Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (18 page)

Thomas Lynch, of South Carolina, was an early advocate of the American cause, had attended the Stamp Act Congress (1765), and from that time on had impressed others with his learning and clarity. John Adams had described him the year before, in the First Continental Congress, as “a solid, firm, judicious man,” an appraisal shared at the time by Silas Deane of Connecticut. Benjamin Harrison, who later aroused Adams’s displeasure, had earned his praise when they first met in Philadelphia by remarking that “he would have come on foot [to the First Congress] rather than not come.” Harrison was an old hand in Virginia politics, having sat in the Burgesses in key committee roles for fifteen years before the war.
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How these three felt about an attack on Boston before the Continental Army’s enlistments expired is not clear. But it is known that many of their colleagues in Congress favored such an attack. Whatever the committee might have said, it soon discovered that informed opinion—that of Washington’s generals—held that their troops were not prepared for such action.

Washington recognized that any attempt to use the committee—or, more important, the Congress—to force the issue could only destroy his standing among the generals who served under him. But the committee’s visit and its reputation in the Congress offered an opportunity to inform the Congress of the complexities he faced in creating an army in the new political world. A natural impulse would have been
to cover up obstacles, especially when they could have convinced the committee and the Congress that failure was in prospect.

The complexities were many. Washington presented them to the committee in a list of twenty-nine questions; several included secondary questions. The maintenance of an army in the face of its dissolution by January 1 was primary in all of the discussions with Washington. The governance of the army—rules and regulations—occupied much of the deliberations; so also did such matters as pay of troops and officers (the latter a major concern of Washington and his circle), rations, supplies, and tentage for the soldiers. There were surprises for almost everyone: What, Washington asked, should he do about Christopher French, a British officer who had been captured and was being held in Hartford, and who insisted that he should be allowed to wear his sword, a demand that elicited little sympathy in Hartford and Cambridge? This matter was not made a formal part of the agenda, but it did come up, with the committee refusing to give advice. There must have been some hilarity over French, if Washington displayed the letters that he wrote. The important questions took several days to review and included requests that the committee give advice on where the army might obtain a variety of essentials: more ammunition, in particular flints and lead, and artillery (from Crown Point and elsewhere in New York, the committee responded), as well as engineers (the committee suggested that Henry Knox and Israel Putnam Jr. be made assistant engineers and promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel). Indians, captured British soldiers, and blacks provided another sort of focus. The British captures should be humanely treated and exchanged when possible; the Indians who had volunteered should be kept in readiness; and the blacks should not be enlisted into the army, the committee advised. Ships and privateers were also subjects of discussion, as was Tory property. The committee gave sound advice on all these matters. On several questions, it simply responded by saying that Congress would have to decide; the committee’s own responsibility had its limits. Perhaps the most formidable example of such a question concerned the possibility of destroying the city of Boston by fire if an assault was not made.

The policy emerging from the discussions had a clear focus: the existence of the army itself, an army that legally had a little more than
two months of life left. The committee recommended that the army continue to reenlist its present members, officers and men, for a year, and that it resort to new enlistments and militia if necessary to bring its number to 20,372. This force was to be divided into twenty-six infantry regiments, at least one of artillery, and companies of riflemen, each of sixty-eight men. That the committee devised, or more accurately drew on, Washington’s careful plan is very much in evidence in this reorganization. When Washington bade them farewell on October 24, he knew that he had achieved much, though he was left with the task of replacing or reenlisting most of the troops who made up the army. In the next few weeks, Congress examined what its committee of conference had done and approved in detail virtually all that it had recommended.
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Washington had urged in his conversations with the committee that one of the needs of the army was a higher degree of professionalism. His letters to friends in and out of Congress in the three months since his arrival in Cambridge had pointed to the ragged—in fact, raw—character of troops and officers. Many of the men by their behavior offended his sense of what a soldier was; many, he implied, though enlisted in the army, were not really soldiers, and for weeks they had given very little evidence of becoming so. At least a part of the fault lay with their officers, who had no sense of themselves as a caste apart. He was disgusted, even repelled, by their failure to maintain a line between themselves and their troops—as he called it, their “familiarity.” Separation born of a sense of their difference was necessary for discipline, for leading and sometimes driving their men in battle. Killing, as he knew well from the war he had fought in the 1750s, did not come easy to men, nor did persistence and steadiness in the face of the likelihood that the soldiers in continental ranks would die even as they killed their enemy.

To improve the quality of the officers, he looked to attracting a better class of men and to strengthening the resolve of those he had. Paying officers more would help set them apart, help them act as gentlemen of honor and character, even if they had demonstrated little of either; it would in a sense establish—or contribute to—“subordination,” another word he favored, essential to discipline.
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Washington got his way with the committee and with Congress. That he had forcefully explained his ideas about a professional army
is clear in a letter from Thomas Lynch, who wrote notifying him “that Congress has agreed to every Recommendation of the Committee and have gone beyond it allowing the additional Pay to the Officers.” Lynch had contempt for “the officers who failed to support Washington—the “pityfull wretches who stood cavilling with you when entreated to serve the next Campaign”—and who “will now be ready enough,” even though they probably didn’t deserve more pay. Lynch’s hope was that Washington “will be able to refuse them with the Contempt they deserve and to find better in their room.”

