His Excellency_George Washington

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Henry Knox was also a gifted amateur, a Boston bookseller well read in engineering whom Washington plucked from the ranks to head an artillery regiment. He demonstrated his resourcefulness in December 1775 by transporting the British cannon captured at Ticonderoga over the ice and snow on forty sleds driven by eighty yoke of oxen to the Cambridge encampment. Like Greene, he worshipped the ground Washington walked on. Both Greene and Knox were subsequently showered with glory, Knox living on to become Washington’s secretary of war in the 1790s.10

  The pattern is reasonably clear. Washington recruited military talent wherever he could find it, and he had a knack for discovering ability in unlikely places and then allowing it to ride the same historical wave he was riding into the American pantheon. But he was extremely protective of his own authority. While he did not encourage sycophants, if dissenters ever broached their criticism out-of-doors, as both Lee and Gates ended up doing, he was usually unforgiving. One could make a plausible case, and several scholars have done so, that Washington’s insistence on personal loyalty was rooted in his insecurity in the face of Lee’s and Gates’s superior military credentials. But the more compelling explanation is that he understood instinctively how power worked, and that his own quasi-monarchical status was indispensable to galvanize an extremely precarious cause. Moreover, as it turned out, his chief liability as a military strategist was not his sense of inferiority, but just the opposite. His special status as “His Excellency” fit him better than any of his old suits, and he was determined to protect it from tearing and shredding. Just as the standing army he sought to create contradicted the political principles it claimed to be fighting for, Washington’s king-like status contradicted the potent antimonarchical ethos in revolutionary ideology. In both cases, Washington acknowledged the incongruity but preferred victory to consistency.11

  From the very start, however, he made a point of insisting that his expansive mandate was dependent upon, and subordinate to, the will of the American citizenry as represented in the Continental Congress. His letters to John Hancock, the first president of the Congress, always took the form of requests rather than demands. And he established the same posture of official deference toward the New England governors and provincial governments that supplied troops for his army. Washington did not use the term “civilian control,” but he was scrupulous about acknowledging that his own authority derived from the elected representatives in the Congress. If there were two institutions that embodied the emerging nation to be called the United States—the Continental army and the Continental Congress—he insisted that the former was subordinate to the latter.12

  In truth, important precedents were being established on the fly during this first year of the war, as both Washington and the leadership in the Congress improvised on the edge of the imperial crisis. What, for example, should one call the army? Before the term “Continental army” gained acceptance, the preferred term was the “Army of the United Colonies of North America.” (The colonies had yet to become states, and the term “American,” which had been used as an epithet by Englishmen to describe the provincial creatures on the western periphery of the British Empire, still retained its negative connotation.) When Washington approved the design for a “union flag,” it looked eerily similar to the Union Jack, so when first hoisted over Cambridge in January 1776 the British troops inside Boston cheered, thinking it signaled surrender. The first official manifestation of civilian control occurred in October 1775, when a delegation from the Continental Congress that included Benjamin Franklin met with Washington and his staff in Cambridge to approve troop requests for an army of 20,372 men.13

  Strictly speaking, the Continental army did not exist until the start of the new year; until then, Washington was commanding a collection of provincial militia units whose enlistments ran out in December 1775. Politically speaking, the endorsement of Washington’s troop requests by the Continental Congress was deceptively encouraging, since compliance depended upon approval by the respective state governments, which insisted that all recruits be volunteers and serve limited terms of no more than one year. And logistically speaking, the vaunted principles of state sovereignty, volunteerism, and limited enlistments—all expressions of revolutionary conviction—produced a military turnstile that bedeviled Washington throughout the war. Instead of a hard core of experienced veterans, the Continental army became a constantly fluctuating stream of amateurs, coming and going like tourists. “It is not in the pages of History, perhaps, to furnish a case like ours,” Washington complained to Hancock, “to maintain a post within Musket Shot of the Enemy for Six Months together . . . and at the same time to disband one Army and recruit another, within that distance of twenty odd British regiments.” The very term “Continental army,” then, implied a level of coherence and stability that was permanently at odds with the transitory collective he was commanding.14

  In this first year of the war, when the revolutionary fires burned their brightest, Washington presumed that he would enjoy a surplus of recruits. In October 1775 a council of war voted unanimously “to reject all slaves & by a great Majority to reject Negroes altogether.” The following month Washington ordered that “Neither Negroes, Boys unable to bear arms, nor old men unfit to endure the fatigues of the campaign, are to be enlisted.” But within a few months, as it became clear that there would not be enough new recruits to fill the ranks as the militia units disbanded, he was forced to change his mind: “It has been represented to me,” he wrote Hancock, “that the free negroes who have Served in this Army, are very much dissatisfied at being discarded—and it is to be apprehended that they may Seek employ in the ministerial Army—I have presumed to depart from the Resolution respecting them, & have given licence for them being enlisted; if this is disapproved of by Congress, I will put a stop to it.” In this backhanded fashion Washington established the precedent for a racially integrated Continental army, except for a few isolated incidents the only occasion in American military history when blacks and whites served alongside one another in integrated units until the Korean War.15

