieutenants—Charles Lee, Horatio Gates, Nathanael Greene, and Henry Knox—provide the outline of the prevalent patterns that would shape his treatment of high-ranking subordinates.

  Lee and Gates were both former officers in the British army with greater professional experience than Washington. Charles Lee was a colorful eccentric. The Mohawks had named him “Boiling Water” for his fiery temperament, which at Cambridge took the form of threats to place all deserters on a hill as targets within musket-shot of British pickets. Lee presumed a greater familiarity with Washington than other generals, addressing him as “My Dear General” rather than “His Excellency.” He also questioned Washington’s preferred strategy of engaging British regulars o
n their own terms in a European-style war, preferring guerrilla tactics and a greater reliance on militia. Lee also liked to make conspicuous displays of his irreverence toward military etiquette, was forever disheveled in his appearance, and was often seen conversing with his ever-present pack of dogs, again the exact opposite of Washington’s dignified formality.

  Horatio Gates was called “Granny Gates” because of his advanced age (he was fifty) and the wire-rimmed spectacles dangling from his nose. He cultivated a greater familiarity with his troops than Washington thought appropriate and, like Lee, favored a greater reliance on militia. Gates thought that Washington’s plan for an assault on the British garrison in Boston was pure madness and, given his experience, felt free to speak out for a more defensive strategy in several councils of war. Both Lee and Gates ended up colliding with Washington later in the war and becoming early exhibits of the primal principle of revolutionary era politics: Cross Washington and you risk ruination.

  Greene and Knox were both inexperienced amateurs drawn to military service by their zeal for American independence. Nathanael Greene was a Rhode Island Quaker, eventually called “the fighting Quaker,” who was cast out of the Society of Friends because of his support for the war. He volunteered to serve in a local militia company, the Kentish Guards, at the rank of private, but ascended to brigadier general within a year on the basis of his obvious intelligence and disciplined dedication. By the end of the war, especially during the Carolina campaigns, he demonstrated strategic and tactical brilliance; he was Washington’s choice as successor if the great man went down in battle. At Cambridge, however, Greene was described as “the rawest, the most untutored being” and placed himself squarely beneath Washington’s authority as an aspiring general officer.