Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (40 page)

To some extent, throughout the year 1780 and into 1781, he was flailing, though not in responsibility as commander of the Continental Army. He performed in that great assignment with skill. On the military side, he held the army together and held the British at bay, even though he faced an army consistently more powerful than his own. He had moved his force in and out of danger, giving ground at times but still mounting a threat that compelled his enemy to keep a significant and sizable army in New York. Washington also met his administrative responsibilities as fully as possible, though his troops remained almost at all times on short rations, sometimes having no rations, were badly clothed, sometimes nearly naked, dreadfully housed, and, when they fell sick or wounded, ineffectively treated. He had worked with an unworkable system since the war’s beginning. No one else could have done as well.

To all of these problems he brought an inflexible will, and a refusal to break under strain. His flailing was not concealed, and yet it was not recognized. It came in his moods: his sense, in 1780 and early 1781, that the crisis emanating from the army’s problems would destroy the cause for which he fought. Yet ironically, his ability to surmount each problem, to go on no matter how desperate the army’s condition, undercut his appeals to Congress for men and supplies. To the Congress he was the General, different from all other men—in fact,
of another order of men. His presence and the strength he embodied seemed to suggest that he was incapable of failure.

Washington’s inner turmoil stood in contrast to this reputation. For he felt he was on the edge of disaster—chaos threatened, he said repeatedly, unless the army received men under a reliable system. Current operations fluctuated with the “two army” system—one army coming and one going—and though Providence had seen the army through the worst of times before, the nation should not depend on it much longer.

As early as the middle of 1780, Washington had a surer means in mind for winning the war than dependence on Providence. The experience of war in America had made him an American who thought about his country as an arrangement of men attached to a union. What was needed, he wrote Fielding Lewis, was a Congress of “absolute powers in all matters relative to the great purposes of War, and of general concern.” To the states and smaller units of government, he would leave matters of local and internal polity for the regulation of order and good government. But war and problems of general concern belonged in a congress, a body made up of “a full and well chosen representation.” There was a bite in this part of his formula—he had commented before on the loss of talent in Congress as the war went along. That he was angry with Congress seems clear in this statement calling for converting it to a body of “absolute powers.”
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It was a proposal he had made privately before. No formal suggestion along these lines went to the president of the Congress. He would restrain himself and honor Congress while chaos thrived around him and the army. But he knew that the army and the Revolution were near a terrible death, whatever men thought and whatever he did.

10

Mutiny and Rallying the French

Washington often wondered at the patience and hardihood of soldiers who had served in what might have been considered squalor. What, he asked, had kept them under arms for years during which they were hungry and often naked or near it? Small numbers had protested, to be sure, in small upheavals, and many more had deserted—almost always going home, not to the enemy. But though the circumstances of their lives never seemed to improve, they held true to the oaths they had sworn when they entered the army, and they fought remarkably well when they had nothing but themselves for support.

Observing these men, Washington feared the worst, and on January 1, 1781, he got it—a mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line, some ten regiments in winter quarters at Mount Kemble, a camp near Morristown. At around nine in the evening, they burst from their tents carrying muskets with bayonets, and after two hours of wildness, in which they killed two officers and wounded others, they set off for Philadelphia, where Congress sat. By this time they had at least four fieldpieces and the skill to use them. A graphic description of the first hours of the affair came to Washington’s headquarters in New Windsor, about six miles above West Point, on January 3.

Anthony Wayne, then a brigadier general and popular with his troops, commanded the Pennsylvania Line, but was now shoved aside by men determined to either go home or improve the conditions of life in the army. Many hoped to leave the army entirely, with honorable discharges and back pay in hand. They had engaged themselves in a riot in leaving Mount Kemble, but they soon proved that they were disciplined soldiers, for after they had forced their officers to get out of the way, they organized themselves into platoons and marched off in military fashion, not as a riotous mob.

No officer sided with them; their leaders were the sergeants who had always fought at their head. Wayne, with several colonels, followed along, fearing that the mutineers would take the road to Elizabeth Town and join the enemy. The troops soon proved otherwise and the next day settled themselves into a rough camp at Princeton.

