His Excellency: George Washington (21 page)

His fixation on New York also meant that Washington adamantly opposed arguments for another Canadian campaign. Once an ardent advocate of a Canadian invasion, he now saw it as a mere sideshow to the main event which would divert troops and treasure needed elsewhere. When pressure from the Congress mounted for a prospective Franco-American expedition into Quebec, Washington objected on the grounds that, once the French planted their flag in a country “attached to them by all the ties of blood, habits, manner, religion and former connexion of government,” they were unlikely ever to leave. He concluded with his unsentimental assessment of the French connection, and with what turned out to be one of the earliest and most forceful statements of the realistic tradition in American foreign policy: “Men are very apt to run into extremes; hatred to England may carry some into excessive Confidence in France . . . ; I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree; but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.”
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For more than two years the singular exception to Washington’s New York rule was the western frontier, the Ohio Country he knew so well. The Iroquois Confederation or Six Nations had made the wholly sensible but spectacularly misguided decision that America was destined to lose the war. And so, alongside British troops from Canada, they had staged raids on settlers in western New York and Pennsylvania designed to annihilate the American presence forever. Reports of the typically savage fighting on the frontier included stories of British officers collecting scalps (definitely true) and joining their Indian allies in cannibalistic victory orgies (probably untrue). In the spring of 1779, Washington ordered a substantial detachment of four thousand troops under John Sullivan to retaliate against the Six Nations with equivalently savage intentions. “Your immediate objects,” he wrote Sullivan, “are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.” Washington, who knew the contested terrain as well or better than anyone else, offered detailed instructions to Sullivan, who during the summer of 1779 conducted a merciless campaign that wholly destroyed about twenty Indian towns and villages. Only the Oneida tribe, which had come over to the American side, was spared. The Six Nations, which had once dominated the Ohio Country and then had vied on equal terms for imperial supremacy with France and Great Britain, never recovered from this blow. While Washington did not believe that Sullivan’s campaign contributed significantly to the immediate cause of defeating Great Britain, it did help establish American control of the trans-Allegheny treasure after the war.
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While Washington was sending a detachment of his army to the west, the British were sending a much larger force to the south. Eventually he realized that the New York garrison, which he regarded as the nucleus of British power on the continent, was becoming a launching site for a full-scale campaign in the Carolinas; as he put it, “the operations in the Southern States do not resemble a transient incursion, but a serious conquest.” Many Americans had presumed that the triumph at Saratoga marked the beginning of the end, but the British ministry had decided that it was merely the end of the beginning. Instead of withdrawing, the British had redoubled their efforts, replacing the troops lost at Saratoga and then adding another army of equivalent size in order to mount an invasion of the highly vulnerable American South.
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THE NADIR

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southern strategy surprised Washington, the resourcefulness of its war machine terrified him. “While we have been either slumbering and sleeping or disputing upon trifles,” he lamented, the British had mobilized “the whole strength and resources of the Kingdom . . . against us.” His dream of a Franco-American conquest of New York now had to compete with a nightmare in which the war did not end in one climactic battle, but in a grinding competition between war-making institutions in which his side was outgunned, outspent, and outlasted. “In modern wars the longest purse may chiefly determine the event,” he lamented, and “their system of public credit is such that it is capable of greater exertions than any other nation.” Up until now, when Washington thought about the importance of virtue as a source for patriotic commitment, he thought in personal terms: the courage of soldiers advancing against a British artillery position; the silent sacrifices of half-naked troops trudging through the snow at Valley Forge; his own decision to risk everything to serve a cause he believed in. Another more impersonal version of virtue now began to circulate in his thinking, a version not dependent on sheer willpower but rather on institutions capable of delivering resources. If the essence of personal virtue was bravery, the essence of institutional virtue was fiscal responsibility. And if the latter version of virtue determined the current contest, Washington acknowledged that “my feelings upon the subject are painful,” for he was saddled with a fiscal system that seemed designed to produce, as he put it, only “false hopes and temporary expedients.”
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His initial understanding of the political liabilities afflicting the Continental Congress, like his initial understanding of virtue, emphasized personal failures of will. The best men, he told Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, preferred to serve in the state governments, where they could “slumber or sleep at home . . . while the common interests of America are mouldering and sinking into irretrievable . . . ruin.” While the second-tier delegates in the Continental Congress dithered over trifling issues, where were the first-tier leaders from Virginia?: “Where is Mason, Wythe, Jefferson, Nicholas, Pendleton, Nelson and another [i.e., Harrison] I could name?” Why was the Congress failing to prosecute profiteers and “forestallers” (hoarders who jacked up the prices of supplies needed by the army), who were obviously “pests of society,” all of whom ought to be “hung in Gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman?” How could a responsible group of legislators allow the currency to become a standing joke—not worth a Continental—and the inflation to spiral to such heights that “a rat, in the shape of a Horse, is not to be bought at this time for less than
£
200?” Given any semblance of equivalent resources, he was prepared to take on the British army and promise victory. But the failure of political leadership at the national level, which had permitted inflation, corruption, and broken promises to become “an epidemical disease,” meant that sheer indifference had become a more formidable enemy “infinitely more to be dreaded than the whole force of G. Britain.” It was beyond belief, he confided to an old Virginia friend, to watch America’s best prospects become “over cast and clouded by a host of infamous harpies, who to acquire a little pelf, would involve this great Continent in inextricable ruin.”
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The real problem, which Washington came to recognize only gradually, was less personal than structural, not so much a lack of will as a deep-rooted suspicion of government power that severely limited the authority of the Continental Congress. Parliament and the British ministry could impose taxes and raise armies because they possessed the sovereign power to speak for the British nation. During the early months of the war the Continental Congress had assumed emergency powers of equivalent authority, which rendered possible the creation of the Continental army and Washington’s appointment to head it. But by behaving as a national legislature, an American version of Parliament, the Congress made itself vulnerable to the same criticism that the colonies had directed at Parliament itself. The central impulse of the American Revolution had been a deep aversion to legislation, especially taxes, emanating from any consolidated government in a faraway place beyond the direct control and supervision of the citizens affected. From the perspective of Virginia and Massachusetts, the delegates gathered in Philadelphia were distant creatures who could not tax them any more than could the House of Commons in London. And since voting in the Continental Congress had always been by state—one state, one vote—it could not plausibly claim to represent fairly or fully accurately the American population as a whole. The Articles of Confederation, officially adopted in 1781, accurately embodied the same one-vote principle and did not create, or intend to create, a unified American nation but rather a confederation of sovereign states.