  Finally, the siege of Boston afforded the first extended glimpse at Washington’s cast of mind as a military strategist. His motives for supporting American independence were always more elemental than refined. Essentially, he saw the conflict as a struggle for power in which the colonists, if victorious, destroyed British presumptions of superiority and won control over half a continent for themselves. While it would be somewhat excessive to say that his central military goal was an equally elemental urge to smash the British army in one decisive battle, there was a discernible mano a mano dimension to his thinking, a tendency to regard each engagement as a personal challenge to his own honor and reputation. At Cambridge it took the form of several risky offensive schemes to dislodge the British regulars, once it became clear that Howe was unwilling to come out from behind his Boston redoubts and face him in open battle. On three occasions, in September 1775, then again in January and February 1776, Washington proposed frontal assaults against the British defenses, arguing that “a Stroke, well aim’d at this critical juncture, might put a final end to the War.” (In one of the plans he envisioned a night attack across the ice with advanced units wearing ice skates.) His staff rejected each proposal on the grounds that the Continental army lacked both the size and the discipline to conduct such an attack with sufficient prospects for success. Eventually Washington accepted a more limited tactical scheme to occupy Dorchester Heights, which placed Howe’s garrison within range of American artillery, thereby forcing Howe’s decision to evacuate or see his army slowly destroyed. But throughout the siege Washington kept looking for a more direct and conclusive battle, suggesting that he himself was ready for a major engagement even if his army was not.16

  His most aggressive proposal, which was adopted, called for a separate campaign against Quebec. Once it was clear that Howe did not intend to oblige him by coming out of Boston, Washington decided to detach twelve hundred troops from his
Cambridge camp and send them up the Kennebec River into Canada under the command of a young colonel named Benedict Arnold. Washington’s thinking about the importance of the Canadian theater reflected his memories of the French and Indian War, in which Canadian forts had been the strategic keys to victory, as well as his belief that the stakes in the current war included the entire eastern half of North America. As he put it to Arnold, “I need not mention to you the great importance of this place & the consequent possession of all Canada in the Scale of American affairs—to whomsoever It belongs, in there favour probably, will the Balance turn.” By capturing Quebec, Arnold would “restore the only link wanting in the great chain of Continental union.”17

  However conventional his thinking about Quebec’s strategic significance, Washington’s commitment to a Canadian campaign was recklessly bold. Arnold’s force had to traverse 350 miles of the most difficult terrain in New England during the outset of the winter snows. Within a month the troops were eating their horses, dogs, and moccasins, dying by the scores from exposure and disease. It is difficult to imagine such a campaign ever being contemplated later in the war, but at this early stage Washington shared the prevalent belief that patriotic fervor, combined with sheer courage, could defeat the elements and the odds.

  Despite truly heroic efforts by Arnold and his troops, the Canadian campaign exposed the illusory character of Washington’s convictions. After linking up with a force commanded by General Richard Montgomery as planned, Arnold’s depleted army made a desperate night assault on Quebec in a blinding snowstorm on December 31, 1775. The result was a catastrophic defeat, both Arnold and Montgomery falling in the first minutes of the battle. (Arnold suffered a serious leg wound but survived, while Montgomery had his face shot off and died on the spot.) If Canada was the key, the British now held it more firmly than before. The Quebec debacle was a decisive blow, but not the kind Washington had intended.18

  Finally, the Cambridge chapter revealed another Washington trait that has not received sufficient attention in the existent scholarship because it is only indirectly connected to military strategy. Historians have long known that more than two-thirds of the American casualties in the war were the result of disease. But only recently—and this is rather remarkable—have they recognized that the American Revolution occurred within a virulent smallpox epidemic of continental scope that claimed about 100,000 lives. Washington first encountered the epidemic outside Boston, where he learned that between ten and thirty funerals were occurring each day because of the disease. British troops, though hardly impervious to the smallpox virus, tended to possess greater immunity because they came from English, Scottish, and Irish regions, where the disease had existed for generations, allowing resistance to build up within families over time. The soldiers in the Continental army, on the other hand, tended to come from previously unexposed farms and villages, so they were extremely vulnerable. At any point in time, between one-fourth and one-fifth of Washington’s army at Cambridge was unfit for duty, the majority down with smallpox. Quite probably Arnold’s force at Quebec was also decimated by the disease in the weeks before the fatal attack.19

  Washington, of course, was immune to smallpox because of his youthful exposure in Barbados. (Subsequent admirers claimed that he was immune to everything.) Equally important, he understood the ravaging implications of a smallpox epidemic within the congested conditions of his encampment, and he quarantined the patients in a hospital at Roxbury. When the British began their evacuation of Boston in March 1776, he ordered that only troops with pockmarked faces be allowed into the city. And although many educated Americans opposed inoculation, believing that it actually spread the disease, Washington strongly supported it. It would take two years before inoculation became mandatory for all troops serving in the Continental army, but the policy began to be implemented in the first year of the war. When historians debate Washington’s most consequential decisions as commander in chief, they are almost always arguing about specific battles. A compelling case can be made that his swift response to the smallpox epidemic and to a policy of inoculation was the most important strategic decision of his military career.

