His Excellency: George Washington (14 page)

This new semi-royal status fit in the grooves of his own personality and proved an enduring asset as important politically as the Custis inheritance had been economically. The man who was obsessed with control was now the designated sovereign of the American Revolution. The man who could not bear to have his motives or personal integrity questioned was assured that he enjoyed more trust than any American alive. The British would change commanding general four times; Washington was forever. Certain deficiencies in his character—aloofness, a formality that virtually precluded intimacy—were now regarded as essential by-products of his special status, indeed expressions of his inherent dignity. And the man who had bristled at the presumptive condescension of British officers and officials was now in charge of the military instrument designed to obliterate the British army and all vestiges of British power in North America. In sum, his new status as “His Excellency” gave him the starring role in a historical drama that seemed tailor-made for him.

On the other hand, the political and even psychological ramifications of his public role did require some personal adjustments. In August 1775 he made several critical comments about the lack of discipline in the New England militia units under his command and described New Englanders in general as “an exceedingly dirty & nasty people.” As a mere Virginia planter such expressions of regional prejudice would have been unexceptional. But as the symbolic spokesman for what were still being called “the United Colonies,” the comments created political firestorms in both the Massachusetts legislature and the Continental Congress. When Joseph Reed, a Philadelphia lawyer who served briefly as Washington’s most trusted aide-de-camp, apprised him of the hostile reaction, Washington expressed his regrets for the indiscretion: “I will endeavor at a reformation, as I can assure you my dear Reed that I wish to walk in such a Line as will give most general Satisfaction.” By nature a reserved and self-contained personality, Washington was discovering that his new public obligation to be all things to all men required him to suppress even the smallest residue of private opinion that might otherwise leak out. Several months later, when Reed reported that the gossip machines in the Continental Congress continued to produce whisperings about regional prejudice against New England, Washington again vowed “to make my conduct coincide with the wishes of Mankind as far as I can consistently.” But it was not easy, even for him, to extinguish completely his personal thoughts and feelings. “I have often thought,” he complained to Reed, “how much happier I should have been, if, instead of accepting of a command under such Circumstances I had taken my Musket upon my Shoulder & enterd the Ranks, or . . . had retir’d to the back Country, and livd in a Wig-wam.”
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Even within what he called “my family,” Washington needed to remain circumspect, because his family meant the staff and aides-de-camp at his headquarters. We know that Billy Lee, his mulatto servant, accompanied him on foot and on horseback at all times, brushed his hair and tied it in a queue every morning, but no record of their conversations has survived. We know that Martha joined him at Cambridge in January 1776, as she would at winter quarters during all subsequent campaigns, but their correspondence, which almost surely contained the fullest expression of personal opinion Washington allowed himself, for that very reason were destroyed after he died. The bulk of his correspondence during the war years, so vast in volume and officious in tone that modern-day readers risk mental paralysis, was written by his aides-de-camp. It is therefore the expression of an official, composite personality, usually speaking a platitudinous version of revolutionary rhetoric. For example, here are the General Orders for February 27, 1776, when Washington was contemplating a surprise attack on the British defenses: “it is a noble Cause we are engaged in, it is the Cause of virtue and mankind, every temporal advantage and comfort to us, and our posterity, depends upon the Vigour of our exertions; in short, Freedom or Slavery must be the result of our conduct, there can therefore be no greater Inducement to men to behave well.” The inflated rhetoric concluded with the more candid warning that anyone attempting to retreat or desert “will be
instantly shot down.
”
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Aware of his own limited formal education, Washington selected college graduates who were “Pen-men” as aides, whose facility with language assured that the grammar and syntax of his correspondence was worthy of “His Excellency.” His most trusted aides—Joseph Reed was the first, followed by Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens later in the war—became surrogate sons who enjoyed direct access to the general in after-dinner sessions, when Washington liked to encourage conversation as he ate nuts and drank a glass of Madeira. Part extended family and part court, these favored aides traded influence for total loyalty. “It is absolutely necessary therefore, for me to have persons that can think for me,” Washington explained, “as well as execute Orders.” The price for what he called his “unbounded confidence” was their equally unbounded service to his reputation. It was understood as a matter of honor that they would write no revealing memoirs after the war, and none of them did.

