THE REBELLION IN NORTH AMERICA had very few partisans in France in early 1775. Apart from the foreign office at Versailles and some far-sighted philosophes, very few people gave it any thought at all. One of those who did was a forty-three-year-old entrepreneur, inventor, architect, spy, and playwright named Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, whose new comedy, The Barber of Seville, had just opened to loud catcalls at the Comédie Française. His sympathy with the plight of the American colonists did not necessarily throw the cause in a great light. Everything about Beaumarchais was stagy and a bit dubious, like the best part of his name, “de Beaumarchais,” which he had managed to filch from the previous husband of his first dead wife, who was just as rich and died after a marriage just as suspiciously short as his second one. The charming Pierre-Augustin was chronically short of funds, but Voltaire, for one, discounted the rumors: Beaumarchais, he said, was entirely “too drôle” to be a wife-killer.
Before appropriating from his first dead wife’s previous husband the pseudo-noble “de,” Beaumarchais was known simply as the “fils Caron,” son of the dashing André-Charles Caron, favorite clock-and watchmaker of the king’s favorite mistress. Since in the spoken French of eighteenth-century Paris, the “s” in fils was almost silent and the “on” in Caron not as nasal as it would become (more like “oh”), Beaumarchais’s real name was pronounced, roughly, fee-karo, so when the character Figaro made his debut in The Barber of Seville, his self-consciously savvy audience knew exactly who they were watching on the stage.
Beaumarchais was the perfect advertisement for himself: His art plagiarized his life, which was a frantic blur—Figaro here, Figaro there—of rehearsals, deals, lover-juggling, and scandal-quashing. He was forever having to get himself out of some new jam. More than once he won his reprieve by undertaking a secret mission to clean up some problem for the king, as he was doing right now, along with closing a big commodities deal and fixing up Barber, which would go on to become one of the hits of the season. Before the year was out, Beaumarchais would become a central figure in supplying critical French aid to the American Revolution, a man without whom there might never have been a United States. Before he could become a revolutionary hero, though, he would have to persuade a certain former French spy to spend the rest of his life dressed as a woman.
As improbable as it may seem that a playwright and a transvestite dragoon would play any role at all in the unfolding of the American Revolution, 1775 was going to be that kind of year, a time as busy and slippery as a Beaumarchais. As the year began, Europe was not at war and it was not at peace. Paris and London were as warm with spies, but there was as yet no settled truth or plot to ferret out. Britain’s colonies in North America, though up in arms, could not yet see the King and Mother Country as the enemy, nor could they see France, so recently the enemy, as a friend. In the colonies, in England, and in France, most people had no intention of putting the end to an old order or starting a new one, even as they were very effectively doing both. History seemed to stumble forward accident by accident in 1775, the year when everything began except for a clear understanding of exactly what that was.
History tends to date revolutions from a definitive outbreak of violence, by which standard the “first year of the American Revolution”* began on the day of Lexington and Concord, and the French Revolution began at the gates of the Bastille. In fact, of course, the French Revolution started long before July 14, 1789, and good arguments have been made that the American Revolution was over by 1775 and that it did not really begin until the Constitutional Convention of 1787. With such fungible birthdays, the American and French revolutions may also be treated as roughly simultaneous, in part because two of their leaders’ lives converged here and in part because they actually were.
April 18, 1775, was a Tuesday, which was market day in Dijon, the capital city of Burgundy. The day before, a miller named Janty had paraded through town with large sacks of flour in a wheelbarrow and almost boastfully said he would refuse to sell any of it for less than the going rate, which was high and going higher. The price of a four-pound loaf of bread had recently almost tripled, to 8 sous, or about $1.80, at a time when the average family consumed five loaves a week ($9), and the peasant’s average weekly wage was $15.* Soon it would rise to 14 sous, meaning the average peasant family would have to spend more than its entire income to keep itself in bread, their diet staple. Instead, of course, they went hungry. People were already going hungry, which is why, that market day, a riot broke out over the price of flour. A mob led by fishwives brandishing sticks and dead carp began by breaking down the door of a lawyer who was hiding a certain M. Carré, the richest flour mill owner in town. M. Carré managed to make his escape scrambling over rooftops, but the crowd then laid waste to the house and all its furniture before destroying his mill. Their rampage slowed at a cave of wine barrels, with which they amused themselves until they fell asleep, but the king’s highest local lawman on duty, taking no chances, spent the night in hiding, awaiting reinforcements.
