Washington: A Life (76 page)

Champe and Baldwin were set to execute their plan in December, when Arnold was sent to Virginia, a state largely untouched by the war thus far, with a fleet of forty-two ships and seventeen hundred soldiers. Despite a warning from Washington, Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson procrastinated in summoning the state militia, and Arnold swept into the state capital at Richmond, burning supply depots and buildings. The scheme to abduct Arnold had been foiled, but Washington remained grimly implacable in his resolve to capture the blackguard. In February 1781 he sent Lafayette to Virginia with twelve hundred troops to pursue Arnold and toughened the terms for dealing with him. Should Arnold “fall into your hands,” he ordered Lafayette, “you will execute [him] in the most summary way.”
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Washington never did capture Arnold. In the spring Arnold wrote to George Germain and suggested a neat way of seducing Washington to the British side. “A title offered to General Washington might not prove unacceptable,” he wrote.
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In the end, Arnold proved no better at reading George Washington’s character than Washington had been at penetrating his disguise.

AFTER THE DRAMA of Benedict Arnold’s treachery, Washington returned to the mundane issues that had long bedeviled his army, especially the abysmal food shortages and barren warehouses that failed to supply winter outfits. His desperate men started to swarm across the countryside, engaging in “every species of robbery and plunder,” Washington reported.
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Earlier in the fall he had grown so distressed over his men ransacking citizens’ homes that he had sentenced to death one David Hall, who stole money and silver plates from a local resident. He assembled fifty men from every brigade to watch the execution and ponder its significance. For all his dismay over such misbehavior, however, Washington was far more livid with the venal farmers who illegally sold “fresh meats and flour of the country” to the British Army, which feasted on ample supplies in New York.
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In late November 1780 Washington sent his army into winter quarters, assigning the bulk of them to West Point, while he lodged in a cramped Dutch farmhouse overlooking the Hudson River at New Windsor, New York. Depressed by this “dreary station,” he had to requisition supplies from nearby residents to set his meager table and pleaded with Congress for emergency funds.
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“We have neither money nor credit,” he wrote, “adequate to the purchase of a few boards for doors to our log huts … It would be well for the troops if, like chameleons, they could live upon air, or, like the bear, suck their paws for sustenance during the rigor of the approaching season.”
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Things grew so grim that Washington’s own horses were starving for want of forage.

Perhaps it was the aborted plan to kidnap Benedict Arnold that planted the idea in Washington’s mind of attempting a daring abduction of Sir Henry Clinton. On Christmas Night he gave the go-ahead to Lieutenant Colonel David Humphreys to row down the Hudson to New York with a small band of men, their oars muffled to avert detection. The nature of the top secret mission was disclosed only to participants, right before they shoved off. “I prefer a small number to a large one,” Washington said, “because it is more manageable in the night and less liable to confusion.”
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The party was supposed to land at Clinton’s house on the Hudson, disarm the guards, pinion Clinton, then hurry back up the Hudson with their high-ranking prize. In the event, a brisk wind sprang up and blew the boats into the bay, scuttling the operation.

On New Year’s Day 1781 Washington’s worst nightmares were realized when thirteen hundred troops from the Pennsylvania Line, encamped near Morristown, mutinied and killed several officers. Much inflamed by rum, these men aired a host of legitimate grievances: insufficient food, clothing, and pay. After grabbing every musket in sight and six cannon, they angrily stormed off toward Philadelphia, where they intended to intimidate Congress into providing relief. The insurgents stressed that they acted under duress—“We are not Arnolds” was a favorite battle cry—but they could no longer stomach the inhumane treatment inflicted on them by politicians. Among other things, they could not tolerate that newly enlisted men were being paid cash bounties while they had received no pay in more than a year.