When word of the affair reached Washington, he thought immediately of riding southward to take charge of dealing with the mutiny. He did not consider the crisis in conventional terms—that is, of only crushing and punishing the disaffected. His reactions were far more complicated: He wanted the mutiny put down, but he also wanted to treat the men involved with fairness, indeed with sympathy, and if that meant recognizing and responding to their grievances, he had long done that in his pleas to Congress. Now, with the failures of the past in mind, he knew that he would have to do far more.

Confronting the men in person was an idea, or impulse, that occurred to him almost simultaneously with the arrival of the dispatch from Wayne. Washington explained later to Rochambeau, among others, that he resisted this inclination in recognition of the likelihood that if he left Morristown, where most of the army was in garrison, an echoing revolt might explode in his absence, as those soldiers had grievances identical to those of the Pennsylvania Line.

At Princeton, Joseph Reed, a former aide of Washington and now president of the Pennsylvania Council, assumed the task of negotiating with the mutineers. By Sunday, a week after the affair began, the negotiations had fallen into place. The Board of Sergeants, representing the men, had demanded that veterans of three years be discharged at once; in case the length of enlistment was disputed, three soldiers should sit with three commissioners on a committee to resolve such disagreements. There was also an expectation by the soldiers’ board that the men would be paid off and properly clothed at the time of discharge. The pay must be in specie or undepreciated currency, a demand that confirmed the loss of faith in Congress’s monetary policy.

Joseph Reed did not yield to most of these requirements but he and the commission did give way to the veterans’ insistence that the army live up to several of the promises it had made when the soldiers were recruited. Wayne’s remaining with the army during the talks between Reed and the Board of Sergeants undoubtedly steadied everyone. The troops trusted him—they had promised to fight under his command if
the British attacked in the midst of the upheaval—and so Reed and his Pennsylvania colleagues received a quiet and peaceful greeting. The agreement that Reed persuaded the sergeants to accept went partway toward the desire of the veterans to be discharged, but such action would be forthcoming only after a committee of Pennsylvania commissioners reviewed each case. No soldier was invited to sit with this body, a circumstance that kept their suspicions high. The agreement was not firm on a commitment to make good earlier promises of back pay and clothing. A general pardon for offenses committed during the mutiny was clear, however, and eased fears of reprisals. And fear there was among the men and the Board of Sergeants, fear they announced by keeping possession of the British spies they held. In a few days they gave up these three men, who after a short trial in a military court went to the gallows. Their bodies were left hanging in the open for the better part of a week.

When the men agreed to stop their mutiny, they extracted important concessions from the army: pay that the army did not have, furloughs for two months for almost half the Pennsylvania Line, and outright discharges for several hundred men. They also left behind an impression that mutiny worked, that it might indeed provide the way to elementary justice in a life filled with harshness, cruelty, and broken promises.

The mutiny confirmed several of Washington’s deepest worries about his army, but it also reassured him that, though his soldiers endured abysmal circumstances in their lines, they remained fundamentally loyal. Near starvation and nakedness made them think of leaving the army; it did not send them into the arms of the enemy, where they would find food, pay, and clothing. This knowledge made it easier for him to maintain his focus on smashing the British.
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That focus had never really left him: He remained steady in his conviction that nothing short of recapturing New York City would end the Revolution. There were moments when he thought the British might, in exhaustion, lose heart and give up the war. He recognized such a feeling in his countrymen; every year, he said, when campaigning slacked off in winter weather, Americans looked to the new year or the next campaign as the final effort. It was a hope that was even shared
by Washington’s staff—Alexander Hamilton, for example, though in Hamilton’s case the feeling was at times one of desperation, not hope.

The possibility of taking New York rested on realities that he could not control or even change. The British unwittingly opened themselves to attack with every detachment of troops they sent from New York to the South. General Clinton hated the process, though he himself had contributed to it in the spring of 1780, when he began the operation that led to the capture of Charleston. After the city fell, he returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis behind with four thousand soldiers. Soon Clinton received requests by Cornwallis for more troops, plus suggestions on how to conduct the war. He considered these appeals carefully and responded, though in so doing he weakened his own force by sending troops to South Carolina.

