Washington

by Ron Chernow

  Washington devoted far more time to the onerous task of drafting letters than to leading men into battle. Running an embryonic government, he protested to Congress that he and his aides “are confined from morn till eve, hearing and answering the applications and letters of one and another,” leaving him with “no hours for recreation.” 25 He groaned at the huge stacks of correspondence and felt besieged by supplicants for various favors. At times the enormous quantity of paperwork must have seemed more daunting than British arms. When brother Samuel asked for a portrait of him, he pleaded a lack of time to sit for a painter: “If ever you get a picture of mine, taken from the life, it must be when I am remov[e]d from the busy scenes of a camp.”26 At times, he appeared overwhelmed by bureaucratic demands, with the “business of so many different departments centering with me and by me to be handed on to Congress for their information, added to the intercourse I am obliged to keep up with the adjacent states.” 27

  Washington had trained himself to write pithy, meaty letters, with little frivolity or small talk. The letters were always clear, sometimes elegant, often forceful. Even Jefferson, a fluent wordsmith, praised Washington’s correspondence, saying that “he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style.”28 Because aides drafted most of Washington’s superlative wartime letters, some historians have denied him credit. But Washington oversaw their work, first giving them the gist of messages, then editing drafts until they met his exacting standards. His aides became fine mimics of their boss, and their letters echo one another’s because they were well schooled in Washington’s style. He wanted letters so immaculate that he had them rewritten several times if they contained even small erasures.

  Washington worked in close proximity with aides, who typically slept under the same roof. These scribes labored in a single room, bent over small wooden tables, while the commander kept a small office to the side. As at Mount Vernon, Washington adhered to an unvarying daily routine. Arriving fully dressed, he breakfasted with his aides and parceled out letters to be answered, along with his preferred responses. He then reviewed his troops on horseback and expected to find the letters in finished form by the time of his noonday return.

  The best camaraderie that Washington enjoyed came in the convivial company of his young aides during midafternoon dinners. Up to thirty people attended these affairs, many sitting on walnut camp stools. As much as possible, Washington converted these repasts into little oases of elegant society, a reminder of civilized life at Mount Vernon. The company dined on damask tablecloths and used sparkling silver flatware bearing Washington’s griffin crest, while drinking wine from silver cups. One aide sat beside Washington and helped to serve the food and drinks. These meals could last for hours, with a bountiful table covered by heavy, succulent foods. One amazed French visitor recalled that “the meal was in the English fashion, consisting of eight or ten large [serving] dishes of meat and poultry, with vegetables of several sorts, followed by a second course of pastry, comprised under the two denominations of ‘pies’ and ‘puddings.’”29 There followed abundant platters of apples and nuts. Washington liked to crack nuts as he talked, a habit that he later blamed for his long history of dental trouble.

  At these dinners Washington seemed at his most unbuttoned. If he wasn’t skilled at repartee, he was quite sociable and had no trouble making conversation, enjoying the company of his bright young disciples. A later visitor to Mount Vernon captured Washington’s contradictory personality: “Before strangers, he is generally very reserved and seldom says a word.” On the other hand, “the general with a few glasses of champagne got quite merry and being with his intimate friends laughed and talked a good deal.”30

  In early 1777 a large turnover occurred in Washington’s military family as his first batch of aides gave way to a flock of new faces. Nathanael Greene briefly replaced Joseph Reed, who had resigned and was somewhat estranged from Washington. After the Fort Washington disaster, Greene was thrilled to be rehabilitated, even if it meant being temporarily demoted to clerical work. “I am exceedingly happy in the full confidence of His Excellency General Washington, and I found [that confidence] to increase every hour, the more [difficult] and distressing our affairs grew,” Greene told his wife.31 Washington demanded self-sacrifice from aides, who had to follow his schedule uncomplainingly. If he slept in the open air before a battle, so did they. “When I joined His Excellency’s suite,” wrote James McHenry, “I gave up soft beds, undisturbed repose, and the habits of ease and indulgence . . . for a single blanket, the hard floor or the softer sod of the fields, early rising, and almost perpetual duty.”32

