The World Turned Upside Down
For George Washington and the dwindling band of officers and men who remained under his command, 1781 would prove to be the decisive year in the struggle for American independence. Yet at its outset there was precious little cause for optimism; indeed, the year opened with an episode that suggested that the patriot cause had reached its nadir and was crumbling from within.
While not as cruel as its predecessor, the winter of 1780–81 was harsh enough for the Continentals still billeted in their old huts at Morristown, New Jersey. The bitter weather did nothing to improve the mood of men who were increasingly irate at their treatment by a Congress and states that seemed indifferent to either their services or sufferings. Besides the usual shortages of food, pay, and clothing that had caused unrest among the Connecticut Continentals in May 1780, veterans of the “Pennsylvanian Line” now nursed more specific grievances. Back in 1777, when the “new army” was recruited, they had been enlisted for “three years or during the war”: a dangerously ambiguous wording. In 1779, as the end of the three years approached, the Pennsylvanian Continentals maintained that their enlistments would expire then, not continue as long as the war lasted. Given the army’s chronic shortage of manpower, Washington and the Pennsylvania state authorities not surprisingly upheld the “duration” argument instead. As a douceur to reconcile the men to the fact that they were indeed signed up for the war, each received $100; yet the way in which the dispute was settled, with some men bullied into accepting the payoff, left a bad taste behind it.1
Deep-seated resentment finally erupted on New Year’s Day 1781, when about 1,500 Pennsylvanian Continentals mutinied at Morristown. As their state was now paying cash bounties for new recruits and for men enlisted on short terms who were willing to sign up for another hitch, these veterans felt betrayed by the settlement they had accepted in 1779. While now insisting that their own enlistments were up, most were ready to reenlist—provided they reaped the same generous benefits as the latecomers and short-timers. The mutineers’ mood was angry. Officers who attempted to restore order were roughly handled, with several of the most unpopular killed or badly hurt by bayonets, musket butts, or stones. For all their violence, the Pennsylvanians were well organized. Electing a “Board of Sergeants” to present their grievances, they resolved to march on Philadelphia—where Congress had presided since the British evacuation of the city in 1778—and confront the revolution’s civilian leadership. The Pennsylvanians’ commander, the fire-eating Brigadier General Anthony Wayne, was unable to quell the discontent, although his men were at pains to assure him of their loyalty to the patriot cause, arresting two agents that Sir Henry Clinton sent from New York in hopes of exploiting the unrest. As Wayne’s determined and defiant men marched through New Jersey to Princeton, he was swept along with them, like a cork on a stream.2
Such signs that the American revolutionary cause was imploding shocked Rochambeau; if the unrest spread and the Continental Army dissolved, the French court directed, he was to sit tight on Rhode Island until his men could be evacuated to the West Indies.3 At his headquarters at New Windsor, above West Point, George Washington was no less concerned at the “unhappy and alarming defection of the Pennsylvania line,” but, with no guarantee that the men under his immediate command wouldn’t follow suit, he was reluctant to leave them and deal with the mutiny in person. Instead, he urged Wayne to contain the situation, staying with his men and negotiating with them. Mass resistance by armed and livid veterans required delicate handling, and Washington desperately needed their manpower: Wayne should “draw from them what they conceive to be their principal grievances and promise to represent faithfully to Congress and to the state the substance of them and to endeavor to obtain a redress,” he advised. Above all, the notoriously hot-headed “Mad Anthony” Wayne should avoid a heavy-handed use of force. Such a tactic might fail to intimidate determined soldiers or backfire by driving them into the open arms of the British.4
Washington’s advice was sound: talk, not intimidation, defused the crisis. When the mutineers reached Trenton, they were met by Pennsylvania’s state president, the former Continental Army adjutant general and Washington aide Joseph Reed, accompanied by representatives from Congress. Negotiating directly with the sergeants, Reed agreed to discharge every man who claimed to have enlisted for three years only, without awaiting confirmation from the regimental muster rolls. The mutineers were also offered new clothing and back pay, along with immunity from prosecution. Many of them promptly reenlisted for the new bounty. Temporarily paralyzed, within weeks the Pennsylvanian Line had resumed its place within the Continental Army.
Washington’s fears of further unrest were well founded. The Pennsylvanians’ success encouraged several hundred of the New Jersey Continentals, based at Pompton, New Jersey, to mutiny on January 20. Although they had recently received $5 in cash in a gesture toward their arrears of pay, these veterans were also angry at the better terms being offered to recruits. The New Jersey troops, who had been urged to march on Congress by their leaders, were swiftly appeased by concessions, and the upheaval at Pompton subsided. Unlike the Pennsylvanians, they didn’t escape punishment. Braced for fresh unrest, Washington was determined that the “dangerous spirit” running through the ranks must now be “suppressed by force.” Unless it was, he warned the president of Congress, “there is an end to all subordination in the Army and indeed to the Army itself.”5
To hammer home his message, Washington sent a 500-strong detachment under Major General Robert Howe to chastise the New Jersey units. By dawn of January 27, after a punishing march through the snow, they were in view of the soldiers’ huts. Howe harangued his own New Englanders to remind them of their duty, then closed in on the unsuspecting erstwhile mutineers. Surrounded and faced with loaded cannon, they quietly submitted. According to Dr. James Thacher, who accompanied Howe’s command, three ringleaders were tried on the spot, “standing on the snow,” and sentenced to be shot immediately. A dozen of their comrades were forced to form the firing squad, shedding tears as they primed their muskets and rammed down cartridges. But they obeyed orders. After two men had been shot to death, the third was pardoned. Thacher believed that the “tragical scene produced a dreadful shock, and a salutary effect on the minds of the guilty soldiers.” He regretted the severity of the punishment inflicted upon men with “more than a shadow of [a] plea to extenuate their crime,” who had “suffered many serious grievances . . . with commendable patience” before finally losing “confidence in public justice.” Echoing Washington’s own mantra, Thacher added: “But the very existence of an army depends on proper punishment and subordination.”6
The latest storm had dissipated, but another was already brewing. In the last days of 1780, the renegade Benedict Arnold, now a brigadier general in the British Army, had arrived off the coast of Virginia with 1,200 men. He had been sent south by Clinton to establish a British naval base in the Old Dominion and mount raids that would divert attention from Lord Cornwallis in North Carolina. Arnold relished his new assignment. Virtually unopposed, his troops sailed up the James River and on January 5 marched into Richmond, now the state capital. The next day, Arnold’s raiders made a pungent bonfire of public buildings and tobacco warehouses. Despite the best efforts of Baron Steuben, who was in Virginia to help rebuild the shattered army of the Southern Department, the militia failed dismally to check the destruction. Reembarking aboard their transports, the British sailed back down the James and began fortifying Portsmouth, near Norfolk.
So far Arnold had rampaged with impunity. The first challenge to his position came in mid-February, when a small French flotilla—one sixty-four-gun ship and a pair of frigates commanded by Captain Arnaud le Gardeur de Tilly—slipped through the British blockade of Newport to reach the Chesapeake. This move was totally unexpected, and Tilly exploited the surprise to capture several British craft, including the forty-four-gun Romulus. His presence suggested that a joint Franco-American attack on Portsmouth was looming, and Arnold was sufficiently concerned to concentrate his forces within its new defenses. But when one of Tilly’s frigates grounded while attempting to get upriver, the Frenchman opted to withdraw before the precarious balance of naval superiority tilted against him. By February 24, he was back at Newport.7
While disappointing in its results, the miniature expedition demonstrated the potential for another, heavier blow at the same target. This held strong appeal for Washington. Before Tilly’s command had sailed, he’d suggested that the entire French squadron at Rhode Island should go south, along with 1,000 of Rochambeau’s soldiers. Washington would contribute a supporting force of American troops under Lafayette, who would make for the Chesapeake overland. By the time Washington sent out his orders to Lafayette, Tilly’s ships were already at sea. After their return, however, no time was lost in forging ahead with plans for a far more ambitious expedition along the lines Washington had envisaged, to be led by the new squadron commander, the Chevalier Destouches.
For his mission, Lafayette was given command of a 1,200-strong detachment of Continental Light Infantry. Working in conjunction with the hard-pressed Steuben, the Virginian militia, and the anticipated French ships, the marquis was to curb Arnold’s depredations and ensure that he did not evade the just desserts for “his treason and desertion.” Indeed, should the traitor fall into Lafayette’s hands, Washington directed, he must receive his punishment “in the most summary way.” Even the fearless Arnold was momentarily unnerved by the prospect of the noose that Washington clearly longed to tie around his neck: Captain Ewald, who served alongside him in Virginia, noticed that when the appearance of Tilly’s ships caused anxiety for the security of Portsmouth, Arnold’s “former resolution” was “mixed with cautious concern due to his fear of the gallows if he fell into the hands of his countrymen.” To escape such a fate, Ewald noticed, Arnold “always carried a pair of small pistols in his pocket as a last resort.”8
Meanwhile, Washington held high hopes for Destouches’s expedition and, to speed it on its way, traveled to Newport himself. This visit gave the French officer corps a first sight of their illustrious ally. Thanks to his well-publicized exploits, Washington already enjoyed a tremendous reputation in Europe, especially among Britain’s inveterate enemies. Far from being disappointed by the reality, his allies found him even more impressive in the flesh. As one young officer, Napoleon Bonaparte’s future chief of staff Louis-Alexandre Berthier, observed: “The nobility of his bearing and his countenance, which bore the stamp of all his virtues, inspired everyone with the devotion and respect due his character, increasing, if possible, the high opinion we already held of his exceptional merit.”9
Berthier was not alone. Rochambeau’s Bavarian aide-de-camp, Baron Ludwig von Closen, was no less impressed when he met Washington at Newport that March and never altered his opinion of him:
Throughout my career under General Washington, I had ample opportunity to note his gentle and affable nature; his very simple manners, his very easy accessibility; his even temper; his great presence of mind, in sum, it is evident that he is a great man and a brave one. He can never be praised sufficiently. In military matters, he does not have the brilliance of the French in expression, but he is penetrating in his calculations and a true soldier in his bearing. This is the opinion of the entire army, which no one can applaud more sincerely than I.10
Washington’s combination of gentleman and warrior had once again served him well, swiftly forging bonds with the aristocratic Old World professionals. His prolonged exposure to the assured gentility of the English-born members of the Fairfax dynasty at Belvoir during his formative years had bequeathed a lasting and vitally important legacy: as another of Rochambeau’s aristocratic aides, Baron Cromot du Bourg, observed that summer, Washington’s “manners are those of one perfectly accustomed to society, quite a rare thing certainly in America.”11 Whatever else worried the French about their allies—their folksy lack of sophistication, their threadbare and undermanned regiments, and their chaotic finances, for example—Washington’s character and conduct did much to redress the balance, leaving an overwhelmingly positive impression; here was a man they could relate to and work with. Indeed, Washington’s reception at Newport resembled a triumph: French soldiers in full parade dress lined the streets, while warships in the harbor fired thirteen-gun salutes in his honor, just as they would have done for a full marshal of France: the “assassin of Jumonville” had come a long way since 1754.12
Destouches’s squadron sailed from Newport on March 8, 1781. It carried fourteen field pieces and more than 1,100 men, many of them grenadiers and “chasseurs,” as the French called their light infantry. Yet it never reached its destination. In another demonstration of the vagaries of sea power, Destouches arrived off Virginia’s Cape Henry on March 16 to find the entrance to Chesapeake Bay blocked by Arbuthnot’s roving squadron. The fleets were evenly matched, and although the British admiral enjoyed the advantage of a following wind—the prized “weather gage”—the ensuing encounter was indecisive. Unable to penetrate the Bay, Destouches called a council of war, then took its advice to return to Newport.13 Clinton meanwhile reinforced Arnold with another 2,000 men under a new commander, Major General William Phillips, a highly experienced officer who had distinguished himself by his skillful handling of the British artillery in Germany during the Seven Years’ War; it was his guns that had killed Lafayette’s father at Minden in 1759.
