In many ways, the two years between Yorktown and the official end of the war were more fraught with danger for the young American republic than the previous six. Having for all intents and purposes won their revolution, patriots came perilously close to throwing it all away.
Euphoria flooded the countryside following the capture of Cornwallis. The nation relaxed. Although the war had by no means ended, the major scenes of confrontation shifted away from the United States. The opening of negotiations in Paris added to the widespread sense of security by raising heady expectations of imminent peace. Relaxation was a natural reaction after the long and bitter struggle. Soldiers wanted to go home. State political leaders hoped to turn their attention to long-neglected local problems. People hungered for normalcy. The citizenry was manifestly tired of the prolonged conflict. Pressures for the dissolution of the nation’s military establishment were all but irresistible. It took every bit of Washington’s power and influence just to keep his army intact during the extended peace talks. What British generals had never been able to accomplish—the destruction of the Continental army—very nearly happened by default. It was true, as nearly everyone sensed, that the conflict had turned a decisive corner: Britain could probably not have won the American war in the years after Yorktown. The king’s external foes were too numerous and his internal opposition too powerful. But Americans very nearly forfeited the fruits of their victory. Some contend that George Washington’s greatest achievement was holding everything together during that final trying period. They may be right.
Peace, like war, can be won or lost. The war was due to end, but the final form of peace would be molded by military actions in far-flung theaters ranging from the West Indies all the way around the globe to India. The thirteen colonies became a backwater of the contest, though not an altogether unimportant theater. What happened in North America affected what happened elsewhere, and vice versa. Despite the virtual absence of fighting in the United States, war had not ended, and the goals for which patriots had sacrificed so much for so long, although at last within sight, were not yet attained. The future of the United States depended upon the activities of the Continental army. Washington’s task was to bring American military power to bear so as to maintain and, if possible, to strengthen his country’s bargaining power. Patriots, having won their war, set out to win their peace. Thus, the fourth phase of the Revolutionary War can be captioned “shaping the peace.”
Immediately after Cornwallis surrendered, George Washington was not thinking of peace; his warrior’s instinct was to press on. He had torn one arm from the enemy at Yorktown, now he wanted to go for another. On 6 October, the very day he opened the Yorktown siege, Washington gave Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Morris a message to memorize. Too sensitive for writing, the words were to be spoken only into the ear of Nathanael Greene. The commander in chief was already preparing another blow. He intended to send the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia lines to Greene right after Yorktown fell. All the cavalry he could mount would go as well. He would try to get the French fleet to assist, but he cautioned Greene not to count on it. Further, if Rochambeau could be talked into joining him, Washington would personally lead the combined armies to South Carolina. He was after greater game than the single enclave at Yorktown.1
When beaten British and German units marched out of Yorktown on 20 October to stack arms in surrender, Washington wasted no time savoring one victory at the expense of the next. He wrote that same day to de Grasse, urging the admiral to support an operation against Charleston. “It rarely happens that such a combination of means as are in our hands at present can be seasonably obtained by the most strenuous of human exertions,” he correctly observed. Having waited so long for the chance to work with a fleet, the general could not bear the thought of failing to exploit the marvelous opportunity. If not Charleston, then what about Wilmington? Or, at the very least, would de Grasse simply ferry American troops and equipment southward? The next day, Washington visited the admiral aboard his mammoth 110-gun flagship, La Ville de Paris, where he personally pursued his request. The admiral, however, found no excitement in besieging fortifications. He had his eye cocked on the West Indies, where a British squadron roamed. Prospects of battle at sea made him deaf to American entreaties for another campaign on land. He agreed only to transport two thousand Continentals to Wilmington, if they were ready to depart on 1 November. But the eager admiral could not contain himself even that long. A few days later he told Lafayette to try to explain to Washington as best he could—and left. The American, biting his tongue, sent a diplomatic note thanking the Frenchman for his help during the Yorktown campaign and imploring him to return the next year for a similar purpose. Nevertheless, he was angered. If de Grasse had cooperated, he lectured Lafayette, there was not a doubt “upon any man’s mind of the total extirpation of the British force in the Carolinas and Georgia.”2