Late that night, on the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Revere rode through the Massachusetts countryside warning that the British were coming, and at a tavern near Lexington Green Captain John Parker and a few dozen of his militiamen stayed up all night waiting for them. Finally, at dawn, a detachment of royal troops showed up as expected, heading for Concord to seize the ammunition depot there. Captain Parker and his men did not plan to stop them. They were only planning to form ranks as a show of strength on the Green, staying off the road and out of the way. In the event, for reasons unknown, the British charged them. Captain Parker instantly ordered his men to disperse, but some did not, and someone on one side or the other fired a shot, and the British officers lost control of their men. When it was over, eight Americans were dead and eleven wounded; the only British casualty was one officer’s horse. As the British proceeded to Concord and news of the engagement spread, however, villagers and farmers turned out by the hundreds, then by the thousands, bringing their muskets and fowling pieces. Two British soldiers and four Americans were killed during a tense standoff in Concord, and on the regulars’ brutal sixteen-mile march back to Boston—outnumbered by a factor of two, exhausted by midday heat, and taking constant fire from behind trees and stone walls on both sides of their line of march—another sixty-five of them were killed. Only the slow loading and famously wild trajectory of musket balls prevented a massacre.
All told, forty-nine “insurrectionists” gave their lives that day, which ended with thousands of colonists holding the high ground around Boston, the British army virtually captive below, the fleet subject to bombardment in the harbor.
England’s King George III was eerily sanguine, almost giddy after Lexington and Concord, even though he knew that his forces were under siege. “Nothing can equal the ease, composure and even gaiety of the great disposer of all in this lower orb,” wrote Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament who was much troubled by this and every other effect of Britain’s colonial policy. “It is too much, if not real, for the most perfect Kingcraft.”
Louis XVI was similarly unruffled by the outbreak in Dijon of what would come to be called the Grain War, which pointed in a long but almost straight line to the fall of the Bastille fourteen years later. He dealt with the disturbance as his grandfather Louis XV would have done, with a couple of exemplary hangings in Paris’s place de Grève. The scapegoats were a twenty-eight-year-old market porter and an even younger apprentice gauzemaker whose crime was having “kicked the door of a bakeshop to demand that it be opened.” The scaffold for their execution was built unusually high, eighteen feet, so that everyone could watch the hangmen cinch the slip knots tight against their necks and then “with their knees, kick the victims off the ladders…. Then the executioners, each holding fast to the beam of a gibbet, [stepped] onto the bound hands of the dying men and, by jabbing them in the stomach with their knees and jerking them, put an end to their agony.”
All very distasteful, so Louis turned his attention to a long overdue and entirely unnecessary coronation in Rheims. A good measure of the cognitive dissonance at this historic moment is the fact that Louis thought a fine way to distract and win back his famished countrymen would be a coronation costing 760,000 livres (more than $5 million),* “covering robes for the king, peers of the realm, major officials of the crown, the chancellor, and others, as well as adornments for the cathedral of Rheims, embellishments for the reliquary of St. Marcoul, the canopy surmounting the crown at Aix-la-Chapelle, lace and linens, royal offerings, medals, remuneration of ceremonial officials, church fees, the cost of transporting monks from the Abbey of Saint-Denis to escort the crown and sword of Charlemagne…expenses and wages of the king’s officers and musicians, lighting, construction costs in the archbishop’s palace and the cathedral as well as the covered walkway between them.” There were to be new clothes for every royal servant down to the pages.
His minister of finance, Anne-Jacques-Robert de Turgot, whose job was to bring some order to the king’s disastrous finances, tried to talk Louis out of having a coronation, then tried to convince him at least to spare some expense by moving it to Paris; but Louis was adamant, and in a way he turned out to be right. The peasants who made their way through the Champagne district just to catch a glimpse of the king at his coronation, awed by the pageantry of it, were moved to tears for love of the king their master. Marie-Antoinette, who was not so crass as to say, “let them eat cake,” but could be fairly crass, had the decency to observe the strangeness of the crowd’s reaction. “It is both a surprise and a relief,” she wrote to her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, “to be so well received just two months after the [Grain War began] and despite the high cost of bread.”
On June 15, 1775, three days after Louis’s coronation, George Washington had dinner at Peg Mullen’s Beefsteak House in Philadelphia with several members of the Continental Congress, which had just elected him commander in chief of an army that did not yet officially exist. The thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson was there, as was Benjamin Franklin, who was almost seventy. The coincidence of timing is evocative, but this was no coronation dinner. Dr. Benjamin Rush, congressman from Pennsylvania, remembered that when someone raised the first after-dinner toast to “the Commander in Chief of the American armies”:
General Washington rose from his seat and with some confusion thanked the company for the honor they did him. The whole company instantly rose and drank the toast standing. This scene, so unexpected, was a solemn one. A silence followed it, as if every heart was penetrated with the awful but great events which were to follow….
