Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (47 page)

Congress’s request concerning Gates was a small part of the war, and he had to turn to more immediate problems almost as soon as he saw the troops captured at Yorktown marched off to their camps in Virginia. The French would also stay in Virginia for the winter, and they were under a command that knew how to cope with it. Some duties were pleasant and fulfilled with satisfaction, such as replies to the congratulations on the Yorktown victory sent by government officials in Alexandria and the General Assembly of Maryland. Washington would soon become practiced in accepting with modesty the praise that came to him. (The happy comments occasioned by Yorktown grew into a chorus with the end of the war.)
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Bad news soon intruded, though Washington was not deeply affected. It came as a surprise: the death of John Parke Custis, Martha’s son. He had fallen ill a short time before Yorktown, though he had been thought to be in good health. George Washington did not care for Jack Custis, but Martha loved the boy, and his death saddened her deeply. Without any false display of grief, Washington gave her as much comfort as possible during their week together.

The new year beckoned—so did Congress—and he and Martha
soon traveled to Philadelphia. He was to remain there throughout the winter, from late November to April 1782, when he made his way back to the army in Newburgh, New York.

Little had been settled in Philadelphia. Congress had established three major committees or boards to act as executive authorities, and Washington as commander in chief was expected to meet with their leaders. The most important of them was the superintendent of finance, Robert Morris, a fascinating figure of great ability but little luck who, after the war, ended his days in a debtors’ prison. Morris and a small number of Philadelphia merchants had founded the Bank of Pennsylvania the year before, with the intention of creating an institution that would supply a currency of reliability. Depreciation of congressional and state notes had deprived the army of almost all that it required—weapons, food, and supplies of virtually every kind—and it had made sustaining troops and officers extraordinarily difficult.
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Whatever the day brought—whether problems of replacing departing troops, supplying those in camp, dealing with Congress, maintaining the discipline of the army while attempting to keep its morale as high as possible, or performing the other seemingly endless tasks facing a commander—Washington attempted to fathom the future. Quite specifically he considered first whether peace was in the offing and, if it came, what problems it would bring for the army and the new nation.

Washington had also to think of the next campaign while everyone else, including the Congress and the people, thought of a world without the war. De Grasse’s departure for the West Indies destroyed the plans Washington had for clearing the southern states of the enemy. Little could be done on any grand scale without naval supremacy—Yorktown had driven that fact home—and Washington was left to think about small-scale operations, which, if nothing else, would serve to keep his troops fresh.
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High and dry, he found himself trying to anticipate his enemy’s moves. His survey of British strength on land in North America reassured him that his enemy could not mount a major campaign without reinforcement. There was no intelligence from any source that suggested that the British were on the move. Nevertheless, he ordered a review of British strength, with particular attention to the number of soldiers available to them in America, from Halifax to the southern states. New York received a careful look. The conclusion, in May
1782, was that the British forces, including loyalist militia and regulars, numbered thirteen thousand. It was, though “careful,” an estimate that could not be relied on with certainty. On the bright side, the loyalist militia had shrunk in size throughout the early months of 1782, and the regulars, nine thousand altogether, seemed to be subject to drainage to the West Indies.
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More attention was paid in the review to possible operations than to the size of the enemy. Given the intelligence available to American planners in Washington’s military family, the review took on the cast of an exercise in a near vacuum. The memorandum recording possibilities assumed that perhaps a successful siege of New York City could be conducted with twenty-five thousand troops. The Continental Army outside the city had nothing like that figure and lost men as the year went on. The part to be played by Rochambeau’s army could not be charted, though in the spring the French had marched and sailed from Virginia to New York. Rochambeau returned to France, and his successor gave no indication of a desire to join Washington in an attack on New York.