With the campaign closed by the departure of the French fleet, as well as by Rochambeau’s subsequent decision to go into winter quarters in Virginia, Washington turned his mind to the next year. He sent southward the reinforcements he had promised Nathanael Greene and started the long journey north to rejoin those forces he had left guarding the Hudson. New York was still the strategic center of operations, so his place was there. Stopping at Mount Vernon—his stepson had just died—the general briefed Lafayette in preparation for the young Frenchman’s return to Versailles. Lafayette would be listened to at court. “A constant naval force would terminate the war speedily,” Washington told his close friend, emphasizing the word “constant.” It could operate from June to September in the north and during all other months in the south. The success of the next campaign, Washington emphasized, “must depend absolutely upon the naval force which is employed in these seas, and the time of its appearance next year. No land force can act decisively unless it is accompanied by a maritime superiority.” The British had been sorely weakened by their loss at Yorktown, and Washington clearly wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to annihilate the remaining garrisons.3
Already, though, the commander in chief was detecting worrisome signs abroad in the land. All too many of his countrymen were talking as if the war were at an end, an end he could not see at all. If pursued vigorously, he admonished in mid-November, the victory at Yorktown could “be productive of much good ... but if it should be the means of relaxation and sink us into supineness and security it had better not have happened.” He was going to Philadelphia, he told Nathanael Greene, where he would “attempt to stimulate Congress to [capitalize on Yorktown] by taking the most vigorous and effectual measures to be ready for an early and decisive campaign the next year. My greatest fear is that Congress, viewing this stroke in too important a point of light, may think our work too nearly closed and will fall into a state of languor and relaxation.” When he reached Philadelphia, he learned that his worst fears had come true. Ecstatic citizens were celebrating the end of the war—two years prematurely.4
In retrospect, it is easy to criticize Washington for not recognizing straightaway that Yorktown had finally given the British a bellyful of the American war. We know the outcome—king and cabinet would agree to write off their thirteen former colonies. To understand these events, however, one must consider not the final but the initial reaction in London. Washington, it turns out, was quite justified in believing the war would continue, for decision makers in the enemy capital thought so too.
When word of Yorktown reached England, Lord North, predictably enough, tried to resign. Even Germain, whose incredibly bad management had led to both Saratoga and Yorktown, saw that chances for military victory in the colonies had disappeared. George III, however, reacted with that stubbornness which makes the bulldog a more recognized symbol of England than the lion. The war would continue, he insisted, “though the mode of it may require alteration.” Dutifully, Germain drafted new instructions for His Majesty’s forces in America. They were to remain strictly on the defensive ashore, with no inland operations permitted. The navy would carry the burden of the new effort by closing American ports and interdicting trade. Redcoats and Tories would assist the navy in distressing the patriots with raids along the coast. In the end, Great Britain turned to the strategy first proposed back in 1775—naval blockade—but it was too late. While those revised instructions were crossing the Atlantic, Lord North was struggling vainly against a rising tide of resistance in Parliament.5
Perhaps the king could have prevailed if Yorktown had been the only dark news. Although his support had been dwindling for some time, he could still muster a majority of forty-one in the House of Commons in December. Then came the deluge. Operating boldly in the West Indies, French seaborne forces captured a string of valuable islands, including St. Eustatius, Nevis, Montserrat, and St. Kitts. They threatened Jamaica. De Grasse had found his excitement. Elsewhere, the fall of Minorca and West Florida deepened the gloom in London. The North ministry could not withstand the mounting pressure. Its support dropped to a margin of just nineteen votes early in January. George III accepted Germain’s resignation on 11 February, but even after ridding himself of the albatross of the “ghost of Minden,” the king could not stall his opposition. A motion to abandon all attempts to coerce the colonists that failed by a single vote on 22 February passed easily days later. For the first time, Parliament had acted to stop the war against the colonists. The ministry resigned, and the king himself considered abdication.
Upon more sober reflection, George III did not take that drastic step, but he was compelled to accept an opposition ministry led by the marquis of Rockingham. The new government was dedicated to reconciliation with America. Rockingham’s policy was to pursue the war against Britain’s European enemies while striving to persuade Americans to accept a union with Britain somewhere short of full independence. Accordingly, revised orders went out to British generals in America.
