That November, the Jay Treaty between Great Britain and America, which sought to iron out disputes and prevent fresh hostilities, only exasperated France. In what amounted to an undeclared war, the French preyed upon American merchant shipping. By the time John Adams succeeded Washington as president in March 1797, the old allies were on the cusp of open conflict. Anti-French sentiment was only stoked by the Paris government’s contemptuous reception of a commission sent by Adams to repair relations. Washington was among those angered by Gallic affronts to America’s commerce and dignity; old as he was, his warrior spirit still burned within him. Visitors to Mount Vernon heard him call upon his countrymen to arm themselves “with a strength and zeal, equal to the dangers with which we are threatened”; as for Washington himself, he was prepared to “pour out the last drop” of his blood in America’s cause.108 He heartily approved when Congress canceled the historic alliance cemented in 1778 and gave American privateers free rein to retaliate against French merchantmen, even though the move might provoke the dispatch of another formidable expeditionary force across the Atlantic, this time bent on conquest.
For all of Washington’s fulminations against France, in July 1798, when Adams sent him a lieutenant general’s commission as commander in chief of all United States forces, he accepted only reluctantly and on condition of staying at Mount Vernon unless a French invasion was imminent. That month, and once again in the teeth of necessity, Congress voted to raise a “New Army,” strengthening the existing 3,000-strong “Old Army” on the western frontier with twelve more regiments totaling about 10,000 men. That reinforcement could be doubled, if war actually erupted, by another “Provisional Army.” As commander in chief, Washington was obliged to appoint his staff, headed by a trio of major generals. Their selection embroiled him in an unseemly and hurtful dispute involving the faithful Henry Knox: although the most experienced of the three nominees, Washington ranked him behind the other two, Alexander Hamilton and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; as the most senior, Hamilton would also serve as the army’s inspector general—in practical terms, the man responsible for building and running the new force. The bulky but vigorous Knox was mortified, not least because Hamilton had never risen higher than colonel during the Revolutionary War. When he complained to Adams, the president overruled Washington’s ranking and made Knox senior major general, with Hamilton relegated to the third. Increasingly curmudgeonly, Washington bridled at this affront to his authority and threatened resignation if Adams failed to reverse his decision. Under mounting pressure, Adams finally caved in: Knox, who struggled to comprehend Washington’s apparent disregard for his long and loyal services, rejected his commission.
For all his reservations about his command, Washington showed some interest in building the New Army, meeting with Hamilton and Pinckney in Philadelphia to compile a list of politically reliable officers; given the heightened animosities between the Federalists and their Republican opponents, this was no easy task. At the prospect of taking the field once more, his thoughts turned again to the kind of figure he would cut at the head of his troops. While no dandy, Washington had always appreciated fine clothing; in 1798, however, he was determined to be more ostentatious, perhaps because he wanted no repetition of 1781, when Rochambeau’s gaudy troops had outshone his ragged Continentals. In specifying his own uniform, Washington reverted to his habitual blue and buff but modified the austere elegance of his Revolutionary War outfit by suggesting embroidery “on the cape, cuffs and pockets,” plus a white plume in the hat as “a further distinction.” Washington was even pickier when it came to horseflesh. His preference was for “a perfect white,” followed in descending order by “a dapple grey, a deep bay, a chestnut, [and] a black.” But it was not just a question of looks, particularly as Washington was not as nimble as he used to be: long legs and height alone were “no recommendation,” adding “nothing to strength, but a good deal to the inconvenience in mounting.”109
Happy to act as little more than a dignified military figurehead, Washington offloaded increasing responsibility upon Hamilton: the former captain of artillery who shared his commander’s strict honor code and who had once told Adams and Thomas Jefferson that Julius Caesar was “the greatest man that ever lived,” welcomed the chance to create an efficient, modern standing army, capable of defending the Republic and even attacking Spain’s American possessions.110
But Hamilton’s martial dream was never realized. During 1799, as renewed talks with France lessened the likelihood of fighting, so the “New Army” was deemed a costly irrelevance and ultimately voted out of existence. In the opening decades of the new century, as Joseph Plumb Martin could testify, not only did the traditional preference for a citizen militia dominate America’s current military establishment, it distorted perceptions of the war in which he had fought as a youngster. In 1818, when legislation promoted by President James Monroe, himself a Revolutionary War veteran who had been wounded at Trenton, authorized pensions for hard-up survivors of the Continental Army, Martin encountered resentment at his “good fortune.” What hurt most was the prevailing sentiment that long-service regulars like Martin had been unnecessary and “that the militia were competent for all that the crisis required.” Martin, like Washington, knew better.111
At the end of his own life, Washington looked back wistfully to the years that had set him on his path to international fame. In 1798, he wrote a remarkable, and revealing, letter to Sally Fairfax, still living in England and long widowed. From Mount Vernon, Washington could see the bleak shell of Belvoir, gutted by fire in 1783. He never looked upon it without regretting that the “former inhabitants, with whom we lived in such harmony and friendship,” were gone. Now the ruins of the mansion which Washington had first entered as an impressionable teenager were no more than “the memento of former pleasures.” Although his wife, Martha, would peruse what he had written and add a contribution of her own, Washington made a telling admission: despite all that had happened to him since, he assured Sally, nothing had “been able to eradicate from my mind, the recollection of those happy moments, the happiest in my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.” Underpinning his decision to make his mark as a soldier, those cherished hours in Sally’s company had exerted a crucial influence upon Washington’s destiny, and that of his country.112
