by Ron Chernow
In the battle’s concluding chapter, two hundred British troops sought asylum in the principal college building, Nassau Hall. According to legend, Alexander Hamilton deployed his artillery against the building and decapitated a portrait of King George II with a cannonball. By the time a white flag of surrender popped from a window, the victorious Americans had inflicted more than five hundred casualties and taken between two hundred and three hundred prisoners; only about three dozen Americans were killed in the one-sided battle. To Washington’s dismay, his soldiers, avid for booty, ransacked Nassau Hall and dragged out food, clothing, furniture, and even paintings. They also fleeced uniforms from British corpses on the battlefield. To stop this plunder, Washington had the field cordoned off by sentries. He also accompanied two wounded redcoats to private homes, where American surgeons treated them and performed amputations. In his humane treatment of prisoners, Washington wanted to make a major statement, telling one officer that British captives should “have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”59
The consecutive victories at Trenton and Princeton resurrected American spirits, especially since the Continental Army had scored an undisputed victory over British regulars. The psychology of the war was dramatically reversed, with the once-dominant British presence in New Jersey “reduced to the compass of a very few miles,” in Washington’s view.60 By rolling back British gains, he undercut the Crown’s new strategy of securing territory and handing out pardons. Nathanael Greene estimated that the Americans had killed or captured up to three thousand enemy soldiers in a two-week stretch. Although Washington wanted to proceed to New Brunswick and raid a major storehouse of British supplies, his men hadn’t slept for two days, and he didn’t believe he could press them further.
The back-to-back victories had also changed the calculus of the war. Henceforth the British would have to conquer the colonists, not simply cow them into submission. The Americans, having bounced back from near despair, now showed an irrepressible esprit de corps. “A few days ago, they had given up the cause for lost,” scoffed the Loyalist Nicholas Cresswell. “Their late successes have turned the scale and now they are all liberty mad again.”61 “Four weeks ago, we expected to end the war with the capture of Philadelphia,” said the Hessian captain Johann Ewald, “and now we had to render Washington the honor of thinking about our defense.”62
The consecutive battles exalted George Washington to a new pinnacle of renown. He had taken the demoralized men who shuffled wearily across New Jersey and shaped them into valiant heroes. Through the many newspaper accounts, these events passed directly into American legend. “Had he lived in the days of idolatry,” said a rhapsodic piece in the Pennsylvania Journal, Washington would have “been worshiped as a god.”63 The battle’s repercussions were worldwide, overturning the presumption that amateur volunteers could never defeat a well-trained European army. Even Frederick the Great added his congratulations: “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”64
For all the many virtues he had shown in his life, nothing quite foreshadowed the wisdom, courage, fortitude, and resolution that George Washington had just exhibited. Adversity had brought his best traits to the surface and even ennobled him. Sensing it, Abigail Adams told her friend Mercy Otis Warren, “I am apt to think that our later misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief.” She quoted a line from the English poet Edward Young: “ ‘Affliction is the good man’s shining time.’”65 One consistent thread from his earlier life had prefigured these events: Washington’s tenacity of purpose, his singular ability to stalk a goal with all the resources at his disposal.
Another stalwart admirer of Washington was Charles Willson Peale. In 1779 the Supreme Executive Council of Philadelphia commissioned him to execute a full-length portrait of Washington to commemorate his Princeton triumph. Washington sat for the portrait over a two-week period, and the result was an inspiring work of easy, graceful lines. A debonair Washington stands with Nassau Hall in the background and a Hessian standard unfurled at his feet. His blue jacket with gold epaulettes opens to reveal a pale blue sash curving across his paunch. He holds one arm akimbo, the other resting on the barrel of a cannon. At the height of his power, Washington stands tall and imposing in high black boots with gold-colored spurs; the left foot is elegantly drawn back, resting on its toes. The portrait breathes a manly swagger, an air of high-flown accomplishment. All traces of provincial tentativeness and uncertainty have disappeared from Washington’s personality. This was the magnetic Washington that so enthralled his contemporaries, not the stiff, craggy figure made familiar to later generations by Gilbert Stuart.
Washington didn’t pause to savor his victory at Princeton. Once Cornwallis awoke and discovered the American ruse, he rushed toward Princeton at a maddening, helter-skelter pace “in a most infernal sweat, running, puffing and blowing and swearing at being so outwitted,” laughed Henry Knox.66 The British arrived an hour after the Continental Army had deserted the town. Washington put his dazed, depleted men through the paces of another fifteen-mile march north to Somerset Court House. They arrived there after sundown and, exhausted, instantly fell asleep on any available bed of straw they could find.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Busy Scenes of a Camp
FOR ALL THE ILLUSTRIOUS FEATS that Washington’s soldiers performed at Trenton and Princeton, they were weary from their epic labors, and the euphoria of their victory was short-lived. The heroism of the patriot army, though quite real, would prove sporadic throughout the war, so that Washington’s own constancy became necessary to sustain the Revolution. Notwithstanding the bounties they had pocketed, men kept vanishing into the woods every day, and Washington griped that he headed an army that was “here today, gone tomorrow, without assigning a reason or even apprising you of it.”1 To flesh out sixteen new regiments, he had to offer twenty-dollar bounties, one hundred acres of land, and a new suit of clothes to anyone older than seventeen but younger than fifty.