Despite Destouches’s failure—the latest in a lengthening list of disappointments—that spring, Washington apparently sensed that the seemingly stalemated war was entering a new and potentially decisive phase. On May 1, he recommenced his diary, or more precisely “a concise journal of military transactions etc”: apart from a terse record of the brutal weather at Morristown in early 1780, he had written nothing since his last entry on June 19, 1775, just days after his appointment as commander in chief.14
Events in the Carolinas, hitherto the source of little save gloom for Washington, now gave him some badly needed encouragement. Finally freed from his punishing, thankless, and distinctly inglorious stint as the Continental Army’s quartermaster general in October 1780, Nathanael Greene had succeeded the tarnished Horatio Gates as commander of the Southern Department. Greene quickly made his mark. Boldly splitting his army at Charlotte in December, he sent about 700 Continentals and militia under Daniel Morgan westward to gather provisions and test British strength in the South Carolina backcountry. Cornwallis ordered his vigorous light cavalry leader Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton in hot pursuit with a sizable detachment, including his own crack formation of Loyalists, the British Legion. “Bloody Ban” caught up with the reinforced Morgan at Hannah’s Cowpens on January 17, 1781. There, the wily “Old Waggoner” drubbed the impetuous dragoon in a devastating encounter that demonstrated the potential of well-handled militia when working in conjunction with dependable Continentals. Faced by oncoming British bayonets, the militia fell back as usual, but only after inflicting significant casualties with their muskets and rifles. Breathless and disordered from their pursuit of the retreating militiamen, Tarleton’s infantry were then caught off guard when Morgan’s well-drilled Continentals, who had staged a disciplined withdrawal, launched a decisive counterattack: of Tarleton’s 1,100 men—mostly British regulars—more than 800 were killed or captured, a grievous loss to Cornwallis’s command.15
Goaded by news of Cowpens, Cornwallis gave chase to Greene, pursuing him north all the way to the Dan River. Greene won the frantic “race to the Dan” and crossed into Virginia, while Cornwallis pulled back to Hillsborough in hopes of rallying the North Carolina Loyalists. They failed to materialize in worthwhile numbers. When Greene recrossed the Dan, Cornwallis advanced to meet him. Carefully shunning battle until he had been reinforced, Greene finally stood his ground on March 15, 1781, near Guilford Court House. Although his 4,400 men outnumbered Cornwallis’s troops by more than two to one, the wary Greene adopted a defensive position, intended, like Morgan’s at Cowpens, to extract the maximum value from his shaky militia: they formed his first two lines, with Continentals in the third. Although the militia crumpled under the British assault, before taking to their heels they inflicted enough damage to ensure that the redcoat line was thinner than ever when it reached the veteran Continentals. Even then, by dint of sheer hard fighting, Greene was forced to retreat after a savage seesawing engagement. Cornwallis held the field, but it was another costly victory, with the British suffering twice as many casualties as their enemies. Washington noted the outcome with approval, informing Greene that he was “truly sensible of the merit and fortitude of the veteran bands” under his command and that war was a chancy business, with the “most flattering” prospects deceptive, especially when militia were involved.16
Despite Washington’s own abiding distrust of militia, both Morgan and Greene had demonstrated that the contribution of such part-timers was not confined to the kind of harassing, irregular warfare that had flared in New Jersey in 1777 or to the intimidation of Loyalist civilians. Indeed, by 1781, many American militiamen had already completed a tour of duty in either the Continental Army or the regular regiments raised by the individual states for their own defense and were more seasoned than their amateur status suggests. In addition, at a time when every redcoat or Hessian casualty was increasingly difficult to replace, the Americans’ ability to boost their own itinerant Continental forces with short-term transfusions of local manpower was starting to tell. Also, while the Continental Army was always far below its theoretical strength, often at barely a half or even a third of the figures voted by Congress, the militia drew many more Americans into the revolutionaries’ armed struggle, albeit for shorter periods and at less risk of death or disability; indeed, the relative attractiveness of militia service strongly discouraged enlistment in the Continentals.17 Some indication of the extraordinary level of involvement is provided by the response to 1832 legislation that belatedly offered pensions for all Revolutionary War veterans who could prove at least six months’ service in any formation—Continental, state regular, or militia: half a century after the end of the conflict, some 65,000 eligible claimants were still alive; taking into account wartime fatalities of perhaps 25,000 and those who had died since 1783, it has been estimated that between 175,000 and 200,000 Americans saw some kind of military service in the revolutionary cause. Based upon the total population of whites and blacks—and allowing both for Loyalists and a widespread reluctance to permit mass enlistment of slaves—almost one in two of all males of “fighting age” served. This was a truly revolutionary scale of mobilization—but one that makes the efforts of Washington’s hard core of long-service Continentals even more remarkable.18
While Cornwallis recuperated from his blooding at Guilford Court House, Greene seized the initiative, marching against vulnerable British outposts in South Carolina. Greene, like Washington, was naturally aggressive; although forced by circumstances to adopt an essentially defensive strategy, he hankered for the crowning glory of battle that he’d read about as a youth. But the decisive victory that Greene craved continued to elude him: on April 25, 1781, as he advanced against the British base at Camden, the young Francis Lord Rawdon marched out to confront him at Hobkirk’s Hill. Rather than await the attack, Greene boldly attempted to envelop Rawdon’s flanks, sending in his veteran Virginian and Maryland Continentals with fixed bayonets. By lengthening his own line, Rawdon baffled Greene’s plan and after another fierce fight obliged him to retreat. Cornwallis rated Rawdon’s victory as “by far the most splendid of this war” although he knew from hard experience that in the Carolinas such tactical successes, however glorious, meant all too little in broader strategic terms.19
Within weeks there were the first hints of a development that would decide the conflict in a far more dramatic fashion than Cornwallis, or Washington, could have imagined. On May 8, the French frigate Concorde, which had left Brest on March 26, arrived in Boston. It brought General Rochambeau’s son, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, with dispatches for his father from the French minister of war, Philippe-Henri-Marie, Comte de Ségur, and a new commander for the naval squadron at Rhode Island, the Comte de Barras; crucially, they bore news that another fleet, under Rear Admiral François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse and consisting of no fewer than twenty-six ships of the line, eight frigates, and numerous transport vessels, had left France for the West Indies. Ségur had added the tantalizing intelligence that this powerful armament would be available for operations on the North American coast in “July or August.”20
The implications for the balance of naval power on the eastern seaboard were momentous: here at long last was a chance to achieve the overwhelming maritime superiority upon which a decisive land campaign could be based. Rochambeau and his new naval colleague both wanted to discuss the strategic situation with Washington without delay, and a meeting was fixed at Wethersfield, Connecticut. Ominously, Admiral Barras was unable to attend the conference on May 22; in yet another indication of the existing limitations upon sea power, he had been obliged to remain at Newport by the sudden appearance off Rhode Island of a British fleet under Arbuthnot. Rochambeau was instead accompanied by Major General François Jean le Beauvoir, Chevalier de Chastellux, a distinguished officer and enlightened philosophe who had already struck up what would become an enduring friendship with Washington. Like his colleagues in the French high command, Chastellux was a nobleman: he, too, was deeply impressed by Washington’s character and wrote a famous sketch that appeared in his popular Travels in North America. To Chastellux, Washington was “the greatest and the best of men” in whom there was a “perfect harmony . . . between the physical and moral qualities.” Such balance extended to Washington’s physiognomy, which was “mild and agreeable” with “neither a grave nor a familiar air.” But there was a striking exception to this calm, carefully moderated character: on horseback Washington was a different man. He was a bold and skillful equestrian, breaking in his own mounts, galloping even when there was no need for haste, and jumping the highest fences with reckless abandon.21 All those long days chasing foxes across Virginia’s Northern Neck like some Rutlandshire squire had not been wasted; the Neck’s proprietor and young Washington’s patron, that fanatical huntsman Lord Fairfax, would most certainly have approved.
Washington’s rapport with Chastellux, which was lubricated by a shared appreciation for fine wine, now yielded useful dividends: for security reasons, war minister Ségur was adamant that Washington should know nothing more than that de Grasse was bound for the West Indies; in the days before the conference, however, Chastellux not only let his hard-riding American friend in on the details but took the liberty of enclosing a memorandum: this urged Washington to set Rochambeau marching for New York; then, once de Grasse had rendezvoused with Barras, the fleet and allied troops should move together against Virginia.22
With hindsight this was prophetic advice; but at Wethersfield Washington was fixated upon his old objective, New York. Indeed, the recent reduction of Clinton’s garrison through the “several detachments” sent to the south now made it a more attractive target than ever. In consequence, it was agreed that the French and American armies should join forces on the Hudson River as soon as possible before moving down toward New York, ready to exploit any chink in Clinton’s Manhattan defenses. If the West Indian fleet arrived off the coast, the combined force could either besiege New York or act “against the enemy in some other quarter, as circumstances shall dictate.” Washington’s diary reveals that such alternative zones of operation included “the southward,” which suggests that Chastellux’s recent hint had at least struck a chord. Yet Washington left Rochambeau in no doubt of his own priorities, piling up the reasons against a southern campaign: the likely wastage of men from long and punishing marches, the lateness of the season for such a far-flung venture, and the difficulties and expense of land transportation all underlined “the preference which an operation against New York seems to have, in present circumstances.” Writing to Major General Sullivan, Washington noted another point in favor of attacking New York: as the garrison was weak, there were fine prospects for success unless Clinton recalled substantial forces from the south. In that case, he added, “the same measure which might produce disappointment in one quarter would certainly, in the event, afford the greatest relief in another.”23
Rochambeau dutifully prepared to shift his troops from Rhode Island to the Hudson. Shortly before they were due to depart, the French general received a dispatch from de Grasse, confirming that he expected to arrive off the North American coast in mid-July and requesting directions on what course to steer. Now determined to keep Washington fully briefed, on June 10, Rochambeau sent him a copy of the admiral’s letter, along with another of his own revealing that he had urged de Grasse to head first for the Chesapeake instead of New York. At first sight, this seemed to overturn the consensus reached at Wethersfield. However, Rochambeau didn’t yet envisage a full-fledged campaign in Virginia; his letter to de Grasse proposed another raid on the British base at Portsmouth, after which the admiral could exploit the prevailing winds to reach New York in just two days. In a postscript to de Grasse, Rochambeau added that, if Washington still wanted the fleet to make directly for New York, then he would fall in line with his wishes. Even though he had recently pressed for the French squadron at Newport to make another effort in the Chesapeake, Washington was taken aback by Rochambeau’s letter. He swiftly replied, reminding him of what they had agreed—“that New York was looked upon by us as the only practicable object under present circumstances.” But he now added a significant qualifier: if naval superiority was secured, other objectives might become “more practicable and equally advisable.” Washington knew that the final decision on the fleet’s destination must rest with de Grasse. He did not know that France’s ambassador to America, Anne-César, Chevalier de la Luzerne, had also written to the admiral, drawing his attention to the worsening position of the patriots in Virginia; in conjunction with Rochambeau’s advice, this influenced de Grasse’s ultimate decision to choose the Chesapeake, not the Hudson.24
By early July, Rochambeau’s command had marched south from Rhode Island and rendezvoused with Washington’s army near his old 1776 battleground at White Plains. To one French officer, Jean-François-Louis, Comte de Clermont-Crèvecoeur, the American troops looked much the same in 1781 as they had to their British opponents five years earlier—poorly clad and with youngsters and men of African descent both conspicuous in the ranks. “In beholding this army,” he wrote, “I was struck, not by its smart appearance, but by its destitution: the men were without uniforms and covered with rags; most of them were barefoot. They were of all sizes, down to children who could not have been over fourteen. There were many negroes, mulattoes, etc.” Aside from the officers, only the artillerymen—“very good troops, well schooled in their profession”—wore uniforms. Rochambeau’s aide, Baron von Closen, corroborated this snapshot of Washington’s tough, tattered and multiracial army: “It was really painful to see these brave men, almost naked, with only some trousers and little linen jackets, most of them without stockings,” he wrote. But for all that they appeared “very cheerful and healthy.” Closen added: “A quarter of them were negroes, merry, confident, and sturdy.” By this stage in the war, besides being scattered throughout Washington’s army, black soldiers were also clustered within individual units: “Three-quarters of the Rhode Island regiment consists of negroes,” Closen noted, “and that regiment is the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers.”25
Making due allowance for exaggeration, the black presence among the rank and file of the Continental Army was clearly significant enough to attract comment from outsiders: the only surviving returns to specify the number of black soldiers, for February 1778, indicate that they already comprised 10 percent of the rank and file, a proportion that is highly unlikely to have declined after a further three years of war. Washington, the slave-owing southern planter, was obliged to overcome the ingrained cultural prejudices that had barred the enlistment of African Americans into the old Virginia Regiment during the 1750s and had attempted to limit their contribution to the army besieging Boston in 1775–76. From Long Island onward, he needed every fighting man he could find—whatever the color of his skin.26
That summer, Washington’s customary lack of manpower steadily undermined his long-held hopes of ejecting the British from Manhattan. By July 20, when Admiral Barras requested a “definitive plan of campaign” that could be forwarded to de Grasse, a despondent Washington was obliged to acknowledge that the ambitious New York plan was becoming increasingly unrealistic: his own army was woefully weak for such a daunting task, with few recruits forthcoming for either the Continentals or the militia; in addition, the states were ignoring his repeated pleas for help. Under these discouraging circumstances, the most he could now do was “to prepare, first, for the enterprise against New York as agreed to at Wethersfield and secondly for the relief of the Southern States”—if, despite his best endeavors, the arrival of de Grasse found him with “neither men, nor means adequate to the first object.” Prospects for the projected New York operation were now so bleak that Washington had requested Henry Knox to suspend the transportation of heavy artillery and stores from Philadelphia in case they had to be conveyed back again.27
For all that, on July 21, a 5,000-strong allied force was sent marching in four columns to test Clinton’s defenses. By 5 a.m. on July 22, they were arrayed in line of battle on the heights above King’s Bridge. A few British dragoons rode out from the Manhattan lines to investigate, and the forts’ cannon commenced a bombardment, but the defenders wisely stayed behind their formidable earthworks. For much of that day and the next, Washington and Rochambeau conducted an extremely thorough reconnaissance of New York’s defenses. To the consternation of the French general, on Throg’s Neck, where the engineers lingered to calculate the precise distance to Long Island, they were cut off by the incoming tide and obliged to swim their horses to dry land.28
As such dedication shows, in late July, Manhattan still remained a potential allied objective. If the states had raised their requested troop quotas, by August 1, all would have been “in perfect readiness” to start the campaign against New York, Washington noted in his diary. Regrettably, “not more than half the number asked of them have joined the army.” With “little more than general assurances of getting the succors called for,” Washington could “scarce see a ground” for continuing his preparations against New York, especially as there was good reason to believe that Clinton would be reinforced from Virginia. Therefore, he added, “I turned my views more seriously (than I had before done) to an operation to the southward.”29
Events in the southern theater now exerted an irresistible pull of their own. While Nathanael Greene was preoccupied with tackling British outposts in South Carolina, his archrival Cornwallis made a move that would ultimately present Washington with the opportunity he had awaited for so long. In late May, and in defiance of Clinton’s orders, the earl had pushed north into Virginia. His junction with the British forces already operating there under Phillips and Arnold and the arrival of further reinforcements from New York gave him a powerful army of more than 7,000 men: it was this very threat that had prompted ambassador Luzerne to urge de Grasse to sail directly for Virginia.