When he wrote to Sally Fairfax, Washington’s attitude toward war had changed; his hunger for glory had been satisfied long before. In a letter to his good friend the Chevalier de Chastellux, written in 1788 as ominous storm clouds gathered in Europe, Washington had shunned the “waste of war and the rage of conquest.” In what was surely a reference to his own youthful motivations, he had observed: “It is time for the age of knight-errantry and mad-heroism to be at an end.” It is perhaps significant that in his final years Washington acquired not one, but two copies of the engraving taken from Joseph Wright of Derby’s poignant 1789 painting The Dead Soldier, to decorate Mount Vernon’s “New Room.” Depicting a young mother with baby in arms, keening over the body of her husband, it was a dramatic depiction of the real cost of war.113
Yet there is no denying the centrality of warfare to Washington’s towering reputation among his contemporaries. Washington knew this himself. It was as a soldier above all that he expected, and hoped, to be remembered. Why else, when on his deathbed and convinced that his “disorder would prove fatal,” would he instruct his personal secretary Tobias Lear to “arrange and record all my late military letters and papers”?114
Washington not only witnessed his country’s transformation from royal colonies into an independent republic but experienced the process at a starkly human and visceral level; by his frontline leadership of the Continental Army, a weapon forged to his own specifications, he did more than anyone to achieve it. Hence it was to Washington—rather than to the more intellectual John Adams or Thomas Jefferson—that Americans first turned for national leadership once their independence had been won. It was apt that Washington’s final hours
should be shared by Dr. James Craik, who had been with him at so many critical moments in his military career: Fort Necessity in 1754, Valley Forge in 1778, and Yorktown in 1781. Now the faithful doctor and his lancet achieved what the Indians, French, and British had all failed to accomplish: his remorseless medicinal bleedings slowly but steadily drained Washington’s great frame of its strength until his pallor prefigured the “marble man” he would soon become.
As “Light Horse Harry” Lee phrased it in his famous eulogy, George Washington had been “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Lee’s careful ordering of these qualifications is revealing. Without his youthful hankering after military fame, kindled by his half brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon and the Fairfaxes at Belvoir, Washington would, in all probability, have remained a footnote in history: a respectable, if unremarkable, surveyor and planter. For Washington, war truly paved the way to everything else. The influences he absorbed as a youngster on the Potomac likewise contributed that other essential strand to his character—the conduct, bearing, and outlook that led his contemporaries to perceive him as a “complete gentleman.”115
Writing in 1903, the British Army’s historian, Sir John Fortescue, believed that all Englishmen should readily acknowledge Washington’s bravery and determination, adding an explanation for his “remarkable” leadership qualities: “Washington had the advantage of being a gentleman,” Sir John wrote. He continued rather stiffly: “I am aware that this is now supposed to be no advantage; but Washington considered it to be essential to a good officer, and I am content to abide by his opinion.”116 While Fortescue was also commenting upon the blurring of social distinctions within his own society, his observation is no less valid: Washington’s gentlemanly persona went beyond a veneer of polite manners; it shaped his whole approach to soldiering and was instrumental in his successful conduct of the American War of Independence. George Washington’s extraordinary reputation as one of the most celebrated men of his own age, or of any other, can be traced back unerringly to his ambition to become both a gentleman and a warrior: it was the gradual fusion of those traits that ultimately forged such a formidably balanced fighter.
Notes
Abbreviations used in notes:
Diaries Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington, 6 vols. (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1976–79)
GW George Washington
JCC Worthington C. Ford et al., eds., The Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, 34 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1904–37)
PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
PWCW W. W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, and Philander D. Chase, eds., The Papers of George Washington: Colonial Series, 10 vols. (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1983)
PWRW W. W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, and Philander D. Chase, eds., The Papers of George Washington: Revolutionary War Series, 20 vols. to date (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1985–)
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly (3rd Series)
WW John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington, 39 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1931–39)
Note: After the first full citation, all other titles are given in shortened form.
Introduction
1. The Annual Register . . . for 1776, p. 148.
2. Patrick Ferguson to Dr. Adam Ferguson [?],January 31, 1778, in Howard H. Peckham, ed., Sources of American Independence: Selected Manuscripts from the Collections of the William L. Clements Library (Chicago, 1978), p. 300.
3. Message to the Delaware Nation, May 12, 1779, in PWRW, 20, pp. 447–48.
4. London Chronicle, January 5, 1782, quoted in Troy O. Bickham, “Sympathizing with Sedition? George Washington, the British Press, and British Attitudes During the American War of Independence,” WMQ, 59 (2002), pp. 101–22: 120.
