By this point in the war the commander in chief was no stranger to bureaucratic fisticuffs, and he seemed to take an odd pleasure in what his Irish troopers would call a nasty hooley. A year earlier, for instance, following the string of Continental defeats in New York, Washington had instructed his second in command Gen. Charles Lee to lead two brigades from Peekskill, New York, to join him in his flight across New Jersey. Lee hesitated. Lee may have been, in Washington’s words, “fickle and violent,” but he was nothing if not shrewd. Lee had sensed that Washington’s reputation was crumbling in the aftermath of the British victories across the state from Long Island to Manhattan to Westchester County. His plan was to become the default replacement when the civil authorities finally recognized the Virginia planter’s inadequacies. In 1775, the First Continental Congress had been hesitant to hand a foreign-born officer such as Lee or Horatio Gates complete command of its military. But after the failed New York campaign, Lee wagered that the country’s desperate straits would alter that approach. He had never been burdened by either humility or introspection.
At 46, Lee was a gifted linguist who spoke six languages and consumed the classics in the original Greek and Latin. Though short and lamppost lean—a bantam figure with a restless demeanor and a discursive speaking style that lent him the aura of a davening rabbi—Lee’s ravenous ego compensated for his physical deficiencies. As a young lieutenant stationed in North America during the French and Indian War with Gen. Braddock—a body of infantry that included fellow junior officers George Washington and Horatio Gates—he had entered into a “marriage” with the daughter of a Seneca war chief, a rather bizarre arrangement for a man whose racist screeds against the Irish were legendary. His bewildered new father-in-law, playing on Lee’s choleric nature, bestowed on him the Iroquoian name “Boiling Water,” and Lee himself admitted that he suffered from “a distemper of mind.” However, he also had a windfall inheritance from his late father, allowing his “distemper” to not hinder his rise through the British army’s ranks. Severely wounded at the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga in 1758—he directed such a steady stream of invective at the attending physician that the doctor later tried to kill him—he secured his military reputation four years later in Portugal, routing a far superior Spanish force during a daring night raid.
Following the Peace of Paris in 1763, Lee’s regiment was disbanded and, sidelined with a major’s half pay, he resigned his commission. He was rescued from a life of roaming London’s gambling halls by King Stanislaw II of Poland, who employed him as an aide-de-camp and promoted him to the ceremonial rank of major general. He later saw action as a British observer attached to the Russian army during the czar’s war against the Turks and, sensing greater opportunities in the American colonies, in 1773 he purchased an estate near the home of his old friend Gates in what is now West Virginia. Two years later, with the outbreak of revolution, he volunteered his services to the First Continental Congress.
Lee raged at being passed over for the post of commander in chief. His indignity was assuaged only by his certainty that the delegates would eventually see the error of opting for an upstart provincial over a seasoned professional soldier. In the meantime, his scorn for Washington did not prevent him from grudgingly accepting the position of Washington’s second in command. Though Lee’s overweening self-regard, turbulent personality, and bouts of paranoia led some in Washington’s circle to consider him mad, his military expertise were never questioned. Even the debilitating attacks of gout that sometimes forced him to be carried into battle on a litter were viewed as a badge of martial discipline.
Washington had always considered himself an adept reader of men. Why he remained blind for so long to Lee’s dangerous ambition remains something of a mystery. He welcomed Lee as a war counselor and even renamed Fort Constitution on the New Jersey side of the Hudson in Lee’s honor after dispatching him from Boston to oversee the construction of New York City’s defensive works. Perhaps it was Lee’s cosmopolitanism that clouded an insecure commander in chief’s judgment. If so, Washington was not alone. Congress soon tapped Lee to take command of the Southern Military Department where, in June 1776, he was lauded for the breathtaking victory over a British fleet at the Battle of Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor.I His adventures in the south earned him a recall to New York as well as accolades in and outside the army—including a $30,000 bonus from an adoring Continental Congress whose delegates Lee privately likened to a herd of cattle. When Washington’s fortunes ebbed following his failure to defend New York City, there were factions among the Continental Army’s officer corps who viewed Lee’s ascension to the top post as the last best hope for the military’s survival.