The earl’s first objective was the elimination of Lafayette’s command, which had been operating in Virginia since April. Badly outnumbered even before the arrival of Cornwallis, the marquis was obliged to give ground before his forces, which included strong formations of cavalry spurred on by the aggressive Tarleton and the equally vigorous if more cerebral Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe, who headed another Loyalist “legion” comprising both mounted dragoons and infantry, the Queen’s Rangers. By June, Washington had reinforced Lafayette with 1,000 more veteran Continentals. These Pennsylvanians were marched south by “Mad Anthony” Wayne, although only after continuing defiance in the ranks obliged him to execute eleven of them; as a further safeguard against insurrection, the rest proceeded with their ammunition and bayonets kept under guard.30 Despite fears for their reliability, the Pennsylvanians were desperately needed by Lafayette, and he was overjoyed when they joined him in early June. Including local militia and newly raised Virginian state “levies,” he now had about 5,000 men with which to counter Cornwallis.
After obliging Lafayette to abandon Richmond, Cornwallis headed for Williamsburg, where he hoped to receive orders clarifying Sir Henry Clinton’s intentions for Virginia. On 26 June, near a tavern known as Spencer’s Ordinary, Cornwallis’s rear guard—a crack force consisting of Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers and Captain Ewald’s company of Hessian jägers—clashed with a larger detachment from Lafayette’s army. It was a hard-fought but indecisive skirmish, with both sides claiming victory. That same day letters arrived from Clinton: dated June 11 and June 15, they caused what Ewald characterized as a “swift change from the offensive to the defensive.” This turnabout was dictated by the threat posed to New York by the united armies of Washington and Rochambeau. Now discounting Lafayette’s burgeoning force as insignificant, Clinton instructed Cornwallis to “take a defensive station in any healthy situation” such as Williamsburg or Yorktown, then, after retaining such troops as he needed to hold that strongpoint, detach the rest to reinforce the endangered New York garrison.31 Cornwallis, who was keen to wage an active campaign in Virginia, reluctantly acquiesced. After reconnoitering possible defensive posts, he returned to Williamsburg with the intention of crossing the James River and then moving on to Portsmouth, where transports would be waiting to embark the men Clinton wanted.
To Lafayette, this planned withdrawal looked more like a retreat—and a fine opportunity to strike a glorious stroke. After celebrating the 4th of July with a review of his army, he set out after Cornwallis, hoping to disrupt his march and fall upon his rear guard. Some 500 Pennsylvanian Continentals under Wayne were pushed ahead. If the bulk of Cornwallis’s army was already across the wide James River, as seemed likely, then those units that remained behind would be easy pickings. On the morning of July 6, Wayne was fed false intelligence suggesting precisely that scenario: but when he hurried onward from Green Spring, following a causeway across a swamp, he discovered that Cornwallis had set a trap and was lying in ambush with virtually his entire army. Faced with field pieces spraying canister and by advancing bayonets, Wayne lived up to his fire-eating reputation: deploying his Continentals in line and placing three guns of his own, he gamely counterattacked. Heavily outnumbered, Wayne’s men were soon floundering back through the marshes in confusion. Lafayette was unable to rally them. Only darkness and the softness of the ground stopped Cornwallis from sending in his dragoons to complete the rout with their slashing sabers.32
Unmolested by the chastened Lafayette, Cornwallis completed his crossing of the James and continued on his way to Portsmouth. Two days after the engagement at Green Spring, he received another dispatch from Clinton. Dated June 28, it called for the troops earmarked for New York to be instead diverted to join a raid on Philadelphia, where Clinton hoped “by a rapid move to seize the stores” assembled there; only after that enterprise would they reinforce New York. The exasperated Cornwallis was about to embark the troops for Pennsylvania as ordered when yet more instructions arrived from Clinton. Written at New York on July 11, these now told the earl to halt the embarkation until further orders: indeed, as both Clinton and Admiral Graves, who had succeeded Arbuthnot in command of the North American squadron, were “clearly of opinion that it is absolutely necessary we should hold a station in Chesapeake for ships of the line as well as frigates,” steps must be taken to fortify Old Point Comfort, which secured the best anchorage, at Hampton Roads. If Cornwallis felt that Old Point Comfort could not be held without possessing Yorktown, and that the whole scheme couldn’t be undertaken with fewer than 7,000 men, the earl was at liberty “to detain all the troops now in Chesapeake” for that purpose.33
Nothing was now said of the threat to New York: Captain Ewald concluded that the enemy’s advance toward the city “had been nothing more than a demonstration” intended to prompt a recall of troops from their real objective, Virginia.34 Reeling under the barrage of Clinton’s contradictory orders, after investigating the alternatives Cornwallis resolved to shift his entire army to Yorktown. In early August, his troops began work on extensive fortifications around the little town, with more earthworks protecting Gloucester, across the York River. From a prowling, aggressive command, Cornwallis’s veteran army had become a static and vulnerable target.
By the time Cornwallis was digging in at Yorktown, Washington’s other old enemies, the feebleness of Congress, and the apathy of the states had already dashed any realistic hope of besieging New York. That cherished plan was finally abandoned on August 14, when Washington received dispatches from Barras. These announced the intended departure of Admiral de Grasse from Cape François, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), on August 3. In command of “between 25 and 29 sail of the line and 3200 land troops” he was making for Chesapeake Bay. As de Grasse must return to the West Indies by mid-October and was anxious “to have every thing in the most perfect readiness to commence our operations in the moment of his arrival,” there was no time to lose. Presented with this narrow but enticing window of opportunity, Washington didn’t hesitate to jettison his original strategy and “give up all idea of attacking New York.” Instead, the French troops and a detachment of the Americans would march to Head of Elk in Maryland, “to be transported to Virginia for the purpose of cooperating with the force from the West Indies against the troops in that state.”35
Two days latter, on August 16, Washington received a letter from Lafayette informing him that Cornwallis was “throwing up works” at Yorktown and Gloucester.36 But for the moment, at least, the full significance of this intelligence didn’t register. In a joint letter to de Grasse next day, announcing their decision to “give up for the present the enterprise against New York and to turn our attention toward the South,” Washington and Rochambeau outlined far broader strategic objectives than cornering Cornwallis: instead, emphasis was placed upon the recovery of Charleston, the bastion of British power in the south; if that city could not be attacked, then they should aim to “recover and secure the states of Virginia, North Carolina and the [back]country of South Carolina and Georgia.”37 So, while the rendezvous with de Grasse was fixed at Chesapeake Bay, the geographical scope for the campaign was initially more ambitious and flexible.
On August 19, the united allied force began moving south. A few days later, Admiral de Barras sailed from Newport with the army’s heavy siege guns to meet de Grasse’s fleet. Still anxious for the security of New York, like Washington in the early summer of 1777, Clinton struggled to fathom his enemies’ intentions. Washington and Rochambeau kept him guessing for as long as they possibly could; at first their troops followed a route suggesting that they were bound for Staten Island or Sandy Hook—both potential jumping-off points for an assault on New York. For crucial days, Clinton was baffled and distracted. It was only after Vice Admiral Sir Samuel Hood arrived from the Caribbean bringing thirteen more ships of the line and confirmation of de Grasse’s departure that Clinton and Admiral Graves realized where the real danger lay and resolved to help Cornwallis. Even then, the true scale of the threat was badly underestimated.
