Washington: A Life (72 page)

As in previous winters, Washington was appalled by the lack of patriotism displayed by private citizens. He did not want to imitate British precedent and force nearby residents to house officers, but voluntary offers were not forthcoming. He reprimanded men who plundered food or livestock from local farms and warned his soldiers that “a night scarcely passes without gangs of soldiers going out of camp and committing every species of robbery, depredation, and the grossest personal insults. This conduct is intolerable and a disgrace to the army.”
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On the other hand, he privately confessed that he felt powerless to stop this marauding.

Then on January 2, 1780, thick snow began to descend on Morristown, accompanied by fierce winds, and continued steadily for four days. It was a blizzard of such historic proportions, said James Thacher, that “no man could endure its violence many minutes without danger of his life.”
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Four feet of snow blanketed the winter camp and drifted to six feet in many places, sealing off the army from incoming supplies and compounding the misery of men shivering in their bunks. Before the winter was through, the Morristown encampment would be pounded by a record twenty-eight snowfalls. It would qualify as one of the most frigid winters on record, so severe that New York Bay crusted over with ice thick enough for the British to wheel cannon across it. Because the ice formed land bridges, Washington meditated a surprise attack on the British garrison at Staten Island. The plan was for 2,500 men under Lord Stirling to cross over from New Jersey, destroy British supplies, and carry off sheep and cattle. Washington, who must have dreamed of reliving the Delaware crossing on Christmas Night 1776, grew so enamored of this plan that he worried the cold snap would end, thawing the ice. The plan was shelved when the British picked up intelligence about it, eliminating the element of surprise. Washington promptly confiscated the caps and mittens issued to men who were to conduct the raid. The British were cooking up their own surprises. In February a British raiding party of three hundred men on horseback crept up stealthily on Morristown in an apparent plot to kidnap Washington. When they couldn’t traverse the deep snow, they turned back and abandoned the plan.

As a howling blizzard swirled around the Ford mansion, Washington filed a dreary report with Congress: “Many of the [men] have been four or five days without meat entirely and short of bread and none but on very scanty supplies.”
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Horror stories abounded of ill-clad men gnawing tree bark or cooking shoes or dining on pet dogs. Washington said his men were eating every kind of horse food but hay. As at Valley Forge, they were starving in the midst of fertile farming country, adding an extra dimension of tragic gloom to their suffering. As Greene lamented, “A country overflowing with plenty are now suffering an army, employed for the defense of everything that is dear and valuable, to perish for want of food.”
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Even forced requisitions didn’t alleviate the abominable situation. As late as April 12 Washington bewailed the perilous scarcity of food: “We have not at this day one ounce of meat, fresh or salt, in the magazine,” and he didn’t know of any carts loaded with meat rolling toward Morristown.
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Further aggravating matters was the fact that his army hadn’t been paid in months. Alexander Hamilton, never one to shy away from strong opinions, probably spoke for many soldiers when he wrote, “We begin to hate the country for its neglect of us.”
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The winter wasn’t a complete loss for Hamilton, who met and fell in love with his future wife, Elizabeth Schuyler, the daughter of General Schuyler. The young woman never forgot Martha Washington’s kindness: “She was quite short: a plump little woman with dark brown eyes, her hair a little frosty, and very plainly dressed for such a grand lady as I considered her … She was always my ideal of a true woman.”
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The war continued to serve as Washington’s political schoolroom. Once again a harrowing winter forced him to think analytically about the nation’s ills. On both the civilian and the military side of the conflict, he condemned slipshod, amateurish methods. America needed professional soldiers instead of men on short enlistments, just as it needed congressmen who stayed in office long enough to gain experience. Most of all Americans had to conquer their excessive attachment to state sovereignty. “Certain I am,” Washington told Joseph Jones, a delegate from Virginia, “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 … our cause is lost.”
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“I see one head gradually changing into thirteen,” he confessed to Jones. “I see one army branching into thirteen and, instead of looking up to Congress as the supreme controlling power of the United States, [they] are considering themselves as dependent on their respective states.”
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Washington viewed the restoration of American credit as the country’s foremost political need, and he supported loans and heavy taxation to attain it. While fighting Great Britain, he pondered the source of its military power and found the answer in public credit, which gave the enemy inexhaustible resources. “In modern wars,” he told Joseph Reed, “the longest purse must chiefly determine the event,” and he feared that England, with a well-funded debt, would triumph over America with its chaotic finances and depleted coffers. “Though the [British] government is deeply in debt and of course poor, the nation is rich and their riches afford a fund which will not be easily exhausted. Besides, their system of public credit is such that it is capable of greater exertions than that of any other nation.”
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This letter prefigures the Hamiltonian program that would distinguish Washington’s economic policy as president. It took courage for Washington, instead of simply demonizing Great Britain, to study the secrets of its strength. Throughout the war, he believed that an American victory would have been a foregone conclusion if the country had enjoyed a strong Congress, a sound currency, stable finances, and an enduring army. Not surprisingly, many other officers in the Continental Army became committed nationalists and adherents of a robust central government. One virtue of a war that dragged on for so many years was that it gave the patriots a long gestation period in which to work out the rudiments of a federal government, financial mechanisms, diplomatic alliances, and other elements of a modern nation-state.

