His Excellency: George Washington (13 page)

And he was right. For the larger truth was that no one was qualified to lead an American army to victory, because the odds against such an outcome appeared overwhelming. No matter how glorious the cause, the prospects of thirteen disparate and contentious colonies defeating the most powerful army and navy in the world were remote in the extreme. It would take almost exactly a year before Thomas Jefferson would draft the document in which the delegates in the Continental Congress pledged “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” on behalf of American independence. Washington fully recognized that by accepting the appointment as commander in chief he was making a personal pledge before anyone else. And if he failed in the high-stakes gamble, his Mount Vernon estate would be confiscated, his name would become a slur throughout the land, and his own neck would almost surely be stretched.
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If the decision to marry Martha Custis most shaped his own life, the decision to take command of the Continental army most shaped his place in history. He made it with his eyes open, with a realistic sense of how much was at stake and with a keen appreciation of what he was up against. In late June, as he was preparing to leave Philadelphia, his thoughts turned momentarily to those lands on the Great Kanawha which royal officials were attempting to deny him. If the military campaign floundered at the start, and he was able to avoid capture, that was the place to which he would flee, taking with him as many troops as he could salvage, holding out as a guerrilla band in wilderness terrain he knew so well and that no British army could conquer. If he was looking for omens, the first one was not encouraging. He assumed command of sixteen thousand militia outside Boston on July 3, 1775, the twenty-first anniversary of his ignominious defeat at Fort Necessity. This time he could not afford to lose.
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CHAPTER THREE

First in War

A
LTHOUGH THERE WAS
no way he could have known it at the time, Washington was assuming command of the army in the longest declared war in American history. He was forty-three years old when he rode out of Mount Vernon toward Philadelphia. He was fifty-one when he arrived back at Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, 1783, the most famous man in the world. He started his odyssey with the presumption that he was fighting a war for American independence, nothing more and nothing less. He ended it with the realization that the war for independence had become the American Revolution. Which is to say that the cause he headed had not only smashed two British armies and destroyed the first British Empire, it had also set in motion a political movement committed to principles that were destined to topple the monarchical and aristocratic dynasties of the Old World.

The American Revolution was the central event in Washington’s life, the crucible for his development as a mature man, a prominent statesman, and a national hero. And while zealous students of the Civil War might contest the claim, the movement that Washington found himself heading was also the most consequential event in American history, the crucible within which the political personality of the United States took shape. In effect, the character of the man and the character of the nation congealed and grew together during an extended moment of eight years. Washington was not clairvoyant about history’s next destination. But he did realize from the start that, wherever history was headed, he and America were going there together.

With only a few exceptions—his conferences with the Continental Congress, and his stopover at Mount Vernon on the way to Yorktown in the fall of 1781—Washington spent the entire war in the field with the Continental army. He was not, by any standard, a military genius. He lost more battles than he won; indeed, he lost more battles than any victorious general in modern history. Moreover, his defeats were frequently a function of his own overconfident and aggressive personality, especially during the early stages of the war, when he escaped to fight another day only because the British generals opposing him seemed choked with the kind of caution that, given his resources, Washington should have adopted as his own strategy. But in addition to being fortunate in his adversaries, he was blessed with personal qualities that counted most in a protracted war. He was composed, indefatigable, and able to learn from his mistakes. He was convinced that he was on the side of destiny—or, in more arrogant moments, sure that destiny was on his side. Even his critics acknowledged that he could not be bribed, corrupted, or compromised. Based on his bravery during several battles, he apparently believed he could not be killed. Despite all his mistakes, events seemed to align themselves with his own instincts. He began the war at the siege of Boston determined to deliver a decisive blow against more disciplined and battle-tested British regulars. He ended it at the siege of Yorktown doing precisely that.

One incident near the end of the war provides a clue to the transformation in his character wrought by the intense experience of serving so long as the singular embodiment of commitment to the cause. In 1781, Lund Washington reported that a British warship had anchored in the Potomac near Mount Vernon, presumably with orders to ravage Washington’s estate. When the British captain offered assurances that he harbored no hostile intentions, Lund sent out a boatload of provisions to express his gratitude for the captain’s admirable restraint. When Washington learned of this incident he berated Lund: “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my House, and laid the Plantation in ruins.” The estate he had spent so long building now paled in comparison to the reputation earned as the primal symbol of American independence. Lund Washington was protecting the interest of the foxhunting Virginia squire who had gone off to war. But that man, Washington was at pains to explain, had grown into something else.
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CAMBRIDGE PREVIEWS