Late in 1776, as Washington fought his rearguard action across 100 miles of New Jersey’s cold, muddy plains and hills, he grew increasingly impatient over Lee’s whereabouts. He had no idea that the general was purposely stalling as he conspired with members of Congress and several like-minded officers to wrest command from Washington. It was during this retreat that Washington had been betrayed by his original military secretary Joseph Reed. Reed had slipped a private note into the mail satchel that carried Lee’s orders to move south from Peekskill. In it he accused Washington of “fatal indecision” during the New York campaign, and proposed that Lee approach Congress with a strategy to re-form the Continental Army with Lee at its head. Incredibly and quite imprudently, Lee not only gave an affirmative response, but shared with Reed his plan to disobey his marching orders.
That November, Reed was on a field assignment when Lee’s communiqué reached Washington’s headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The anxious commander, seeing that it was from Lee, opened the letter and discovered Reed’s and Lee’s perfidy. Reed offered to resign when confronted with the proof, but Washington demurred. Their relationship, however, was never the same. For Lee’s part, Washington did not let on that he had seen the correspondence; he merely reiterated his order that Lee lead his 3,000 troops into New Jersey, ford the Delaware north of Trenton, and unite with him in Pennsylvania. When Lee finally crossed the Hudson he informed Washington, in a startling act of insubordination, that he believed his force would be more effective harrying the enemy’s flanks and rear. Privately, he wanted nothing to do with what he saw as Washington’s inevitable defeat.
By mid-December, Lee was still dallying close to the British lines in northern New Jersey when he visited a local inn. There remains some question as to whether the establishment also constituted, in the era’s euphemism, a romp through Cupid’s grove. A commander’s venturing to a brothel so near enemy territory was unsound policy, if not hubristic lunacy. Sure enough, that night a local Tory informed a patrol of British dragoons of Lee’s whereabouts. Early on December 13, 1776, 70 horsemen led by Col. Banastre Tarleton, notorious for his brutality toward the rebels, surrounded the tavern. They easily routed Lee’s small guard and captured the general in his slippers and nightshirt. A Hessian trumpeter sounded a mocking trombatensto to mark the occasion. Lee was also taken with a letter addressed to Gen. Gates in which he maligned Washington’s military judgment as “damnably deficient.” The irony was lost on the British, and Lee spent the next 16 months under loose and luxe guard importuning the man he had tried to supplant to send him his horses, his hunting shirt and rifle, and his beloved hounds.
The British, who viewed Lee much as he saw himself, were ecstatic over his capture. Tarleton and his company were feted by a regimental band concert and toasted with copious rounds of spirits, some of which they apparently used to inebriate Lee’s horse. Conversely—as the historian John Buchanan notes—when the news of Lee’s capture spread through the Continental Army, “consternation swept the rebel ranks.” The exception was Washington. Upon receiving the “melancholy intelligence” two days later, he wrote a terse note to John Hancock “sincerely regret[ting] Genl Lee’s unhappy fate.” Though his compassion was no doubt sincere, one senses that he was also relieved at no longer having to parry with his barmy and scheming number two.
It was during the Continental Army’s plodding march through New Jersey in late 1776 that Thomas Paine, accompanying the troops, published another pamphlet, entitled The Crisis. In Common Sense, Paine’s incessant hectoring of George III as “The Royal Brute of Great Britain” shattered the king’s image as a benign monarch manipulated by Parliament into burdening the colonists with onerous taxes. Common Sense had been a key factor in turning American public opinion against the Crown.II In The Crisis—whose 13 chapters were dedicated to the 13 colonies—Paine composed a paean to the Continental soldier’s fortitude under duress. The tract contained Paine’s most famous lines: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Washington befriended Paine along the trek, and by the time he led his 3,000 or so shivering troops across an ice-strewn bend in the Delaware into Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, he had ordered copies of The Crisis distributed to company commanders to be read aloud to the soldiers huddled about their campfires. Days later, his force now swollen to some 5,000 troops with the addition of Pennsylvania and Delaware militiamen, the Continental Army recrossed the Delaware and captured Trenton. As it would turn out, Washington’s laconic handling of the Charles Lee affair provided the template with which he would address future political struggles.
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The paucity of food and clothing was not the only burden that Washington bore as he braced for the hard winter of 1778. By New Year’s Day, with the raising of the log huts soon to be completed and no major military engagements on the horizon—combat in the world’s northern climes was at that time generally an eight-month-a-year proposition—there was only so much work to conjure to keep his men busy. As a result, a dispiriting boredom began to pervade the entire parenthesis-shaped line buffering Philadelphia from Trenton in the north to Wilmington in the south. This was particularly true in the thick center of the crescent at Valley Forge.