Had Clinton clung to his New York army, he could have justifiably claimed that he acted from need. He was in a sense very much alone with his problems. The colonial secretary, Lord George Germain, running the war from Whitehall, gave advice on strategy freely, though not much in the way of troops and supplies in support. Clinton’s backing in Britain was firm, but he, like Washington, worried over the logistics of feeding and supplying his army. He also felt hampered by Germain’s schemes for action, all of which were unrealistic and, Clinton thought, almost fantastical.

Washington did not know that his counterpart suffered under the burden of meddlers three thousand miles away. Nor did he realize that Clinton sometimes felt neglected as provisions and the materials of war dwindled in his camp. For the British army did not sustain itself by drawing on local sources. To be sure, Clinton bought what he could from nearby farms and merchants, but his soldiers could not have survived without the supplies carried in by merchantmen and transports from Britain. The British did have the advantage of hard currency at hand, but the basic allotments of food, weapons, ammunition, and equipment had to be brought in from across the Atlantic.
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When Washington learned that his enemy had to cope with shortages of provisions and men, he yearned to take advantage of such circumstances. He was hampered by the reluctance of the French, long considered an indispensable ally, to commit their forces to a large-scale campaign. That they were reluctant was not surprising—and not surprising to Washington. He had not hidden his problems from them; far
from it, he had, from motives of honesty, told them ever since d’Estaing had arrived that he was leading an army in transit. The French really needed no reports from him on the condition of the troops he commanded if they trusted their own eyes. There were always French officers with the Americans in camp and Congress, where a great deal of truth was spoken about the Continental Army. Washington himself knew of the talk and simply followed his instincts in dealing with the French. These instincts were informed by a knowledge of the politics necessary in dealing with friends and foes. He had, from an early age, come to the conclusion that men were moved by their interests and passions.

The French government was filled with such men, as was its army and navy. He respected those he dealt with, and in the early months of their coming he trusted what they said, including promises and statements of intention, though when their statements seemed to diverge from his understanding of their interests, his skepticism took over. The French, he discovered early on, studied the political environment before they declared themselves and before they acted. They were cautious above all else. Their officers in America never seemed to feel that they were independent of the home authorities, and indeed seemed always inclined to emphasize their connections to the French court and their king.
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Some undoubtedly were shocked at the form and appearance of the Americans. French officers and men were well turned out, with clean uniforms, buttons polished, and muskets and swords in obvious working order. Others must have been amused at the American shabbiness, and as for the Americans on the parade ground, the less said the better.

They exempted Washington from the common scorn that the rustics-in-arms evoked. In their eyes he was different. Lafayette’s affection for him approached idolatry, but Lafayette was very young when they met and was prepared to embrace him as a father. The Comte de Chastellux, only two years younger than Washington and born into a distinguished family, was far more sophisticated than Lafayette and far more learned. He was a veteran of the Seven Years’ War, having fought in Germany, and brought high intelligence as well as courage to his wartime service. Like most French officers, he looked forward to meeting Washington, and may have expected that he would encounter a remote, even standoffish man. Their meeting, which occurred in
1780, disabused him of any such thoughts, as he noted of Washington’s greeting that “his kindly dispositions toward me were not feigned.” His impressions of Washington, formed during extended meetings, were that Washington was “the idea of a perfect whole: Brave without temerity, laborious without ambition, generous without prodigality, noble without pride, virtuous without severity, he seems always to have confined himself within those limits, where the virtues, by clothing themselves in more lively, but more changeable and doubtful colors, may be mistaken for faults.” Chastellux also found Washington impressive physically, noting that his “stature is noble and lofty; he is well built and exactly proportioned,” with a “fine face … neither a grave nor a familiar air, his brow is sometimes marked with thought but never with worry.” Like many others who met Washington, Chastellux remarked that he was an “excellent and bold horseman, leaping the highest fences and going extremely quick without standing upon his stirrups, bearing on the bridle, or letting his horse run wild.”
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