Washington remained frustrated with congressional reluctance to confer on him the power to appoint his own general officers. Some of the political resistance sprang from fear of arbitrary power, but it also testified to envy festering below the hero worship, a petulant undercurrent that would persist for the rest of Washington’s career. Speaking of Washington, John Adams lectured his congressional colleagues not “to idolize an image which their own hands have molten.” Adams thought Washington already had too much power: “It becomes us to attend early to the restraining [of] our army.”2
After Princeton, an exhausted Washington took his shrunken army into winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, instead of retreating back into Pennsylvania. This inspired decision enabled him to harass British supply lines and to expel the enemy from many parts of New Jersey. Nonetheless the decision carried grave risks. Washington was now perilously short of men, and as he admitted years later, the British could easily have vanquished this thinly guarded camp, “if they had only thought proper to march against us.”3 A small incident shows that he didn’t wish to jinx his recent run of victories through any precipitate action. On January 8 he thanked the Pennsylvania Council of Safety for “your notice of the eclipse of the sun which is to happen tomorrow. This event, without a previous knowledge, might affect the minds of the soldiery.”4 In an age alive to portents, Washington feared that his soldiers might interpret a solar eclipse as a sign of providential displeasure.
Twenty-five miles west of New York City, ringed by protective hills, Morristown was rich in farms that could feed famished troops and provide a snug winter retreat. For his headquarters, Washington chose a building on the village green that once served as a tavern. He enjoyed a frugal life, compared to the sumptuous balls that General Howe
was throwing for his officers in Manhattan. Once the hubbub of battle subsided, Washington longed for Martha’s company and was starved for news of home. For months he had discontinued correspondence with friends and family in Virginia, “finding it incompatible with my public business,” as he told Robert Morris. “A letter or two from my family are regularly sent by the post, but very irregularly received, which is rather mortifying, as it deprives me of the consolation of hearing from home on domestic matters.”5 With his emotional life still rooted in Mount Vernon and the war now threatening to drag on interminably, he contended that nobody “suffers more by an absence from home than myself.”6 Martha, unable to travel across a snowbound landscape, wouldn’t arrive until nearly spring.
The commander in chief had no respite from the crisis atmosphere that had shadowed him for months. Conditions were so appalling in patriot hospitals that one doctor remembered having seen “from four to five patients die on the same straw before it was changed.” 7 When smallpox appeared in his camp, Washington feared a calamity and hastily informed Hancock that he planned to inoculate all his troops. He also asked Dr. William Shippen to inoculate recruits passing through Philadelphia en route to his army, an enlightened action that helped stave off an epidemic.
Washington’s tenure as commander in chief featured relatively few battles, often fought after extended intervals of relative calm, underscoring the importance of winning the allegiance of a population that vacillated between fealty to the Crown and patriotic indignation. The fair treatment of civilians formed an essential part of the war effort. Washington had a sure grasp of the principles of this republican revolution, asserting that “the spirit and willingness of the people must in a great measure take [the] place of coercion.”8 No British general could compete with him in this contest for popular opinion. With one eye fixed on the civilian populace, Washington showed punctilious respect for private property and was especially perturbed when American troops sacked houses under the pretext that the owners were Tories. His overriding goal was to contrast his own humane behavior with the predatory ways of the enemy.
Nothing expressed Washington’s outrage over the abuse of civilians more powerfully than an October 1778 incident involving his personal guard. John Herring, a member of that guard, was sent to get supplies for Washington’s table and was furnished with a horse and pass. When rebuffed at the home of a Tory named Prince Howland, he spied some costly objects he coveted and dispatched three others from Washington’s guard—John Herrick, Moses Walton, and a fifer named Elias Brown—to procure them. The three men broke into Howland’s house and looted silver spoons, silver dollars, and clothing, then repeated the performance at the home of one John Hoag. In protesting the incident, Howland described the three vandals as having worn the round hats adorned with bearskin strips that distinguished Washington’s guard. Washington endorsed the death sentences handed down by a court-martial to Herring, Brown, and Walton, along with one hundred lashes for Herrick. “His Excellency the Commander in Chief approves these sentences,” read the general orders. “Shocked at the frequent, horrible villainies of this nature committed by the troops of late, he is determined to make examples which will deter the boldest and most harden[e]d offenders.”9 While Walton and Brown escaped before execution, John Herring was duly hung, and John Herrick received his one hundred lashes.
The opinions of New Jersey’s citizens became of paramount importance after the Trenton and Princeton victories removed the aura of protection that had sustained Loyalist families. A militant to his fingertips, Washington cherished no love for Tories, whom he portrayed as diabolical and branded “abominable pests of society.” 10 He now promulgated an order that those who had sworn loyalty to England should swear allegiance to the United States. For those who demurred, Washington granted (in a lovely rhetorical ploy) “full liberty” to defect to the other side.11 He devised an exquisitely civilized policy: Loyalists would be conducted to British lines with their personal possessions but would have the option of leaving behind their wives and children. Such Solomon-like solutions made George Washington the country’s first chief executive a dozen years before he was officially elected to the post.
