Washington contemplated his decision for days before responding to Hamilton that he could not accept actions that would disrupt society and end in blood. He would trust the more discerning officers to remember his past conduct and endorse his resistance to any armed rebellion. To succeed, the leaders of the revolt would have to remove or discredit him.
Early in March 1783, an unsigned leaflet passed among the officers at Newburgh, New York, where Washington was waiting for Britain to withdraw her troops. The circular, written by an aide to Horatio Gates, attacked the Congress for its coldness and severity to the army and urged officers to suspect any man who advised them to be more patient or moderate. General Washington responded immediately with an order forbidding his men to meet secretly, and he scheduled an open discussion for March 15. Washington wasn’t going to attend, but when a second leaflet claimed that he had endorsed the rebel officers’ demands by calling the meeting, Washington changed his mind and went.
The confrontation was held in a new wooden hall built for both chapel services and dancing. George Washington had relied throughout his public career on other men to voice his sentiments and write his speeches. He arrived visibly nervous, with a paper prepared by an aide. He briefly rebutted the anonymous writer of the leaflets. “Can he be a friend to the army?” Washington asked. “Can he be a friend to this country?”
As the officers listened, they showed no emotion. They seemed to treat Washington as a stranger who had to win them over on the strength of his arguments.
Washington ended his prepared remarks with fine, flattering cadences: “You will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, ‘Had this day been wanting, the world would never have seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining.’ ”
His speech was finished, but Washington was not. He had brought a letter from a Virginia congressman who spoke forcefully of the nation’s debt to the army and promised to redeem it. As Washington began to read, he faltered. After the first paragraph, he stopped, fished in a pocket and took out a new pair of spectacles.
“Gentlemen,” Washington said, “you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now I find myself growing blind.”
Tears welled up in the eyes of many of the men. Washington finished reading the letter and left the hall. When he had gone, the assembled officers voted unanimously to express their confidence in the Congress and to ask George Washington to continue as their spokesman.
—
On April 19, 1783, eight years to the day since General Gage’s troops fired on Lexington Green, the cessation of hostilities between Great Britain and the United States of America was announced. At Continental Army headquarters, the men gave three huzzahs and sang a song called “Independence.”
In June, General Washington wrote the last of his circular letters—appeals he had made regularly to the governors of all thirteen states asking them for recruits and provisions. The tone was different this time, and men were soon calling it “Washington’s Legacy.” The commander in chief reminded the states that they were entering a time of political probation. Washington named four things that would be necessary to preserve American independence: an indissoluble union of states under one federal head; a sacred regard for public justice; the adoption of a proper peace establishment, which meant an army scaled down and disciplined to America’s new needs; and a friendly willingness of the people of the United States to forget their local prejudices and, when called upon, to sacrifice their individual advantages to the good of the community.
Before the month was out, the country learned the urgency of what Washington called “a proper peace establishment” when eighty soldiers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, mutinied over their grievances. Less portentous than the insurrection Washington had faced down at Newburgh, this one had more immediate impact. When the rebels marched on the capital, soldiers in Philadelphia joined them and increased their number to five hundred. They surrounded the Congress, shouting and pointing their muskets at the windows.
The revolt was soon over, and its two ringleaders escaped on a ship just leaving for Europe. But during the threatening hours members of the Congress had fled to Princeton, New Jersey. When calm was restored, Philadelphians asked them to return, but the delegates were tired of being abused and mocked there and voted not to go back. After several months in Princeton, they moved on to Annapolis. The members decided to build two federal towns—one on the banks of the Delaware, another, to mollify the Southern states, on the Potomac River.
In rueful letters to friends and family throughout the years he had been away from home, General Washington had repeated a Biblical phrase: he longed for the day when he could repose again under his own vine and fig tree. Now, in the autumn of 1783, he judged that the time had come. On November 25 the last British soldiers were evacuated from New York, and Washington returned there for the first time in seven years. He held up his procession through the streets for an hour because he wanted the American flag flying before he started down Broadway, but the departing British troops had greased the flagpole and the Americans couldn’t shinny up it. At last a young man borrowed cleats from an ironmonger and climbed to the top.
At noon on Tuesday, December 4, Washington’s officers in New York held a farewell dinner for him at Fraunces Tavern in Pearl Street. When the general arrived, his men seemed to hold their breath. No one spoke. Washington filled his glass with wine and raised it.
“With a heart full of love and gratitude,” he began, “I now take leave of you.”
Washington wished for them that their days ahead would be as prosperous and happy as the days behind them had been glorious and honorable.
His officers took up their glasses. Then Washington said, “I cannot come to each of you, but I shall feel obliged if each of you come and take me by the hand.”
Henry Knox was nearest. As he grasped the general’s hand, Washington’s face was bathed in tears and they embraced silently. After that, each officer came forward and kissed Washington on the cheek. The only sound was weeping. George Washington would return to Mount Vernon, and his officers felt they would never see him again.
