He had done one thing more. He had captured the holy grail for public actors, operating as a politician with extraordinary success while at the same time not seeming to be one at all, with all the negative baggage that the label has always carried. He was seen, and ever would be seen, as a farmer, a soldier, a patriot. After sixteen years as a legislator, six years in appointive office as judge and city trustee, and his sponsorship of key political moves like the Association of 1769 and the Fairfax Resolves, almost no one thought of him as a political operator, nor would they in the future. It was magic.
PART III
[Washington] possesses two of the great requisites of a statesman, the faculty of concealing his own sentiments, and of discovering those of other men.
—Edward Thornton (1792)1
For the last third of Washington’s life, he was the most conspicuous figure in North America, under constant scrutiny as he led Americans through the Revolutionary War, then the creation of a democratic republic, and finally the perilous early years of that unprecedented form of government. At each stage, Washington’s success grew not from incisive intellectual feats. Indeed, some contemporaries slighted his intelligence and mocked his deliberate habits. Rather, Washington repeatedly was in the seat of greatest power because of his sure judgment of events, canny evaluations of people, great energy and determination, and steady focus on critical strategic goals.
This book will examine five watershed periods in his last quarter century of life that illustrate how he applied to America’s greatest challenges the political mastery learned through his first forty-three years.
Winning the War: Across eight months of war beginning in December 1777, he remade the army during its bitter winter camp at Valley Forge, thwarted a scheme to wrest control of that army from him, and won the critical battle of Monmouth Court House.
Building a Nation: Through the unsettled, drifting years between the end of the fighting in 1781 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, Washington managed soldier mutinies, disbanded the army, and led the creation and acceptance of an effective yet limited government.
Governing a Republic: During his first term as president, he engineered the enactment of the laws that laid the foundation for the new union under the Constitution.
Preserving Peace: During his second presidential term, his controversial policy of neutrality kept the United States out of a bloody European war, and he also quelled internal rebellion, preserving a nation still crippled from eight years of fighting with Britain.
Valuing Freedom: In his final years, Washington searched for a road away from slavery that did not dissolve the union, a futile search that ended with his long-overdue act of freeing his own slaves: an attempt to point his countrymen down a road he never found.
WAR
Chapter 32
The Bloody Path to Valley Forge
For eight years, the Revolutionary War pitted neighbors against each other in savage fighting. Sharpshooters sniped from behind trees, saber-wielding horsemen rode down enemies, infantry charged with bayonets, debilitating diseases decimated battalions of men, and prisoners starved. The war touched everyone. Armies took what they needed from farmers and merchants, only sometimes paying. At different times, foreign soldiers occupied the four largest cities—Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Charleston. A German mercenary fondly remembered Philadelphia, where “every soldier lived lighthearted, merry, and in abundance,” although “no resident was certain of his property among the fifteen thousand men from all classes of society.”1
The fighting even brought prosperity to a few. The British brought goods and silver across the sea, while the revolutionary governments spent heavily to support the war.2
Before the war, Americans enjoyed greater freedom than most people then on Earth; they rebelled not to win their liberty but to defend it. That defense brought profound changes that few foresaw, spreading ideals of liberty and self-government and undermining obedience to a king and a class hierarchy.3
The fighting seesawed, both sides meeting successes and failures. Attacking Quebec in a blizzard on New Year’s Eve of 1775, the rebels failed miserably. A few months later, Washington watched with satisfaction as the British boarded ships and sailed away from Boston, choosing not to take on the New Englanders who had fought so fiercely at the Battle of Bunker Hill nearly a year before. Americans exulted in Washington’s bloodless triumph.
But the autumn of 1776 brought brutal defeats around New York City that nearly annihilated the army. The British took 3,000 prisoners and critical supplies. Washington had too few soldiers and weapons, too many officers he thought were incompetent, and even lacked reliable maps of his own country. His inexperience as commander in chief showed. By December 1776, he confessed to his brother, “I think the game is pretty near up.”4 With a daring surprise attack on Trenton on Christmas morning, however, he dragged the cause back from the brink, then won again at Princeton a week later. That last-minute revival allowed the Continental Army to limp into winter quarters at Morristown, New Jersey.
But Trenton and Princeton could not conceal how desperate the situation was. British naval power controlled New York’s many waterways. The Continentals melted away with illness and desertion. At least 5,000 had already died in the cause, as many from starvation and disease as on the battlefield. To make his army seem larger than it was, Washington rotated New Jersey militia through his camp.5
The rebellion’s glory faded. Prices soared. Enlistments declined. Clinging to the myth of citizen-soldiers called from their hearths and then returning home, many Americans despised a “standing army” as too centralized and dangerous to liberty. Experience punctured the myth, as militias skedaddled when combat began, just as Washington had learned during the previous war. He wanted an army of men trained to be soldiers.
The United States proclaimed itself with the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. For all of that document’s high-flown sentiment, the new nation had but two institutions: Congress and the Continental Army. Each measured its life-span in months. The United States had no executive officers, no courts, no power to tax. Congress and the army had to mature, at speed, to stave off Britain’s global power.
