To bring him urban know-how and political finesse, the Virginia planter recruited as aides-de-camp, men prominent in the revolutionary leadership: Joseph Reed, a lawyer, and Thomas Mifflin, a merchant. Reed was a zealot with a ponderous melancholy face. Mifflin, who had handled business affairs far beyond Washington’s scope, was also celebrated as an orator. His handsome features were always in facile motion.
When Washington, having found his own way, ceased to depend upon his four original advisers, all four became his extremely dangerous enemies.
On June 23, 1775, Washington’s party set out to join his army in Cambridge. The Commander in Chief was seen off with as much military pomp as Philadelphia could muster. Fortunately, he did not know that the most influential member of Congress burned, as he watched, with jealousy. “Such,” John Adams wrote, “is the pride and pomp of war. I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels which I have sown.”
Washington’s route passed through New York City. As coincidence would have it, on the very day he was expected to ferry across the Hudson, the Royal Governor, William Tryon, was expected to sail up the harbor on his return from a visit to England. Unsure of their allegiance and thus of which arrival they should celebrate, the New York Provincial Council was driven to distraction. They finally decided that one militia company should meet Washington, another Tryon, and the rest attend whoever arrived first.
Washington having arrived first, a satisfactory parade led him into the city, but in the middle of the reception in his honor many important guests slipped silently away: Tryon was receiving. The General and the Governor lodged a few doors apart. As spectators tried to judge New York sentiment by comparing the amount of attention paid to each of the opposing leaders, Washington found that his first revolutionary competition was not on any battlefield but in the civilian world for popular support.
In passing a resolution congratulating Washington on his arrival, the New York Assembly expressed the hope that, after “the fondest wish of every American soul, an accommodation with our mother country,” had been achieved, Washington would “cheerfully” lay down his arms “and resume the character of our worthiest citizen.” Washington could reply with complete sincerity that when he and his colleagues “assumed the soldier we did not lay down the civilian.” They yearned for “that happy hour when the establishment of American liberty upon the most firm and solid foundations shall enable us to return to our private stations.”
Washington was, indeed, so little the dedicated soldier that he never regarded fighting the enemy as the fundamental means by which the Revolutionary War would be won. He demonstrated again and again his conviction that the crucial battlefields were in the minds of individual Americans. If the majority decided that they would be better off under renewed submission to the Crown, all military efforts to defeat the British would be of as little avail as trying to stop a river that was perpetually flowing. But, if the people became such staunch supporters of American rights that they would hold steadfast through any emergency, the British might just as well march their military might into the ocean.
TWO ENGLISH OFFICERS IN THE AMERICAN ARMY WHO SCHEMED AGAINST WASHINGTON
Major General Charles Lee, engraved by A. H. Ritchie after a drawing by B. Rushbrooke (Courtesy of the Prints Division, New York Public Library)
Major General Horatio Gates by Gilbert Stuart (Courtesy of Mrs. Charles A. Pfeffer, Jr.)
While in New York, Washington heard that a great battle had been fought outside Boston for the control of Bunker (or Breed’s) Hill. Dispatches presented the engagement as a patriot defeat because the Massachusetts army had been driven from the ground. The new Commander in Chief was too naïve to realize the significance of the great loss the British had suffered. The generals from overseas had been so scornful of their amateur opponents that they had sent wave after wave of professional soldiers against the seemingly ridiculous earthen redoubt that the Americans had built. When they counted their dead, the British recognized a bitter lesson: since their soldiers could only be replaced at great cost from overseas, they could not again suffer major casualties by attacking embattled American farmers who had defenses to crouch behind. When Washington became conscious of this British conclusion, it was to have a major effect on his strategy.
As Washington approached his army, he stopped off at Watertown, the seat of the Massachusetts Congress. He found there no lack of revolutionary fervor. However, what the delegates had to report was not encouraging. The army was in the greatest confusion; almost everything needed to be straightened out. Yet, it was far from clear that the Yankee troops would willingly obey the orders of a Virginian. Washington undoubtedly remembered that his own previous visit to Massachusetts had been to protest the claims of a Marylander to give orders to the Virginia Regiment. He agreed that it would be wise for him to take advantage of the Sabbath by slipping inconspicuously into the encampment.
The review with which the new Commander was said to have been greeted as he stood under “the Washington Elm” is, although enshrined in the history books, pure legend. (The army was not well enough trained to march in a review and would probably have greeted the Virginian with jeers not cheers.) There is better reason to believe that Washington attended, on the night of his arrival, a drunken party, during which “adjutant Gibbs of Glover’s was hoisted (English fashion) chair and all upon the table, and gave the company a rollicking bachelor’s song.”