No one’s heart seemed to be penetrated with that sensation more sharply than Washington’s. Earlier in the day, notified of his unanimous election, he had thanked his colleagues for the honor they bestowed on him but warned them that their confidence might prove to be misplaced: “I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in the room that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.”
This was more than the rhetoric of false modesty, but it was that too. He had, after all, worn his military uniform every day of the convention, he had taken his place on every military committee, and he was the obvious candidate. As a Virginian when the battle and the army were in New England, and at a time when knitting the Northern and Southern colonies together was critical, he was politically perfect; and as the only delegate who could claim anything close to the status of a war hero, thanks to his service in the French and Indian War, he was the clear military choice as well. Beyond that, there was the argument of his bearing: The way he looked and commanded a room inspired attention and respect. At something over six feet two inches, he was a head taller than everyone around him, and though he seemed to be composed of damaged spare parts—a nose too large for his pockmarked face, eyes too small for their sockets, a mouth slammed shut over decayed teeth, enormous hands and feet and outsized hips—the effect of George Washington in motion was by every account one of profound grace. Benjamin Rush credited him with “so much martial dignity…that there is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side.”
On the other hand: He had not been in active service for fifteen years, he had never led more than a few hundred men or won an important battle, he had had little acquaintance with strategy except in books, and his character was not molded for conflict. Behind his famous, carefully managed calm, he was hotheaded and extremely sensitive to criticism, and never more obviously so than during his early years in the military. The history of his first engagement might have given the delegates pause had the subject come up, because while touted by Washington as a victory, it was in fact a flagrant failure of command, a military debacle, and a political disaster of global proportions.
As a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, Washington had been given a small detachment charged with fortifying a British garrison at the meeting of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers, “the Forks of the Ohio.” When he got there, he found that it had already been occupied by a large and well-armed French force. While awaiting instructions, he and his men, led by a band of friendly Indians and their chief, came upon a small encampment of French forces they thought had been sent out against them. The brief but bloody engagement (fifteen minutes, ten French soldiers killed; one colonial casualty) gave Washington his first acclaim in the colonial press, whose accounts featured the young officer’s adrenal response to first blood. “I hear bullets whistle,” he was quoted as saying, “and believe me there is something charming in the sound.”
The truth was not glorious at all. Having caught the French by surprise in early morning, Washington’s men fired first. All of the musket wounds had to have been inflicted in the first two volleys, because at that the French commander, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, sieur de Jumonville, who was shot as he called for quarter, got Washington to cease firing. Reading from a prepared statement, he said he was on a diplomatic mission to all British troops in the area, who were ordered to leave this territory immediately or face eviction by French armed forces. Jumonville had an English translator with him, but accounts differ as to who read the summons. If Jumonville was reading it in French, Washington would have had no idea what he was saying. The Indian chief with him, however, spoke very good French, so he was in no confusion when he walked over to the wounded commander, who was lying on the ground. “Tu n’est pas encore mort, mon père [Thou art not dead yet, my father],” he said. Then he buried his hatchet in Jumonville’s skull. With that the Indians killed some of the wounded and scalped the dead, while their chief “took out [Jumonville’s] brains and washed his hands in them.” In the first battle of his military career, Washington presided over a massacre, and if his report of it was not technically a lie, which is debatable, it was a great deal less than the whole truth. Making the best of a horrible incident—and demonstrating the side of his character that had been toughened by his time in the frontier—Washington suggested that the French scalps be sent to Delaware and Iroquois villages as arguments for joining the American/English cause.
A few weeks later, a punitive expedition led by Jumonville’s brother killed a third of Washington’s troops and forced him to surrender his ineptly positioned, badly constructed, but well-named Fort Necessity. Beyond that, one of the articles of capitulation that Washington signed stipulated that he had “assassinated” a diplomat (a word that Washington’s Dutch fencing instructor, who had been brought along to translate, apparently botched). Washington’s signature on a document that one contemporary writer called “the most infamous a British subject ever put his hand to” gave the French the ability to fix on Britain the responsibility for firing the first shot in what became Europe’s Seven Years’ War, known in America as the French and Indian War. Voltaire’s famous remark—“Such was the complication of political interests that a cannon shot fired in America could give the signal that set Europe in a blaze”—may be an exaggeration of more than the ordnance involved, but the Jumonville affair began an escalation that did in fact end in a general European war.