Washington tried his utmost to assign tasks to his troops. Scouts regularly patrolled the roads leading to Philadelphia to interdict smugglers and gather intelligence on enemy movements. Select senior officers were instructed to begin the planning for next spring’s campaign. And the work of compiling the reports the commander in chief intended to present to the congressional delegation soon to arrive from York proceeded apace. But as the lack of purposefulness hung more heavily over the camp, Valley Forge twitched with feuds and frictions great and small—a reminder, Washington’s biographer Joseph Ellis notes, “of an earlier era’s conviction that character was not just who you were but also what others thought you were.”
From his days captaining the Virginia Blues, Washington was accustomed to attending to the minutiae of military matters. He now found himself adjudicating squabbles between junior officers protesting the promotions of their peers, company commanders disputing each other’s jurisdictions, and a long line of officers demanding courts-martial to answer vague rumors of their battlefield cowardice or negligence. Scores of officers resigned their commissions, and hundreds more threatened to do so. Although technically against army regulations, duels over real and perceived slights were fought so often that John Adams complained to his wife that Washington’s soldiery had devolved into “quarreling . . . Cats and Dogs worry[ing] one another like Mastiffs . . . Scrambling for Rank and Pay.” The discord was not limited to the lower rungs of the officer corps.
In one case, Washington was forced to rule on what he considered an unseemly grab for the spoils taken from the British brig HMS Symmetry, which in late December had run aground near Wilmington and been captured by Gen. Smallwood. Smallwood’s detachment claimed a proprietary interest in the shirts, shoes, bolts of cloth, and kegs of rum discovered in the vessel’s hold. Several general officers at Valley Forge challenged this, claiming that their own superior rank entitled them to a share of the bounty. Washington ultimately ordered the goods transferred to the winter cantonment while burdening Smallwood’s command with housing and feeding the 80-odd British prisoners, including several officers’ wives. This opened what would become a long-standing gash in the relationship between the two men.III In another instance, Washington was petitioned by a group of regimental commanders objecting to the lack of beer, cider, or rum in their daily rations. He had to remind them that their troops faced the same, if not worse, privations. It is not recorded whether Washington watched with a ravening eye when he later ordered the captured kegs of spirits tapped. Each noncommissioned officer and enlisted man was issued a gill of the hard liquor while the officers received none.
These shallow if virulent intramural annoyances boiled over in late December when word reached Valley Forge that Congress had bypassed its own commander in chief’s universal military authority and named Thomas Conway, an Irish-born former colonel in the French army, to the heretofore nonexistent post of inspector general. Gifted with a silver tongue and, per his portraits, a visage resembling a clenched fist, Conway had arrived in America six months earlier bearing a brigadier’s commission from Silas Deane. At 42, Conway had fought with competence at Brandywine, but was accused of abandoning his brigade at Germantown as it broke against the enemy’s left flank. He had also made no secret of his contempt for America’s provincial army officers nor, as an avowed fortune hunter, of his desire to ride the tailwind of America’s revolution into a more lucrative posting upon his return to the French army.
Conway haunted the halls of Congress during his serial visits to York in the aftermath of Germantown and insinuated himself into the delegates’ graces via, among various patrons, the Board of War’s Gen. Mifflin. It helped that the awestruck statesmen, desperate for any positive military tidings, were susceptible to what John Laurens labeled Conway’s “preposterous panegyricks of himself.” Alexander Hamilton, less florid, settled for “the vain boasting of foreign pretenders.” In addition to being a braggart, Conway was also a whiner. When he learned that a fellow French brigadier had been promoted to major general, he threatened to resign and return home unless offered the same rank. In response, Gen. Mifflin advocated the creation of the post of inspector general, which carried with it the promotion Conway desired. As news of the foreigner’s elevation spread through the winter cantonment, Washington’s squabbling collection of more experienced and longer-serving brigadiers revolted.