As Washington and his allies headed down through New Jersey on the scent of future victory there was a chance to revisit past triumphs. On August 29, Rochambeau and his staff dined with Washington at Princeton, then accompanied him to Trenton on what amounted to a “staff ride” across battlefields that were already celebrated among the French officers. Plainly fascinated, Closen recalled that Washington explained “the dispositions, movements and other circumstances” of the “famous” twin engagements.38 Sadly for future historians, Closen failed to record Washington’s words. Another of Rochambeau’s aides, Baron Cromot du Bourg, who covered the same ground two days later, gave his own detailed account of the famous battles in his diary. He rightly characterized Washington’s night march to Princeton in the early hours of January 3, 1777 as “an extremely bold and well combined movement,” yet his report of the standoff at Trenton on the previous evening indicates that the distortions of legend were already creeping in: according to Bourg, Washington’s army had numbered less than 4,000, while Cornwallis had a mighty host of 10,000; in fact, as already seen, Washington had led about 6,500 men, his opponent 5,500.39
Making steady progress, Washington’s men paraded through Philadelphia on September 2 in hot, dry weather. Knowing that the ladies were watching from their windows as they passed through the “splendid city,” Dr. Thacher regretted the thick dust that obscured the tramping columns.40 Given their ragged condition, some Continentals may have welcomed the dense pall kicked up by their bare feet. The French, who marched in over the next two days, had no such reason to hide their blushes. As Closen proudly reported, they “were much acclaimed by the inhabitants, who could never have imagined that French troops could be so handsome.” Compared with Washington’s threadbare Continentals, they must have seemed like soldiers from some fanciful oil painting: Closen’s own unit, the German-speaking Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment, wore sky-blue coats set off with citrus-yellow facings, although he conceded that it was the Soissonnais Regiment, “with its rose-colored lapels and facings, in addition to its grenadiers’ caps with great rose and white plumes,” that especially “impressed the fair sex.”41
During the march to Philadelphia through New Jersey, Washington had remained unsure whether Cornwallis would maintain his positions straddling the York River. By the time he reached the city on September 2, it seemed clear that the earl intended to stand his ground, but Washington was now racked with anxiety over the whereabouts of de Grasse. He confided to Lafayette that he was “distressed beyond expression,” particularly as a British fleet was also reported to be steering for the Chesapeake. This worrying intelligence was correct: Admirals Graves and Hood, with nineteen ships of the line, had sailed from New York on August 31, while Clinton had embarked 4,000 troops ready to follow in their wake once the seas had been cleared of the enemy. If the British ships reached the Chesapeake first, Washington fretted, it would “frustrate all our flattering prospects in that quarter.” By now those hopes rested upon the elimination of Cornwallis: should the earl’s retreat by sea be cut off by French naval superiority, then Washington didn’t doubt that Lafayette would do everything he could to baffle his escape by land. Two days later, when he reported developments to Nathanael Greene, Washington remained in an agony of uncertainty. There was still no news of de Grasse or of Barras, who had left Rhode Island with his squadron carrying the French siege artillery on August 24. Washington added: “From the circumstances related, you will readily conceive, that the present time is as interesting and anxious a moment, as I have ever experienced.” He nonetheless hoped for “the most propitious issue of our united exertions,” which would trap Cornwallis and force him to surrender.42
On September 5, Washington finally learned that de Grasse had arrived safely in Chesapeake Bay. Normally so restrained, he could no longer contain his excitement. Sailing with Rochambeau on the Delaware River toward Chester, Pennsylvania, Closen spotted “General Washington, standing on the shore and waving his hat and white handkerchief joyfully.” When they disembarked, Washington reported that de Grasse had brought twenty-eight ships of the line and 3,000 troops: the infantry had already landed to strengthen Lafayette’s force and prevent Cornwallis from breaking out overland, while the admiral would block his escape by sea. Baron du Bourg noted in his diary: “From this moment it was openly announced that we were marching upon Yorktown.” With so much at stake it was an emotional moment. Washington and Rochambeau “embraced warmly,” and the whole army shared their “joy in having their calculations work out so well.” For once, events had run like clockwork. Closen mused that Rochambeau “must indeed have felt deep satisfaction in having the time draw near when his long-considered plans would be executed and in winning the approval of General Washington, who originally had been bent upon a campaign against New York.”43
In 1788, when quizzed about his own role in the genesis of the Yorktown campaign, Washington remembered things rather differently. He maintained that for almost a year he’d had no intention of attacking New York. Every attempt had been made to convince the enemy otherwise, but that was just an elaborate smoke screen. Even before the intervention of de Grasse, Washington remembered, it was “the fixed determination to strike the enemy on the most vulnerable quarter.” As New York was too strong, “the only hesitation that remained was between an attack upon the British army in Virginia or that in Charleston.” Following “several communications” and “incidents,” he recalled, the enemy’s “post in Virginia” was upgraded from a “provisional and strongly expected” target to “the definitive and certain object of the campaign.” 44 Either Washington’s memory was playing tricks upon him, or he was guilty of wishful thinking; as already seen, from the time of the Hartford conference in September 1780 until the following August, his gaze remained fixed upon the garrison of New York: if the men and supplies he wanted had materialized, he would have assaulted Manhattan. Yet neither could Rochambeau claim the lion’s share of the credit that the loyal Closen considered his due. When the French general proposed the Chesapeake as an objective in May 1781, he had envisaged a hit-and-run raid, not a full-blown commitment of sea and land power: and, as Washington’s subordinate, he was ready to abide by his wishes should he insist that New York must remain the priority. More than anything, it was de Grasse’s unilateral decision to sail for Virginia that paved the way for the operation, although only Cornwallis’s sudden vulnerability, which no one could have predicted when the admiral left the West Indies, provided the opportunity for the combined allied forces to land a devastating and potentially decisive blow. Given these exceptionally fortuitous circumstances, the real father of the Yorktown campaign was surely Washington’s faithful friend “Providence.”
Yet as the allies moved south in September 1781, there was no guarantee of victory. In Maryland, Washington was once again served notice that, while his tattered and shoeless Continentals might not look like proper soldiers, they regarded themselves as such and expected to be treated accordingly. When Major General Benjamin Lincoln marched the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania Continentals to Head of Elk, they refused to continue without part of the back pay owed to them. These were not men to be trifled with: despite the firing squads of January, they were still demanding their “rights.” Given their timing Washington had little choice but to appease them. When desperate appeals to the newly appointed superintendent of finance, Robert Morris, yielded just $20,000, Washington was obliged to approach Rochambeau, who selflessly donated 50,000 of the 150,000 livres that he still had with him; this made it possible to issue the men a month’s pay in coin. Like the extraordinary bounty tendered after the Battle of Trenton, money talked. As Closen noted, this hard cash “raised spirits to the required level.” The next day, September 8, the pacified Continentals happily embarked for the voyage down Chesapeake Bay.45
Having surmounted the latest hurdle in his path, Washington rode on ahead of his army, keen to start laying the groundwork for the impending siege of Yorktown. On September 9, Washington reached his “own seat at Mount Vernon.” It was more than six years since he had last seen his beloved home on the bluff above the Potomac River, and his long letters to cousin Lund leave no doubt that it was never far from his thoughts. Frustratingly, if predictably, Washington’s diary reveals nothing of the emotions he must have felt at that moment, simply noting that he stayed for three nights before pushing on again for Williamsburg. During that time, Rochambeau and the Chevalier de Chastellux were Washington’s guests. According to Washington’s secretary, Colonel Jonathan Trumbull, Mount Vernon had accommodated a “numerous family” of staff officers who enjoyed “great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.” This sociable interlude was all too brief, as Washington was eager to meet Admiral de Grasse and agree “upon a proper plan of cooperation.” On September 13, while on the road to Williamsburg, the allied generals and their staffs heard reports that de Grasse had left Chesapeake Bay on September 5 to engage a British fleet; agonizingly, the outcome of the encounter was not yet known. Closen captured the tense mood, reporting that all were “very anxious to learn the result of the battle and if M. de Grasse [had] re-entered the bay, since we were aware of the absolute necessity for us to have his fleet in the Chesapeake to protect our operations.”46
The wait for news was mercifully short. The following day, on the final leg to Williamsburg, the generals received intelligence that de Grasse was back on station after fending off the combined fleets of Graves and Hood. They had left New York on August 31, unaware that de Grasse had already reached the Chesapeake the day before. His pronounced superiority in ships was another unpleasant surprise: on the assurance of Admiral Rodney, they’d expected him to leave the West Indies with part of his fleet, not all of it. After an inconclusive cannonade, the fleets shadowed each other for two more days as they drifted south, allowing Barras’s squadron from Newport to slip into the bay with the vital siege artillery. No less crucially, after assessing the damage to his ships, Graves reluctantly returned to New York to refit.
Increasingly concerned for Cornwallis, Clinton authorized a belated diversion intended to draw Washington’s attention back to the north. Benedict Arnold led a ferocious attack on the coast of his native Connecticut, torching New London and unleashing an assault on Fort Griswold, near Groton, in which the garrison was massacred after rejecting a summons to surrender.47 But Washington now refused to be deflected from his purpose, even by the hated Arnold. His arrival at Williamsburg on September 14, attended by just a handful of hard-riding aides and servants, quickly turned into another triumphal entry, with the French and Continental regiments parading and townsfolk flocking to catch a glimpse of him. According to Major St. George Tucker of the Virginian militia, the presence of the commander in chief had an immediate effect upon morale, giving “new hopes and spirits to the Army.”48
On September 17, Washington and Rochambeau left for the meeting with de Grasse aboard his flagship, the Ville de Paris, off Cape Henry. The admiral agreed to extend his stay for a further fortnight, until the end of October. However, it was unlikely that he would be able to lend his strength to any other combined operations, which ruled out the attack on Charleston that the allied generals had mooted. Washington and Rochambeau returned to Williamsburg on September 22, knowing that they now had little more than a month in which to subdue Yorktown before the screening fleet departed, taking 3,000 French troops with it. Facing a fixed deadline, the allies couldn’t simply sit back and blockade the town in hopes of starving out the defenders. They would have to prosecute a formal siege, digging trenches and bombarding the garrison into submission or, if Cornwallis stubbornly refused to yield, taking his fortifications by storm.49
Writing to de Grasse on September 25, Washington was confident that with “their superiority of strength and means” they had enough time, particularly for an operation that was “reducible to calculation.”50 This was quite literally true: of all the branches of eighteenth-century warfare, siegecraft was the most scientific, following a recognized sequence of moves that methodically yet inexorably increased pressure on the besieged: given enough men, guns, and munitions, the result should not be in doubt. By the time Washington wrote to de Grasse, the entire allied army had concentrated at Williamsburg: some 16,000 strong, of which just 3,000 were local militia; it outnumbered Cornwallis’s forces by two to one. In addition, in its swampy fastness, the earl’s army was rapidly succumbing to fevers, with barely 5,000 men fit for duty.
After entering the James River, most of the transports carrying the American and French troops had disembarked near Jamestown. As the erudite Dr. Thacher observed, this “was the place where the English first established themselves in Virginia, in 1607.” Despite its historical significance, with just two houses still standing, the settlement no longer deserved to be called a town; its decline symbolized the degree to which the Old Dominion, like the rest of Britain’s former colonies, was outgrowing its roots and slaking off the past. By a remarkable coincidence, the birthplace of British America lay within an easy march of Yorktown, where the old regime would soon receive its deathblow.
For a Yankee like Thacher, Virginia’s Tidewater presented an unfamiliar and sometimes disturbing scene. The region was famed for its excellent tobacco, while cotton, Indian corn, hemp, and flax were also cultivated. Yet, as Thacher reported with disgust, these crops all depended upon the labor of slaves, “a species of the human race, who have been cruelly wrested from their native country and doomed to perpetual bondage, while their masters are manfully contending for freedom, and the natural rights of man.”51
For the many black soldiers in Washington’s army—both freedmen and slaves hoping to win their liberty as substitutes for whites unwilling to fight—the Virginian campaign must have stirred still stronger emotions. Such men included a veteran of the 2nd New Jersey Regiment with the suitably Republican name of Oliver Cromwell. “Brought up a farmer” and enlisting in the Continental Army in 1776 while in his early twenties, Cromwell had already fought under Washington’s command at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, and Monmouth. Cromwell’s story was highlighted in the spring of 1852, when his local newspaper interviewed him on his one hundredth birthday. As New Jersey’s Burlington Gazette informed its readers, while many of them were familiar with this “old colored man,” few knew that he was “among the survivors of the gallant army who fought for the liberties of our country ‘in the days which tried men’s souls.’” It is a remarkable story, but Cromwell’s discharge certificate, signed by Washington himself, survives to affirm it.52 Cromwell died in January 1853: old as he was, even he hadn’t lived long enough to see the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson’s trinity of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” become the inalienable rights of all his countrymen. It would take another, far bloodier civil war to redress the glaring irony behind America’s fratricidal struggle for independence from Great Britain.