Henry Clinton returned to England under a cheerless cloud after a stay in America that had begun with Bunker Hill, and Guy Carleton came down from Canada to replace him as commander of all British forces. Carleton’s instructions were enough to make a professional soldier choke; they prohibited him from engaging the enemy in any fashion, even from defending himself in event of a major attack. He was to capitulate rather than resist. If he could work out an arrangement with Washington, he was to withdraw the bulk of his men from the United States for duty in other theaters. Carleton’s conciliatory action at the front paralleled a similar diplomatic offensive in Paris. British agents contacted rebel representatives there, ostensibly opening peace negotiations but really trying to foster better Anglo-American relations while attempting to split the Americans from their French allies. The English had some success in Paris but none at all in America, where a suspicious George Washington stubbornly refused to ease the military pressure on Carleton.
Nothing was farther from Washington’s mind than an under-the-table deal with his foe. The war, as far as he was concerned, could not terminate until its goals were achieved, and Britain had indicated no willingness to accept the territorial claims or the independence of the United States. At first he was convinced that “the enemy intend to prosecute the war vigorously,” especially in the west, which would “serve to establish and secure their claim to the extended limits of Canada.” To counter that threat, he contemplated sending an expedition to seize Detroit, or, at the very least, throwing a sufficient force beyond the mountains to stop hostile advances. Those were his thoughts in February. Later, learning of the change of government in Britain, he paused in his planning. The nature of American operations, he said, “must depend greatly on the views of the enemy and the particular mode of war which they shall in future adopt.” His expectation of what the British would do was precisely on the mark—he guessed they would cease all operations in the south, hold one or more bases, and “take up the desultory naval war.” Prudently assessing the struggles to come, Washington instructed Nathanael Greene, still in the south, to content himself for the time being with “confining the enemy to their lines, and preventing them from carrying their ravages into the country.” Although he was waiting to see what path the conflict would take, Washington forecast no early end to it. “I confess to you candidly,” he wrote his wife’s brother, “that I see very little prospect of the war ending with this campaign.”6
As it gradually became evident that royal forces intended only to sit tight, that they would likely neither attack nor depart, Washington began to analyze his chances of striking them somewhere. Fortunately for Carleton, Washington never learned of London’s instructions to surrender if attacked. New York City, the general informed the secretary at war, could be cracked only if a French fleet participated, if Rochambeau could send some five or six thousand soldiers, and if the Continental army could be augmented by another ten thousand men. A campaign in the south also required a fleet, “without which it is folly even to think of one.” Bermuda was a candidate for a raid, and Halifax was a possibility, if no other objective appeared feasible. But it was the old magnet Canada that drew Washington’s attention most strongly. All other objectives would require support from a fleet, which patriots could not control. The northern province could be won, Washington thought, in just two campaigns, with an invasion force marching either by way of the Great Lakes or straight north over the well-trod Lake Champlain route. Besides expanding the limits of the United States, he reckoned, the proposed expedition would subdue “all the Northern and Western Indians,” restoring peace on the frontier all the way from the Bay of Fundy to the backwoods of North Carolina. Moreover, invading Canada would cost no more than protecting the extensive frontier against Indian depredations over a prolonged period. Defense was an annual expense, the commander in chief explained, while attack would put “the axe to the root, would remove the cause, and make a radical cure.” That, of course, would also mean an end to any worry over British “intriguing after peace shall be established.” Furthermore, it “would at once develop the mysterious conduct of the people of Vermont,” who were threatening to align themselves with the Canadians. Last, there was the matter of money: Canada’s business, especially the lucrative fur trade, would be a boon to the economy of the United States. Washington figured he could take Canada by starting in September with only eight thousand men.7
It was just as well that the general was thinking again of operating without assistance from a fleet. Admiral de Grasse, after a series of victories, went down to defeat in a climactic encounter off Saints Passage in April 1782. De Grasse himself was captured. That defeat ended the period of French naval predominance in American waters and virtually eliminated any hope of another combined campaign like Yorktown. Washington’s reaction to the loss is evidence of his keen awareness of the variegated shadings of this phase of the war. Militarily, of course, it robbed the allies of flexibility. Rochambeau had been holding his army in Virginia, a central location from which he could march quickly either to New York or Charleston, wherever de Grasse might appear. Now there was no chance of an allied assault against either base, Washington informed his subordinates. But all was not black. To the secretary of foreign affairs he wrote, with remarkable insight, that the British victory at sea might even draw peace nearer! For the first time in a long while, he said, Britain had a distinct advantage. The king could bargain now from a position of relative strength. If Americans remained strong and ready, London might see this as the moment for opening serious negotiations.8