The hardship of the Morristown winter persisted well into the spring. On May 25 two mutinous regiments of the Connecticut Line, defying Washington’s orders, burst from their huts at dusk, flashing weapons, and declared they would either return home or confront local farmers to “gain subsistence at the point of the bayonet.”
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These men, not having been paid in five months, saw no relief in sight. The officers calmed them down without further incident, but they were no less distraught than their men. Instead of feeling resentful toward his rebellious troops, Washington directed his anger at apathetic citizens who permitted this deplorable state. “The men have borne their distress with a firmness and patience never exceeded … but there are certain bounds beyond which it is impossible for human nature to go,” Washington warned Congress.
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In coping with this high-pressure situation, Washington receded deeper into himself, as if afraid to voice his true feelings aloud, lest it demoralize his men. “The great man is confounded at his situation,” Greene reported to Joseph Reed, “but appears to be reserved and silent.”
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Martha Washington, who stayed in Morristown until June, told her brother-in-law that “the poor General was so unhappy that it distressed me exceedingly.”
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At times Washington pretended to a deeper philosophic serenity than he could honestly claim. “The prospect, my dear Baron, is gloomy and the storm thickens,” he told Steuben, then went on to say, “I have been so inured to difficulties in the course of this contest that I have learned to look on them with more tranquillity than formerly.”
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In a revealing letter to Robert Morris that May, Washington noted, with restrained jollity, that in the absence of wine, he had been forced to substitute grog made from New England rum and drink it from a wooden bowl. Then he made a comment that suggested how his wartime experience had dampened his general experience of things. When his “public duty” ended, he told Morris, “I may be incapable of … social enjoyments.”
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What lifted Washington from the worst depths of dejection was the extraordinary heroism of his army, which had been reduced to eight thousand men, one-third still unfit for duty. Looking back upon the ghastly conditions of that winter, he found the army’s survival almost beyond belief. To brother Jack, he expressed amazement: “that an army reduced almost to nothing (by the expiration of short enlistments) should sometimes be five or six days together without bread, then as many without meat, and once or twice two or three without either; that the same army should have had numbers of men in it with scarcely clothes enough to cover their nakedness and a full fourth of it without even the shadow of a blanket, severe as the winter was, and that men under these circumstances were held together, is hardly within the bounds of credibility, but is nevertheless true.”
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IN THE SPRING OF 1780 Washington’s most immediate concern was the uncertain fate of the threatened American garrison in Charleston, South Carolina. Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis had set sail with a large flotilla from New York and besieged Charleston as the main theater of war shifted irreversibly to the South. The American force was commanded by Major General Benjamin Lincoln, a husky former farmer from Massachusetts. Lincoln was popular and widely respected, and Washington credited him with being “an active, spirited, sensible man.”
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The commander in chief remained a far-off observer of the Charleston deadlock, however, since Congress and the Board of War had deprived him of jurisdiction over the southern department, and he didn’t care to quarrel with this blatantly political decision.

Queasily aware of what the loss of a major seaport would mean, Washington prophesied that the fall of Charleston would probably “involve the most calamitous consequences to the whole state of South Carolina, and even perhaps beyond it.”
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At the very least it would expose the Carolinas to merciless British raids. By massing his men in the coastal city, Lincoln had left the interior pretty much defenseless. “It is putting much to the hazard,” Washington confided to Steuben. “I have the greatest reliance on General Lincoln’s prudence, but I cannot forbear dreading the event.”
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Washington’s dread was not misplaced. On May 12, 1780, Charleston capitulated to the British, and 2,571 Continental soldiers, 343 artillery pieces, and almost 6,000 muskets fell into enemy hands. Under the arcane rituals of eighteenth-century warfare, defeated forces were typically allowed to surrender with dignity and march out with their colors flying proudly. To shame the Americans, the British forbade them this customary honor, forcing them to lay down their arms in humiliated silence. The defeated soldiers then faced the unpleasant choice of either becoming prisoners of war or returning home with a solemn vow to refrain from further fighting, reverting to loyal British subjects.

As he reflected on this devastating blow, Washington sounded alternately bitter and philosophical. He believed the British had expertly timed their campaign to exploit his army’s weakness at Morristown and knew this resounding victory would “ give spirit to our enemies.”
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He also suspected the British would use Charleston as a springboard to launch incursions into the Carolinas and Virginia. True to his prediction, Clinton, while steering a large portion of his forces back to New York, left Cornwallis with a sizable force to terrorize the South. At the same time Washington wondered whether the British had now stretched themselves too thin, forcing them to pay a steep price in blood and treasure to maintain this faraway outpost.

With the American treasury empty, Washington could not contemplate a potent offensive campaign without French largesse. That winter the French had decided to send an enormous expeditionary force to America, commanded by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, the Count de Rochambeau. It was the first time the French had supplemented a fleet with a massive army. France had elevated the illustrious Rochambeau to the lofty rank of lieutenant general but, in a diplomatic concession to American sensibilities, agreed that he would be placed, at least nominally, under Washington’s orders. The French fleet under the Chevalier de Ternay would also be subject to Washington’s control, yet after his frustrations with the mercurial d’Estaing, Washington entertained no illusions about exercising any real influence.

The person assigned to herald this impending force was a natural choice for the job. In early March Lafayette set sail for America, ready to resume his post as a major general and act as intermediary between Washington and Rochambeau. As soon as he disembarked in Massachusetts in late April, Lafayette, never bashful about his starring role in the American drama, rushed off a typically histrionic letter to Washington that throbbed with boyish excitement: “Here I am, my dear general, and in the midst of the joy I feel in finding myself again one of your loving soldiers … I have affairs of the utmost importance which I should at first communicate to you alone.”
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Washington grew emotional as he read the message. Then on May 10 the beaming author himself strode into his presence, and the two men eagerly clasped each other. Recounting this sentimental reunion, Lafayette wrote that Washington’s “eyes filled with tears of joy … a certain proof of a truly paternal love.”
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Washington lost no time in lobbying Lafayette for a Franco-American invasion of New York, which would possess the collateral advantage of lessening British pressure on the southern states.