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John Laurens was one of the first to sense the dissident stirrings. “The promotion of Gen. Conway has given almost universal disgust,” he informed his father: “His military knowledge and experience may fit him for the office of inspector general, but the right of seniority violated, without any remarkable services done to justify it, has given a deep wound to the line of brigadiers.” By this time the young Laurens had become an unofficial back channel from which Henry Laurens could take the pulse of the army, and he cautioned his father to expect further tumult. It was a warning borne out when Nathanael Greene wrote to Congress protesting Conway’s advancement and nine other brigadiers—including Henry Knox, Enoch Poor, and Jedediah Huntington—signed a petition complaining of the irregular nature of an appointment that Hamilton described as “most whimsical favoritism.” The entire misadventure was indicative of the broken connection between America’s civil authorities and its military.
On the whole, the Continental Army’s officer corps was a self-doubting class, their temperamental insecurities heightened in relation to rank. Unlike their European counterparts—whose birthrights, wealth, and even coats of arms often trumped merit—America lacked a stratum of nobility. As a result, American military officers valued their honor above all else, often including property, wives, and family. The concepts of reputation, prestige, and rank were virtually inseparable, with rank being the “only honourable badge of distinction” separating them from mere commoners. In Conway, these men now found themselves subordinate to a condescending soldier of fortune whose ascension had overstepped the bounds of military protocol. As John Laurens added in his letter to his father, Conway’s promotion had united the officers in camp in a “universal anger” that had “convulsed the army.”
Washington’s attachment to the principle of military subordination to civil authority was strong. He nonetheless recognized a snub when he saw one. He had allowed his nine generals to submit their letter of indignation through his office, demonstrating at least a tacit approval of its contents. Though he filed no formal protest of his own—and even went so far as to falsely assure Conway that his appointment “has not given the least uneasiness to any Officer”—he shared his true feelings about the usurpation of his power in a letter to the Virginia congressman Richard Henry Lee. “If there is any truth in a report which has been handed to me, that Congress hath appointed . . . Brigadier Conway a Major General in this Army, it will be as unfortunate a measure as ever was adopted. General Conway’s merit, then, as an Officer, and his importance to this Army, exists more in his own imagination, than in reality.”
Washington also made it known to Conway and Gen. Gates that he was aware of a letter to the latter in which Conway impugned the commander in chief and his senior staff as “a weak General and bad Counsellors.” The snide remark about Washington’s inner circle is what undoubtedly set Hamilton off on a tirade like Laurens’s. He wrote to his friend George Clinton, the governor of New York, decrying Conway’s “impudent importunity,” calling him “a monster,” “vermin bred in the entrails of this chimera dire,” and, finally, “a villainous calumniator and incendiary.” Compared with Hamilton’s diatribe, Washington’s assessment of Conway as a “bad scribe” seems almost quaint.
Much as with his deft handling of Gen. Lee, Washington found a pretext for simply refusing to recognize Conway’s appointment when the new inspector general arrived at Valley Forge on December 29. He could not officially acknowledge Conway’s authority, he said, until the Board of War notified him of it in writing. That such a communiqué was, for reasons lost to history, never forthcoming did not prevent Conway from attempting to exercise the prerogatives of his new office. On New Year’s Eve he had delivered to the Potts House a letter demanding that a detachment of mid-level officers, sergeants, and corporals be culled from each regiment and placed under his command. These troops were to be drilled in maneuvers that they would then use to instruct the rest of the army. Conway boasted that he had personally witnessed successful European armies train in this manner. Washington refused to even respond, and instead referred Conway’s letter to Congress, again citing the official silence from the Board of War regarding the general’s authority.
Conway spent the next week stewing over the cool reception he had received at Valley Forge. He finally penned another letter to Washington, accusing him of acting like an “absolute King.” As if addressing an unschooled bumpkin, he wrote that if Washington’s thin skin had been bruised over the disparaging remarks in his correspondence with Gen. Gates, well, that too followed the sophisticated Old World manner of European officers freely critiquing their superiors. He ended the dispatch with an ultimatum. “I do not wish to Give you or any officer in the army the Least uneasiness,” he wrote. “Since you will not accept of my services, since you can not bear the sight of me in your camp, I am very ready to goe Where ever Congress thinks proper and even to france. And I solemnly Declare that far from resenting the undeserv’d rebuke I met with from you, I shall Do everything in my power to serve this cause. These are the true sentiments with Which I remain sir your Excellency’s Most obedt humble servant.”