If Washington can be blamed for that, he can be given responsibility for both the French and American revolutions as well, because by the time the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War, both France and England were virtually bankrupt. Britain’s need to raise taxes to pay for that war resulted in the Stamp Act, the “Intolerable Acts,” the Boston Tea Party, and all that followed, just as the attempt to raise revenue in France would lead eventually, if by a more circuitous route, to the storming of the Bastille and the execution of Louis XVI. None of this of course could have been foreseen in 1754, and when Washington marched his men out of Fort Necessity on July 4, that surely would not have struck him as a date he would ever celebrate.
This was not the Washington of marble coolness and self-mastery; this was an undisciplined young officer who would cover up a failure in order to prevent damage to his reputation, a man whose temper and temperament were as yet untamed. With a couple of weeks to think about what had happened, he apparently realized this about himself, because he asked “ardently” to be placed “under the command of an experienced officer.”
Given the greatness of his later accomplishments, the letters of his early military career show somewhat more than one wants to see of Washington, but they also explain the man he would become. Other than reports of actions in the field, his most notable official communications in these years are personal pleadings filled with frustration, humiliation, and rage. One persistent and increasingly sharp complaint was about the inequality between militia officers and those of the British regular army, one of whom he desperately wanted to be. That second-class status was an issue so important to him that his report to Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie on the Jumonville disaster was preceded by a very long passage complaining that his pay as a militia colonel did not equal that of a British captain. He had written to the governor and others several times before about this, and Dinwiddie had obviously had enough of it, because Washington’s letter, an unsuccessful mix of flattery, fault-finding, and self-regard, began with a kind of apology: “I am much concerned that your Honour should seem to charge me with ingratitude, for I assure you, Honorable Sir, nothing is a greater stranger to my breast, or a sin that my soul abhors, than that black and detestable one Ingratitude.” He then repeated his complaint and supported it by reminding Dinwiddie what a valuable officer he was: “I have a constitution hardy enough to encounter and undergo the most severe trials, and, I flatter myself, resolution to face what any man durst, as shall be proved when it comes to the test….” All of which was true, but there were eight paragraphs of that before Washington got around “to acquaint you with what has happened” in the place now called Jumonville Glen. He gives the incident two sentences before spending several paragraphs warning Dinwiddie not to believe whatever contrary stories he might hear later.
After Jumonville, Dinwiddie broke the Virginia Regiment into companies that were to be headed by militia captains reporting to captains in the regular army. Effectively demoted, Washington angrily resigned, and when he was offered an honorary commission if he would lead a company in the next campaign, he blew up: “If you think me capable of holding a commission that has neither rank nor emolument annexed to it, you must entertain a very contemptible opinion of my weakness, and believe me more empty than the commission itself.” Rather than deal with the issue again, he signed up as an unpaid volunteer with the next expedition to the Forks, a much larger one led by British General Edward Braddock, whom he ended up burying after a bloody defeat there. Washington’s cool leadership of that retreat saved many lives, earning him rightful praise and a new measure of renown, but a few months later he virtually came apart over the decision to build a new road to the Ohio Valley, this time from Pennsylvania rather than Virginia. He had written to the authorities that if they undertook such “a new road to the Ohio…all is lost! All is lost, by Heavens!” His complaints were so hysterical that a British general wondered aloud whether Washington was actually fit to lead men, given behavior that was “in no ways like a soldier.” When they decided to build the road despite this warning of apocalypse, Washington wrote in desolation to John Robinson, then speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses: “That appearance of glory once in view, that hope, that laudable ambition of serving our country and meriting its applause, is now no more!” His “country” was still Virginia, not yet colonial America.
When he set out the first time for the Forks of the Ohio, Washington described his mission as an enactment of “the heroic spirit of every free-born Englishman to attest the rights and privileges of the King…and rescue from the invasion of a usurping enemy our Majesty’s property, his dignity and land.” A little more than a year later, he wrote to his brother about the same mission: “I was employed to go on a journey in the winter (when I believe few or none would have undertaken it) and what did I get by it? My expenses borne!”
During his five years in the Virginia militia, Washington threatened four times to return his commission, decided three times to resign from the militia, and did so twice.