  Washington’s choices for his military family were permeated by an aristocratic ethos that could be hard to square with the republican spirit. He perpetuated the patrician ethos first encountered on General Braddock’s staff; indeed, his use of the term “family” was borrowed from British practice. Of twenty-two aides-de-camp and military secretaries that he appointed during the first two years of the conflict, more than half came from Virginia and Maryland, many of them smart young men from his own social class. Robert Hanson Harrison of Virginia and Tench Tilghman of Maryland fit the bill perfectly, while Caleb Gibbs took the role of the token New Englander.

  Washington was adept at identifying young talent. He wanted eager young men who worked well together, pitched in with alacrity, and showed esprit de corps. His own personality forbade backslapping familiarity or easy joviality. Beneath his reserve, however, he had an excellent capacity for reading people and adapting his personality to them. As before the war, he remained wary in relationships and lowered his emotional barriers only slowly, but he was trusting once colleagues earned his confidence. Washington’s young aides satisfied a need for affection that men his own age, with whom he felt far more competitive, could scarcely have done.

  Debilitated by never-ending bags of mail, Washington said he needed someone who could “comprehend at one view the diversity of matter which comes before me.”33 On March 1, 1777, that person appeared in the shape of Alexander Hamilton, the twenty-two-year-old boy wonder and artillery captain whose pyrotechnics at White Plains and the Raritan River had so impressed Washington. In the short, slim, and ingenious Hamilton, Washington encountered an ambition that could well have reminded him of his younger self.

  Unlike the often affluent aides in Washington’s family, Hamilton was an illegitimate young man who had been born on Nevis and spent his adolescence on St. Croix. Five years earlier he had been an impoverished clerk in a Caribbean trading house. Thanks to a subscription taken up by wealthy local merchants who spotted his potential, he was sent to school in North America. Starting in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and then at King’s College in New York, he displayed the same knack as the young Washington for capturing the confidence of influential older men. Possessed of an aristocratic savoir faire that belied his background, Hamilton turned himself, with uncommon speed, from an outcast of the islands into a Revolutionary insider. His perfectionist nature rivaled Washington’s own. He toted about a sack of books, including Plutarch’s Lives, to improve himself and made extensive notations in the empty pages of a pay book. Still, noticeable differences between the two men introduced tensions. Hamilton was more cerebral than Washington and less tolerant of human foibles, racing through life at a frenetic pace. Where Washington could usually subdue his strong emotions, Hamilton was often impetuous, with highly fallible judgment. For all his charm, he was much too proud and headstrong to be a surrogate son to George Washington or anyone else.

  Hamilton rapidly became Washington’s most gifted scribe and his “principal and most confidential aide,” often attending war councils and enjoying a comprehensive view of the conflict.34 One officer claimed that Hamilton “thought as well as wrote for Washington.”35 Hamilton revered Washington’s courage, patriotism, and integrity and never doubted that he was the indispensable figure in the war effort. Nevertheless, no man is a hero to his valet, and Hamilton left some candidly critical
views of Washington. He regarded Washington as a general of only modest ability and quickly sensed the powerful emotions bottled up inside his overwrought boss, whom he often found snappish and difficult.36

  By this point in the war, Washington’s leadership style was crystal clear. He never insulated himself from contrary opinions, having told Joseph Reed early in the war to keep him posted on even unfriendly scuttlebutt. “I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors,” he wrote. “The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove the prejudices which are imbib[e]d against him.”37 Washington made excellent use of war councils to weigh all sides of an issue. Never a man of lightning-fast intuitions or sudden epiphanies, he usually groped his way to firm and accurate conclusions. Equipped with keen powers of judgment rather than originality, he was at his best when reacting to options presented by others. Once he made up his mind, it was difficult to dislodge him from his opinion, so thoroughly had he plumbed things through to the bottom.