5. “Particulars of the Life and Character of General Washington . . . Signed an OLD SOLDIER,” Gentleman’s Magazine, August 1778, pp. 368–70: 370. This first appeared in two newspapers, Lloyd’s Evening Post and Public Advertiser, on August 17, 1778.
6. The Annual Register . . . for 1777, p. 20.
7. See, for example, Dave Richard Palmer, The Way of the Fox: American Strategy in the War for America, 1775–1783 (Westport, Connecticut, 1975), p. 143; John Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (New York, 2007), p. 100; Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency George Washington (New York, 2004), pp. 74, 100–101; Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York, 2005), p. 366.
8. For a discussion of these two paintings that reaches a different verdict on their effectiveness, see David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York, 2004), pp. 429–31.
9. On West, Copley, Peale, and Trumbull see Chapter 2, “Transatlantic Journeys,” in Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London, 2010), pp. 83–116.
10. Isaac J. Greenwood, “Remarks on the Portraiture of Washington,” in The Magazine of American History, with Notes and Queries, 2 (1878), pp. 30–38: 38. The author of the article was the grandson of the dentist John Greenwood.
11. Ibid., p. 31.
12. GW to Greenwood, January 6, 1799, in WW, 37, p. 83.
13. Greenwood, “Remarks on the Portraiture of Washington,” Magazine of American History (1878), p. 38. For Houdon’s bust and statue, see William M. S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton, George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1999), pp. 155–58, 164.
14. Ibid., pp. 165, 205, 215–16, 222–25.
15. Stuart’s portrait of “Washington at Dorchester Heights” in 1776, which was painted in 1806, is in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. See Richard McLanathan, Gilbert Stuart (New York, 1986), pp. 127–31.
16. This memoir is given and discussed in Fred Anderson, ed., George Washington Remembers: Reflections on the French and Indian War (Lanham, Maryland, 2004).
17. For Washington’s revision of the genesis of the Yorktown campaign, see below, p. 393.
18. William S. Powell, ed., “A Connecticut Soldier Under Washington: Elisha Bostwick’s Memoirs of the First Years of the Revolution,” WMQ, 6 (1949), pp. 94–107: 95, 101, 103–104.
1: Finding a Path
1. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), p. 214.
2. “The American Ancestry of Mary Ball,” Appendix 1 of Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington: A Biography, 7 vols. (New York, 1948–57), 1, p. 530.
3. Ibid., p. 15.
4. Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 (New York, 2001), p. 142.
5. See J. Frederick Fausz, “‘Engaged in Enterprises Pregnant with Terror’: George Washington’s Formative Years among the Indians,” in Warren R. Hofstra, ed., George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry (Madison, Wisconsin, 1998), pp. 115–55: 118.
6. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: The Forge of Experience (1732–1775) (Boston, 1965), p. 11.
7. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 17, 26–27.
8. See Franklin’s editorials in the Pennsylvania Gazette, April 11 and May 9, 1751.
9. On the rise of Virginian slavery, see especially Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975).
10. For the Vernon phenomenon, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 140–48.
11. David Syrett, “The Raising of American Troops During the War of the Austrian Succession,” in Historical Research, 73 (2000), pp. 20–32: 21–25.
12. Dated June 9, 1740, and delivered to him on July 10, 1740, Lawrence Washington’s commission is preserved at Mount Vernon (Record no. 6236/W–734).
13. D. E. Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1
986), pp. 51–52.
14. Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1991), p. 149.
15. Lawrence Washington to Augustine Washington, May 30, 1741, in The Magazine of American History, with Notes and Queries, 2 (1878), pp. 435–37: 437.
16. Ibid.
17. Smollett’s “An Account of the Expedition Against Carthagena in the West Indies” first appeared in A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages (1756). The citation here is from The Miscellaneous Works of Tobias Smollett . . . 6 vols. (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1800), 4, p. 444.
18. Ibid., p. 432.
19. See Vernon to General Wentworth and to the Governor of Jamaica, both from aboard Princess Carolina, at anchor off Terra Bomba, March 20, 1741, in B. Mcl Ranft, ed., The Vernon Papers (Navy Records Society, 1958), pp. 193–95.
20. [Charles Knowles] An Account of the Expedition to Carthagena (Dublin, 1743), pp. 11, 33n, 46–47.
21. Miscellaneous Works of Smollett, 4, pp. 440, 442–43.
22. “George Washington’s ‘Remarks,’” in Anderson, ed., George Washington Remembers, p. 15.
23. For the “cherry tree story,” see Rasmussen and Tilton, George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths, pp. 13–14.
24. I am extremely grateful to Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, director of Collections and Interpretation at the American Revolution Center, Philadelphia, for bringing this intriguing relic at Mount Vernon to my attention.
25. On the significance of the Rules of Civility, see especially Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1988), p. 7; Rasmussen and Tilton, George Washington: The Man Behind the Myths, pp. 11–12.
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