Throughout the summer of 1782, the American commander walked gingerly through the confusing maze that he termed “concilitary war.” Carleton tried in every way he could think of to convince his opponent that, so far as the British were concerned, “all hostilities stand suspended.” But Washington remained skeptical. When he asked Carleton to provide passage for the return to Charleston of several South Carolina refugees—a normal humanitarian act typical of eighteenth-century warfare—the Englishman responded with an alacrity that raised American eyebrows. His rapid and full agreement, the commander in chief puzzled, “strikes me in a very disagreeable light.” When the Englishman suggested exchanging captured American seamen for British soldiers, the doubting Virginian saw behind the plan a veiled attempt to strengthen royal units fighting in the West Indies, which, he cautioned Congress, would be nearly the same as employing the returned soldiers in America itself. Besides, British warships under Admiral Robert Digby were aggressively blockading American ports, and General Frederick Haldimand, in Canada, was energetically stirring up strife on the American frontiers. Both actions bothered Washington. He was so concerned with Haldimand’s operations, in fact, that he took a hurried trip north in July to examine the upper Hudson and the Mohawk River areas, thinking that theater might once again become a scene of active war. Washington insisted on holding Carleton responsible for all warlike acts, on land or sea, by regulars or Tories or Indians.9
At midsummer Washington still read duplicity into Britain’s pacific overtures. “Sir Guy Carleton is using every art to soothe and lull our people into a state of security,” he claimed, quite correctly, of course. Of the “line of conduct pursued by the different commanders,” he wrote sarcastically:
Sir Guy gives strong assurances of the pacific disposition of his most gracious Majesty, by land. Sir (that is to be) Digby gives proofs... of his most gracious Majesty’s good intention of capturing everything that floats on the face of the waters.... To an American, whose genius is not susceptible of refined ideas, there would appear some little inconsistency in all this; but, to the enlarged and comprehensive mind of a Briton, these things are perfectly reconcilable.
Nevertheless, the general did cancel an expedition against Indians in western Pennsylvania on the grounds that they were relatively quiet and that he believed Carleton was actually trying to restrain them. Nor could he refrain from gloating over the discomfiture caused New York Tories by Carleton’s persistence in talking of peace. “[They] are little better than a medley of confused, enraged, and dejected people. Some are swearing and some crying; while the greater part of them are almost speechless.”10
On 2 August, Carleton sent his American counterpart a message reporting on the favorable progress of peace talks in Paris, adding his own belief that prospects for an armistice were good. Washington, informing Nathanael Greene of developments, remained unconvinced. “I confess I am induced to doubt everything, to suspect everything.” He could not rid his mind of the former “duplicity and perverse system of British policy.” Yet he could not deny the mounting evidence, such as the British evacuation of all bases in the south except Charleston. Unless the English were blatantly lying, he wrote James McHenry, “we are now advanced to that critical and awful period when our hands are to be tried at the arts of Negotiation.”11
Caution should be the American watchword, Washington warned. Even if the British were sincere, peace talks could still fail. What is more, he said, if the Rockingham ministry meant to offer no more than the “independence” given to Ireland, the war would definitely continue. Regardless, the Continental army would have to remain ready: “Nothing will hasten peace more than to be in a condition for war.”
Then, a thunderclap! With even the ever-pessimistic Washington talking guardedly of peace, shocking news crossed the ocean. The marquis of Rockingham had died suddenly on 1 July, being replaced by the earl of Shelburne. Shelburne was known to be no friend of Americans, no supporter of independence. Making matters worse was a resurgence of British fortune. After trouncing de Grasse in April, the Royal Navy had won several other key clashes, putting Britain in a powerful bargaining position. Worst of all, perhaps, was painful evidence of double-dealing on the part of France and Spain. The two Bourbon kingdoms were combining to thwart American aspirations to expansion. Britain was once more in a position—and in a mood—to be less generous in responding to colonial demands for territory and independence, while America’s recent allies were becoming, at the very best, friendly foes. It was fortunate that George Washington had not relaxed his guard.
