by Ron Chernow
At first, Washington hesitated to voice opinions to Congress that went beyond his military bailiwick. Then in early November he sent Laurens a persuasive letter that laid out his misgivings about a northern operation. Any such invasion would introduce “a large body of French troops into Canada” and put them “in possession of the capital of that province, attached to them by all the ties of blood, habits, manners, religion, and former connection of government.”17 Once entrenched in Quebec, France would be well placed to control the United States, which was “the natural and most formidable rival of every maritime power in Europe.”18 Of this eloquent statement of realpolitik, Edmund Morgan has commented that it “remains one of the more striking examples of the quick perception of political realities that lay behind Washington’s understanding of power.”19
Perhaps corroborating Washington’s worst fears, Lafayette went to Philadelphia without seeking his approval and lobbied Congress for a Canadian invasion. To Washington’s dismay, some members endorsed the proposal with unthinking enthusiasm. When Lafayette traveled up the Hudson Valley to confer with Washington, the Frenchman fell ill with a high fever at Fishkill, New York, sixteen miles from the Continental Army camp. When it looked as if Lafayette might die, Washington was on such tenterhooks, according to Lafayette’s later florid account, that he rode over every day to “inquire after his friend, but fearing to agitate him, he only conversed with the physician and returned home with tearful eyes and a heart oppressed with grief.”20 By late November Lafayette had sufficiently recovered to leave for Boston, hoping to catch a ship back to France for a quick visit and “present myself before the king and know in what manner he judges proper to employ my services.”21
THAT FALL THE ATMOSPHERE grew thick with rumors that the British might evacuate New York, but even though a large number of British ships sailed south to destinations unknown in November, Sir Henry Clinton remained fixed in the city. As for winter quarters, Washington decided to house the main body of his troops at Middlebrook, New Jersey, west of Staten Island, in countryside much prettier than Valley Forge. Washington shared the home of the Philadelphia merchant John Wallace, who lived on the Raritan River, four miles west of Bound Brook. His extended absence from Mount Vernon preyed on his mind, for it began to look as if he might be trapped in some form of permanent exile. “I am beginning to throw the troops into cantonments for their winter quarters,” he told brother Jack, “giving up all idea this fourth winter of seeing my home and friends, as I shall have full employment during the winter to prepare for the campaign that follows it.”22
While the Continental Army was better clothed than at Valley Forge, it hadn’t solved all the problems of the previous winter, thanks to congressional ineptitude. By now, Washington had become habituated to a draining atmosphere of a perpetual, slow-motion crisis. “Our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous, and deplorable condition than they have been in since the commencement of the war,” Washington insisted to Benjamin Harrison.23 He had learned a valuable lesson at Valley Forge, where he had made the mistake of concentrating his men in one compact group. This time he scattered his troops across a broad area, extending north to the Hudson Valley and as far off as Connecticut, a strategic dispersal that facilitated the hunt for forage and supplies. He also ordered the application of more sanitary methods in the camp, forbidding earthen floors in huts and requiring that they be roofed with boards, slabs, or shingles.
On December 23 Washington took a brief respite from his incessant labors and traveled to Philadelphia to confer with Congress about the prospective Canadian invasion. Perhaps in preparation for this trip, he ordered new clothing for Billy Lee—two coats, two waistcoats, and a pair of breeches—that would do credit to both slave and master in the city’s tony salons. Washington had already asked Martha to meet him in Philadelphia and she had eagerly awaited him there since late November. They would celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary in the city that January. The Pennsylvania Packet noted with gratitude that this sojourn was “the only relief” Washington had “enjoyed from service since he first entered into it,” yet the trip would prove anything but a vacation. Staying at the Chestnut Street home of Henry Laurens, Washington got a view of civilian life that would revolt him with an indelible vision of private greed and profligacy. Like soldiers throughout history, he was jarred by the contrast between the austerity of the army and the riches being earned on the home front through lucrative war contracts.
Ever since Valley Forge, Washington had lamented the profiteering that deprived his men of critically needed supplies, and he remained contemptuous of those who rigged and monopolized markets, branding them “the pests of society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America,” as he erupted in one fire-breathing letter. “I would to God that one of the most atrocious of each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman.”24 Because of hoarding and price manipulation, among other reasons, the mismanaged currency had lost 90 percent of its value in recent months. As he contemplated these problems, Washington was also distraught over popular disunity and wished that the nation could move beyond factional disputes, telling Joseph Reed that “happy, happy, thrice happy the country if such was the government of it, but, alas! we are not to expect that the path is to be strewed w[i]t[h] flowers.”25
Broadening his critique of the political situation, Washington traced the source of the nation’s problems to the very structure of the Articles of Confederation. Deprived of taxing power, Congress had to rely on requests to the states. Instead of dealing with such structural defects, the legislature had deteriorated into partisan backbiting. “Party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day,” he wrote, while the “great and accumulated debt, ruined finances, depreciated money, and want of credit” were “postponed from day to day, from week to week, as if our affairs wore the most promising aspect.”26 One can see here the seeds of Washington’s later version of federalism, shaped by the fear that the public would become so wedded to local government that the national government would be left weak and ineffective in consequence.