The picture Lynch painted of the weakest of the army’s officers was of a group that had failed to display the spirit that honored distinctions among officers and their soldiers. With the new Articles of War and the increase in pay, he told Washington, “you will not now suffer your Officers to sweep the Parade [with] the Skirts of their Coats or bottoms of their Trowsers, to cheat or to mess with their Men, to skulk in battle or sneak in Quarters, in short being now paid they must do their Duty & look as well as act like Gentlemen. Do not bate them an Ace, my Dear General, but depend on every Support of your Friends here.”
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To “bate them an Ace” meant to make the slightest abatement, or ease up on the demands made of officers.

Washington knew that with the new regulations he could use a stronger hand in dealing with officers and soldiers, but he knew also that his immediate assignment to create a new army from the old would not be easy. The major obstacle was quite simple: His army had subscribed, or enlisted, in agreements that expired on December 31, 1775. Rhode Island and Connecticut troops had signed on until the first of December.

Massachusetts troops served under Articles of War originally agreed to by the colony’s provincial congress on April 5; these regulations, which by any standard were inadequate, furnished the basis of a second version drafted for the Continental Army and established by the Congress on June 30, after Bunker Hill, when in effect it took over the war from the legislatures of the New England colonies/states. At the time of Congress’s action in June, many soldiers refused to sign the articles, for fear that they would extend their service beyond the date they originally had agreed to. Now, in early November, they were
asked to subscribe to new articles approved by Congress, which would extend their service until the end of 1776.
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Washington had dreaded the problem of holding the army together almost from his first day in Cambridge; desertions were at an unacceptable number as winter approached, and the period for recruiting was short. Not knowing what to expect from Congress, he had begun the process of reconstruction of his force before it disintegrated. In August he ordered all officers and men to sign the Articles of War approved in June by the Continental Congress. (The Congress had made the Massachusetts regulations its own, with slight changes here and there.)

Wary soldiers proved reluctant to sign. Congress had anticipated this reluctance and in issuing instructions to sign gave Washington the authority to retain soldiers whether they signed or not. But uncertainty about the length of service remained, with many officers and men wondering whether they would be compelled to stay under arms past the expiration date of their service.

Washington wanted them to stay as long as possible, ideally until the war ended but, at the least, well into the new year, when he hoped to have a new army under his command. In early October, his concern had risen to the point that he sought reassurance from the troops themselves. He seems to have been slightly more concerned about the officers and in late October asked that all officers declare whether they would remain in the service until the end of 1776. A few days later, it was clear that a third to a half of them would remain in the army. In the general orders of October 26, he repeated an argument for continuing service in terms he had used before—with one difference. The usual exhortation had seen Washington refer to the “great Cause,” sometimes “the glorious cause”—“When Life, Liberty, & Property are at stake.” This late October appeal had an extraordinary timeliness in his linkage of the cause to a recent atrocity—the burning of Falmouth by the British navy. Falmouth was a town on the northern coast of the District of Maine, and virtually nothing of it survived this calculated action. In Washington’s phrasing:

our Country is in danger of being a melancholy Scene of bloodshed, and desolation, when our towns are laid in ashes, and innocent Women & Children driven from their peaceful habitations.… Where Calamities like these, are staring us in the face, and a brutal, savage enemy (more so than was ever yet found in a civilized nation), are threatening
us, and everything we hold dear, with Destruction from foreign Troops, it little becomes the Character of a soldier, to shrink from danger, and condition [bargain] for new terms.
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The use of the word “condition” referred to demands for better compensation, food, and clothing made by soldiers and their officers in the final months of 1775. Washington wanted more pay and better support of all kinds for his soldiers, but he hated having them ask for it. So urgent was the need to keep the ranks filled and led by competent officers that he now coupled his patriotic appeal with the claim that “the General also thinks that he can take upon him to assure the Officers and Soldiers of the new army, that they will receive their pay once a Month regularly.”
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(Early in January he was to find that he could not pay his troops at all.)

Throughout these months, his anxiety about the army seems not to have lessened. His efforts to keep as many soldiers as possible and to replace those who would leave never let up. In several ways he showed a surprising flexibility in the means to hold his men. He agreed to temporary furloughs to enable soldiers to go home for short periods in order to find winter clothing for themselves; he offered a month’s pay for those in desperate need; he advised men who were paid to spend it on shirts, stockings, shoes, and leather breeches, not, he added, on coats and waistcoats, which the army would provide at cost. He also continued his appeals to Congress for more money with which to pay his troops.
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All these efforts were made in circumstances that suggested that the new army would face problems equal to or greater than the old. Weapons and powder had to be found for new recruits, who frequently arrived in camp without them. Washington demanded that soldiers who refused to reenlist should leave their muskets behind when they left camp. When that demand was ignored, he threatened to withhold pay from those who carried off their muskets. He also offered to buy back such muskets, and then ordered his regimental commanders to send officers into surrounding towns to buy weapons. Recruits to the new army who came bearing muskets were rewarded one dollar per musket.

By the middle of January 1776, his army—its soldiers coming and going—numbered around 10,500 men. A part of this number were
militia, temporary substitutes from Rhode Island and New Hampshire for the regulars who had gone home. A month later he estimated that his army had two thousand men without muskets, and gunpowder for those with weapons was difficult to find.

Slowly men came into camp, and by the end of February he could count something close to fifteen thousand in camp. More arms trickled in, among them a shipment of muskets from France and small numbers from most of the colonies. When Congress accepted six regiments from Virginia, the men came bearing arms.
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Yet he felt little reassurance as he saw their numbers climb. They were far from the size that everyone in the army and the committee of conference had agreed was necessary for either offensive or defensive operations, and many of the men were not really soldiers. “Raw” had been the adjective Washington used when he regarded the force he commanded in the summer. It took months to make a soldier, and it took time to train units to fight in a coordinated manner as an army.