“Our prospect of peace is vanishing,” the commander in chief concluded glumly. “That the king will push the war as long as the nation will find men or money admits not of a doubt in my mind .... If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst; there is nothing which will so soon produce a speedy and honorable peace as a state of preparation for war, and we must either do this or lay our account for a patched up, inglorious peace after all the toil, blood, and treasure we have spent.” Writing to the secretary of foreign affairs, Washington predicted the negotiations would be “spun out to a considerable length” or perhaps broken off altogether. “In the meantime it will be our policy to proceed as if no negotiations were on foot.” Writing to Greene in September, the general quoted Benjamin Franklin: the British were “unable to carry on the war and too proud to make peace.” Then he penned a letter to Franklin, telling him how the year that had opened with such high hopes was closing with a question mark. “We are now beginning again to reflect upon the persevering obstinacy of the King, the wickedness of his Ministry, and the haughty pride of the nation, which ideas recall to our minds very disagreeable prospects, and a probable continuance of our present trouble.”12
Once again, the commander in chief took stock of his military options. It was too late that year to do anything effective, but he prepared for 1783. As always in the past, his primary aim was to drive the enemy out of New York. He ordered Greene to start troops on the long trek north from the Carolinas because he expected the British soon to evacuate Charleston, their only remaining base on American soil outside New York, and also because there would be no more foreign help. The French fleet had been removed from the scene, and the army was removing itself. Rochambeau marched his troops from Virginia to Boston that fall, where he embarked for the West Indies. The patriots were on their own again. Washington, standing at West Point with an army small but more efficient than ever, watched New York like a spider watching a fly. If Carleton sent reinforcements to the Caribbean and should leave too weak a garrison, he planned to descend swiftly upon the city. And if none of his New York schemes panned out, there was always Canada. He instructed Brigadier General William Irving, commander of the western department, to lay in provisions for a campaign by way of Lake Erie, and he took other steps to insure a passage beyond Fort Ticonderoga.13
But there were to be no more campaigns. Despite Shelburne’s staunch anti-American sentiments, the momentum of events made a peace of some description inevitable. Britain was weary to the bone of the long, unpopular, and largely unsuccessful war. The time to quit was at hand. Thomas Paine, pondering those strange days that seemed suspended in some never-never land between war and peace, concluded correctly that the conflict was drawing to a close. Since a growing number of modern scholars have turned to plumbing the reasons why nations terminate wars, Paine’s unusual but very perceptive thoughts merit repeating.
I fully believe we have seen our worst days over.... I draw this opinion from the peculiar effect which certain periods of time have more or less on all men. The British have accustomed themselves to think of the term of seven years in a manner different to other periods of time. They acquire this partly by habit, by religion, by reason, and by superstition. They serve seven years apprenticeship; they elect their Parliament for seven years; they punish by seven years transportation, or the duplicate or triplicate of that term; their leases run in the same manner; and they read that Jacob served seven years for one wife and seven years for another; and the same term likewise extinguishes all obligations (in certain areas) of debt or matrimony; and thus, this particular period, by a variety of concurrences, has obtained an influence in their minds superior to that of any other number.
They have now had seven years war, and are not an inch farther on the Continent than when they began. The superstitious and the populous part will conclude that it is not to be; and the reasonable part will think they have tried an unsuccessful scheme long enough, and that it is in vain to try it any longer.
Paine might also have mentioned the interesting coincidence of the date of the formation of a new ministry bent on peace—seven years to the month after the clash between redcoat and minuteman on Lexington Green.14
Whether weary of war or not, though, king and cabinet were not about to cut everything loose and run. Fortunes, reputations, and sometimes even kingdoms stood to be gained or sacrificed in the give and take of the negotiating table. It was not unusual for skilled diplomats to win in bargaining what generals had been unable to win in battle. That did not mean military actions diminished in importance as nations negotiated—on the contrary, they often became more important. Thus, those battles fought after Yorktown were in many ways far more important than earlier and better known engagements. While all of the European antagonists accepted this fact, not every American leader understood it. Fortunately, Washington was one of the handful who did.