At Williamsburg, the allies braced themselves for their final push to Yorktown, some twelve miles off. As he prepared to close in for the kill, Washington reverted to aggressive mode. General Orders issued to the American troops now recommended them to “place their principal reliance on the bayonet, that they may prove the vanity of the boast which the British make of their particular prowess in deciding battles with that weapon.” Joseph Plumb Martin remembered that they were directed to “exchange but one round” with the enemy before deciding matters with the bayonet.53
General Wolfe, who had zealously championed such “volley and bayonet” tactics in the British Army during the 1750s and had famously demonstrated their effectiveness on Quebec’s Plains of Abraham, would certainly have approved of Washington’s methods, if not his cause. Such pointed directives offer further evidence of the striking extent to which Washington’s army now resembled its British enemy. Despite enduring popular perceptions of an organization that prided itself upon marksmanship, by the climax of the long war with Britain the Continental Army was increasingly putting its faith in cold steel, the trademark of the professionals. This gave immense satisfaction to Washington’s drillmaster, Baron Steuben. Reporting on the progress of his reforms to Franklin in September 1779, Steuben wrote proudly: “Though we are so young that we scarce begin to walk, we can already take Stony Points and Paulus Hooks with the point of the bayonet, without firing a single shot.”54
The same trend was taken even further in orders governing the arming of Washington’s officers. Rather than shouldering the “fusils,” or light muskets, carried by their British counterparts, American officers were required to equip themselves with spear-like “espontoons.” At first sight, this was a curiously conservative move: while traditionally seen as the European officer’s badge of rank, the espontoon had long since been abandoned by the British Army in America; General Braddock, so often taken to epitomize outmoded Old World methods, had ordered his officers to leave theirs behind before marching for Fort Duquesne in 1755. Yet it is clear that Washington regarded the espontoon as especially suited to his conception of the ideal officer. At Valley Forge in December 1777, he ordered every officer “to provide himself with a half-pike or spear as soon as possible—fire-arms, when made use of, withdrawing their attention too much from their men.” Washington had a point: at White Plains, as Clinton noted with annoyance, the British attack on Chatterton Hill almost stalled after an officer paused to fire and reload his fusil. In American hands, the espontoon was not simply a symbol of authority, but a lethal weapon: Anthony Wayne requested fifty for his officers in 1779 and wielded one himself at the storming of Stony Point. Orders issued at Morristown in April 1780 warned that no officer, including captains, was “to mount guard or go on detachment” or “appear with his regiment under arms” without an espontoon. Two years later, Washington was still extolling the virtues of “that useful and ornamental weapon.” In another intriguing throwback to the clashes of antiquity that so fascinated Washington and his contemporaries, the Continental Army’s officers went into battle at Cowpens, Guilford Court House, and Yorktown armed much like the Spartans at Thermopylae.55
While at Williamsburg Washington’s army received tidings of a bloody engagement in South Carolina in which Major General Nathanael Greene and his veterans had gathered fresh laurels. In his diary, Major St. George Tucker of the militia excitedly noted news of “a complete victory obtained over the British.” In fact, although Greene had written those very words to Lafayette, on September 8, he’d once again seen victory slide from his grasp. His attempt to surprise a British force at Eutaw Springs under Lord Rawdon’s successor, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Stewart, came frustratingly close to success. In what would be remembered as one of the most stubbornly contested fights of the war, Greene’s North and South Carolina militiamen performed well, standing firm and trading close-range volleys with Stewart’s redcoats. When Greene advanced his veteran Continentals, much of the British line caved in. But the right wing, under Major John Marjoribanks, held firm, repelling a cavalry charge and wounding and capturing its leader, Colonel William Washington. By now, Greene’s men had overrun Stewart’s camp. When their looting and drinking caused a breakdown of discipline, the redcoats’ staying power slowly turned the scales, just as it had at Germantown four years earlier. In another echo of that battle, the British rallied behind the walls of a substantial house before launching a decisive counterattack that drove the mortified Greene from the field.56
Eutaw Springs was the last major battlefield confrontation of the American Revolutionary War. But for all its ferocity it was a minor affair compared with the impending siege in Virginia. The allied army marched to Yorktown on September 28, in one long column, then split and encamped before the little town that night. The Americans assumed the traditional post of honor and seniority on the right, the French, as their auxiliaries, took the left. Despite the forces massing against him, Cornwallis remained optimistic of holding out until help arrived. His confidence was bolstered the next day, September 29, when he received a dispatch from Clinton. Sent five days earlier, this assured him that relief would soon be on its way. Sir Henry had met with Graves and his replacement, Vice Admiral Robert Digby, who’d arrived at New York on September 21 with another three ships of the line. Finally alert to the full danger facing Cornwallis, they had agreed that 5,000 troops should be embarked, and the “joint exertions of the navy and army” made to rescue him. The force should be ready to sail by October 5. Cornwallis immediately replied that Sir Henry’s letter had given him the “greatest satisfaction.” He added: “I shall retire this night within the works, and have no doubt, if relief arrives in any reasonable time, York and Gloucester will be both in possession of His Majesty’s troops.”57
Acting on Clinton’s pledge, Cornwallis promptly abandoned three outlying redoubts that buttressed the center of his position, so enabling him to deploy his diminishing manpower along a shorter defensive perimeter. Yet by giving up his first line without a fight, Cornwallis allowed his enemies to shave vital days off their schedule and to burrow forward to within effective artillery range far more swiftly than they had anticipated. Rather than approaching Yorktown’s fortifications by the customary triple line of trenches or “parallels,” as the methodical Clinton had done at Charleston, they would be able to get by with just two. In addition, as Washington reported in his diary, the evacuated British defenses proved “very serviceable” to the allies in coming days as they began their own works, reconnoitered the enemy’s lines, stockpiled stores, and brought up artillery.58
The Connecticut veteran Joseph Plumb Martin, who was now a sergeant in the army’s corps of sappers and miners, remembered that work on the first parallel commenced on October 6 —but only after Washington himself had “struck a few blows with a pickaxe.” This was, as Martin sardonically observed, “a mere ceremony, that it might be said ‘Gen. Washington, with his own hands first broke ground at the siege of Yorktown.’”59
Despite the defenders’ gunfire, the diggers made good progress in the light sandy soil. Three days later, on October 9, the first parallel had been established at a range of 600 yards from Yorktown’s ramparts, and the allied artillery batteries were ready for action. Washington’s role as supreme commander of the land forces was now acknowledged in another symbolic act: Dr. Thacher reported that he formally initiated the bombardment, putting a glowing portfire to the touch hole of the first gun to be fired, at which “a furious discharge of cannon and mortars immediately followed.”60
The French and American gunners subjected Yorktown’s defenders to a remorseless pounding. Rochambeau was an old hand at sieges—according to Closen, this was his fifteenth; but it was only Washington’s second, and in scale and intensity it bore little resemblance to Boston in 1775–76, which had been more like a blockade until Henry Knox’s guns arrived from Ticonderoga. Washington was clearly fascinated by what he now witnessed, especially the expertise of the gunners. In his diary he noted how accurate cannon fire subdued the enemy’s batteries, allowing the mortars to lob in their shells with devastating effect. Baron von Closen maintained that the French gun crews were “so skilled and sure in their aim that they used to wager that they could hit the same embrasure”—the narrow opening from which guns were fired—“six times in succession. General Washington often admired their ability.”61
James Thacher was awestruck by the sheer spectacle of the “tremendous and incessant” bombardment. On October 10, the French surpassed themselves when they used forge-heated cannonballs—“red hot shot”—to burn a British forty-four-gun ship, HMS Charon, and three transports anchored in the York River. “I had a fine view of this splendid conflagration,” Dr. Thacher wrote.
The ships were enwrapped in a torrent of fire, which spreading with vivid brightness among the combustible rigging, and running with amazing rapidity to the tops of the several masts, while all around was thunder and lightning from our numerous cannon and mortars, and in the darkness of the night, presented one of the most sublime and magnificent spectacles which can be imagined.
During daylight, the shells from the mortars were clearly visible as black balls, but at night they became “like fiery meteors with blazing tails,” appearing “most beautifully brilliant” before descending “to execute their work of destruction.” Thacher shared Washington’s admiration for the technical proficiency of the gunners, who could calculate that a shell would “fall within a few feet of a given point, and burst at the precise time, though at a great distance.” Such blasts caused “dreadful havoc” among the defenders, sending body parts spinning far up into the air. The deadly traffic was not all one way: on duty in the trenches, the doctor was kept busy ministering to his comrades: more than a dozen were killed or wounded on one day alone.
As the specialist engineers and artillerists went about their business Washington and many of his officers became little more than bystanders. Yet even a static siege could provide a stage for the displays of cool courage in which they delighted. By visiting the trenches, Washington showed his men that he was sharing their dangers; in his journal Dr. Thacher recorded how, during a considerable “cannonading from the enemy, one shot killed three men, and mortally wounded another.” The chaplain of Thacher’s regiment, the Reverend Evans, was standing close to Washington when another shot hit the ground nearby, showering his hat with sand. Evans, who was “much agitated” by this near miss, doffed his hat and showed it to Washington, exclaiming, “See here, General!” With his “usual composure,” Washington had replied: “Mr. Evans, you had better carry that home and show it to your wife and children.”62
Washington’s presence in the front lines was also recalled by Sarah Osborn, a cook and washerwoman whose husband was a commissary sergeant in the 3rd New York Regiment. At Yorktown, Sarah regularly braved the British batteries to bring up the rations she had cooked for her husband and his comrades as they toiled in the trenches. On one occasion “she met General Washington, who asked her if she ‘was not afraid of the cannonballs.’” As a veteran of the Continental Army, and clearly at ease in the presence of “His Excellency,” Sarah had chaffed back that she couldn’t let the bullets “cheat the gallows”; besides, “It would not do for the men to fight and starve too.”63 As both she and Washington knew only too well, many of the Continentals now besieging Yorktown had done precisely that many times before.
By October 12, work had begun on the allies’ second “parallel,” within only 300 yards of the British lines. For the work to progress it was necessary to eliminate two redoubts that outflanked it on the right. It was agreed that both should be stormed on the night of October 14. French grenadiers and chasseurs were given the task of assaulting the larger of the strongpoints, “Redoubt No 9,” while the Continental Light Infantry were allocated “No 10.” Lafayette was in overall command of the American operation and gave responsibility for leading the attack to his aide-de-camp and fellow countryman the Chevalier de Gimat. Washington’s former aide Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton objected to this: on grounds of seniority, the honor belonged to him, not Gimat, he argued. After examining the dates of the rival claimants’ commissions, Washington—who had long believed in strict military protocol—ruled in Hamilton’s favor.64
As Washington reported to Congress, both the French and Americans secured their objectives with “firmness and bravery”; carrying unloaded muskets, the troops “effected the business with the bayonet only.”65 In fact, the French had been obliged to load and open fire: they’d taken heavy casualties as they waited for ax-wielding pioneers to hack a path through the stout wooden palisade that surrounded their objective; the Americans, who simply tore down the obstructions with their bare hands, suffered just nine killed and thirty-two wounded—about a third of the French losses.66
Alexander Hamilton was unscathed, although having just recently married he clearly felt a pang of guilt at the dangers he’d needlessly courted. Two days later, he wrote to his wife, Elizabeth, seeking to justify the behavior that could easily have left her prematurely widowed: “My honor obliged me to take a step in which your happiness was too much risked,” he explained. Hamilton reassured his bride: “There will be, certainly, nothing more of this kind.” Honor had now been satisfied and, with the exploit duly reported “in the Philadelphia papers,” properly recognized.67
Washington’s own rank and responsibilities barred him from participating in such overtly aggressive displays, but he continued to find other ways to demonstrate his sangfroid in the face of the enemy. Soon after the storming of the redoubts, a young Virginian soldier laboring on the siege lines witnessed “a deed of personal daring and coolness in General Washington which he never saw equaled.” John Suddarth, who was sixteen at the time, recalled that this occurred when the British unleashed “a tremendous cannonade” in a desperate effort to demolish the besiegers’ steadily encroaching works. Noticing activity in the British lines, and determined to establish exactly what was happening, Washington took his telescope and climbed up onto the “highest, most prominent, and most exposed point of our fortifications.” There, as Suddarth remembered, he “stood exposed to the enemy’s fire, where shot seemed flying almost as thick as hail and were instantly demolishing portions of the embankment around him.” Washington stayed put for ten or fifteen minutes, despite the repeated efforts of his aides to coax him back under cover: they “were remonstrating with him with all their earnestness against this exposure of his person and once or twice drew him down.” They were “severely reprimanded” for their trouble, and Washington resumed his place until he was completely satisfied.68
Cornwallis’s own position under the allies’ bombardment was now growing increasingly hopeless: on the night of October 15, a spirited sortie to spike enemy guns in the advanced batteries brought only temporary respite, and a last-ditch attempt to break out by ferrying his garrison across the river to Gloucester was stymied by a storm. On October 17, Cornwallis bowed to the inevitable and proposed a negotiation of terms; two days later it was agreed that the garrison must surrender themselves as prisoners of war.