Washington’s leavetaking continued through tumultuous receptions in Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore. At Philadelphia, Washington left an accounting of his expenses since 1775. He included the cost of bringing his wife to headquarters between campaigns, along with his supplies, travel, pay for secret intelligence and the entertainment necessary for a man in his position. The eight-year total was 1,972 pounds, nine shillings and fourpence. When auditors went over the accounts, they found that Washington’s figures were off by less than one American dollar.
At Annapolis, although many delegates had already left the Congress to attend to business at home, more than two hundred men turned out for a dinner in Washington’s honor. As one guest observed, the mood of the affair was so elevated that not a soul got drunk. Washington attended a ball that evening at the State House, where he danced every set—he still loved to dance—because he owed it to the ladies to give each that memory.
On Tuesday, December 23, 1783, General Washington entered the congressional chamber of the Maryland State House precisely at noon. He left his horses waiting at the door. When the ceremony was over, Washington planned to set out on the fifty-mile ride that would have him at Mount Vernon in time for Christmas. He would take with him trunks of official papers and two young former officers who would help him sort and arrange them.
Washington had been yearning to retire to his plantation, and now he was almost free and on his way. He had no reason to think that his countrymen would ever demand that he asssume new burdens for America. Yet Washington made two changes in the draft of his farewell to the Congress before he delivered it. In his “affectionate and final farewell” to the Congress, he removed the words “and final.” And when he spoke of taking his “ultimate leave” of pu
blic life, Washington struck the word “ultimate.”
Charles Thomson, the first secretary of the Congress, escorted General Washington to his seat. Thomas Mifflin, once suspected of plotting in the Conway Cabal, was the presiding officer. “Sir,” said President Mifflin as the galleries quieted, “the United States in Congress assembled are prepared to receive your communications.”
General Washington stood and bowed to the twenty members. As he pulled out his farewell remarks, the general’s hands trembled. He congratulated the Congress on the nation’s independence and said that he was resigning “with satisfaction the appointment I accepted with diffidence—a diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our cause, the support of the supreme power of the union and the patronage of Heaven.”
Washington asked for Congress’s patronage for his family of officers and commended his country to the protection of Almighty God. Then his voice broke, and everyone in the State House felt his agitation. He recovered, reached into his coat, and brought out his commission as commander in chief. With a few words, he handed it back to Thomas Mifflin.
In his tribute to the retiring commander, President Mifflin praised George Washington, not only for his wisdom and fortitude but for always protecting the nation’s civil rights through every change and disaster. Many found Mifflin’s reading of his remarks dry and uninspired, but no one complained about the words themselves, which had been written for the occasion by Thomas Jefferson.
Acknowledgments
Writing the story of the American Revolution first occurred to me more than twenty years ago when I was reporting from Saigon on the war in Vietnam. The unconventional tactics of the National Liberation Front as its soldiers fought the world’s most powerful nation brought back memories of the battle of Lexington and Concord from high-school history class. From time to time after that, I tested the parallel by reading histories of the American Revolution, and I found that they fell into two categories. Those surveys that were intended as textbooks were often blandly neutral and heavy with dates. Books by such writers as Susan Alsop, Bernard Bailyn, Fawn Brodie, Marcus Cunliffe, Burke Davis, Pauline Maier, Edmund Morgan, Gary Nash, Arthur Tourtellot and Hiller Zobel were vivid and exciting, but they usually treated a single life or event—Thomas Hutchinson or Thomas Jefferson, the Stamp Act congress or the Boston Massacre. There seemed to be a place for a book that approached the revolution as a story, focusing on the principal actors as they moved from the writs-of-assistance trial in 1761 to General Washington’s resignation from the Continental Army in 1783. The book would be meant for readers who knew that Washington had crossed the Delaware, but didn’t know why; that Benedict Arnold had betrayed his country, but didn’t know how.
The research taught me that after two centuries few facts or interpretations were beyond dispute. Parson Weems’s anecdote of George Washington and the cherry tree appeared only in the fifth edition of his imaginative biography. Other inventions and errors were harder to detect and, sometimes, to give up. Modern historians do not believe, for example, that Nathan Hale said he regretted having but one life to give for his country. Many of them also question whether Patrick Henry had the presence of mind to conclude his challenge to George III with “If this be treason, make the most of it.” In their old age, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams each gave slightly different answers to historians who were asking about events already fifty years past. A writer today can only sift the evidence and make judgments, aware that Samuel Adams would probably repudiate every line that has ever been written about him.
No pleasure quite compares with reading original letters and diaries in their own faded ink. But if a writer ignored the modern scholarship available to him, he might labor a lifetime and still not grasp the whole epic story. I have drawn on the writers I’ve mentioned, as well as the multi-volume works of James Thomas Flexner, Dumas Malone, Douglas Southall Freeman, G. O. Trevelyan and William V. Wells, among others. Sometimes the most valuable insights have come from the shortest studies. Professor Bailyn’s essay on John Adams succinctly revealed Adams’ admirable, contradictory character; and Arthur M. Schlesinger’s article on the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” convinced me that he had penetrated its significance. Two other unusually valuable guides have been George F. Scheer and Hugh F. Rankin’s Rebels and Redcoats and the monumental bibliography of the Revolution completed in 1984 by Ronald Gephart for the Library of Congress.