Given the number of troops available to him and to the British in New York, Washington concluded that he could not attempt to take the city. Peace was in the air in any case, and the British on New York Island seemed somnolent. He did not trust the British, even when their new commander in America, Sir Guy Carleton, began assuring him that he had no intention of mounting an aggressive campaign. Carleton had arrived in America on May 5, 1782, and a week later Washington’s old adversary, Henry Clinton, sailed for home. The communications coming out of the headquarters of the new commander in chief from that point on had a different tone, with no threat discernible.
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Washington’s primary reaction to this change was one of suspicion laced with dislike, though he knew that he would have to take Carleton seriously on a multitude of matters. But peace, if it was coming, would be decided in Europe, not in the headquarters of the British commander. The war, in a quiet phase in America, he knew, continued in Europe. The issues in play there were complex, and sorting them out could not be done fully from the evidence available to him. To understand them, he relied on friends such as Lafayette and on travelers, newspapers, and occasionally officials in the American Commission
in Paris. Congress, too, sometimes passed along information that had come to it, largely from the same European sources.

Washington followed English politics as closely as possible. He could not discover the details of cabinet and parliamentary strife, but his overall grasp was usually accurate. The attitude of the king seemed especially crucial in any decision the government might make, he thought, and he awaited news of the king’s speech at the opening of Parliament in 1782. In February, a frigate arrived with a copy.

The speech did not reassure him. The king preferred war to peace, and for several months hence he took comfort from the idea that the colonies in America might agree to independence and yet assume a subordinate status in the empire. How exactly an arrangement of this sort might be devised was not clear, and in any case most British leaders at this time wished to cut their country’s losses by giving up the colonies altogether. North resigned his office on March 20, with great relief that at last he could be free of problems that seemed always to defy solutions. The king did not want him to go but finally agreed, and then faced the difficulty of finding a replacement he could stomach. For a short period the solution was Lord Rockingham, a man whom the king despised. But Rockingham died soon after taking office. Then came the customary maneuvers, and the Earl of Shelburne replaced him. Shelburne was widely distrusted by English politicians, known almost as much for his lies as for his ability, but despite his reputation, he knew how to read his king. He seems to have held hopes for a constitutional arrangement that satisfied both Englishmen and Americans, but whatever his hopes and beliefs, he moved so as to satisfy his royal master and Parliament.
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After a suggestion by Benjamin Franklin, now one of the members of the peace commission appointed by Congress, both sides agreed to negotiations. Talks were not conducted easily, but by November 30 a preliminary agreement on ending the war had been reached, with plenty of problems left to be decided. The Americans insisted that before they would agree to talk, the British must recognize their independence. Once the British gave in to this requirement, hard bargaining about a whole series of questions got under way. These included the location of boundaries, the Newfoundland and St. Lawrence fisheries, loyalist property, and prewar debts owed “on either side.” There were other demands by the Americans, of great interest to Washington,
among them that the British withdraw their forces from the United States “with all convenient speed,” a requirement that brought all sorts of trouble in the months ahead. Resolution of all these matters came in January 1783, when a final agreement was signed by the negotiators. France and Spain, the two major continental powers at war with Britain, made peace shortly thereafter. Final approval by all sides had been reached by the end of 1783, the American ratification by Congress coming on September 3.
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In August 1782, Washington confessed that his revulsion for the enemy continued, a feeling that he could not banish for years afterwards: “From the former infatuation, duplicity, and perverse system of British Policy; I confess I am induced to doubt everything & to suspect everything.” Carleton offered reassurance as the talks went on in Paris, but he too suffered from a lack of knowledge of what was being said. No doubt he did not tell Washington everything he knew, but he did report that the king had instructed his ministers to concede independence at the opening of the negotiations. At other points, he claimed to know nothing fresh about the Paris proceedings. During most of the year, this assertion of ignorance rang true. The British in America were not the last to know what was going on in Europe—they were the next to last.