Washington trod a fine line in dealing with Congress, finding himself in an inherently contradictory position. He had far more power than any congressman and felt it his duty to make his opinions known. On the other hand, ideology required the military leader to submit to the wishes of Congress and acknowledge civilian control. The situation demanded exquisite tact from Washington, who could exploit his fame only up to a certain point. This balancing act explains why he felt both very powerful and, at moments, completely impotent during the war. In Philadelphia he met Conrad-Alexandre Gérard, the first French minister to the United States, who found him “cold, prudent, and reserved,” but nonetheless detected the essence of his greatness. “It is certain that if General Washington were ambitious and scheming, it would have been entirely in his power to make a revolution, but nothing on the part of the general or the army has justified the shadow of a suspicion,” he informed Versailles. “The general sets forth constantly this principle, that one must be a citizen first and an officer afterwards.”27
As he tried to straighten out the nation’s affairs, Washington developed a fine rapport with the new president of Congress, John Jay, whom he had known since the First Continental Congress. Despite their best efforts, Washington and Nathanael Greene found their serious work obstructed by an unceasing round of parties. To fulfill his duties, Greene said, he “was obliged to rise early and go to bed late to complete them. In the morning, a round of visiting came on. Then you had to prepare for dinner after which the evening balls would engage your time until one or two in the morning.”28 The toast of the town, sought by every hostess, Washington was shocked at the decadent civilian life that contrasted with the hardscrabble world of his men. He stared in outraged wonder at the stately carriages rolling by, the opulent parties unfolding around him. It infuriated him that people feasted as his men suffered. “Speculation
, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of men,” he wrote.29 As Greene aptly noted, the city’s luxurious life gave Washington “infinitely more pain than pleasure.”30 He began to feel vaguely guilty about lingering in Philadelphia while his men still wallowed in poverty. By now he had developed something close to a mystic bond with his men and placed great store on his presence among them. “Were I to give in to private conveniency and amusement,” he told Joseph Reed, “I should not be able to resist the invitation of my friends to make Phila[delphia] (instead of a squeezed up room or two) my quarters for the winter, but the affairs of the army require my constant attention and presence.”31
When Washington returned to Middlebrook in February 1779, after a six-week stay in Philadelphia, he and Martha tried to brighten up the winter camp. Since the tin plates at meals had grown rusty, Washington ordered a set of china for the table along with six genteel candlesticks. The fare was less spartan than at Valley Forge, and the Washingtons entertained in modest style. As the surgeon James Thacher said of one dinner, “The table was elegantly furnished and the provisions ample, but not abounding in superfluities . . . In conversation, His Excellency’s expressive countenance is peculiarly interesting and pleasing; a placid smile is frequently observed on his lips, but a loud laugh, it is said, seldom, if ever, escapes him. He is polite and attentive to each individual at table and retires after the compliments of a few glasses.”32 Thacher assessed Martha with an approving eye: “Mrs. Washington combines in an uncommon degree great dignity of manner with the most pleasing affability, but possesses no striking marks of beauty.”33
Washington remained a man of unusual physical stamina who was still strong, manly, and youthful, while Martha had aged more quickly. One telling difference was that while George still loved to dance, especially with lovely young women, Martha had renounced the practice. In November Washington had expressly asked Nathanael Greene to have his young wife, Caty, come to the winter camp, and she duly arrived with her little boy, George Washington Greene. At a dance in February to celebrate the first anniversary of the French alliance, Washington danced first with the obese Lucy Knox. Having done his social duty, he then indulged in an experience that recalled happier times: he danced all evening with Caty Greene. “His Excellency and Mrs. Greene danced upwards of three hours without once sitting down,” Nathanael Greene wrote. “Upon the whole we had a pretty good frisk.”34 Perhaps it was the aftereffect of the social whirl of Philadelphia, but Washington now seemed more attentive to women. “It is needless to premise that my table is large enough to hold the ladies; of this they had ocular proof yesterday,” he told one correspondent, echoing a famous line from Othello. Henry Knox also arranged a splendid fireworks show for the celebration and boasted of the fashionable spectators who sat on a specially erected stage. “We had about seventy ladies, all of the first ton [French for breeding or manners] in the state, and between three and four hundred gentlemen.”35
As at Valley Forge, Washington wondered whether he could retain his restive officers, who had grown disenchanted as they saw civilians pocketing huge wartime profits while they lacked money to tide over their struggling families. “The large fortunes acquired by numbers out of the army affords a contrast that gives poignancy to every inconvenience from remaining in it,” Washington warned Congress. 36 To stem the wholesale defection of ordinary soldiers, he offered land, clothing, and bounties of up to two hundred dollars to keep his fragile army together.
Amid these fears of a shrinking force, Washington’s twenty-four-year-old aide John Laurens hatched an audacious plan to raise a black regiment of three thousand slaves from South Carolina and Georgia, who would win their freedom at the close of the contest. Laurens had been emboldened by the success in recruiting black soldiers from Rhode Island. At Valley Forge Washington had lent Laurens qualified support, telling him that “blacks in the southern parts of the continent offer a resource to us that should not be neglected.”37 Yielding to his son’s wishes, Henry Laurens had canvassed congressional support for a scheme that would allow blacks to fight in exchange for emancipation, but he returned a somber assessment: “I will undertake to say there is not a man in America of your opinion.”38 The idealistic John Laurens tabled the idea for a year, then revived it at Middlebrook.