All shipping, weapons, stores, and money were to be handed over to the victors; officers could keep their swords, while all ranks were allowed their “baggage and effects”—with the exception of “property taken in the country.”69
Such “property” embraced former slaves who had thrown in their lot with the British. They included eighteen-year-old Barnard E. Griffiths, a “negro man” and “laborer” born at Charleston who’d joined the British forces besieging the city in 1780 and enlisted in the Queen’s Rangers. According to his colonel, John Graves Simcoe, not only was he “very useful as a guide” but he served as a dragoon. Indeed, Griffiths was “frequently distinguished for his bravery and activity,” particularly at the skirmish near Spencer’s Ordinary, where he had fought hand to hand with a French officer and in a subsequent charge against the rebel infantry “by his gallantry preserved the life of his captain and was severely wounded.” When Yorktown surrendered, Simcoe successfully interceded with Baron Steuben to ensure that Griffiths “might not risk the hazard of being sent prisoner into the country.” The extraordinary efforts taken by an officer and gentleman like Simcoe on behalf of a former slave testify not only to his own enlightened humanity, but to the powerful bonds of comradeship; like the friendship between the Mohawk Joseph Brant and English aristocrat General Lord Percy, they also demonstrate the potential of a shared warrior’s code to surmount barriers of class and race.70
Sir Henry Clinton’s promised help for Cornwallis had never arrived, although here at least he was not to blame: Graves’s naval repairs had progressed with agonizing slowness. Waiting to embark at New York to make a “spirited exertion for the relief of Lord Cornwallis,” on October 6, Captain Peebles of the 42nd already knew that “the fate of America” was probably hanging in the balance; despite that, ten days later, when a desperate plea for help arrived from Cornwallis, the “Navy people” were still dragging their feet: it was October 19 before the fleet left port.71
That same day, Yorktown’s defenders marched out to lay down their arms. Pleading an indisposition, Cornwallis delegated the duty of surrendering to his subordinate, Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, who had led the Brigade of Guards throughout the bloody southern campaign. Firsthand accounts of what happened next disagree over details, especially the mood of the key players, but the following sequence is as plausible as any: O’Hara at first rode up to Rochambeau to formally surrender his sword, apparently because he was confused rather than seeking to deliberately snub Washington; at this, a French officer, Comte Mathieu Dumas, indicated the rightful recipient; taking off his hat, O’Hara apologized to Washington for Cornwallis’s absence; as etiquette required that Washington refuse to accept the surrender of an officer of inferior rank, he in turn politely directed O’Hara to his own second in command, Major General Lincoln, the same officer who’d been obliged to capitulate at Charleston; Dumas recalled that Washington had softened his rejection of the proffered weapon with the words “Never from so gallant a hand.”72 Such magnanimity in the moment of victory, particularly toward a respected fellow soldier like O’Hara, would certainly have been more characteristic of Washington than the studied disdain with which he has sometimes been credited by later writers, and more in keeping with the courtesy enshrined in the Rules of Civility that he had transcribed as a teenager.
With O’Hara and Lincoln now riding at their head, the long column of vanquished British and German veterans marched out down a corridor formed by the victors: ragtag Americans to their left, pristine French on the right. Sarah Osborn left her cooking and washing to watch the procession. Although she didn’t know his name, Sarah never forgot Brigadier O’Hara’s “full face” or the tears that rolled down his cheeks. Perhaps the tough Irishman wept from sheer shame at the British Army’s humiliation; more likely he was remembering his son Augustus, a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery killed six months earlier at Guilford Court House; O’Hara himself had been severely wounded in that same terrible fight. Now, as the survivors of Cornwallis’s army marched out to surrender, such sacrifices must have seemed all too pointless.73
The precise terms of the capitulation reflected those imposed upon Lincoln’s men at Charleston, deliberately withholding some of the traditional honors of war: Yorktown’s defenders were required to keep their regimental colors cased rather than flying bravely on the breeze, while the drummers and fifers, whose instruments were decked in black cloth as if for a funeral, were denied the privilege of playing one of the victors’ tunes and restricted to a British or German march. According to a hallowed story, which has never been satisfactorily verified or debunked, they chose the melody of a popular, and singularly apt, English song: “The World Turned Upside Down.” If, as has been suggested by music historians, the tune was identical to that of an older song, “When the King Enjoys His Own Again,” the choice was both wistful and defiant.74
Arriving at the field appointed for their formal surrender, the British and Hessians relinquished their weapons. It was now, “the last act of the drama,” as Dr. Thacher styled it, “that the spirit and pride of the British soldier was put to the severest test, here their mortification could not be concealed.” Indeed, the redcoats’ platoon officers seemed chagrined when giving the command to “ground arms,” and their men only did so in a “sullen temper,” throwing down their muskets with violence. Such truculence is scarcely surprising: for many of Cornwallis’s men, it was their first defeat at rebel hands. Malcolm McKenzie and Neill Thomson of the 71st Highlanders were typical. As their pension applications testified, before “at last being taken prisoner with Lord Cornwallis,” both had already helped to win an impressive string of victories at Long Island, Fort Washington, Brandywine, Briers Creek, Camden, Guilford Court House, Jamestown Point, the capture and defense of Savannah, and the taking of Charleston, along with “numberless petty skirmishes too tedious to mention.”75
Thacher, who had joined the American army besieging Thomas Gage’s redcoats at Boston in 1775 and tended the war’s casualties ever since, clearly found the surrender of McKenzie, Thomson, and their surly comrades a moment to savor. For George Washington, commander of the Continental Army throughout those six long years of danger, hardship, and frustration, the thronged field outside the battered Virginian town must likewise have offered a supremely satisfying sight: nothing less than the humbling of the proud military organization that had rejected his youthful advances during the 1750s and inflicted humiliating defeats upon him twenty years later.
Ironically, that same British Army had provided not only a focus for Washington’s enduring resentment but a blueprint for the American regular force that he had built and ultimately led to partake of a stunning victory. The Continental Army that maintained the long war for independence, the force that Nathanael Greene believed to embody the “stamina of liberty,” mirrored the British prototype, and at Washington’s insistence.76 Just like the Virginia Regiment that he had sought to shape into a unit proficient enough to join the British Army, the Continentals were drawn from much the same strata of society as the redcoat rankers, served under harsh regular-style discipline, and took orders from a distinct caste of gentlemen officers. Given the English roots of Washington and many of his countrymen, as Baron Steuben had acknowledged, some imitation was only to be expected. But it is also clear that, despite his distinctly ambivalent relationship with the British Army, Washington never ceased to admire it as a military organization. As late as November 1780, when settling a point of administration, he referred the president of Congress to the “British Army, from whence most of our rules and customs are derived, and in which long experience and improvement has brought their system as near perfection as in any other service.” 77
The indelible British brand on Washington’s army was clear enough to one of the thousands of royal soldiers snared at Yorktown. Now able to scrutinize the rebels at closer quarters and with greater leisure than he had been accustomed to since 1776, jäger Captain Ewald cautioned against equating them with some “motley crowd of farmers.” On the contrary, he observed, their “so-called Continental, or standing, regiments are under good discipline and drill in the English style as well as the English themselves.” At Yorktown, the Continentals were still showing the British habits that Steuben had been unable to curb at Valley Forge. Ewald, another German weaned on Prussian principles, “was greatly surprised that the Americans were not in close formation, arm to arm, but”—like the redcoats—“had consistently left a place for a man between every two men.” The captain believed that if the war against the French, who used the traditional close-order formation, should continue, the British might “come out dirty in the first affair.” Then again, Ewald hadn’t been with Brigadier Medows at The Vigie in ’78.
Besides noting striking similarities between the rival armies at Yorktown, Captain Ewald also detected important differences. For all their crisp drill, the Americans, who were “handsome . . . well-built men,” remained lamentably clad and shod. Ewald reported: “I have seen many soldiers of this army without shoes, with tattered breeches and uniforms patched with all sorts of colored cloth, without neckband and only the lid of a hat, who marched and stood their guard as proudly as the best uniformed soldier in the world, despite the raw weather and hard rain in October.” To Ewald, here was the key distinction between the American revolutionaries and their enemies. He marveled:
With what soldiers in the world could one do what was done by these men, who go about nearly naked and in the greatest privation? Deny the best-disciplined soldiers in Europe what is due them and they will run away in droves . . . But from this one can perceive what an enthusiasm—which these poor fellows call “Liberty”—can do!78
When considering the motivation of the average Continental soldier, Ewald’s objective testimony is surely worth considering. As the memoirs of even that jaundiced veteran Joseph Plumb Martin make clear, material gain and patriotism were not mutually exclusive incentives for Washington’s regulars; the underlying loyalty of the exasperated mutineers of 1780 and 1781 suggests that many other men must have been motivated by a combination of both—bolstered of course by a strong measure of allegiance to their comrades. It was not the least of Washington’s strengths that he recognized, almost from the outset of the Revolutionary War, that high-flown ideology alone was not enough to sustain men—whether officers or rank-and-file soldiers—who risked their lives and livelihoods for long years while so many of their countrymen sat idly on the sidelines.
While it was by no means clear to Washington in October 1781 or for many months to come, the swift and unexpected elimination of an entire British army at Yorktown marked the real end of Britain’s attempt to deny the fact of American independence. When the news reached London on November 25, it caused widespread gloom, compounding dissatisfaction with Germain’s strategy and reinforcing opposition to an unpopular and costly struggle. On February 27, 1782, the Commons voted to suspend hostilities in America; Lord North resigned soon after. The new ministry, headed by Charles Watson Wentworth, Lord Rockingham, was committed to settling a comprehensive peace with the Americans.79
If, in the short term, the decisive outcome of the Yorktown campaign hinged upon the help of Rochambeau and especially de Grasse, the foundations for the victory had been laid by Washington long before. Without his resilience and leadership of the Continental Army, particularly during those pivotal weeks in New Jersey in December 1776 and January 1777, the revolutionary cause would have foundered long before French intervention made such a stroke even a possibility. According to another anecdote that is impossible to verify but nonetheless rings true enough, the essence of this was acknowledged by none other than Cornwallis himself. At a dinner held after his surrender, so the story goes, the earl rose to respond to a toast and addressed Washington with these words: “When the illustrious part your Excellency has borne in this long and arduous contest becomes a matter of history, fame will gather your brightest laurels rather from the banks of the Delaware than from those of the Chesapeake.”80 Without Trenton and Princeton there could have been no Yorktown.