I have had kind and knowledgeable assistance from staff members at the British Library in London, the Doheny Library of the University of Southern California, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society and the Swem library, William and Mary College. I would like to mention especially Virginia Renner and Leona Schonfeld at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and Judith Farley at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Professors Larry Ceplair and Pauline Maier undertook careful readings of the manuscript, and their suggestions were extremely helpful.
Among other friends and colleagues who aided and encouraged me were Norman Corwin, Peter Craske, Ed Cray, William X. Dunne, Charles Fleming, Karl and Anne Taylor Fleming, Donald and Patty Freed, Betty Friedan, Albert B. Friedman, Lew Grimes, David Halberstam, Denton Holland, Sue Horton, Richard Houdek, Leonard Leader, Irwin C. Lieb, Luther Leudtke, Ethel Narvid, Bryce Nelson, Lynn O’Leary-Archer, Frances Ring, Joe Saltzman, Sebastião Santos, Jorge Schement, Robert J. Schoenberg, Clancy Sigal, Ronald Steel, Peter Virgadamo, Franklin Woodson, Paul Zall and the late Jon Bradshaw.
Lynn Nesbit at International Creative Management brought an enthusiasm for the project that has been heartening throughout the years of research and writing. The skill and dedication of Alice E. Mayhew and Henry Ferris in their editing at Simon and Schuster, and of Vera Schneider in her copyediting and indexing, have been unique in my experience. I thank them most gratefully.
A. J. LANGGUTH, professor emeritus of journalism in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is the author of nine previous books, including Union 1812 and Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975. He lives in Los Angeles.
Register online at www.simonandschuster.com for more information on this and other great books.
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Notes
OTIS: 1761–62
Adams in Town House: Hosmer, 56–57; Tudor, 60; Francis Bowen, 63–64; Wells, I, 44; John Adams, Works, X, 245; John Adams, Statesman, 126–28.
Molasses: Galvin, 69.
Boston’s unemployed: Benjamin Labaree, Colonial, 218.
Hutchinson supported writs: Old South, 4.
Hutchinson family deaths: Bailyn, Ordeal, 22.
“. . . te expectare”: Hutchinson, Diary, I, 46.
“Depend on it”: Sibley, VIII, 152–53.
Hutchinson’s style: Bailyn, Ordeal, 20.
Hutchinson and silver: Warden, 139.
Hutchinson in Milton: Hutchinson, Diary, I, 164.
Peggy Hutchinson dies: Bailyn, Ordeal, 29.
“Summa Potestatis”: Galvin, 18. “Potestas”: M. H. Smith, 227.
Otis calls on Hutchinson: Hosmer, 47; Waters, 119.
Otis sees Hutchinson on Boston Neck: Galvin, 20.
threw out votes: Waters, 82.
Indian scalps: Ibid., 89.
Speaker Otis as shoemaker: Oliver, 27.
“little low dirty things”: Waters, 105.
Bernard offers justiceship: Hutchinson, History, III, 63; Hosmer, 47.
Montesquieu: Hosmer, 67–68.
province in flames: Oliver, 36.<
br />
“. . . hell I’ll stir.”: Francis Bowen, 45.
“. . . danced the brutes!”: Ibid., 10.
pregnant nanny: Waters, 75.
Otis’ largest fees: Francis Bowen, 16.
“Powder plot . . .”: Forbes, 89.
Otis refused a fee: Francis Bowen, 18.
“. . . despise all fees.”: Tudor, 57.
Gridley’s arguments: Waters, 22.
Ware anecdote: Francis Bowen, 60; Adams, Works, II, 525.
Thacher’s voice: Tudor, 58.
Hutchinson on Thacher: Sibley, X, 325.
Otis as flame of fire: Francis Bowen, 58.
Parliament’s power: Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets, I, 100–102.
Otis warns king: Bancroft, IV, 415; Hosmer, 58.
“A man’s house is his castle”: M. H. Smith, 554.
Adams’ attitude toward Britain: Ibid., 254–56; John Adams, Spur, 34η.
Adams on taking up arms: Wells, I, 44; John Adams, Statesman, 132.
London Magazine: Hutchinson, History, III, 68.
Otis elected to House: Ibid., 69.
“a damned faction”: John Adams, Works, X, 248.
Otis’ temper in House: Francis Bowen, 67–68.
“Bedlamism”: Sibley, XI, 254.
“. . . beings called devils.”: John Adams, Diary, I, 346.
Otis would take revenge on Hutchinson: Waters, 148.
“. . . live half well enough.”: Boston Gazette, Jan. 11, 1761.
“. . . ill-gotten gain and power.”: Sibley, XI, 256.
House drops Otis’ language: Francis Bowen, 84–85.
Patriots Page 61
