His Excellency: George Washington (23 page)

The Yorktown siege was essentially an exercise in engineering, which happened to be one of the Continental army’s major weaknesses. Fortunately, the French army included the best military engineers in the world. As a result, though Washington was officially in command, the Yorktown siege was primarily a French operation. Ever meticulous, Washington issued a fifty-five-point memorandum to his officers clarifying their respective duties. He was also given the ceremonial honor of firing the first cannon shot against the British defenses, which according to lore scored a direct hit on a group of British officers gathered at the dinner meal. Most of the time, however, Washington only watched and tried to keep himself busy as the noose tightened around Cornwallis’s army.
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Sighting: October 5, 1781

It is a moonless and rainy night as a squad of American sappers and miners attempt to extend the trench-line to within five hundred yards of the British perimeter. Sergeant Joseph Plumb Martin is in charge of the digging, only twenty-one but a six-year veteran of the Continental army, one of those poor New England farm boys who had signed up “for the duration” because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. While digging away in the mud, a stranger appears alongside Martin’s squad in the trench and urges the troops to work quietly because British sentries were nearby, and if discovered and captured to avoid divulging valuable information. Martin thinks this is well-intentioned but useless advice, since, as he later puts it, “we knew as well as he did that Sappers and Miners were allowed no quarter,” meaning that they would be shot if discovered. Then a group of officers crawl into the trench and Martin hears them address the stranger as “His Excellency.” This prompts Martin to wonder why the commander in chief is so needlessly and casually exposing himself to danger. Washington apparently never gives the matter any thought. The next night he joins the squad again, this time carrying a pickaxe, so that it can be recorded, somewhat inaccurately, that General Washington with his own hands first broke ground at the siege of Yorktown.
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Cornwallis acknowledged the inevitable on October 17, requesting a meeting to settle terms of surrender. Washington had only negotiated a surrender once before in his life, and that was his own at Fort Necessity twenty-seven years earlier. He insisted on the capitulation of the entire British garrison, though he did permit one British ship carrying Loyalist troops to sail off to New York. His diary entries during the forty-eight-hour truce focus on the logistical details of the surrender rather than the historical significance of the American victory or what he thought about it. His letters to de Grasse, urging an immediate continuation of the campaign, probably against Charleston, reveal that he did not realize that Yorktown was the final battle of the war.
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On October 19, as he sat astride Nelson, his favorite mount, while the defeated British troops marched out between the French and American armies, one witness reported that several redcoats ridiculed the American troops for their disheveled appearance and joked about shoeless victors. Cornwallis, pleading illness, excused himself from the surrender ceremony, and his surrogate, apparently confusing Rochambeau for Washington, attempted to present his sword to the French general. Several hundred black slaves, previously under Cornwallis’s protection, many dying of smallpox, attempted to flee into the woods. Washington ordered them rounded up and advertisements published to return them to their rightful owners. (It is possible that some of Washington’s former slaves at Mount Vernon were in the group.) The most consequential battle in American history, the decisive battle Washington had been questing after for six years, had just been won, but Washington did not understand that the war was over, and the surreal surrender scene itself added to the muddle. On a personal level, a family tragedy soon contributed to the confusion of the crowded moment, when Washington learned that Jackie had come down with camp fever, probably meningitis. He arrived at his stepson’s bedside on November 5, just in time to watch him die.
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EXTENDED EPILOGUE