  Even as he fought the British, Washington deemed their army the proper model to emulate. As late as 1780 he made passing reference to “the British Army, from whence most of our rules and customs are derived, and in which long experience and improvement has brought their system as near perfection as in any other service.” 38 As in choosing aides, Washington believed that well-bred people made the best officers, advising Patrick Henry that the most reliable way to select a candidate was to find someone with “a just pretension to the character of a gentleman, a proper sense of honor, and some reputation to lose.”39 As in the French and Indian War, he warned officers to avoid excessive familiarity with their inferiors. “Be easy and condescending in your deportment to your officers,” he instructed a Virginia commander, “but not too familiar, lest you subject yourself to a want of that respect which is necessary to support a proper command.”40 He required noncommissioned officers to wear swords “as a mark of distinction and to enable them the better to maintain the authority due to their stations.”41 At the same time he pleaded with officers to lead by example and share their men’s hardships, saying “it ought to be the pride of an officer to share the fatigue as well as danger to which his men are exposed.”42 That he championed Knox and Hamilton shows how the exigencies of the war forced him to search beyond his own social stratum and democratize the army almost in spite of himself.

  During that Morristown winter Washington stressed the importance of clean clothing and sanitary quarters and a nutritious diet with vegetables and salads. He issued blanket prohibitions against playing cards and dice. While he couldn’t ban alcohol outright—the daily rations of rum were bottled courage—he tried to have soldiers drink it in diluted form and avoid “the vile practice of swallowing the whole ration of liquor at a single draft.”43 Washington valued well-played music in army life and assigned a band to each brigade. At one point he chided a fife and drum corps for playing badly and insisted that they practice more regularly; a year later, after the drummers took this admonition to an extreme, Washington restricted their practice to one hour in the morning, a second in the afternoon. He was also irked by the improvisations of some drummers and, amid the misery of Valley Forge, took the trouble to issue this broadside to wayward drummers: “The use of drums are as signals to the army and, if every drummer is allowed to beat at his pleasure, the intention is entirely destroy[e]d, as it will be impossible to distinguish whether they are beating for their own pleasure or for a signal to the troops.”44

  In crusading for moral reformation among his men, Washington feared that profane language would undermine discipline. He winced when soldiers swore in his presence. As the general orders said of Washington, “His feelings are continually wounded by the oaths and imprecations of the soldiers whenever he is in hearing of them.”45 He was also apt to invoke the aid of religion. During the summer of 1776 the Continental Congress granted him permission to attach chaplains to each regiment, and he encouraged attendance at divine services by rotating his own presence among them. “The blessings and protection of Heaven are at all times necessary, but especially so in times of public distress and danger,” he assured his men, hoping “that every officer and man will endeavor so to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.”46 This was one of the rare times Washington referred to Christianity rather than Providence. In fact, he favored having chaplains chosen by local military units so no denominational character could be imposed from above.

  Washington construed favorable events in the war as reflections of Providence, transforming him from an actor in a human drama into a tool of heavenly purpose. This expressed his religious faith but also satisfied certain political needs. While it lifted from his shoulders the credit for victories, it also didn’t burden him unduly with the crushing weight of defeat. He didn’t have to feel as if the entire fate of the nation rested with him. For someone afraid of showing vanity, he could also avoid boasting by invoking the signal role of Providence, enabling him to discuss victories with seeming humility. Unquestionably Washington believed that Providence watched out for the United States of America and for him. Early in the war he told his brother Samuel that he had “a perfect reliance upon that Providence which heretofore has befriended and smiled upon me.”47 It’s worth noting that Washington didn’t see humans as passive actors and believed that God helped those who helped themselves: “Providence has done much for us in this contest,” he said later in the war, “but we must do something for ourselves, if we expect to go triumphantly through with it.”48