Washington recognized that Congress embodied the nation’s legitimacy and authority, even though it was in many ways not a national legislature, but a diplomatic body of thirteen sovereign states.6 Each state chose and paid its own delegates. To support the army, Congress asked states to send money. If they did not, Congress printed currency that swiftly lost value.
Washington faced immense obstacles. He commanded mostly raw recruits on short enlistments, which meant that untrained soldiers kept replacing untrained soldiers. Officers also were inexperienced, except for Europeans who sought career-advancing commands. Washington took advantage of the foreigners’ expertise in engineering and tactics, but preferred Americans for senior positions. Battlefield setbacks brought grumbling about the general. His erratic second-in-command, Charles Lee, lamented that Washington was “most damnably deficient.”7
Washington’s two favorite subordinates—Nathanael Greene and Henry Knox, head of artillery—were self-educated New Englanders from modest backgrounds. Knox was apprenticed to a bookseller at the age of nine and opened his own shop twelve years later, reading voraciously the whole time. A large, beefy man with gracious manners, Knox gave military advice that bristled with references to precedents like Sweden’s King Charles XII’s tactics at the Battle of Poltava. Greene abandoned his Quaker faith and his iron business to join Rhode Island’s forces. Sturdily built and taller than average, Greene had asthma and a pronounced limp that made him seem so unmilitary that when the Rhode Islanders first elected their officers, they passed over him completely. Washington, however, prized competence, talent, and loyalty over pedigree and surface appearances. He saw the strengths that Greene and Knox could bring, but they all wer
e learning their profession on the fly.8
Their opponents were formidable, beginning with the many Americans called Tories or loyalists or “the disaffected.” The loyalists knew the country as well as Washington’s men did; they fought as well; and because they looked and sounded like the Continentals, they were effective spies.
The enemy’s professionals, British and German, had years of experience as cohesive military units. Their battlefield skills exceeded anything the Continentals could muster. Washington’s chief engineer, the Frenchman Louis Duportail, insisted that Americans were “incapable . . . of resisting the enemy on equal ground.” They could succeed, he preached, only from higher ground or a fortified position, as they had at Bunker Hill. Those suggesting otherwise, he wrote, “do not know what troops are.” Rather than slug it out with the enemy, he and others urged the strategy of the Roman general Fabius Maximus, who defeated Hannibal of Carthage by avoiding battle until the frustrated Carthaginian launched reckless attacks on entrenched defenses.9
Exhilarated by the triumph at Trenton, Congress affirmed Washington’s command in late December 1776, stating its “perfect reliance on the wisdom, vigor, and uprightness of General Washington.” For the next campaign, the commander wanted a tighter army organization and soldiers on longer enlistment periods.10 Perhaps 1777 would be better.
* * *
Luckily for the Americans, indecision and geography delayed the British offensives that year. An attack led by General John Burgoyne struggled down from Canada through the Champlain valley, aiming to control the Hudson River and sever New England from her sister states. To stop Burgoyne, Horatio Gates commanded the army’s northern wing, plus 12,000 militiamen. Washington reinforced Gates with two more regiments and the rifle brigade of Colonel Daniel Morgan, so Gates outnumbered Burgoyne by 3 to 1.11
After weeks of dithering in New York City, General Sir William Howe decided not to help Burgoyne but to sail 15,000 men to the Chesapeake Bay. He aimed to seize the American seat of government, Philadelphia. To meet that thrust, Washington hurried across New Jersey with the balance of his army plus militia, about 15,000 in all. By Duportail’s formula, the even numbers meant the Americans were overmatched.12
In early September, the armies clashed at Brandywine Creek, west of Philadelphia. Duportail was right. Surprised by Howe’s flanking maneuver, the Continentals scrambled into a violent fray, but the better-disciplined enemy prevailed. American casualties were roughly double those of the enemy, though the defeat marked the emergence of a twenty-year-old Frenchman named Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette.13 With a passionate nature and more wealth than experience, Lafayette had secured an honorary major generalship from Congress. At Brandywine, Washington admired how the young Frenchman fought on despite a wound, beginning a father-son relationship that dissolved Washington’s customary aloofness.14
The Continentals meant to defend Philadelphia, but Howe wrongfooted them with a feint to the north. Pivoting, the British marched into the city without firing a shot.15
Washington, however, was not finished. When the news arrived that Burgoyne’s army had been checked at the first Battle of Saratoga, Washington challenged his men not to be outdone. On the foggy morning of October 3, Washington’s attack at Germantown north of Philadelphia drove the enemy back for two miles. The advance foundered as gun smoke mingled with fog to ruin visibility. A detachment failed to cover an American flank. The British and Hessians clawed back the ground they had lost. The Continentals retreated again.16