In the end, the patriots emerged victorious from the prolonged negotiations. Of all the belligerents in the war, only the United States had held firm objectives from which it had steadfastly refused to budge. And in one of the conflict’s supreme ironies, America’s “militia diplomats,” with the aged Benjamin Franklin spearheading the attack, turned the duplicity of European politicians to advantage, brilliantly playing one against the other. On 30 November 1782, while Washington was looking for an opening to attack New York, American and British representatives in Paris signed a preliminary treaty of peace. When Parliament heard the terms granted to the revolutionaries, it was shocked—independence and generous territorial concessions! Shelburne was voted out of office for conceding too much, but events had progressed too far to be retrieved by the successor government. On 20 January 1783, faced with the surprising American diplomatic fait accompli, the other powers agreed to a general armistice. The fighting was over, barring an unlikely breakdown in the final negotiations. Nothing remained now but to await an agreement on a definitive treaty.
Nothing indeed! How curious those words might sound to a Continental soldier brought back to life to hear how most military histories treat his war. His ordeal had by no means ended. On 23 December 1782, Congress learned of Britain’s willingness to treat on the basis of American independence. It would be a full year before Washington could safely resign his commission, twelve agonizing months in which the Revolution, having triumphed, had to be prevented from consuming itself. The war’s final, frightening year was the one that came closest to seeing the failure of the Revolution.
Mount Vernon was never far from Washington’s thoughts. Throughout the war, he dreamed of the beauty and tranquility of his plantation on the Potomac. Now, for the first time in nearly eight years, the international situation seemed calm enough to permit him to spend some of the winter months there. He bubbled joyously as he contemplated relaxing at his own hearth rather than in some borrowed house near a dreary Continental encampment. But it was not to be. When time came to leave headquarters, he could not, he dared not.
“The temper of the Army is much soured,” he wrote on 14 December 1782, “and has become more irritable than at any period since the commencement of the war.” It was not just the men who so worried the commander in chief; they were usually restless, and mutinous flare-ups from time to time were more or less expected. The situation now was different—and more dangerous. The new, ugly mood of the Continental army originated with “combinations among the officers,” who always before had “stood between the lower order of the soldiery and the public.”15
The rebellion within a rebellion had been building ever since the great victory at Yorktown. Its causes were part economic, part political, and part psychological.
The first is easily explained: Congress was broke. Members had been obliged to assess themselves a dollar each just to pay the expenses of the rider bearing the news of Yorktown. France, after sending such generous aid in 1781, announced a sudden end to its largesse, forcing Americans to raise their own funds. Congress, though, had no ability to tax. Under the Articles of Confederation, the power to tax belonged to the states. Congress could only levy assessments against the various state governments and hope they would meet them. But the states, never reliable to begin with, simply stopped trying after Yorktown. By 1 June 1782, their total contributions for the year amounted to about $20,000, which was enough for just one day’s operation of the Continental establishment. By September, even after impassioned pleas for support, Congress had collected but $125,000 of a required $6 million. Soldiers went unpaid. So did members of Congress, for that matter, but they were able to get along. Many delegates simply went home—a privilege called desertion in the army—often leaving Congress unable to do business for lack of a quorum. Some found sponsors. Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew who had immigrated to America shortly before the outbreak of war, personally paid the bills of several members, including James Madison. Fortunately, though Americans seemed perversely unwilling to finance their own ship of state, the fragile craft was not set completely adrift by European statesmen. Loans from Holland helped, and Benjamin Franklin wheedled yet another advance from Louis XVI. “Our people certainly ought to do more for themselves,” Franklin wrote acidly as he forwarded the money. “It is absurd the pretending to be lovers of liberty while they grudge paying for the defense of it.” But those foreign gifts merely postponed the moment of crisis. The financial crisis came to a head when the paymaster of the Continental army ceased to function for lack of funds. Congress could afford neither to maintain the army nor to reduce it. There was no money to pay forces that were not needed, nor was there any to pay what was owed to those who would be leaving. The men could not in conscience be turned out destitute, and they could not be safely released without their back pay. They would rebel. Fielding an army without money had been difficult; disbanding one without it would be dangerous.