For several days Conway’s challenge hung in the air like a mote of dust. Washington, checking his temper, sensed a trap and refused to be drawn into a political dispute with a man whose patronage was so powerfully proved. Finally, he effortlessly deflected the bluff by informing Conway, “It remains with Congress alone to accept your resignation.” He surely took sly pleasure in adding that should the delegates indeed acquiesce in their new inspector general’s fit of pique, “you will have my hopes for a favourable passage and a happy meeting with your Family & Friends.” As Washington expected, Congress refused to accept Conway’s resignation.
Washington may have held his tongue at Conway’s impudence, but the Irishman’s patronizing words were more than his longtime aide Tench Tilghman could swallow. Tilghman surely spoke for Washington’s inner circle when he wrote to Pennsylvania’s Gen. John Cadwalader that Conway “has come down full of his own importance and wrote the General a letter for which he deserved to be kicked.” Intimating a duel, John Laurens noted that had Conway condescended so to any officer other than the commander in chief of the Continental Army, the insult would have been “revenged in a private way.”IV Yet even as Conway continued to bombard Gen. Mifflin and congressional delegates with complaints about Washington’s icy reception, Washington did not engage. As he would explain to the governor of New Jersey, William Livingston, “To persevere in one’s duty, and be silent, is the best answer to calumny.”
Shunned by nearly every officer at Valley Forge, Conway found himself operating in a sort of limbo and took to quartering himself and his staff some 20 miles north of the camp in the village of Pottsgrove. Washington, meanwhile, saw a more sinister hand than the bumptious Conway’s driving the imbroglio. His suspicion fell on the generals Gates and Mifflin. The entire affair might have struck him as a plot device from Goldoni’s slapstick A Servant of Two Masters, a version of which he had surely attended back in Virginia.
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It had long chafed foreign-born officers such as Gates, Lee, and Conway that Washington’s leadership style kept faith with a meritocracy that favored young, competent homegrown generals with little formal military education over so-called professional soldiers. That the likes of Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, and Anthony Wayne had ascended to key positions in the Continental Army was seen as an insult to the established hierarchy. Foisting an auditor like Thomas Conway upon the commander in chief was one of the few means Gates had of putting Washington in his place. But Conway’s promotion and appointment were only one front in a multifaceted assault.
Earlier that fall Congress had approved a long-debated plan to professionalize the Board of War to more closely resemble Britain’s War Office. No longer would rotating congressional delegates make up the committee; it would now consist of three permanent members and a clerical staff tasked with acting as sole intermediaries between Congress, state authorities, and the army. The board’s original purview—compiling officer rolls; securing prisoners of war; and monitoring the movements of troops, arms, and equipment—was also expanded to include the supervision of recruiting operations and the oversight of arms production and procurement. General Mifflin, Adjutant Gen. Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, and Washington’s fellow Virginian and military secretary Robert Hanson Harrison were initially elected to constitute the board’s directorship. But Harrison wished to remain at Washington’s side in the field and declined the post. His seat was awarded to the former commissary general, Connecticut’s Joseph Trumbull. At this Gen. Mifflin persuaded Congress to expand the board to five permanent members and recommended the appointments of the board’s former secretary Richard Peters and Gen. Gates to fill the new slots. Congress agreed and, again at Mifflin’s suggestion, Gates was named the board’s president.
If Mifflin did not hide his disdain for Washington, Gates was more subtle. The “Hero of Saratoga” had already shown himself to be a wily political operative, and as president of the new Board of War he was unlikely to remain satisfied with an offstage role filing regimental rosters or tending to prisoners. Behind the scenes he wisely juxtaposed his victory in the north against Washington’s stalled Pennsylvania campaign, so much so that, to most observers, Gates seemed, like Gen. Lee before him, to have set his sights on Washington’s job. For now, however, the board’s most urgent task was provisioning Valley Forge, and to that end its ukases flew fast and furious toward Lancaster, seat of the Pennsylvania state assembly ostensibly tasked with supplying the winter camp. The Board of War’s directives, though couched as suggestions, were intended to demonstrate to the state representatives that the national government would no longer abide their foot-dragging.