His other “family” was the cast of senior officers that assembled around him during the siege of Boston. Twenty-eight generals eventually served under Washington in the Continental army over the course of the war. Almost half of them were present at Cambridge in 1775–76. A full accounting of even that smaller group, interesting though it may be, would carry us down twisting side roads and astray of our proper objective, which is Washington himself. Four of Washington’s chief lieutenants—Charles Lee, Horatio Gates, Nathanael Greene, and Henry Knox—provide the outline of the prevalent patterns that would shape his treatment of high-ranking subordinates.

Lee and Gates were both former officers in the British army with greater professional experience than Washington. Charles Lee was a colorful eccentric. The Mohawks had named him “Boiling Water” for his fiery temperament, which at Cambridge took the form of threats to place all deserters on a hill as targets within musket-shot of British pickets. Lee presumed a greater familiarity with Washington than other generals, addressing him as “My Dear General” rather than “His Excellency.” He also questioned Washington’s preferred strategy of engaging British regulars on their own terms in a European-style war, preferring guerrilla tactics and a greater reliance on militia. Lee also liked to make conspicuous displays of his irreverence toward military etiquette, was forever disheveled in his appearance, and was often seen conversing with his ever-present pack of dogs, again the exact opposite of Washington’s dignified formality.

Horatio Gates was called “Granny Gates” because of his advanced age (he was fifty) and the wire-rimmed spectacles dangling from his nose. He cultivated a greater familiarity with his troops than Washington thought appropriate and, like Lee, favored a greater reliance on militia. Gates thought that Washington’s plan for an assault on the British garrison in Boston was pure madness and, given his experience, felt free to speak out for a more defensive strategy in several councils of war. Both Lee and Gates ended up colliding with Washington later in the war and becoming early exhibits of the primal principle of revolutionary era politics: Cross Washington and you risk ruination.

Greene and Knox were both inexperienced amateurs drawn to military service by their zeal for American independence. Nathanael Greene was a Rhode Island Quaker, eventually called “the fighting Quaker,” who was cast out of the Society of Friends because of his support for the war. He volunteered to serve in a local militia company, the Kentish Guards, at the rank of private, but ascended to brigadier general within a year on the basis of his obvious intelligence and disciplined dedication. By the end of the war, especially during the Carolina campaigns, he demonstrated strategic and tactical brilliance; he was Washington’s choice as successor if the great man went down in battle. At Cambridge, however, Greene was described as “the rawest, the most untutored being” and placed himself squarely beneath Washington’s authority as an aspiring general officer.