Politically, the story is rather more sordid. Economic agonies could be traced to excessive demands on scarce funds or, at worst, to ineptness and indifference. Political problems, on the other hand, sprang from raw maneuvering for personal power at the expense of the ideals of liberty and democracy for which the Revolution had been waged. Many Americans, exasperated with Congress’s impotence, wanted, reasonably enough, to establish a stronger form of government. But some pursued that desirable end by means that could have plunged the United States into internal war. Some saw the army as a useful instrument for cajoling an inept civil government. Some even believed that a military dictatorship was called for, while others favored the establishment of an American monarchy. Such ominous talk was rife in officers’ huts during the winter of 1782–83, often encouraged by outsiders, including members of Congress.
Perhaps the saddest reason for unrest, and in several respects the most difficult to combat, was the psychological. The average American had not been so well off in years. Farms were producing bountifully, trade was increasing, business beginning to boom, armies no longer ravaged the countryside, militiamen heard fewer calls to arms to take them away from their work. The people had plenty—which made the poverty of the army hard to comprehend, impossible to accept. Men who had given many of their most productive years, who had risked their lives, who had endured terrible conditions, were men not likely to appreciate the success and ease of those who seemingly had sacrificed nothing. As the officers stated it in a petition to Congress, “Shadows have been offered to us while the substance has been gleaned by others.” In the army’s view, the country was acting most ungratefully. For all their blood and sweat, Continental veterans were receiving neither recognition nor reward. That hurt—deeply.
Who can say what would have followed had the Continental army turned on the Continental Congress? It could easily have happened. A body of soldiers acting without officer leadership did in fact chase Congress from Philadelphia in 1783. The War of Independence would not have been the only revolution to devour itself. At the very least, the American negotiators in Paris would have been undermined. However Americans might have sorted out their differences, the geographical limits of the United States would very likely have been drastically restricted, and many patriots surely would have faltered in their devotion to the ideal of independence.
Only George Washington had the prestige and influence to keep the restive army in hand. His successful suppression of the budding rebellion among the officers is well chronicled. His actions, culminating in the dramatic Newburgh Address, may have kept the Revolutionary War from degenerating into a civil war. In a marvelous display of personal leadership, he prevented penury, intrigue, and self-pity from destroying the army—and probably the nation itself. Having been rudder and keel and mainsail through the long, rough voyage, he was a firm anchor in the final storm.16
With that last, dangerous winter safely behind him, Washington received heartwarming news in the spring. It came first in a polite dispatch from the British. Carleton told him in early April of the general armistice signed in January. Pending official word from Congress, the general promptly ordered his outposts “to suspend all acts of hostilities.” On 14 April, he let a British messenger pass through Continental lines to carry word to General Haldimand in Canada. On his own, to speed communications, the American commander sent word by Indian runner directly to the British officer commanding at Niagara, telling him of the cease-fire and urging him to keep Indians off the warpath. Recent events had presaged another round of brutal warfare on the frontier. Still Washington did not announce the treaty to his own men. He wanted to hear it from Congress first. Then, when official word finally arrived, he waited a little longer for the most appropriate day he could think of. With a fine flair for the dramatic, he had the announcement “publicly proclaimed” precisely at noon on 19 April 1783, the eighth anniversary of Lexington and Concord. Every man received an extra ration of liquor to join the general in a toast wishing “perpetual peace, independence, and happiness to the United States of America.”
Although victory loosed in the nation a sincere wave of elation and relief, the following months were not easy for soldiers. Until Carleton evacuated New York, which he would not do until completion of the definitive treaty, the army’s job would not be done. A small, ready force would have to remain to prevent British or loyalist opportunism and to hedge against a possible resurgence of the war. That presented Americans a most difficult dilemma. The military establishment was much too large and Congress much too poor. The government still could afford neither to retain nor to reduce its army. As the secretary of the board of war told Steuben, “The difficulty which heretofore oppressed us was how to raise an army. The one which now embarrasses us is how to dissolve it.” Yet the moment could be delayed no longer. The army had to be disbanded. An unhappy but pragmatic Washington found the answer. He released most of his men on furloughs, which ostensibly permitted him to recall them in the event fighting flared again, but which was really a way to reduce the army without having to produce severance pay. Washington preferred injustice to his faithful followers to the trampling of civil government. Perhaps he knew that Cromwell’s New Model Army had become disloyal only after Parliament had tried to dismiss it without pay. From first to last, he was not a Cromwell. Most of the Continentals marched home, never to receive the money due them. Their homecoming was not particularly joyful; many citizens looked upon the returning veterans with resentment rather than the respect the soldiers had expected. A few were even mobbed. Only later would the country express its gratitude. The war had been too long and too bitter. Those who remained in ranks were consolidated at West Point to await the British departure.