T
HE STORY
of the siege of Boston can be told in one sentence: Washington’s makeshift army kept more than ten thousand British troops bottled up in the city for over nine months, at which point the British sailed away to Halifax. Less a battle than a marathon staring match, the conflict exposed the anomalous political circumstance created by the Continental Congress, which was prepared to initiate a war a full year before it was ready to declare American independence. Although Washington subsequently claimed that he knew by the early fall of 1775 that George III was determined to pursue a military rather than political solution to the imperial crisis, he went along with prevalent fiction that the British garrison in Boston contained “Ministerial Troops,” meaning that they did not represent the king’s wishes so much as the policy of his evil and misguided ministers. And although he eventually expressed his frustration with the moderate faction in the Continental Congress, who were “still feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation,” Washington also recognized that the radical faction, led by John Adams, needed to exhaust all the diplomatic alternatives and patiently wait for public opinion outside New England to mobilize around the novel notion of American independence.
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But if the siege of Boston was more an anomalous preliminary than the main event, it was also Washington’s debut as commander in chief. Here, for the first time, he encountered the logistical challenges he would face during the ensuing years of the war. He met many of the men who would comprise his general staff for the duration. And here he demonstrated both the strategic instincts and the leadership skills that would sustain him, and sometimes lead him astray, until the glorious end. The Cambridge encampment, then, was a preview of some tumultuous coming attractions.

Events of enduring significance occurred before Washington arrived at Cambridge. On June 17, 1775, about 2,200 British troops made three frontal assaults on New England militia units entrenched on Breed’s Hill. Later misnamed the Battle of Bunker Hill, the fight was a tactical victory for the British, but at the frightful cost of more than one thousand casualties, nearly half the attacking force. When word of the battle reached London, several British officers observed caustically that a few more such victories and the entire British army would be annihilated. On the American side, Bunker Hill was regarded as a great moral triumph that reinforced the lesson of Lexington and Concord; namely, that militia volunteers fighting for a cause they freely embraced could defeat disciplined British mercenaries. Several newspaper stories made the connection between Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela and Bunker Hill, which seemed to suggest that the very man who had once rescued the redcoats could now lead inspired American amateurs to a quick and easy victory by mobilizing their superior virtue against plodding professionals.
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Two seductive illusions were converging here. The first was the perennial belief harbored by both sides at the start of most wars that the conflict would be short. The second, which became the central myth of American military history, was that militia volunteers fighting for principle made better soldiers than trained professionals. Washington was not completely immune to the first illusion, though his version of a quick American victory depended on the willingness of Commander Gage’s replacement, General William Howe, to commit his force in a decisive battle outside Boston, in a repeat of the Bunker Hill scenario, which would then prompt the king’s ministers to propose acceptable terms for peace. Neither Howe nor the British ministry was prepared to cooperate along these lines, and since the only acceptable peace terms on the American side—independence of Parliament’s authority—was at this stage non-negotiable on the British side, even Washington’s narrow hope had no realistic prospects.
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Washington was thoroughly immune to the second illusion about the innate superiority of militia. Based on his earlier experience as commander of the Virginia Regiment, reinforced by what he witnessed on a day-to-day basis at his Cambridge encampment, he became convinced that an army of short-term volunteers, no matter how dedicated to the cause, could not win the war. “To expect then the same service from Raw, and undisciplined Recruits as from Veteran Soldiers,” he explained, “is to expect what never did, and perhaps never will happen.” His convictions on this score only deepened and hardened over the years, but from the start he believed that militia were only peripheral supplements to the hard core, which needed to be a professional army of disciplined troops who, like him, signed on for the duration. His model, in effect, was the British army. This, of course, was richly ironic, since opposition to a standing army had been a major source of colonial protest during the prewar years. To those who insisted that a militia army was more compatible with revolutionary principles, Washington was brutally frank: those principles can only flourish, he insisted, if we win the war, and that can only happen with an army of regulars.
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Another significant development occurred on his way to Cambridge, an event less conspicuous than the Battle of Bunker Hill but with even more far-reaching implications. Both the New York and the Massachusetts legislatures wrote congratulatory letters addressed to “His Excellency,” which soon became his official designation for the remainder of the war. To be sure, “His Excellency” is not quite the same thing as “His Majesty,” but throughout the summer and fall of 1775, even as delegates to the Continental Congress struggled to sustain the fiction that George III remained a friend to American liberty, poets and balladeers were already replacing the British George with an American version of the same name.
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In October 1775, the African-born slave and poet Phillis Wheatley sent Washington her lyrical tribute, which concluded: “A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine / With gold unfading, Washington! Be thine.” (Washington wrote Wheatley to express his thanks, the only occasion in his correspondence when he directly addressed a slave.) The public disavowal of George III that Tom Paine launched with
Common Sense
in January 1776, and that Thomas Jefferson then made official in the Declaration of Independence the following July, destroyed George III as the singular symbol of authority for American subjects in the British Empire. The obvious, indeed the only personal replacement as the new symbol of authority for American citizens in the nascent yet-to-be-named nation, was Washington. Unlike European monarchs, the source of his authority was neither biological nor spiritual (i.e., divine right), but rather the purity of his revolutionary credentials. He was not an accident of blood; he had chosen and had been chosen. When General Gage questioned the legitimacy of his rank, Washington responded in a letter that was widely circulated in the American press: “You affect, Sir, to despise all Rank not derived from the same Source with your own. I cannot conceive any more honourable, than that which flows from that uncorrupted Choice of a brave and free People—the purest Source & original Fountain of all Power.”
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