What Washington felt about the British was undoubtedly shared by the officers and men of the Continental Army. These men also harbored suspicions of the Congress in Philadelphia. The uncertainty about the negotiations for peace fed their uncertainty about money owed them by the United States. The Articles of Confederation provided that “All charges of war, and all expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare, and allowed by the united states in congress assembled, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury.” In practice, this meant that Congress was expected to pay all officers, not including those of the militia, from funds contributed by the states. The states in the Congress had laid out this system but had failed to send money to Congress for the common treasury. Their failure was quite typical of their conduct by 1780, even though it was considered a scandal by the officers and bitterly resented. In that year, Congress gave in to demands that it do something—perhaps without conviction—and resolved to
grant pensions for life to officers who remained in service until the end of the war. Such officers would receive pensions of half their regular pay. Where the money would come from for such payments was not clear, and the promise to pay did not bring unanimous agreement—or agreement of any sort from several of the states. Delegates from all the New England states opposed this arrangement, arguing that it forecast the creation of a caste.
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Army officers themselves probably held no such fear. Certainly, after the battle of Yorktown, the promise made in 1780 had lost its attractiveness, and in fact seemed by many not to be believed. Those officers who had volunteered their services for the duration of the war had long considered themselves badly treated and even betrayed, and quite naturally began questioning whether pensions promised them when the war ended, as well as pay, would be honored.

Congress had begun making plans for reducing the size of the army and cutting down the officer corps even before peace seemed to be in the offing. When it became known in 1782 that negotiations for peace had begun, sensitivities throbbed, and requests—soon to be demands—were made that Congress pay the soldiers who had served it.

Washington had always worried over what he thought was owed to his officers, but he did not give sustained attention to the matter until Yorktown. The end of the war as a remote possibility now gave way to a feeling that it was coming. He had watched the development of his officers since 1775 with great interest: These men, a varied lot, came from all over the republic, and they were not all of genteel status. But Washington treated them all as if they were gentlemen, and wanted them paid as if they were. Basic fairness required that they receive the pay their rank called for and that they conduct themselves as men of quality. In the army, such a style of conduct imposed standards of dress and rations as well as of leadership. Many officers found that in the army they could not live like gentlemen; they could not even support their families. It was not that they led lives of extravagance in the army, but that they were not paid, on occasion for many months at a time.

After Yorktown, Washington felt forced to complain to Congress about the conditions of life they endured. He had sensed the damage to morale and pride before his officers said anything explicit about such matters. He expected that the chain of command would be respected
by everyone in the army, but on these problems of pay and later of pensions, he did not insist that it be observed. He usually communicated his dissatisfactions to Congress, and in the case of matters of such importance, he almost always confined his communication to its president. But increasingly as the war went along, he also wrote members, especially those he knew personally. He avoided language that might embarrass the president of Congress and never sought to undercut his authority.
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After Congress created institutions with executive authority, Washington often wrote their secretaries, as they were called. Sometimes his letters carried an angry tone. The secretary of war, Benjamin Lincoln, received the harshest of Washington’s protests on behalf of officers in 1782 and 1783. A blast from Washington must have stung, because Lincoln had served under him and had also been recommended to Congress for the secretaryship by him. In August 1782, Washington questioned a newly established policy regarding the issue of rations to continental officers. Rank established the number of such rations an officer might draw, a standard no one protested against. What angered Washington was the slashing of any rations an officer might claim. It was a change that drew deep anger, because officers were badly fed in the best of times, and now the old grievance about quality was expanded to include a reduction of rations authorized. As Washington remarked, this cutting came at a time of deplorable circumstances. “Is it policy,” he asked, “is it Justice, to keep a Sore, Constantly gangreened, when no good End is, or possibly can be answered by it?” Six weeks later, he listed the consequences of the new policy for his officers—“want of money” for day-to-day life, debts, loss of credit, distress of families, “bare rations” when civil officers have more. He also noted the loss of pride that congressional action brought in American officers who, faced with the hospitality of their French peers, could not reciprocate and felt humiliated by their plight. And always lurking in the background of these discussions of pay for the officers was the vexing matter of back pay. All such matters seemed especially pressing as the coming of peace appeared more imminent.
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