Unconvinced that Britain would relinquish the struggle, and braced for a counterstroke, Washington kept his troops in fighting trim, drilling them to a peak of efficiency. Back in its old positions above Manhattan, by the summer of 1782 the Continental Army looked very different from the force that had besieged Yorktown. That September, when he attended a review at Washington’s headquarters in the Hudson Highlands, Rochambeau’s aide-de-camp, Baron von Closen, was “struck by the sight of these troops, armed, in new uniforms, and with excellent military bearing.” The baron marveled at the difference just a year could make. In the following month, that harshest of all critics—Washington himself—assured John Jay: “Our Army is better organized, disciplined, and clothed than it has been, at any period since the commencement of the war.”81
At long last Washington had the well-tempered weapon he had always wanted; ironically, with the war winding down, there was now little prospect of wielding it against the Republic’s red-coated enemies. In the summer of 1782, however, there were hints that a reliable, regular army might soon be needed elsewhere, on the western frontier. Washington received disturbing tidings from the Ohio Country, where militiamen sent against his old enemies the Delawares and Shawnees had met with catastrophic defeat at Sandusky. The slain included Washington’s boyhood friend and later business partner Colonel William Crawford, a man for whom he “had a very great regard.” The utter failure of the expedition was bad enough, but the manner of Crawford’s death was worse still: taken captive, he had been subjected to a grisly and protracted ordeal by torture, a fate ordained in reprisal for the recent unprovoked massacre by drunken militia of ninety-six peaceful Delawares—men, women, and children—at the Moravian mission at Gnadenhütten. As Washington recognized, given their mood of exasperation, “no other than the extremest tortures which could be inflicted by savages” were to be expected by their captives. “For this reason,” he warned, “no person should at this time, suffer himself to fall alive into the hands of the Indians.”82
Kept sheathed against the Republic’s external enemies, as peace looked ever more likely, the Continental Army remained a weapon that might be brandished elsewhere, at a Congress that continued to ignore its long-standing grievances. By October 1782, for all their smart looks and crisp drill, Washington sensed that his soldiers’ simmering frustrations and anxieties for the future were coming to the boil. In a letter to Benjamin Lincoln, now secretary at war, he warned that the army’s patience was almost exhausted, its “spirit of discontent” higher than ever before. Unpaid, all ranks faced a “prospect of poverty and misery.” Even generals could offer their guests no better fare than “a bit of beef without vegetable,” washed down with “stinking whiskey.” Washington dreaded the consequences for civilian society of disbanding an army in which so many veterans were “soured by penury and what they call the ingratitude of the public.”83
The anticipated unrest erupted in 1783 in a fashion that fed the most lurid fears of standing armies. Its flashpoint was the Continental Army’s final winter quarters, around the quiet village of Newburgh, just north of West Point.84 As ever, the rank and file were clamoring for their back pay, but it was the officers’ concerns that now drove events. Back in 1780, amid anxiety that Benedict Arnold’s treason might trigger a wave of copycat defections, Congress had upgraded the officers’ half-pay pensions from seven years to life. Since then, however, nothing had been done about them, fueling rumors that the anticipated peace and vociferous civilian opposition would persuade Congress to break its word. In December 1782, a group of officers led by General Alexander McDougall drew up a petition for Congress, offering to accept lump-sum severance payments in lieu of half pay. Further delays would have “fatal effects,” it warned, implying that the army would mutiny to secure its goals.
The officers’ petition was swiftly identified as a valuable weapon by those members of Congress, known as the “nationalists,” who wanted a far stronger central government than that established under the Articles of Confederation ratified in 1781, one with the power to impose the taxation necessary to satisfy the officers. Even though it was just two years since angry, mutinous soldiers had marched on Philadelphia, Congress refused to be intimidated and rejected the petition. News of that development reached Newburgh on about March 8. Colonel Walter Stewart, who delivered the tidings, poured fuel on the flames by adding that Congress aimed to disband the army without settling its accounts. Stewart began seeking the assistance of a high-ranking officer capable of increasing pressure on the politicians. Such a role had already been suggested to Washington by his former aide, the brilliant, ambitious Alexander Hamilton, now a Congressman and vocal nationalist. On February 13, Hamilton wrote: “It appears to be a prevailing opinion in the army that the disposition to recompense their services will cease with the necessity for them, and that if they once lay down their arms, they will part with the means of obtaining justice.” Hamilton, himself a veteran of the fighting from Long Island to Yorktown, regretted “that appearances afford too much ground for their distrust.” While the army’s unease might certainly prove useful in lending weight to Congress’s drive to establish “general funds” capable of satisfying the Republic’s creditors (not least, its soldiers), it would be difficult to keep “a complaining and suffering army within the bounds of moderation,” he added. Washington’s influence must be employed to “guide the torrent,” channeling the pent-up anger for the greater good.85
But Washington shunned such a role. While sympathetic to his officers’ plight, he considered the army “a dangerous instrument to play with.” His second in command at Newburgh, Major General Horatio Gates, was more amenable to calls for concerted action against Congress. Gates had no liking for the nationalists, who numbered several old enemies, but he was badly in debt and believed in an effective protest campaign. Whether Gates was merely a “tool” of the politicians or followed his own agenda is a debatable point, but Washington swiftly came to believe that his former rival was behind the growing disaffection. In a clear reference to the “Conway Cabal,” he wrote to Hamilton on March 4: “The source, may be easily traced as the old leaven, it is said, for I have no proof of it, is again, beginning to work, under the mask of the most perfect dissimulation, and apparent cordiality.”86
While there is no hard evidence that Gates aimed to usurp Washington’s position or was planning a coup d’état to overthrow Congress, he undoubtedly took a prominent role in the agitation. Acting without Washington’s authorization and against military regulations, he seemed heedless that his actions might go beyond the settling of legitimate scores and ignite a full-blown military revolt against civilian authority. With Gates’s approval, his close friend and aide, John Armstrong junior, issued anonymous addresses to the officers, implying that the time was ripe to take matters into their own hands; these were copied and distributed by another of Gates’s associates, Captain Christopher Richmond.87
The first of the “Newburgh Addresses,” which surfaced on March 10, called for a meeting of general and field officers the next day to secure “redress of grievances.” It urged them to resent “the slightest mark of indignity from Congress.” After all, whatever the “political event the army has an alternative”: if peace came, only death could disband it without a just settlement; should the war drag on, the army could seek the direction of its “illustrious leader,” Washington, then “retire to some unsettled country” in the west, leaving America helpless to its fate.88
Armstrong’s wording implied that Washington backed the address. In fact, he was appalled, concluding that it was “not only planned, but also digested and matured in Philadelphia.” He responded swiftly and decisively, using official General Orders of March 11 to deplore “such an irregular invitation” and to announce a meeting of his own on March 15 “to hear the report of the committee of the army to Congress” and to draw up a plan of action “best calculated to attain the just and important object in view.” This move not only wrested the initiative from Armstrong and his supporters but also bought time, both for his own response and to allow emotions to cool, giving his officers “leisure to view the matter more calmly and seriously.” Nothing daunted, Armstrong reacted with a second address, approving this change of plan and once again attempting to convince his readers that Washington approved of the steps already taken.89
Ironically, given his own role in stirring up the unrest, it was Gates, as senior ranking officer under Washington, who chaired the assembly on March 15. When it opened, in a newly constructed building called the “Temple of Virtue,” Washington made a lengthy address of his own. This emphasized his consistent advocacy of the army’s interests and warned against rash actions that would not only “sully the glory” they had won but “open the flood gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.” In counterpoint to this horrifying scenario, Washington was convinced that Congress held “exalted sentiments” of the army’s services, merits, and sufferings and would render it justice. But the workings of Congress were slow, he cautioned, and the men must be patient.90
At the close of his speech, which met with a stony silence, Washington delved into his pocket, unfolded a supporting letter from Congressman Joseph Jones, and started to read it. Then he hesitated, rummaged in his pocket again, and produced a pair of glasses. Washington’s officers had no idea that he needed them. “Gentleman, you will permit me to put on my spectacles,” he apologized, “for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Washington’s simple gesture and words achieved what the droning phrases of his carefully written speech had failed to do. The mood of the officers changed immediately. Men who had been surly, cynical and resentful were now choking back sobs and wiping away tears as they recalled the dangers and hardships they had shared under Washington’s unwavering leadership. Whether his action was spontaneous or calculated is unclear, but beyond doubt he had played a masterstroke; it has been characterized as a “virtuoso performance,” even his “finest hour.”91
When Washington quit the “Temple of Virtue,” his officers adopted a memorial affirming their “unshaken confidence” in Congress and condemning the anonymous addresses. The crisis was over. Having persuaded his officers to put their faith in Congress despite so many disappointments, Washington immediately resumed his campaign to ensure that his own trust hadn’t been misplaced. Three days after the decisive meeting, he wrote to Elias Boudinot, the latest president of Congress, “entreating the most speedy decision” to settle the officers’ grievances. Washington left no doubt of what his own feelings would be if the sufferings and sacrifices of his officers were not properly rewarded: “Then shall I have learned what ingratitude is, then shall I have realized a tale which will embitter every moment of my future life,” he grimly pronounced. In a letter that same day to Congressman Jones, he warned that, while the “storm which seemed to be gathering” had “dispersed,” there was no room for complacency. Those who now assumed that the danger of mutiny had passed should be wary, as men who believed themselves dealt with “ungratefully, and unjustly” were capable of anything, especially as “characters are not wanting, to foment every passion which leads to discord.”92 Congress didn’t need Washington’s prompting: shaken by the escalating threats and unaware of the dramatic turnaround at Newburgh, it enacted a plan commuting half pay for life into full pay for five years.
By personally taking control of the situation rather than surrendering the initiative to militants bent upon confrontation, Washington ensured that he would continue to champion the army’s cause as he always had, by persistent, respectful lobbying. His strong leadership at Newburgh was expressed as a voice of moderation, not the bullying ranting of a military dictator. Despite his immense and, by 1780, unrivaled prestige, Washington never succumbed to the temptation of grasping supreme power—like Oliver Cromwell before him and Napoleon Bonaparte after—even though some officers fervently believed that he should. When Colonel Lewis Nicola wrote to Washington in May 1782, suggesting that it would be in America’s best interests if he declared himself king, he received short shrift: “Banish these thoughts from your mind” came the uncompromising reply. Indeed, Washington had warned that Nicola’s proposed American monarchy, with a new King George supplanting the old one in London, was “big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country.” It was a notion that he felt obliged to regard “with abhorrence and reprehend with severity.” For all his promotion of a reliable, standing army and his determination to keep it in being until it was no longer needed, Washington never deviated from his belief that the military should remain subordinate to the civil power: he had no more desire to become a dictator at Newburgh in March 1783 than at Trenton in December 1776.93
Had Washington failed to defuse the “Newburgh Conspiracy” and instead endorsed its objectives, a group of officers might have menaced Congress into meeting their demands, thereby establishing a precedent for military interference in American government. The more drastic scenario of a full-blown coup d’état seems highly unlikely, not least because of a clear lack of solidarity between the officers and the enlisted men, whose mass support would have been essential to any takeover bid. While both groups had grievances in common, they never acted together. The unbridgeable social gulf between them was clear in 1780 and 1781, when mutinying soldiers turned wrathfully upon unpopular superiors. On their part, officers had shown no hesitation in implementing the harsher floggings ordered by Washington from December 1779 to combat marauding, even though these exceeded the army’s Articles of War. Hierarchy and punishment only reinforced the traditional antipathy between the ranks that runs through the recollections of Joseph Plumb Martin: while he and his comrades might admire individual officers for their bravery, many others, like his own captain, David Bushnell, were heartily disliked and considered fair game for potentially lethal pranks: it was only with difficulty that Sergeant Martin persuaded several “young hotheads” to abandon their plan to frighten “the old man” by igniting a wooden canteen packed with enough gunpowder to blow him sky high.94 Significantly, this conspicuous absence of the kind of fellow feeling that might have generated and sustained a coup was itself a consequence of Washington’s own vision of the Continental Army as a formation in which officers would be “gentlemen” like him, distinct in background and ethos from the humble rank and file.
The upheaval at Newburgh had scarcely subsided when news arrived that a treaty signed in January had ended hostilities between Great Britain and the United States; although the definitive Peace of Paris was not ratified until September, as Washington announced in his General Orders of April 18, the initial proclamation had closed a “long and doubtful contest” and promised “the approach of a brighter day than hath hitherto illuminated the Western Hemisphere.” Having now accomplished their “glorious task,” it only remained for the actors in the drama to exit the stage with applause. Washington was confident that the men who had enlisted for the war—“who ought to be considered as the pride and boast of the American Army”—would be honorably discharged as soon as possible.95
Because the British still garrisoned Charleston, Savannah, and New York City, Congress decided that its troops should be put on “furlough,” for recall if required, and released in batches to minimize the impact upon civilian society. Each veteran received three months’ pay in the form of “final settlement certificates”; their furlough papers could also be used to claim warrants for the 100 acres of bounty land that every “three-year or the duration” enlistee had been promised. Desperate for food and clothing to see them home, many men swiftly sold their papers for a fraction of their face value. As Joseph Plumb Martin recalled in old age, while there was talk of bounty lands, nothing was done to help the soldiers secure them: the only interest came from speculators “driving about the country like so many evil spirits,” who promptly fleeced the veterans. He added bitterly: “When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses, and nothing said about land to pasture them upon.”96
Like Sergeant Martin, George Washington had signed up “for the duration.” Despite their vastly different prospects, he, too, faced the challenge of adjusting to peace. That process began with Washington’s farewell address to his army, delivered in his General Orders of November 2. Preparing “to take his ultimate leave . . . of the military character,” he thanked all of his men, from the generals, “for their counsel on many interesting occasions, as for their ardor in promoting the success of the plans he had adopted,” to the noncommissioned officers and privates, “for their extraordinary patience in suffering, as well as their invincible fortitude in action.” What this “band of brothers” had achieved during eight long years of conflict, Washington maintained, “was little short of a standing miracle.”97
A month later, there was a more intimate parting scene in New York City. The last redcoats were finally evacuated on November 25, 1783; Washington rode in that same afternoon to a hero’s welcome from cheering crowds. On December 4, at Fraunces Tavern on Pearl Street, Washington bid farewell to his general officers and staff. Of his closest companions, only Henry Knox, Baron Steuben, and a few others were present, but it was an emotionally charged occasion for all that, with Washington embracing each man in turn. The last links were severed on December 23, when Washington broke his homeward journey to Mount Vernon and paused at Annapolis, Maryland, where Congress had convened. Having completed the task entrusted to him back in 1775, Washington delivered his formal resignation, taking his “leave of all the employments of public life.”98
Of course, Washington’s retirement from what he had styled “the great theater of action” was temporary. Given his standing as the man who had done more than anyone else to win American independence, it was inevitable that there would be further calls upon his guidance and leadership as the young Republic struggled to stamp its credentials and construct a strong national government. In spring 1787, Washington was unanimously elected to chair the convention that hammered out the US Constitution; on April 30, 1789, he was inaugurated first president of the United States; reelected, he would hold the post until 1797. His retirement was all too short, and he died on December 14, 1799, aged sixty-seven, from an inflammation of the throat contracted while inspecting his farms on horseback during a snowstorm.