Washington’s first duty was to determine the strategic situation. The shoreline of Boston Harbor was then (much water has since been filled in) shaped like a battered half moon. The New England army was encamped along the rim of this arc and in the town of Cambridge behind it. From areas about ten miles apart, two peninsulas shaped like tennis rackets angled into the bay towards each other, their heads being separated only by a narrow channel. Boston and Charlestown necks were occupied by the enemy. Their narrow connections with the mainland were so fortified that troops could not pass either way. Out in the harbor was what looked like a forest of dead trees: masts of a British fleet that dominated all deep water.
As Washington rode through the New England encampment, the stench indicated that the troops were risking their health by not digging privies. He quickly discovered that commonly no one gave or obeyed any orders. The militiamen, having elected their officers, expected due subservience to the sovereign voters. What entrenchments there were had been dug according to argumentative whim and indolent caprice. How true that everything needed reorganizing, replanning, enlarging, strengthening!
The grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Regimental Chaplain William Emerson, soon noted, “There is great overturning in the camp as to order and regularity. New lords, new laws. The Generals Washington and Lee are upon the lines every day.” Orders were read to the regiments every morning after prayers. “Great distinction is made between officers and soldiers. Everyone is made to know his place and keep it, or be tied up and receive thirty or forty lashes according to his crime. Thousands are at work every day from four till eleven o’clock in the morning. It is surprising how much work has been done.”
The basic necessary reform, Washington believed, was to establish a good officer corps. “I have,” he reported to a fellow Virginian in Congress, “made a pretty good grand slam among such kind of officers as the Massachusetts government abounds in … having broke one colonel and two captains for cowardly behavior in the action on Bunker’s Hill.” He had discharged or was prosecuting various other officers for incompetence or peculation. “In short, I spare none, yet fear it will not all do, as these people seem to be too inattentive to everything but their interest.”
Since the enemy shipping would enable the British to concentrate their force in an attack on any spot in his defenses, Washington ordered that horses be kept saddled in every area to give the alarm. If he were to have the necessary reserves always ready, his own force would, he
calculated, have to be twice the British: eighteen to twenty thousand men. He was assured that his army was at least that size, but this was only a guess. Repeated orders failed to induce his officers to send in returns of their men. “Threatening means’” finally elicited imperfect reports that were frightening. The army was not more than fourteen thousand, of whom twelve—hardly more than the British—were fit for duty. But at least Washington could quiet himself with the thought that he had enough powder. The storerooms, he had been assured, contained 308 barrels. But then it developed that this was the total amount that had been delivered to the army since the beginning of the campaign. Most had been expended at Bunker Hill. There were in fact only thirty-six barrels, less than nine rounds a man. The army would be helpless if the British attacked.
Although Washington had no way of knowing that a leader in the Massachusetts Congress was a British spy, he cautiously kept the fact that his army was defenseless from all but two or three key men. Every conceivable spurious reason for needing powder was imagined and used in appeals broadcast across the land. As Washington spent sleepless nights listening for alarm bells, powder appeared from here and there until at last he could stretch his long form out in comparative ease.
Washington’s recurring difficulties merged with his regional prejudices to fill him with such bitterness against the New Englanders that his discretion failed him. The Yankees were, the Virginian wrote, “generally speaking the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw … an exceedingly dirty and nasty people.”
Some of these strictures were leaked to John Adams and the other New Englanders in Congress. Although—as subsequent events were to show—they did not forget, they made no attempt to remove Washington from the command.
How can one explain why the Virginian, who had come in as an unpopular appointment and had shaken up the army so violently (even making Congregationalists work on the sacrosanct Sabbath), had gained in prestige with the Yankees despite his insulting remarks?
To begin with, there was his appearance. Word traveled to London that Washington’s martial dignity would set him apart among ten thousand men: “Not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side.” And then there was his charm. On meeting him, Abigail Adams quoted to her husband what the Queen of Sheba had said on meeting Solomon, “The half was not told me.”
Although the New England leaders were prevented by local equalitarianism from establishing military subordination, they realized the importance of discipline, and were glad, even if they publicly criticized Washington, to see it established. And Yankees respected frugality and labor. Washington had not only personally refused a salary, but he wasted nothing. And no one could have been more faithful. Perhaps because he had been criticized during the French and Indian War for being often away from his regiment, he never left the camp except to ride occasionally to consult the legislators at Watertown.
Furthermore, the army was comfortable in its situation. The enemy remained quiescent. Food and clothing were still plentiful. Being all from a single region where immunity had been built up to the prevailing diseases, the men were healthy. The blockade at Boston was less like a military campaign than an extended mass camping trip.
It was Washington who lay awake worrying; it was Washington who suffered. James Warren, the president of the Massachusetts Congress, wrote, “I pity our poor general, who has a greater burden on his shoulders and more difficulties to struggle with than I think should fall to the share of so good a man.… I see he is fatigued and worried.”
