Washington: A Life (56 page)

Twenty-five miles west of New York City, ringed by protective hills, Morristown was rich in farms that could feed famished troops and provide a snug winter retreat. For his headquarters, Washington chose a building on the village green that once served as a tavern. He enjoyed a frugal life, compared to the sumptuous balls that General Howe was throwing for his officers in Manhattan. Once the hubbub of battle subsided, Washington longed for Martha’s company and was starved for news of home. For months he had discontinued correspondence with friends and family in Virginia, “finding it incompatible with my public business,” as he told Robert Morris. “A letter or two from my family are regularly sent by the post, but very irregularly received, which is rather mortifying, as it deprives me of the consolation of hearing from home on domestic matters.”
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With his emotional life still rooted in Mount Vernon and the war now threatening to drag on interminably, he contended that nobody “suffers more by an absence from home than myself.”
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Martha, unable to travel across a snowbound landscape, wouldn’t arrive until nearly spring.

The commander in chief had no respite from the crisis atmosphere that had shadowed him for months. Conditions were so appalling in patriot hospitals that one doctor remembered having seen “from four to five patients die on the same straw before it was changed.”
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When smallpox appeared in his camp, Washington feared a calamity and hastily informed Hancock that he planned to inoculate all his troops. He also asked Dr. William Shippen to inoculate recruits passing through Philadelphia en route to his army, an enlightened action that helped stave off an epidemic.

Washington’s tenure as commander in chief featured relatively few battles, often fought after extended intervals of relative calm, underscoring the importance of winning the allegiance of a population that vacillated between fealty to the Crown and patriotic indignation. The fair treatment of civilians formed an essential part of the war effort. Washington had a sure grasp of the principles of this republican revolution, asserting that “the spirit and willingness of the people must in a great measure take [the] place of coercion.”
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No British general could compete with him in this contest for popular opinion. With one eye fixed on the civilian populace, Washington showed punctilious respect for private property and was especially perturbed when American troops sacked houses under the pretext that the owners were Tories. His overriding goal was to contrast his own humane behavior with the predatory ways of the enemy.

Nothing expressed Washington’s outrage over the abuse of civilians more powerfully than an October 1778 incident involving his personal guard. John Herring, a member of that guard, was sent to get supplies for Washington’s table and was furnished with a horse and pass. When rebuffed at the home of a Tory named Prince Howland, he spied some costly objects he coveted and dispatched three others from Washington’s guard—John Herrick, Moses Walton, and a fifer named Elias Brown—to procure them. The three men broke into Howland’s house and looted silver spoons, silver dollars, and clothing, then repeated the performance at the home of one John Hoag. In protesting the incident, Howland described the three vandals as having worn the round hats adorned with bearskin strips that distinguished Washington’s guard. Washington endorsed the death sentences handed down by a court-martial to Herring, Brown, and Walton, along with one hundred lashes for Herrick. “His Excellency the Commander in Chief approves these sentences,” read the general orders. “Shocked at the frequent, horrible villainies of this nature committed by the troops of late, he is determined to make examples which will deter the boldest and most harden[e]d offenders.”
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While Walton and Brown escaped before execution, John Herring was duly hung, and John Herrick received his one hundred lashes.

The opinions of New Jersey’s citizens became of paramount importance after the Trenton and Princeton victories removed the aura of protection that had sustained Loyalist families. A militant to his fingertips, Washington cherished no love for Tories, whom he portrayed as diabolical and branded “abominable pests of society.”
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He now promulgated an order that those who had sworn loyalty to England should swear allegiance to the United States. For those who demurred, Washington granted (in a lovely rhetorical ploy) “full liberty” to defect to the other side.
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He devised an exquisitely civilized policy: Loyalists would be conducted to British lines with their personal possessions but would have the option of leaving behind their wives and children. Such Solomon-like solutions made George Washington the country’s first chief executive a dozen years before he was officially elected to the post.

During the winter of 1776-77 the British sent out foraging parties from New York to raid the New Jersey countryside, and Washington directed the militia to “harass their troops to death” in what became a conflict of “daily skirmishes.”
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This small-scale warfare whittled away British power as the militia gathered horses, cattle, and sheep to feed the American army. Thomas Jones, a Loyalist judge in New York, wrote that not “a stick of wood, a spear of grass or a kernel of corn could the troops in New Jersey procure without fighting for it.”
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Congressmen constantly requested that Washington defend their districts but refused to appropriate money to do so. These amateur experts, he thought, had no idea of the handicaps under which he toiled. “In a word,” he seethed, “when they are at a distance, they think it is but to say, ‘Presto! Begone’ and everything is done.”
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It took tremendous strength to parry requests from politicians whose support he desperately needed.

During the long Morristown winter, Washington made notable advances in organizing a spy network under his personal supervision. This operation had enjoyed a top priority from the moment he arrived in Cambridge in 1775. With his natural reticence and sphinxlike personality, Washington was a natural student of espionage. At first his spy operation was haphazard in nature, cohering into a true system only by 1779. To guarantee secrecy, he never hinted in letters at the identity of spies. Instead he assigned them names or numbers or employed vague locutions, such as “the person you mentioned.”
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He favored having the minimum number of people involved in any spy ring, and the diagram of the network existed in his mind alone. After 1779 he frequently had spies communicate via invisible ink, developed by John James’s brother James, who was a doctor and an amateur chemist. This ink was usually applied to blank pages of books or interlined in family letters. “It is in my power, I believe, to procure a liquid which nothing but a counter liquor (rubbed over the paper afterwards) can make legible” was how he described its workings.
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Secret notes were typically pressed between leather bindings and pasteboard covers of transported books.