The ranking officer on the scene was the valiant but hot-blooded Anthony Wayne. Washington encouraged him to stick close to his men as they marched and not brake their movement until they crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania. Washington experienced an overriding fear of massive desertion or even full-blown defection to the British—Sir Henry Clinton sent emissaries to entice them into exactly such treachery—and he thought it would help tostem such flight if the river stood
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the mutineers. Because his officers warned of smoldering discontent among the New Windsor troops, Washington feared abandoning them and tried to screen them from inflammatory news of the mutiny. Taking personal charge of the situation, he also worried about a loss of face if he ordered mutineers to desist and they ignored him. Bypassing Congress, Washington wrote directly to the states and demanded more provisions along with three months’ pay for the troops. Sympathetic to their complaints, if aggrieved by their methods, he spluttered in wrath that “it is in vain to think an army can be kept together much longer under such a variety of sufferings as ours has experienced.”
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The Pennsylvania Line stopped at Princeton and Trenton and never reached Philadelphia. To squash the uprising, Wayne drew on New Jersey soldiers and summoned additional militia. He negotiated a settlement with the mutineers under which half would be discharged and another half furloughed until April. The soldiers would receive certificates to compensate them for their depreciated currency and would be issued extra clothing. Although Washington accepted the expediency of this bargain, he hated negotiating with disobedient soldiers. Wayne also decided, with Washington’s blessing, to make an example of the ringleaders. He called out twelve refractory members of the revolt and lined them up in a farmer’s field before firing squads made up of their fellow soldiers. One fifer described this brutal scene: “The distance that the platoons stood from [the condemned men] at the time they fired could not have been more than ten feet. So near did they stand that the handkerchiefs covering the eyes of some of them were set on fire … The fence and even the heads of rye for some distance within the field were covered with the blood and brains.”
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When one firing squad victim lay bleeding but still alive, Wayne ordered a soldier to bayonet him to death. The soldier balked, saying he couldn’t kill his comrade. With that, Wayne drew his pistol and said he would kill the man on the spot if he didn’t obey orders. The hapless soldier then stepped forward and plunged his bayonet into the writhing man. To ensure that the bloody message of these deaths lingered, Wayne ordered the entire Pennsylvania Line to circle around the dead soldiers.

Anthony Wayne had no qualms about his action and wrote proudly to Washington that “a liberal dose of niter [gunpowder] had done the trick.”
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Washington, who could be extremely tough when necessary, didn’t second-guess Wayne’s reprisals. Months later he told Wayne, “Sudden and exemplary punishments were certainly necessary upon the new appearance of that daring and mutinous spirit which convulsed the line last winter.”
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Washington had long believed that mutinies, if not stamped out vigorously, would only multiply.

No sooner was the Pennsylvania mutiny suppressed than the contagion spread to the New Jersey Line in Pompton. As two hundred mutinous troops, giddy with liquor, headed for the state capital at Trenton, Washington decided he had had enough. He refused to negotiate with the rebels, demanded unconditional submission, and vowed to execute several of the leaders. To quell the uprising, he ordered five hundred or six hundred troops under Major General Robert Howe to march from West Point toward New Jersey. He also tried to impress upon the loyal troops “how dangerous to civil liberty the precedent is of armed soldiers dictating terms to their country.”
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Sending troops was a high-stakes gamble, since Washington didn’t know whether they would fire upon rowdy fellow soldiers, “but I thought it indispensable to bring the matter to an issue and risk all extremities,” he told Congress.
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On January 27 General Howe surrounded the mutineers, snuffed out the revolt, and made an example of several instigators. He lined up a firing squad composed of a dozen mutineers and ordered them to execute two mutinous sergeants. Three of the executioners were told to shoot at the head and three at the heart, while the other six stood ready to finish off victims that lay squirming on the ground. Once again Washington feared he would squander his authority if men disobeyed him, and he kept his distance from the scene at Ringwood, New Jersey. Once he heard that the New Jersey men had surrendered and repented, he took up their crusade to lobby politicians for better pay, food, and housing.