Handsome, smart, and dashing, John Laurens was no ordinary advocate for emancipation. His father had traded slaves on an immense scale, importing between seven thousand and eight thousand captive souls from Africa. The younger Laurens had long meditated on ways to free these slaves and expunge the family taint, telling his father a year earlier, “I have long deplored the wretched state of these men.”39 No idle dreamer, John Laurens was prepared to free his family’s slaves as part of his program, which he saw as the prelude to general emancipation. In the aftermath of the overwhelming British victory at Savannah, Georgia, in late December 1778, John Laurens warned that South Carolina urgently needed a black force to avert “impending calamity.”40 On March 16 Henry Laurens wrote to Washington and accentuated the strategic utility of the concept, asserting that if the patriots had three thousand armed blacks in the Carolinas, “I should have no doubt of success in driving the British out of Georgia.”41
By this point, with a heavy influx of black soldiers from New England, the Continental Army had become a highly integrated force. But Washington knew that it was one thing to train and equip blacks from the northern states and quite another those from the South. He must have wondered whether such an action might someday sound the death knell for slavery at Mount Vernon. Like many southern slaveholders who were uncomfortable with slavery in principle, Washington hoped the institution would wither away on some foggy, distant day. By contrast, the Laurens plan was radical and immediate, with incalculable consequences. Washington found Laurens’s motives both “laudable” and “important,” but he had pointed reservations about his plan.42
On March 20 Washington sent Henry Laurens a letter that threw away a major historic opportunity. Although surrounded by staunch abolitionists such as Laurens, Hamilton, and Lafayette, he couldn’t break loose from the system that formed the basis of his fortune. With his darkest fears as a planter trumping his hopes, he cast doubt on prospects for the Laurens plan and advanced the dubious argument that, if Americans armed their slaves, the British would simply retaliate in kind—an odd statement, since Lord Dunmore had already raised American hackles with his Ethiopian Regiment. Then Washington broached a still more deeply rooted fear: that a black regiment in South Carolina might foment dangerous thoughts of freedom among slaves everywhere. As slaves saw their black brethren marching off in arms, it might “render slavery more irksome to those who remain in it.” Trying to wriggle free of this topic, which he obviously found exceedingly unpleasant, Washington ended on a disingenuous note. “But as this is a subject that has never employed much of my thoughts, these are no more than the first crude ideas that have struck me upon the occasion.”43
Overcoming doubts from southern delegates, Congress approved a resolution on March 29 that might have paved the way for abolishing southern slavery: “That it be recommended to the states of South Carolina and Georgia, if they shall think the same expedient, to take measures immediately for raising three thousand able-bodied negroes.”44 The resolution proposed that masters would be compensated at a rate of $1,000 per slave, while armed slaves would be liberated at the conclusion of the war. Because John Laurens was a member of the South Carolina legislature, Washington allowed him to head home and argue his case in person. But that assembly, dominated by slaveholders, was scandalized by the Laurens plan and rejected it resoundingly, despite the security it might have afforded against a British invasion. In a postmortem, Washington told Laurens, “I must confess that I am not at all astonished at the failure of your plan. That spirit of freedom, which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object,
has long since subsided and every selfish passion has taken its place.”45
What Washington couldn’t acknowledge was that he himself had been lukewarm about the plan for self-interested reasons. Whatever his reservations about slavery, he never showed courage on the issue in public statements, restricting his doubts to private letters. Even before the war Washington had felt burdened by slavery, not so much on moral grounds, but as a bad economic system that saddled him with high fixed costs from a large, sullen, and inefficient labor force. Washington prided himself on being a progressive, up-to-date farmer and thought that human bondage mired him in an antiquated system. Two months before being chosen as commander in chief, he made a revealing comment about notices for the sale of indebted estates that appeared daily in Virginia gazettes. Without “close application,” he said, Virginia estates were forever doomed to lapse into debt “as Negroes must be clothed and fed [and] taxes paid . . . whether anything is made or not.”46
Even as he brooded about the Laurens proposal, Washington contemplated a drastic plan to sell all his slaves and invest the proceeds in interest-bearing loan office certificates to help finance the war effort. Perhaps this made him reluctant to press a plan that involved emancipating blacks. On February 24, 1779, Washington sent a chilling letter to Lund Washington in which he pondered aloud a liquidation scenario. If America lost the war, he noted, “it would be a matter of very little consequence to me whether my property is in Negroes or loan office certificates, as I shall neither ask for, nor expect, any favor from his most gracious Majesty . . . the only points therefore for me to consider are . . . whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have negroes and the crops they will make, or the sum they will now fetch and the interest of the money.”47 Clearly slaves were just another form of salable property for Washington, and the only question was what price they fetched or what profit they yielded compared to other assets. While he had scruples about breaking up slaves’ families, he evidently had none about selling them, provided they stayed together.