TEN
An Early Triumph
(1775–1776)
On accepting the command, Washington had written to his wife that he expected to be home by autumn. It was hard to doubt that George III, impressed by the resistance which his loyal but outraged American subjects were mounting, would curb his parliament and ministry. Furthermore, after Washington had surveyed the situation at Cambridge, he decided that a completely effective strategy was open to him. He would hold the “ministerial troops” in a tight blockade. He would successfully harass any effort they made to break out into the countryside. The army in Boston, having thus been made useless, would “sink” Great Britain “under the disgrace and weight of the expense.” This would surely “overthrow the designs of the administration.”
However, as the stalemate went on for month after month, Washington became increasingly concerned about the future of his own army. No preparation had been made for maintaining the blockade in midwinter—no warm clothes, no adequate shelter. And, in any case, the enlistments of almost all his troops would come to an end with the year 1775. This bothered Washington all the more because he was not temperamentally attuned to inaction. He began trying to persuade his generals that the British position in Boston was not as impregnable as it seemed. True, there were sophisticated defenses backed by expert artillery; true, any invading force would have to traverse a large expanse of water that was guarded by floating batteries. But surely brave and devoted men might face down all obstacles and smash the enemy! Washington’s generals could not be convinced, and Washington was not sure enough of his conclusions to override his Council of War.
Banner of Washington’s Life Guard (Drawn by Benson J. Lossing. From the 1852 edition of his Pictorial Field Book of the American Revolution)
Recruiting poster (Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York)
And so, as the year approached its end, Washington was faced with the necessity of recruiting his army anew. Most of the common soldiers felt that they had done their stint: let others take their places. And efforts to reorganize the haphazardly raised regiments into a force more uniform and efficient disarranged the officer corps. Although no man’s commission was as old as a year, and the differences might be no more than a day—or even a few minutes—officers got into the most acrimonious hassles concerning which had the right to a higher rank because he was the senior. “Such a dearth of public spirit and want of virtue,” Washington cried out, “such stock-jobbing and fertility in all the low arts to obtain advantages … such a dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen.” If only he could justify it “to posterity and my conscience,” Washington would, he explained, abandon settled America to the British and inhabit the wilderness in a wigwam.
On New Year’s Eve so many of the troops went home that all the blockading defenses could not be manned. Although Washington did his best to cover up, the weakness was too widespread to escape the eyes of spies. It seemed certain that the British would attack. He arranged with his officers on what hills far behind the lines the fleeing remnant of his army would reassemble. But the British did not attack. They hoped the rebels would realize how ridiculous they seemed and give up. When Washington celebrated the dawn of 1776 by raising the newly designed American flag, some Britons assumed that it was a flag of surrender.
The British were annoyed rather than discouraged by their plight in Boston. The unexpected outbreak of the rebellion had found their army in a most disadvantageous position. To march into Massachusetts would serve no strategic end, and the cost in casualties of their victory at Bunker Hill did not encourage further entanglements with the determined farmers of New England. If the rebels did not before then recover their senses, the British command would, at their own good time, use their control of the ocean to move to a more advantageous base. And George III was not reacting as Washington had expected. Instead of curbing his government, he declared publicly that he intended to hire foreign mercenary troops—either Russian or German—to smash by force an insurrection which he by no means regarded as a loyal protest. The Americans, he growled, manifestly intended to establish “an independent empire.”
Washington, who had, up to this time, sought compromise rather than an independent empire, began to change his mind. He was deeply impressed by Thomas Paine’s arguments and exhortations in Common Sense. On January 31, 1776, Washington first acknowledged in writing the
possibility of independence. Four days later, he urged Congress to notify Great Britain that “if nothing else could satisfy a tyrant and his diabolical ministry, we are determined to shake off all connections with a state so unjust and unnatural.” Washington now felt an even greater need to attack Boston and annihilate the enemy.
Several hundred miles to the northwest, an irregular force, led by Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, had captured the British frontier fort at Ticonderoga, and with it what Washington considered “a noble train of artillery.” Colonel Henry Knox, a fat former bookseller who had studied in books the use of cannon, was Washington’s commander of artillery. He supervised pulling the guns over snow and ice to Cambridge. Washington decided to use this ordnance in staging a battle that could at one stroke win (or lose) the war.
Dorchester Neck extended into the harbor southeast of Boston Neck. Neither side had occupied it, although from its heights cannon could fire into the British-held city. Washington resolved that silently, on a dark night, he would build there a fortification containing cannon. The endangered British would be forced to ferry a large detachment from Boston to clear the heights in an engagement resembling Bunker Hill. Washington hoped that his reorganized army would, in addition to inflicting heavy casualties, succeed in holding its ground.
This was only the beginning of what Washington planned to achieve. Since, in attacking Dorchester, the British would have to weaken their garrison in Boston, Washington intended to send four thousand men in small boats across the half mile of water to invade the city. Having landed at two separated beachheads, they would converge and march against the unfortified rear of the British lines on Boston Neck, smash the defenses there, and let in an additional patriot force.
Washington- The Indispensable Man Page 8