Although American losses at Germantown exceeded the enemy’s, the Continentals emerged with a surprising confidence. They stressed the opening stages of the battle, not its unhappy conclusion. One claimed the contest had been “eight tenths won,” while another reported that “our men are now convinced they can drive the chosen troops of the enemy . . . whenever they attack them with ardor.” A visitor reported that the soldiers were “sensible only of a disappointment, not a defeat.”17
* * *
After the British seized two Delaware River forts that controlled maritime access to Philadelphia, the Continentals could not recapture the city before winter set in. Washington assured Congress that the British gained little from “possession of our towns, while we have an army in the field . . . It is our arms, not defenseless towns, they have to subdue.”18
The Continentals needed to rest and reorganize in winter quarters, while keeping watch on the enemy’s movements. Sir William, his supplies arriving by ship, was snuggling into Philadelphia to keep his army—and himself—warm and amused through the cold months.19 Valley Forge, twenty miles west of the city, offered some advantages to the Americans. The site, a rough triangle with the Schuylkill River and Valley Creek on two sides, had fresh water and forests for wood gathering. Perched atop open country that sloped down to Philadelphia, it would overlook any British advance. An army there also could defend York to the west, where Congress had settled after fleeing Philadelphia, or Lancaster to the north, where Pennsylvania’s government had relocated. That Valley Forge was barren and windswept, and ill served by roads, would soon become clear.20
The march began with a congressionally decreed day of thanksgiving, which disgusted many soldiers. The army’s supply services were in a death spiral. A New Hampshire officer recorded that his men had no bread for three days. All he was thankful for was “that we are alive and not in the grave with many of our friends.” A Connecticut soldier noted his ration that day was a dollop of rice and a tablespoon of vinegar, followed by a sermon, topped off with “a leg of nothing and no turnips.”21
The Continentals were, one soldier reported, “not only starved but naked; the greatest part were not only shirtless and barefoot, but destitute of all other clothing, especially blankets.” The feet of 2,000 unshod soldiers left blood on the frozen ground. They arrived, he added, in “truly forlorn condition—no clothing, no provisions, and as disheartened as need be.” An army surgeon wrote movingly of the suffering:
There comes a soldier, his bare feet are seen through his worn-out shoes, his legs nearly naked from the tattered remains of an only pair of stockings, his breeches not sufficient to cover his nakedness, his shirt hanging in strings, his hair disheveled, his face meager, his whole appearance pictures a person forsaken and discouraged.22
The supply failures mounted. A few days after the march, a Rhode Island general complained of three days without bread and two without meat. “The men must be supplied,” he wrote, “or they cannot be commanded.” Washington directed each brigade to send men into the country to collect food, but they found little there. Soldiers took to chanting, “No meat, no meat.” When Washington ordered a unit to oppose a British sortie from Philadelphia, the soldiers had no provisions, so they stayed in camp. That led, he wrote, to “a dangerous mutiny . . . which with difficulty was suppressed.”23
Washington’s walking scarecrows had to build their own shelters. His orders specified each hut’s size (fourteen feet by sixteen feet), the components (logs for the walls, packed with clay, and roofs of split slabs covered with earth, fireplaces of wood lined with clay), and the locations (each regiment along a “street,” with officers’ huts behind those of the private soldiers).24 Though Washington ordered that twelve men build each hut, an acute shortage of tools meant that often only three could labor at a time, sharing a single dull ax. For malnourished men in freezing weather, the effort was excruciating.25
The pamphleteer Thomas Paine somehow found the spectacle charming. The soldiers reminded him of “a family of beavers, some carrying logs, others mud and the rest fastening them together.” Lafayette more realistically called the huts “little shanties that are scarcely gayer than dungeon cells.” To demonstrate solidarity with soldiers sleeping in tents, Washington stayed in his tent for the first weeks at Valley Forge, then made a farmhouse his headquarters.26
The suffering was constant. A New Jersey officer led twenty shoeless me
n on a scouting expedition. They cut up blankets to wrap around their feet, but the fabric quickly wore through “and they could be tracked by the blood.” A Massachusetts man wrote, “I have seen the soldiers turned out to do their duty in such poor condition that . . . I could not refrain from tears. It would melt the heart of a savage to see the state we are in.”27
Unwashed men, poorly fed and wearing rags, contracted dysentery and pneumonia and typhus. Scabies, caused by parasites, infected entire brigades. “I have seen the poor fellows,” an officer recorded, “covered over and over with scab.”28
Makeshift hospitals would “prove a grave for many,” Nathanael Greene complained. General Anthony Wayne agreed: “Our men are falling sick in numbers every day, contracting vermin and dying in hospitals.” In February, a congressional committee found “sickness and mortality . . . in an astonishing degree,” noting that “the sick and dead list has increased one third in the last week . . . which was one third greater than the week preceding.”29 Before the encampment ended, one-fifth of the army would die. “The many deaths,” a junior officer wrote, “may serve to prepare us all for a dying hour.” Another remembered that “death seemed to stare the poor soldiers in the face.”30
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