Now, as commander in chief, he would report to every member of the Continental Congress in theory, and to several of them in fact; and for as long as there was a war there would be a world of second-guessers all around him. In the intervening years, though, Washington had studied himself closely; and however loudly he disclaimed any ambition for it, he had worked steadily toward and finally achieved the position that would give him either the glory he so desperately sought or the disgrace he so abjectly feared.
Three days after his election as commander in chief, he wrote to explain himself to Martha, who was expecting him home any day. In that letter, he disclaimed any wish for the Continental command and any effort to get it: “You may believe me, my dear Patsy, when I assure you, in the most solemn manner, that, so far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavor in my power to avoid it…. It was utterly out of my power to refuse this appointment, without exposing my character to such censures, as would have reflected dishonor upon myself, and given pain to my friends.” On the other hand, he enclosed a will that he said he had been too busy to finish before he left home. Why would he have thought to start drafting a will before a journey to Philadelphia that he had made before? For that matter, when he left Mount Vernon for the Second Continental Congress, why did he bring his uniform?
That day too he closed a diary that he had been keeping for fifteen years, in which he had made a daily note of the weather: “Very warm in the forenoon but cooler much afterwards,” he wrote. “Wind shifting northerly.”
In New York, on the way to Cambridge, Washington broke the seal on an urgent message from Massachusetts authorities to Congress. It reported on the battle that would come to be known as Bunker Hill, an all-out British attack on colonial entrenchments above Boston. “Though this scene was almost horrible, and altogether new to most of our men,” the report read, “yet many stood and received wounds by swords and bayonets before they quitted their lines.” There had been sixty or seventy Americans killed and a hundred wounded, the authorities reported, but more among the enemy.
In fact, British losses were enormous. They had to make three assaults before they overcame the colonists’ resistance, and more than 1,000 out of the 2,400 British regulars engaged in the battle were killed or wounded.
Washington would have been pleased to know that colonial soldiers could stand up so well against regulars and may have shared this news with his hosts in New York, but he would not have passed on what he read in the next paragraph: “As soon as an estimate can be made of public and private stocks of gunpowder in this Colony it shall be transmitted without delay, which we are well assured will be small, and by no means adequate to the exigence of our case.”
When he arrived in Cambridge, he was relieved to hear that the store of gunpowder was 308 barrels, or about 16 tons, and he was pleased by the placement of American fortifications, if not by their quality. On the other hand, the army he found was a tent city with a floating population that lacked any semblance of martial discipline. In a letter to his fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee, he complained of “an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people which, believe me, prevails but too generally among the officers of the Massachusetts part of the Army….[T]here is no such thing as getting officers of this stamp to exert themselves in carrying orders into execution.” He had been predisposed against New England officers and soldiers in part by an old friend Major Thomas Gage, who had written to militia colonel George Washington in 1756 that New Englanders were “the greatest boasters and worst soldiers on the continent…I never saw any in my life as infamously bad.” Gage was now on the other side of Washington’s field glasses, in command of the British fleet in Boston Harbor.
A worse problem by far than inferior officers, Washington’s force was outnumbered—there were fewer than fourteen thousand Continentals fit for duty, as opposed to the eighteen thousand he had been promised—and his blindness and impotence on the water without a naval force meant Gage could deliver a devastating surprise attack virtually any time and anywhere up and down the coast. “Between you and me,” Washington wrote Richard Henry Lee a week after he arrived, “I think we are in an exceedingly dangerous situation.”
On August 1, he found out just how dangerous it was. When he had asked for an accounting of all the gunpowder on hand, he had been given the total number of barrels that had been sent to the troops headquartered at Cambridge, including all that was used at Bunker Hill. Instead of 308 barrels, there were only 36, enough for fewer than nine rounds per man (British troops carried sixty). Someone with Washington when he heard the news said, “For half an hour, he did not utter a word.”
While Benjamin Franklin talked up the virtues of bows and arrows, Washington quietly ordered his men to begin sharpening spears. He also began America’s first campaign of disinformation, putting out the word that despite an almost embarrassing oversupply of gunpowder, the men should stop shooting off their weapons in camp, whether for sport or to keep them clean, since such signs of amateurism would only give comfort to the enemy. Arriving troops of riflemen helped for a while by picking off British sentries from a distance, which had a terrorist effect while using minimal ammunition, but in time the riflemen became restive and demanding and Washington wished they had never come. Some of them, he grumbled, “know no more of a rifle than my horse.”
In those first weeks and months in Cambridge, Washington had every reason to remember his prophecy to Patrick Henry the day he was chosen commander in chief. “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you. From the day I enter into command of the American armies I date my fall and the ruin of my reputation.”