Washington was too active a person to sit around idly and too responsible an officer to leave his men before their work was done. He looked for a way to use his diminished forces. Eight years of constantly searching for a course to achieve his nation’s goals had left the habit imprinted on his mind; the war’s final year was no different in that regard. Before learning of the armistice, he had recommended making “one great and decisive effort to expel the enemy from their remaining possessions in the United States.” After the cease-fire, he shifted his attention westward. In July, he journeyed to Albany for a closer look at frontier events.17 Concerned by some of the reports he heard, he sent Steuben on an inspection tour of posts in the west and ordered Robert Howe to be ready to take four hundred to five hundred men to occupy the British forts as soon as they were evacuated.18
As a matter of fact, the general’s attention had never really strayed from the beckoning land over the mountains. Even in the midst of the crucial events of 1781, he had continued to push campaigns aimed at reducing the threat from hostile tribes. Preparing for an offensive into the west, he had begun cutting a road early in 1782 from Fort Pitt to Niagara. Although George Rogers Clark’s destruction of Chillicothe in Ohio on 10 November 1782 was the war’s final clash beyond the mountains, Washington asked Congress to authorize one last campaign against the Indian nations in 1783. The westward expansion of the new nation was an abiding interest of Washington’s. If few of his aggressive plans from those final two years ever came to fruition, it was only for want of means, not desire.
After Yorktown, preserving the Continental army had once again become more important than defeating the enemy army. Offensive operations would be undertaken, Washington had informed his lieutenants, only when patriots had a “moral certainty of succeeding.” Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to view him as defensive or passive at this stage. National goals, particularly territorial aggrandizement, obliged him to keep pressure on the enemy in New York while trying to extend American sway wherever he could. The arts of negotiation, as the commander in chief well understood, do not permit one to break stride near the finish line. For the most part, the military weakness of a small nation, tired of war and weak of purse, frustrated his efforts in this final phase. But, by keeping an army together and exerting constant, albeit light, pressure on the enemy, he helped assure a favorable settlement.19
The final treaty was signed in Paris on 3 September 1783. Its first article stated: “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States... to be free, sovereign and independent.” The goal of independence had been attained. The second article specified the new nation’s boundaries, the third acknowledged American rights to the Grand Banks fishing grounds, and the eighth guaranteed free navigation of the Mississippi. The United States achieved all its territorial goals except for Florida, which went to Spain, and Canada, which remained in British hands. Florida was no great loss in American eyes, but the failure to win Canada in the final treaty was a galling disappointment, especially since the preliminary treaty had ceded much of Ontario to the United States. Even so, Americans emerged with more than they could have reasonably expected. They had not occupied Canada, so they could make no valid claim to it. On the other hand, much of the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi was still contested at war’s end. Both London and Madrid had claims there—which were neither frivolous nor indifferently pressed. Spain, in particular, had worked to exclude the patriots from the Mississippi valley. That all of the West should go to the United States was by no means a foreordained result of the negotiations. Beyond question, the patriots came out ahead. Firmness after Yorktown, at both the fighting front and the truce table, had won much for America.20
Not until a ship traversed the Atlantic could Washington and Carleton learn that they had been at peace for weeks. The Englishman lost no time in folding his tents, sailing in late November. Washington promptly rode into New York, the city he had been forced from in 1776 and which he had striven ever since to retake, signifying the completeness of his victory. After a tearful farewell party at Fraunces Tavern, he left the Continental army. Stopping at Annapolis, where Congress was meeting, the general surrendered his commission. Only one of the members then in attendance had been present when it had been given to him in June 1775. No act of the Continental Congress was more propitious for the country than commissioning Washington as commander in chief, except perhaps keeping him in that position. Having seen to that final duty, George Washington, esquire, spurred away for Mount Vernon, reaching his home on the Potomac in time for Christmas.