Henry Knox was also a gifted amateur, a Boston bookseller well read in engineering whom Washington plucked from the ranks to head an artillery regiment. He demonstrated his resourcefulness in December 1775 by transporting the British cannon captured at Ticonderoga over the ice and snow on forty sleds driven by eighty yoke of oxen to the Cambridge encampment. Like Greene, he worshipped the ground Washington walked on. Both Greene and Knox were subsequently showered with glory, Knox living on to become Washington’s secretary of war in the 1790s.
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The pattern is reasonably clear. Washington recruited military talent wherever he could find it, and he had a knack for discovering ability in unlikely places and then allowing it to ride the same historical wave he was riding into the American pantheon. But he was extremely protective of his own authority. While he did not encourage sycophants, if dissenters ever broached their criticism out-of-doors, as both Lee and Gates ended up doing, he was usually unforgiving. One could make a plausible case, and several scholars have done so, that Washington’s insistence on personal loyalty was rooted in his insecurity in the face of Lee’s and Gates’s superior military credentials. But the more compelling explanation is that he understood instinctively how power worked, and that his own quasi-monarchical status was indispensable to galvanize an extremely precarious cause. Moreover, as it turned out, his chief liability as a military strategist was not his sense of inferiority, but just the opposite. His special status as “His Excellency” fit him better than any of his old suits, and he was determined to protect it from tearing and shredding. Just as the standing army he sought to create contradicted the political principles it claimed to be fighting for, Washington’s king-like status contradicted the potent antimonarchical ethos in revolutionary ideology. In both cases, Washington acknowledged the incongruity but preferred victory to consistency.
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From the very start, however, he made a point of insisting that his expansive mandate was dependent upon, and subordinate to, the will of the American citizenry as represented in the Continental Congress. His letters to John Hancock, the first president of the Congress, always took the form of requests rather than demands. And he established the same posture of official deference toward the New England governors and provincial governments that supplied troops for his army. Washington did not use the term “civilian control,” but he was scrupulous about acknowledging that his own authority derived from the elected representatives in the Congress. If there were two institutions that embodied the emerging nation to be called the United States—the Continental army and the Continental Congress—he insisted that the former was subordinate to the latter.
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In truth, important precedents were being established on the fly during this first year of the war, as both Washington and the leadership in the Congress improvised on the edge of the imperial crisis. What, for example, should one call the army? Before the term “Continental army” gained acceptance, the preferred term was the “Army of the United Colonies of North America.” (The colonies had yet to become states, and the term “American,” which had been used as an epithet by Englishmen to describe the provincial creatures on the western periphery of the British Empire, still retained its negative connotation.) When Washington approved the design for a “union flag,” it looked eerily similar to the Union Jack, so when first hoisted over Cambridge in January 1776 the British troops inside Boston cheered, thinking it signaled surrender. The first official manifestation of civilian control occurred in October 1775, when a delegation from the Continental Congress that included Benjamin Franklin met with Washington and his staff in Cambridge to approve troop requests for an army of 20,372 men.
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Strictly speaking, the Continental army did not exist until the start of the new year; until then, Washington was commanding a collection of provincial militia units whose enlistments ran out in December 1775. Politically speaking, the endorsement of Washington’s troop requests by the Continental Congress was deceptively encouraging, since compliance depended upon approval by the respective state governments, which insisted that all recruits be volunteers and serve limited terms of no more than one year. And logistically speaking, the vaunted principles of state sovereignty, volunteerism, and limited enlistments—all expressions of revolutionary conviction—produced a military turnstile that bedeviled Washington throughout the war. Instead of a hard core of experienced veterans, the Continental army became a constantly fluctuating stream of amateurs, coming and going like tourists. “It is not in the pages of History, perhaps, to furnish a case like ours,” Washington complained to Hancock, “to maintain a post within Musket Shot of the Enemy for Six Months together . . . and at the same time to disband one Army and recruit another, within that distance of twenty odd British regiments.” The very term “Continental army,” then, implied a level of coherence and stability that was permanently at odds with the transitory collective he was commanding.
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In this first year of the war, when the revolutionary fires burned their brightest, Washington presumed that he would enjoy a surplus of recruits. In October 1775 a council of war voted unanimously “to reject all slaves & by a great Majority to reject Negroes altogether.” The following month Washington ordered that “Neither Negroes, Boys unable to bear arms, nor old men unfit to endure the fatigues of the campaign, are to be enlisted.” But within a few months, as it became clear that there would not be enough new recruits to fill the ranks as the militia units disbanded, he was forced to change his mind: “It has been represented to me,” he wrote Hancock, “that the free negroes who have Served in this Army, are very much dissatisfied at being discarded—and it is to be apprehended that they may Seek employ in the ministerial Army—I have presumed to depart from the Resolution respecting them, & have given licence for them being enlisted; if this is disapproved of by Congress, I will put a stop to it.” In this backhanded fashion Washington established the precedent for a racially integrated Continental army, except for a few isolated incidents the only occasion in American military history when blacks and whites served alongside one another in integrated units until the Korean War.
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