R
ATHER THAN CELEBRATE
his victory, Washington spent several months warning everyone who would listen that the British ministry would respond to Yorktown the same way it had responded to Saratoga. “The king will push the War as long as the Nation would find Men or Money,” because the leading figures in the British government were convinced that “the Sun of Great Britain will set the moment American Independency is acknowledged.” He refused to believe reports from London and Paris that British negotiators tacitly recognized that they had lost their American empire. Even with the capture of Cornwallis’s army, he pointed out, the British still possessed a formidable force on the American continent, considerably larger than the Continental army. During an extended visit to Philadelphia, he urged the Congress to order him to resume the offensive, perhaps against Charleston, or, even better—the old dream again—against the British garrison at New York.
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The great revolutionary polemicist and gadfly Thomas Paine tried to calm Washington down, claiming that the number seven had magical powers over British thinking; it was the length of Parliament’s terms, apprentice contracts, and property leases, so it stood to reason that this primal number would mark the end of the war, begun in 1775, in 1782. But Washington not only refused to submit America’s fate to mere superstition, he insisted on maintaining his army in a state of readiness until the peace treaty in which the British officially acknowledged that America was wholly independent was signed. He admitted that there was a powerfully personal dimension to his feelings on this score. “From the former infatuation, duplicity, and perverse system of British policy,” he told Greene, “I confess I am induced to doubt everything, to suspect everything.” Never a man to place his fate in trust, he had learned to mistrust everything emanating from London. Even the term “negotiations” troubled him. What was there to negotiate? The British had tried to destroy him and his army, but he had destroyed them. He wanted the personal satisfaction that came with an unqualified, unconditional surrender. He wanted them to say that they had lost and he had won. He wanted his vaunted superiors to admit that they were his inferiors.
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Even while the war was still raging there had been critics in the Congress and the state governments who conjured up troubling comparisons between the Continental army and the Roman legions of Julius Caesar or the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell. Everyone knew that these earlier experiments with republicanism had ended in military dictatorship. And despite glorious tributes to the victories of the Continental army, the very term “standing army” remained an epithet, seared into American memory with woodcut replicas of the Boston Massacre and inscribed in the Declaration of Independence as one of George III’s criminal acts against the citizens of Massachusetts. During his Fabian phase Washington was even accused of deliberately prolonging the war in order to extend his quasi-monarchical power as commander in chief. And his well-known contempt for the fighting prowess of militia also made him vulnerable to critics who argued that militias were safe and republican, while standing armies were dangerous and monarchical.
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After Yorktown, moreover, new life was breathed into these old fears, since Washington’s insistence on maintaining the Continental army at full strength during a time when the majority of the citizenry believed, correctly it turned out, that the war was over only intensified fears that he intended to become the American Cromwell. It did not help matters when reports circulated that Alexander Hamilton, probably in his cups, had let it be known that the new nation would be infinitely better off if Washington marched the army to Philadelphia and ordered the Continental Congress to disperse. Such loose talk triggered the fear that the infant American republic was about to be murdered in its infancy by the same kind of military dictatorship that had destroyed the Roman and English republics in their formative phases. And since these were the only two significant efforts to establish republican governments in recorded history, the pattern did not bode well.
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Washington was fully aware of this pattern, and therefore recognized the need to make explicit statements of his intention to defy it. In May 1782 a young officer at the Newburgh encampment, Lewis Nicola, put in writing what many officers were whispering behind the scenes: that the Continental Congress’s erratic conduct of the war had exposed the weakness of all republics and the certain disaster that would befall postwar America unless Washington declared himself king. (If the title itself caused problems, Nicola wrote, perhaps a less offensive name could be invented to appease public opinion.) Washington responded with a stern lecture to “banish these thoughts from your Mind,” and denounced the scheme as “big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country.” When word of Washington’s response leaked out to the world, no less an expert on the subject than George III was heard to say that, if Washington resisted the monarchical mantle and retired, as he always said he would, he would be “the greatest man in the world.”
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While George III’s judgment as a student of history has never met the highest standards, his opinion on this matter merits our attention, for it underlines the truly exceptional character of Washington’s refusal to regard himself as the indispensable steward of the American Revolution. Oliver Cromwell had not surrendered power after the English Revolution. Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, and Castro did not step aside to leave their respective revolutionary settlements to others in subsequent centuries. We need to linger over this moment to ask what was different about Washington, or what was different about the political conditions created by the American Revolution, that allowed him to resist temptations that other revolutionary leaders before and since found irresistible.

It was certainly not a lack of revolutionary stature. He had been the centerpiece around which the army and the cause itself had formed in 1775. And he remained the human face and majestic figure that embodied dedication to American independence throughout the long and tortured path toward Yorktown.

Nor was it a matter of Washington’s confidence that the new government, now called the Confederation Congress, could manage the postwar conditions any more competently than it had managed the war itself. He made his skepticism about the discrepancy between the political and economic problems facing the American republic and the wholly inadequate national government abundantly clear: “I am decided in my opinion,” he wrote the governor of New York, “that if the powers of Congress are not enlarged, and made competent to all
general purposes,
that the Blood which has been spilt, the expence that has been incurred, and the distresses which have been felt, will avail in nothing; and that the band, already too weak, which holds us together, will soon be broken; when anarchy and confusion must prevail.”
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Nor did Washington share the deep aversion to executive power, or for that matter centralized political power of any kind, that Virginia’s leading political thinkers—including George Mason and Thomas Jefferson—regarded as the seminal impulse of republican government and the true “spirit of ’76.” The chief political lesson he took from his experience during the war was that the federal and state governments lacked sufficient energy, and that in rejecting the authority of the British Parliament and king, American statesmen had overgeneralized about the need to place tight limits on political authority per se. In his correspondence with the state governments, he often recommended a strengthening of the executive branch, and his constant refrain throughout the war was that the failure of the Continental Congress to behave as a sovereign national government with coercive authority over the states placed him at a distinct disadvantage in the competition with the British leviathan.
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Finally, Washington harbored no illusions that the Confederation Congress would keep the promises it had made to the army. In 1780 the Congress had enacted a resolution to give veteran officers half pay for life. But by the winter of 1782–83 it had become clear that the revenue to fund this pension would never be raised. Hamilton, now serving as a delegate in the Congress, reported that even a less expensive proposal of full pay for five years would fall victim to the same fate, an empty promise that would be completely forgotten once the peace treaty was signed and the army disbanded. By January 1783, Washington had concluded that the Congress’s fear of a standing army had rendered treatment of the army itself into a standing joke. “The Army, as usual, are without pay; and a great part of the Soldiery without Shirts,” he noted caustically, “and if one was to hazard for them [Congress] an opinion, it would be that the Army had contracted such a habit of encountering distresses and difficulties, and of living without money, that it would be impolitic and injurious to introduce other customs into it.” He confessed to Hamilton that “the predicament in which I stand as a Citizen and Soldier is as critical and delicate as can well be conceived.” His loyalty to the officers and veterans of the Continental army had a powerful emotional edge, for he believed, with some justice, that they had made the personal sacrifices that produced American independence. But he also believed, with equivalent certainty, that virtue would be its own and only reward, that “the prospect for compensation for past Services will terminate with the War.”
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All of these considerations—Washington’s transcendent stature, the weakness of the new federal government, and the grievances of the army—came together in March 1783 to create the Newburgh Conspiracy, which might also be called “the Last Temptation of Washington.” In this culminating moment of his military career, Washington demonstrated that he was as immune to the seductions of dictatorial power as he was to smallpox. And, as was so often the case with his most dramatic decisions, the reasons for his behavior were so deeply buried in his character that they functioned like a biological condition requiring no further explanation.