During the winter of 1776-77 the British sent out foraging parties from New York to raid the New Jersey countryside, and Washington directed the militia to “harass their troops to death” in what became a conflict of “daily skirmishes.”12 This small-scale warfare whittled away British power as the militia gathered horses, cattle, and sheep to feed the American army. Thomas Jones, a Loyalist judge in New York, wrote that not “a stick of wood, a spear of grass or a kernel of corn could the troops in New Jersey procure without fighting for it.”13 Congressmen constantly requested that Washington defend their districts but refused to appropriate money to do so. These amateur experts, he thought, had no idea of the handicaps under which he toiled. “In a word,” he seethed, “when they are at a distance, they think it is but to say, ‘Presto! Begone’ and everything is done.”14 It took tremendous strength to parry requests from politicians whose support he desperately needed.
During the long Morristown winter, Washington made notable advances in organizing a spy network under his personal supervision. This operation had enjoyed a top priority from the moment he arrived in Cambridge in 1775. With his natural reticence and sphinxlike personality, Washington was a natural student of espionage. At first his spy operation was haphazard in nature, cohering into a true system only by 1779. To guarantee secrecy, he never hinted in letters at the identity of spies. Instead he assigned them names or numbers or employed vague locutions, such as “the person you mentioned.”15 He favored having the minimum number of people involved in any spy ring, and the diagram of the network existed in his mind alone. After 1779 he frequently had spies communicate via invisible ink, developed by John James’s brother James, who was a doctor and an amateur chemist. This ink was usually applied to blank pages of books or interlined in family letters. “It is in my power, I believe, to procure a liquid which nothing but a counter liquor (rubbed over the paper afterwards) can make legible” was how he described its workings.16 Secret notes were typically pressed between leather bindings and pasteboard covers of transported books.
To spy on New York—“the fountain of all intelligence,” Washington anointed it—was his principal objective, and he soon had the town covered with informers. He preferred people who could gather intelligence in the course of their everyday affairs, and his mind proved inventive in its choices.17 With some spies Washington even offered personal coaching, telling one to “mix with and put on the airs of a Tory to cover his real character and avoid suspicion.”18 With an insatiable appetite for intelligence, he entreated Presbyterian minister Alexander McWhorter, the chaplain of an artillery brigade, to press convicted spies for information, while offering them theological comfort before they were hung.
Right before the Princeton battle, Washington informed Philadelphia financier Robert Morris that “we have the greatest occasion at present for hard money to pay a certain set of people who are of particular use to us . . . Silver would be most convenient.” 19 Washington considered Morris, a huge man with a ruddy complexion and a genial personality, the financier with the best mercantile knowledge and connections in North America. He often tapped Morris for money because he needed to bypass Congress, which couldn’t be trusted to keep secrets. When Morris first approached a rich Quaker in Philadelphia for funds, the man balked, saying he was “opposed to fighting of any sort.”20 Morris overcame the man’s religious scruples and sent Washington two canvas bags bulging with glittering coins, including Spanish silver dollars, French half crowns, and English crowns, an incident Washington always remembered. That he was allowed to supervise an espionage budget, without accounting to Congress, bespeaks the extraordinary trust placed in the commander in chief. Periodically he asked Congress for sums of gold for spies and kept the money bags with his personal belongings for safekeeping. He practiced the entire range of espionage
tactics, including double agents and disinformation. In March 1777, for example, he passed along a litany of false information to Elisha Boudinot, who was supposed to relay it to a spy “to deceive the enemy.”21
The circumspect Washington showed real artistry as a spymaster. This wasn’t surprising, since he had repeatedly engaged in bluffs to fool the enemy. In April 1777 he alerted Joseph Reed that an unnamed man, recently arrested, had served as an American spy. He was such a valuable agent that Washington passed along orders that his allegiance should be reinforced by a “handsome present in money” and that he should then be released in such a way as “to give it the appearance of an accidental escape from confinement.”22 Washington’s instructions sounded knowing: “Great care must be taken so to conduct the scheme as to make the escape appear natural and real. There must be neither too much facility, nor too much refinement, for doing too little, or overacting the part, would alike beget a suspicion.” 23 In using spies as double agents to spread disinformation, Washington again seemed very expert: “It is best to keep them in a way of knowing as little of our true circumstances as possible and, in order that they may really deceive the enemy in their reports, to endeavour in the first place to deceive them.”24 On one occasion that winter, when an officer requested permission to arrest a spy, Washington shrewdly suggested that he woo the spy with a dinner invitation, then leave nearby, as if by sheer negligence, a sheet pegging the Continental Army’s strength at a grossly exaggerated number. It was one of many ways that Washington misled the enemy to conceal his own weakness.