Congress also authorized the board’s principals to journey to the winter encampment on an official inspection tour. This mission fell apart almost immediately, fractured by personal politics worthy of the Byzantine court. After seeming to acquiesce in the congressional mandate, Gen. Gates announced suddenly that he and his fellow members were entirely too busy with reorganizing the board’s affairs to venture so far from York. Though the excuse fooled few, no delegates objected. It was left to soldiers like Connecticut’s truculent Gen. Huntington to speak plain. “I fancy they don’t like us well enough to come,” he bluntly informed his friend Joseph Trumbull.
Yet Huntington and officers of a similar mind had missed the forest for the trees. It was Gates’s offhand mention of the board’s reorganizational efforts that should have raised eyebrows. In fact, Gates and his fellow board members were in the process of securing from Congress unprecedented concessions, including the power to establish a network of supply depots throughout Pennsylvania and western New Jersey independent of Washington’s control. These would be manned by purchasing agents and transportation superintendents appointed by the board, in effect overriding the army’s established commissary department. Although the term would not enter the American vernacular for another 150 years, these were the first steps of a classic power play Gates and his cohort planned to spring against Washington.V
Not everyone in Washington’s orbit was as obtuse about the board’s intentions as Gen. Huntington. It took the Marquis de Lafayette less than a week after Gen. Conway’s arrival at Valley Forge to deduce the true intent of his presence. The young Frenchman wrote to Washington that before departing his home country he’d “believed that all good Americans were united together.” Now, however, he professed himself shocked at the Board of War’s duplicity, and in a separate note to Henry Laurens he warned the president of Congress to keep a watchful eye on Gates. The general’s successes in the north country, Lafayette noted, “have turned all the heads and raised his party to the highest degree. Some have been audacious, ungrateful, and foolish enough as to hope it would reflect on General Washington’s reputation and honor—men indeed to be pitied as well as despised.” Thus the new year opened with more and increasingly varied reports of “dirty arts and low intrigues” making their way to Washington’s headquarters.
Few of these “intrigues” came by official post or mail coach. Instead most arrived at Valley Forge by hint and rumor, like daylight emanating from a sun so beclouded that neither particle nor wave carried it directly. One old friend alerted Washington that Gates’s allies had convinced influential congressional delegates, particularly the New Englanders, that it was only the commander in chief’s terminal mismanagement that had allowed the British to take Philadelphia. Another reported whispers in York that the Continental Army actually outnumbered Gen. Howe’s troops by a factor of three or four, yet for some reason Washington refused to engage. Patrick Henry forwarded an anonymous letter he’d received in Virginia that scorned Washington’s leadership and posited, “We have wisdom, virtue and strength enough to save us if they could be called into action. The northern army has shown us what Americans are capable of doing with a GENERAL at their head. The spirit of the southern army is in no ways inferior to the spirit of the northern. A Gates, a Lee, or a Conway would in a few weeks render them an irresistible body of men.” Henry and Washington both recognized the author’s handwriting as that of the general’s old ally turned antagonist Dr. Rush.
This is where the personal embodiment of the world’s first laboratory of democracy stood in the thirtieth month of the American Revolution—blamed for losing both New York and Philadelphia; his troops resembling an army of beggars; his supply lines a laughable calamity; and his authority nibbled and nipped at from all sides by jealous and power-hungry subordinates. All this might have been enough to induce a commander of lesser character to throw up his hands and return home to his wife and family. Washington, needless to say, was not that commander.
I. Most historians have since concluded that despite loudly taking credit for the fight, Lee had little impact on the Continental victory, and even less to do with the subsequent triumphant defense of Fort Moultrie, located on Sullivan’s Island, when the British counterattacked.
II. Such was Paine’s mastery of propaganda that he had in fact managed to transform an amiable and befuddled old “farmer king” most comfortable ambling through his fields into an ogre of tyranny.
III. Smallwood’s attempt at a reconciliation with his commander in chief was dashed when Washington coolly rebuffed his truce offering of a matched pistol set taken from the brig.
IV. As it happened, seven months later, on July 4, Cadwalader would severely wound Conway in a duel. After his bullet passed through Conway’s mouth and neck, Cadwalader is said to have stood over the bleeding Irishman and remarked, “I have stopped that damned rascal’s lying, anyway.” (Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 322.)
V. The first appearance of power play, in 1921, related to an American football formation. A decade later it had gravitated to hockey, and in 1941 the term was applied to politics.