  After lingering in the Boston harbor for over a week, the British fleet sailed away on March 17, 1776. The American press reported the retreat as a crushing blow to the British army. The Continental Congress ordered a gold medallion cast in Washington’s honor. Harvard College awarded him an honorary degree. And John Hancock predicted that he had earned “a conspicuous Place in the Temple of Fame, which Shall inform Posterity, that under your Directions, an undisciplined Band of Husbandmen, in the Course of a few Months became Soldiers,” defeating “an Army of Veterans, commanded by the most experienced Generals.” While uplifting, subsequent events would soon show that this was an overly optimistic appraisal.20

  PANORAMA

  AS WASHINGTON took his army south from Boston to New York in the spring of 1776, the Continental Congress moved closer to declaring American independence, and a British fleet carrying 33,000 soldiers and sailors—the largest expeditionary force yet to cross the Atlantic—moved closer to the American coastline. The conjunction of these two dramatic developments virtually assured that the formerly remote prospects for a peaceful reconciliation were now gone altogether. One of the great ironies imbedded in that propitious moment, available to us only in retrospect, was that widespread support for what Washington described as the “American Cause” was in fact cresting, and would never again reach the height it achieved during the Boston siege. “The spirit of ’76” should more accurately (if less lyrically) be called “the spirit of late ’75 and early ’76,” because patriotic fervor began to erode just as the war became politically official and militarily threatening.21

  Though Washington himself never wavered—in the end, steadfastness was his most valuable attribute, along with the stamina that accompanied it—popular enthusiasm for the war faded alongside the illusion that it would be a brief affair. The mythological rendition of dedicated citizen-soldiers united for eight years in the fight for American liberty was, in fact, a romantic fiction designed by later generations to conceal the deep divisions and widespread apathy within the patriot camp. The fundamental strategic challenge facing Washington was to fight a conventional war against the British army in the midst of a civil war for the hearts and minds of the American people. And the very term “American people” suggests a national collective that was still in the process of being born. If we are to properly assess his achievement, we need to fully understand his predicament after the Boston phase. That means moving to a higher elevation from which to scan the historical terrain more panoramically than anyone on the ground could manage at the time.22

  Why was that huge British fleet sailing toward the American coast? The obvious answer is that George III and his chief ministers, Lord North and Lord George Germain, had decided to crush the rebellion with one massive projection of British military power. But since, at least in retrospect, this decision has gone down as one of the biggest blunders in the history of British statecraft, and since, again in retrospect, the ingredients for a viable political solution to the imperial crisis were clearly present from 1774 onward, why did the ministry regard war as its only option? The political solution had been offered by the Continental Congress in 1774 and again in 1775. Three years later, after the disastrous defeat at Saratoga, Lord North proposed essentially the same solution: freedom from Parliament’s authority over colonial domestic affairs in return for continued economic membership in the British Empire. But by then it was too late. This principle of shared or overlapping sovereignty between the home government and peripheral states eventually became the political framework for the British Commonwealth, and before that the federal idea at the core of the American Constitution. By embracing it in 1775 the British government would have prolonged American membership in the British Empire until well into the next century and avoided the American Revolution, and American history would have flowed forward i
n a direction that took little if any account of George Washington.

  More recent American history should allow us to comprehend more empathetically the reasons for the fatal British miscalculation. In the late eighteenth century Great Britain was a newly arrived world power still learning how to manage its recently acquired empire. A version of the “domino theory” haunted all the ministry’s deliberations: if the American colonies were granted political autonomy over their domestic affairs, then Canada, Ireland, and the British Caribbean possessions would surely demand equivalent status and the entire empire, India included, would gradually unravel. Military advisors tended to view the looming conflict through the prism of the French and Indian War, where the British army captured French forts at the strategic strong-points (such as Louisbourg, Quebec, and Pittsburgh) and won a decisive victory, all the while developing only contempt for the fighting prowess of American militia. (The Earl of Sandwich informed the ministry that, based on his experience, 1,000 British regulars could defeat 100,000 provincial troops.) Dissenting voices warned that the lessons of the French and Indian War were irrelevant, since there were no strategic strong-points that, once captured, produced a decisive conclusion. Lord Camden, for example, cautioned his colleagues in Parliament that the British army would find itself adrift in a boundless sea of troubles: “To conquer a great continent of 1,800 miles, containing three millions of people . . . seems an undertaking not to be rashly engaged in.” But such dissenters were ignored. The best and brightest minds in the government were confident that the bulk of the American population were loyal to the king and that, regardless of colonial loyalty, the British army was invincible.23