A critical element of the relief effort lay in soliciting fresh money from France. In December Congress drafted John Laurens as a special envoy to France, where it hoped he would team up with Benjamin Franklin to wrest a huge loan from the court at Versailles. Laurens, with Thomas Paine acting as his secretary, was to fire up French enthusiasm through compelling eyewitness accounts of the war. Because of Washington’s renown in France, Congress also hoped that a certified member of his military family would receive an effusive welcome. For three days Washington huddled with Laurens and Paine to forge a strategy. “We are at the end of our tether,” Washington told them, “and now or never our deliverance must come.”
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He deemed a foreign loan essential, since America had only a tiny moneyed elite and Congress had mismanaged its finances. If he had to keep confiscating produce from farmers, Washington feared that supporters would find the Continental Army’s methods “burdensome and oppressive,” defeating the idea of a fight for liberty.
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Even as Washington jockeyed to keep his northern army from unraveling, the prospects for victory brightened in the South. On January 17 Brigadier General Daniel Morgan pulled off a spectacular victory at Cowpens, South Carolina, routing a veteran army under the notorious Tarleton. For once, it was the Americans who spread terror by sprinting forward with fixed bayonets. The tally of casualties decisively favored the Americans: more than 300 British soldiers were killed or wounded versus a mere 70 Americans; 500 able-bodied enemy soldiers were captured along with 800 muskets. Sir Henry Clinton later identified the Cowpens disaster as “the first link of a chain of events that followed each other in regular succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America.”
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Washington celebrated the “decisive and glorious victory” and insisted it would have a dramatic effect on the southern campaign.

 

 

INEVITABLY, the private appraisal of Washington by his close subordinates was less glowing than their public eulogies. He was too much of a perfectionist to enjoy an easy rapport with his aides, and his discontent sometimes festered before erupting unexpectedly. By dint of the superlative letters he had drafted and his military acumen, Alexander Hamilton had risen to become Washington’s de facto chief of staff. When Congress decided to create three new positions—ministers of war, finance, and foreign affairs—Hamilton’s name was bandied about as a prospective “superintendent of finance.” Before Robert Morris accepted the post, General Sullivan asked Washington to comment on Hamilton’s financial abilities, and the commander seemed taken aback: “How far Colo. Hamilton, of whom you ask my opinion as a financier, has turned his thoughts to that particular study, I am unable to ans[we]r, because I never entered upon a discussion on this point with him. But this I can venture to advance from a thorough knowledge of him, that there are few men to be found of his age who has a more general knowledge than he possesses and none whose soul is more firmly engaged in the cause or who exceeds him in probity and sterling virtue.”
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Although Hamilton subscribed to Washington’s values and principles—which was why he could mimic him so expertly in letters—he expressed misgivings about his personality. Hamilton had taken a long and searching look at George Washington. Working in daily contact with a man burdened by multiple cares, Hamilton inevitably was exposed to Washington’s bad-tempered side. A stoic figure who strove to be perfectly composed in public, Washington needed to blow off steam in private, and the proud, sensitive young Hamilton grew weary of dealing with his boss’s varying moods.

Like many talented subordinates, Hamilton nurtured a rich fantasy life and could easily have imagined himself in Washington’s place. He found a desk job, even such a prestigious one, too lowly and monotonous for his tastes and dreamed of battlefield glory, repeatedly requesting a field command. But he wielded such a skillful pen that Washington was reluctant to dispense with it and turned him down. In December 1780 he also scotched Hamilton’s chance of becoming adjutant general, which would have jumped him over several officers of superior rank and thereby created endless trouble.

On December 14, 1780, Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler, which catapulted the young West Indian into a more rarefied social sphere. The orphaned young man must have felt buoyed by a sense of security altogether new in his experience. That January he resolved that “if there should ever happen [to be] a breach” with Washington, instead of settling their differences, he would “never to consent to an accommodation.”
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In other words, Hamilton would not provoke a break, but he was fully prepared to exploit one. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Washington, who felt beleaguered after two mutinies in New Jersey.