To spy on New York—“the fountain of all intelligence,” Washington anointed it—was his principal objective, and he soon had the town covered with informers. He preferred people who could gather intelligence in the course of their everyday affairs, and his mind proved inventive in its choices.
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With some spies Washington even offered personal coaching, telling one to “mix with and put on the airs of a Tory to cover his real character and avoid suspicion.”
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With an insatiable appetite for intelligence, he entreated Presbyterian minister Alexander McWhorter, the chaplain of an artillery brigade, to press convicted spies for information, while offering them theological comfort before they were hung.

Right before the Princeton battle, Washington informed Philadelphia financier Robert Morris that “we have the greatest occasion at present for hard money to pay a certain set of people who are of particular use to us … Silver would be most convenient.”
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Washington considered Morris, a huge man with a ruddy complexion and a genial personality, the financier with the best mercantile knowledge and connections in North America. He often tapped Morris for money because he needed to bypass Congress, which couldn’t be trusted to keep secrets. When Morris first approached a rich Quaker in Philadelphia for funds, the man balked, saying he was “opposed to fighting of any sort.”
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Morris overcame the man’s religious scruples and sent Washington two canvas bags bulging with glittering coins, including Spanish silver dollars, French half crowns, and English crowns, an incident Washington always remembered. That he was allowed to supervise an espionage budget, without accounting to Congress, bespeaks the extraordinary trust placed in the commander in chief. Periodically he asked Congress for sums of gold for spies and kept the money bags with his personal belongings for safekeeping. He practiced the entire range of espionage tactics, including double agents and disinformation. In March 1777, for example, he passed along a litany of false information to Elisha Boudinot, who was supposed to relay it to a spy “to deceive the enemy.”
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The circumspect Washington showed real artistry as a spymaster. This wasn’t surprising, since he had repeatedly engaged in bluffs to fool the enemy. In April 1777 he alerted Joseph Reed that an unnamed man, recently arrested, had served as an American spy. He was such a valuable agent that Washington passed along orders that his allegiance should be reinforced by a “handsome present in money” and that he should then be released in such a way as “to give it the appearance of an accidental escape from confinement.”
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Washington’s instructions sounded knowing: “Great care must be taken so to conduct the scheme as to make the escape appear natural and real. There must be neither too much facility, nor too much refinement, for doing too little, or overacting the part, would alike beget a suspicion.”
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In using spies as double agents to spread disinformation, Washington again seemed very expert: “It is best to keep them in a way of knowing as little of our true circumstances as possible and, in order that they may really deceive the enemy in their reports, to endeavour in the first place to deceive them.”
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On one occasion that winter, when an officer requested permission to arrest a spy, Washington shrewdly suggested that he woo the spy with a dinner invitation, then leave nearby, as if by sheer negligence, a sheet pegging the Continental Army’s strength at a grossly exaggerated number. It was one of many ways that Washington misled the enemy to conceal his own weakness.

Washington devoted far more time to the onerous task of drafting letters than to leading men into battle. Running an embryonic government, he protested to Congress that he and his aides “are confined from morn till eve, hearing and answering the applications and letters of one and another,” leaving him with “no hours for recreation.”
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He groaned at the huge stacks of correspondence and felt besieged by supplicants for various favors. At times the enormous quantity of paperwork must have seemed more daunting than British arms. When brother Samuel asked for a portrait of him, he pleaded a lack of time to sit for a painter: “If ever you get a picture of mine, taken from the life, it must be when I am remov[e]d from the busy scenes of a camp.”
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At times, he appeared overwhelmed by bureaucratic demands, with the “business of so many different departments centering with me and by me to be handed on to Congress for their information, added to the intercourse I am obliged to keep up with the adjacent states.”
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Washington had trained himself to write pithy, meaty letters, with little frivolity or small talk. The letters were always clear, sometimes elegant, often forceful. Even Jefferson, a fluent wordsmith, praised Washington’s correspondence, saying that “he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style.”
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Because aides drafted most of Washington’s superlative wartime letters, some historians have denied him credit. But Washington oversaw their work, first giving them the gist of messages, then editing drafts until they met his exacting standards. His aides became fine mimics of their boss, and their letters echo one another’s because they were well schooled in Washington’s style. He wanted letters so immaculate that he had them rewritten several times if they contained even small erasures.

Washington worked in close proximity with aides, who typically slept under the same roof. These scribes labored in a single room, bent over small wooden tables, while the commander kept a small office to the side. As at Mount Vernon, Washington adhered to an unvarying daily routine. Arriving fully dressed, he breakfasted with his aides and parceled out letters to be answered, along with his preferred responses. He then reviewed his troops on horseback and expected to find the letters in finished form by the time of his noonday return.

The best camaraderie that Washington enjoyed came in the convivial company of his young aides during midafternoon dinners. Up to thirty people attended these affairs, many sitting on walnut camp stools. As much as possible, Washington converted these repasts into little oases of elegant society, a reminder of civilized life at Mount Vernon. The company dined on damask tablecloths and used sparkling silver flatware bearing Washington’s griffin crest, while drinking wine from silver cups. One aide sat beside Washington and helped to serve the food and drinks. These meals could last for hours, with a bountiful table covered by heavy, succulent foods. One amazed French visitor recalled that “the meal was in the English fashion, consisting of eight or ten large [serving] dishes of meat and poultry, with vegetables of several sorts, followed by a second course of pastry, comprised under the two denominations of ‘pies’ and ‘puddings.’”
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There followed abundant platters of apples and nuts. Washington liked to crack nuts as he talked, a habit that he later blamed for his long history of dental trouble.