Detailed examination of these years falls beyond the scope of this study, but a brief overview makes it possible to revisit key themes from Washington’s long military career. As president, Washington showed no more inclination to don the mantle of military dictator than he had when commander in chief of the Continental Army. Yet neither did he lose his faith in the kind of professional standing army that had been crucial to achieving American independence, but which remained anathema to many of his countrymen.
At the close of the Revolutionary War, the Republic’s permanent military establishment had been axed. By January 1784 America’s regular army amounted to a small unit of artillery and a single regiment of infantry: just 600 men guarding stores at West Point and Springfield, Massachusetts, and supervising the reoccupation of New York City. Mindful of civilian fears of a strong military, but aware of the need for national security, Washington had put forward his “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment” while his veterans were still disbanding: this scheme, which reflected his own experience and the advice of his general officers, envisaged a small regular force of just 2,600 troops, backed up by a properly trained and regulated militia, subject to Congress rather than to the individual states; a cohort of the youngest militiamen, aged eighteen to twenty-five, would drill more intensively, forming elite units like the minutemen companies of 1775. Washington had promoted a compromise solution in which some militia would be shaped to resemble regulars, but Congress rejected his plan. Instead, the tiny remnant of the old Continental Army was slashed further, to just eighty men.99
The same Republican suspicions that scotched Washington’s “Sentiments” fueled the furor that followed the foundation of the Society of the Cincinnati in 1783. Promoted by Henry Knox and Baron Steuben, this was an exclusive fraternity for senior Continental Army officers, intended to commemorate and perpetuate the brotherhood forged during the hardships and dangers of the Revolutionary War. Its title was inspired by the Roman citizen-soldier Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who had famously left his plow to serve the republic in its hour of need, only to relinquish power and return to farming once the crisis was over; the obvious parallels with Washington’s own experience would earn him the title of the “American Cincinnatus”; with his liking for agriculture, it was a tag he did nothing to discourage. Despite such symbolism, given its elitist, martial character, it was scarcely surprising that the society immediately provoked howls of outrage from civilians who detected sinister purposes behind its worthy facade: membership was hereditary, descending through eldest sons, which hinted at the establishment of an American “nobility,” while the payment of contributions into a fund for needy members suggested a war chest that might be tapped for other, less charitable purposes, perhaps even to topple the confederation. Washington’s acceptance of the society’s presidency offered evidence that his own motives were harmless, not least because he had no son to inherit his membership, but the public criticism of what looked like a militaristic organization, steeped in the traditions of standing armies, was unabated.100
Such entrenched attitudes ensured that in the years following the Peace of Paris the burden of national defense would fall upon the state militias, the same feckless amateurs who had frequently driven Washington to distraction during two wars. After 1789, the president’s enduring belief in the superiority of regulars, which was shared by Alexander Hamilton and other leading nationalists, was only reinforced by events on the western frontier. There, the festering troubles with the fiercely independent nations of the “Old Northwest” beyond the Ohio River finally erupted in a bloody war.
This new conflict opened badly for the young republic, reflecting both the feebleness of its truncated military establishment and the emergence of a powerful pan-Indian confederacy galvanized by fear of American encroachment and the growing influence of spiritual leaders preaching a return to native values. During 1790–91, two expeditions met with humiliating defeat. The first, led by Brigadier General Josiah Harmar, escaped relatively lightly. It involved about 1,500 men; just 300 were regulars, the balance poor-quality Kentucky and Pennsylvania militia. Sent to “chastise” the Miamis and Shawnees along the Maumee and Wabash Rivers, they were themselves roughly handled by tribal warriors under the skillful Miami leader Little Turtle. Harmar’s debacle merely served notice of a greater disaster to come.
In 1791, a second force was sent, this time to establish a fort in the heart of hostile territory. It was commanded by the revolutionary war veteran Major General Arthur St. Clair, now aging and gout ridden. St. Clair’s campaign revealed no hint of strategic flair: poorly organized and supplied and lacking intelligence of its enemy, his undisciplined army blindly blundered its way into Indian country. On November 4, 1791, near the Wabash River, it was expertly ambushed by a tribal force embracing Shawnees, Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, Ottawas, Miamis, Chippewas, and Cherokees and virtually annihilated. In scenes that recalled Braddock’s defeat in 1755, some 650 of St. Clair’s 1,400-strong command were slaughtered and hundreds more wounded; it was the bloodiest reverse ever suffered by the United States at the hands of Indians. The victors’ spoils included 1,200 muskets and eight cannon, two of them howitzers reputedly captured from Cornwallis at Yorktown. During both expeditions the small contingents of regulars had fought bravely before being overwhelmed; but the militia fled in shameful panic, just as they had done at Kip’s Bay in 1776 and Camden in 1780.101
The shocking carnage of “St. Clair’s Defeat” and the unchecked frontier raiding that followed strengthened Washington’s renewed calls for a larger regular army capable of tackling the tribes and restoring the Republic’s dented martial reputation. Congress swiftly agreed to increase the size of the military establishment from two to five regiments of infantry, a total of 5,168 rank and file. Soon after, Washington realized another goal, a reformed and federally controlled militia. To pay for these new forces, Congress introduced a heavy and extremely unpopular tax on spirits.102
There remained the vexing question of who should inherit St. Clair’s frontier command. Like the president himself, most of the surviving generals who had fought and won the Revolutionary War were past their prime; yet if passed over for a younger, more vigorous man of lower rank, like Colonel “Light Horse Harry” Lee for example, they could be counted upon to object on grounds of seniority. The selection process showed Washington at his most grudging; old comrades were summarily dismissed for real or perceived faults: rifleman Daniel Morgan was “intemperate,” “illiterate,” and often incapacitated by palpitations; Charles Scott and George Weedon were both overly fond of a drink; Steuben was competent enough, and both “sober and brave,” but sadly a foreigner. After fifteen candidates were eliminated, the choice finally fell upon Major General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, although he, too, scarcely received a hearty endorsement from his former commander, being “open to flattery—vain—easily imposed upon—and liable to be drawn into scrapes.” As for Wayne’s drinking habits, Washington was unsure whether he was sober “or a little addicted to the bottle.”103
Picked as the best of a bad bunch, Wayne was an excellent choice, proving himself an energetic trainer, firm disciplinarian, and resolute combat commander. Instead of filling five regiments, his 5,000 men were formed into the “Legion of the United States.” This reorganization was approved by Washington and his secretary at war, Henry Knox, on the advice of Steuben. Besides conjuring up the spirit of Julius Caesar, it followed the recommendations of French military theorists like Maurice de Saxe and Turpin de Crissé and also the example of the highly effective legions led by men like Banastre Tarleton, John Graves Simcoe, and “Light Horse Harry” Lee during the Revolutionary War. Wayne’s force was split into four “sublegions”: each of them was a flexible, self-contained formation fielding infantry armed with muskets and bayonets, and also riflemen, cavalry, and field artillery.104
Over the next two years, while fitful efforts were made to negotiate with the Indians, Wayne recruited and trained his legionaries. Those who still favored a peaceful settlement with the tribes were dissuaded by the outbreak of war between Great Britain and France in 1793. Britain’s policy of boarding American vessels and pressing their crews to man the Royal Navy sparked fresh resentment against the old enemy; it was only intensified by the revelation that a continued British presence in the Old Northwest, which flouted the terms of the 1783 peace, was inciting the Republic’s Indian enemies.
When Wayne’s offensive finally opened in the summer of 1794, he belied his reputation for rashness, leaving nothing to chance. Like John Forbes in 1758, Wayne anchored his advance on fortified camps. His regulars were screened by effective scouts—allied Chickasaw and Choctaw warriors, and also highly mobile mounted riflemen from Kentucky, the same type of fighters who had ruthlessly eliminated Major Ferguson’s command on King’s Mountain in 1780. At Fallen Timbers on August 20, Wayne’s disciplined regulars proved their worth, routing their opponents under Shawnee war leader Blue Jacket with a close-range volley and bayonet charge that recalled Bouquet’s tactics at Bushy Run. One Ottawa chief remembered how he and his warriors “were driven by the sharp ends of the guns of the Long Knives,” while Wayne assured Henry Knox that the enemy had been “taught to dread, and our soldiery to believe in, the bayonet.”105 He consolidated his battlefield success with another tried and tested element of frontier warfare, the deliberate devastation of Indian crops. Wayne’s victorious campaign and the marked reluctance of the British to intervene on behalf of their allies shattered the Indian confederacy.
Its mission fulfilled, the Legion was swiftly dismantled. Once again, the Republic would put its faith in a citizen militia. In fact, at the very time Wayne was leading his legionaries against Blue Jacket’s warriors, no fewer than 15,000 militiamen from four states had been summoned to deal with a grave internal security issue in western Pennsylvania. The insurrection was dubbed the Whiskey Rebellion after the farmers who refused to pay the steep federal tax on the liquor they distilled to maximize profits from their grain. Part of the huge militia army was camped near Fort Cumberland, Maryland, a spot familiar to Washington from his first military career as a soldier of the king. Escorted by three troops of leather-capped light dragoons, Washington arrived on October 16, 1794 to find every regiment “drawn up in excellent order to receive him.” According to Dr. Robert Wellford of Fredericksburg, as Washington reviewed the long line of infantry “he deliberately bowed to every officer individually.”106 Prepared to lead the militiamen in person, the sixty-two-year-old president was immaculate once more in a fashionably cut version of his old blue-and-buff Continental Army uniform and spurring another impressive white steed. Daunted by the sheer numbers mobilized against them and the awesome reputation of the man at their head, the whiskey rebels wisely dispersed without a fight.
Events across the Atlantic raised the prospect that Washington might be obliged to buckle on his sword again, this time in conflict with his former enemies and allies, the French. By 1794, the revolution that dethroned Louis XVI was already into its fifth year and had long since degenerated into the bloody terror that made the Americans’ rejection of George III seem mild and restrained. The crippling debts incurred by France in helping to strip Britain of her North American colonies had done much to cause the upheavals; before they had run their course, most of Europe had been dragged into a cycle of wars that would last for decades, only ending in 1815 with Emperor Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Many Frenchmen who had fought alongside Washington’s Continentals played prominent roles in their own country’s revolution. For example, veterans of the sieges of Savannah and Yorktown led the storming of another strongpoint, the notorious Bastille; Lafayette was carried along on the tumult, experiencing its unpredictable currents; at the outset, his military fame gained him command of the Republican National Guard, and he achieved immense popularity before being forced into flight by the rise of the Jacobin extremists. Many others were less fortunate: unlucky as ever, the Comte d’Estaing went to the guillotine in 1794, marked down for death by his loyalty to Marie-Antoinette.107
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.