Washington had given little thought to these political questions before the war. His revolutionary convictions, to be sure, included a staunch rejection of Parliament’s power over the colonies. But the core of his hostility to British power had been rooted in questions of control rather than an aversion to political power per se, in the fact that it was
British
more than it was power. Personally, he despised the British presumptions of superiority that rendered him a mere subject. Politically, he believed that only an independent America could wrest control of the untapped riches west of the Alleghenies from London nabobs. He had left more finely tuned arguments about the proper configuration and character of an indigenous American government to others.

In 1780 he decided that he could no longer afford to remain silent. Although there were a few glimmerings before that date, he had been reluctant to express his opinions, lest in so doing he violate the near-sacred principle of civilian control. In 1777 he began the practice of sending routine Circulars to the States requesting money, supplies, and fresh recruits, his implicit recognition that ultimate power over these essentials lay with the state governments. By 1780 his growing sense of desperation pushed him over the edge as he became an outspoken advocate for expanded powers at the national level. “Certain I am,” he informed one Virginia delegate in the Congress, “that unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone; unless they are vested with powers by the several States competent to the great purposes of War, or assume them as a matter of right . . . that our Cause is lost. We can no longer drudge on in the old way. I see one head gradually changing into thirteen.” The Congress needed to do more than recommend; it needed to dictate. “In a word,” he complained, “our measures are not under the influence and direction of one council, but thirteen, each of which is actuated by local views and politics.” If the Congress failed to expand its mandate and become a true national government, he warned, “it will be madness in us, to think of prosecuting the War.”
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These were controversial conclusions about what the American Revolution must come to mean if it were to succeed. They were not destined to receive a full hearing until later, after the war had been won. Washington had reached them earlier than most precisely because he did not believe the war could be won unless they were immediately implemented. And in typical fashion, his thinking was not driven by theoretical arguments about republican government but by the harsh realities of war he faced as commander in chief, which by 1780 had come to resemble a more painful and protracted version of Valley Forge.

In January, for example, as two fully equipped British regiments prepared to embark from New York for South Carolina, sixty troops in the Massachusetts line had not been paid for a year and had not eaten in four days. Half the men had no shoes, but were intending to walk home because they had long since eaten their horses. Down in New Jersey, where the countryside had been picked clean after four years of foraging, Washington was forced to order a general confiscation of cattle and grain from the local farmers, noting that the choice was between stealing or starving: “We must assume the odious character of plunderers instead of the protectors of the people.” No one could be sure about the current size of the Continental army—the best guess was around ten thousand—because many enlistments ended with the new year, creating what Washington described as a forever fluctuating force “constantly sliding from under us as a pedestal of Ice would do from a Statue in a Summers day.” And no matter what the official rolls claimed, the number of starved, sick, and shoeless soldiers was so large that, as Washington put it, “there is greater disproportion between the total number, and the men fit for duty . . . than in any army in the world.” Even if the long-awaited French fleet magically appeared off Long Island, Washington estimated that he had only about half the troops necessary under his direct command to conduct a successful siege of New York.
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Over the ensuing months, what was already a dangerous situation became truly desperate. The winter encampment at Morristown in 1780 was more deplorably difficult than Valley Forge, with deaths and desertions reducing Washington’s army to about eight thousand, of which fully one-third were not fit for duty. In the summer Washington learned of two major British victories in the South. Despite heroic efforts by its defenders, Charleston fell victim to British naval supremacy, the entire American garrison of over five thousand taken prisoner. Then Gates’s army, recently sent south by the Congress with Washington’s grudging endorsement of Gates’s choice, was wholly routed at Camden. Washington tried to put the best face on these catastrophes, claiming that British naval supremacy had probably made Charleston indefensible, and that Gates’s futile attempt to repeat his Saratoga triumph by relying heavily on militia only demonstrated the folly of that celebrated but misguided tactic. In October, Washington recommended sending Greene, his most trusted general, to take charge of the surviving remnants of the army in the south. He confessed to Greene that it was probably an impossible mission, like sending one of the “forlorn hope” squads into battle and near-certain death.
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