  AS A MAN LADEN WITH MANY SECRETS who unburdened himself to only a small circle of confidants, Washington had to hide moments of despondency from the army, giving few people access to his private grief. In the spring of 1777 a secondhand report reached Lord Howe’s ears that a maid in Washington’s employ “frequently caught him in tears about the house and [said] that, when he is alone, he appears constantly dejected and unhappy.”49 Washington weathered the winter’s stern rigors, only to buckle beneath a ten-day illness in early March that left him so weakened that he dealt only with essential business. His army of Continental soldiers had thinned to a paltry 2,500 men. It must have been a huge relief to him when Martha arrived in camp in mid-March. She had long since bowed to her fate as faithful helpmeet, the person who could cater to his emotional needs and create an entertaining social life. It helped that she had struck up a warm rapport with his military family.

  Martha set about to get her husband to relax and enjoy the convivial society of several ladies. She organized cordial dinners, pleasant jaunts on horseback, and other lighthearted escapes. Everyone watched the commander in chief visibly brighten in her presence, confirming that theirs was a happy marriage. A young French aristocrat shortly to arrive at camp, the Marquis de Lafayette, viewed Martha as “a modest and respectable person, who loves her husband madly.”50 A sharp-eyed newcomer to the scene, Martha Daingerfield Bland, wife of a Virginia colonel, corroborated the “perfect felicity” between the Washingtons.51 Mrs. Bland enjoyed the outings on horseback, which gave her a chance to ogle the personable young aides—“all polite sociable gentlemen,” as she informed her sister-in-law Fanny. She seemed especially attracted to Hamilton, describing him as “a sensible, genteel, polite young fellow, a West Indian.”52 Most of all she was positively smitten with Washington: “Now let me speak of our noble and agreeable commander (for he commands both sexes), one by his excellent skill in military matters, the other by his ability, politeness, and attention.”53 Washington had a teasing, flirtatious nature, she hinted; with attractive young women, there was nothing dour about him. At riding parties, she wrote, “General Washington throws off the Hero and takes on the chatty, agreeable companion. He can be downright impudent sometimes—such impudence, Fanny, as you and I like.”54

  Whenever possible, Washington enlisted the support of women in the war, especially in donating clothing, bandages, or ot
her supplies. When Sarah Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s daughter, sent such a gift on behalf of patriotic women, Washington replied gallantly that “the value of the donation will be greatly enhanced by a consideration of the hands by which it was made and presented.”55 Often, when he addressed women during the war, a gracious note leavened his careworn prose. Quite different were his stormy relations with the hundreds of women who tagged after the army. Some “camp followers” were undoubtedly prostitutes, but many more were wives and friends of soldiers who washed, sewed, and baked in exchange for daily rations. Washington objected that they bogged down the speedy movement of his army, and it especially irked him when women were given critically short spaces in wagons. As he complained early in the conflict, “The multitude of women . . . especially those who are pregnant, or have children, are a clog upon every movement.” 56 In the end Washington threw up his hands in despair and concluded that he couldn’t exile these women without sacrificing their husbands and lovers, “some of the oldest and best soldiers in the service.”57

  During the summer of 1777 Washington invited into his retinue a prepossessing young aide who brought dash and brilliance to the task. John Laurens, twenty-two, was the son of Henry Laurens, who would succeed John Hancock as president of the Continental Congress and was one of South Carolina’s largest slave owners. The younger Laurens had a classy European education—schooling in Geneva, legal study in London—and enhanced both the intellect and the reforming spirit of Washington’s staff. In later describing Laurens, Washington issued the sterling appraisal that “no man possessed more of the amor patria—in a word, he had not a fault that I ever could discover, unless intrepidity bordering upon rashness could come under that denomination, and to this he was excited by the purest motives.”58 As with Hamilton, Tilghman, and several others, Washington showed a special affinity for ambitious young aides who looked trim in uniform or astride a horse and possessed great charm and intelligence.