Washington: A Life (86 page)

For Washington, 1782 was taken up with matters possessing more symbolic than military meaning. The most vexing involved the treatment of prisoners, and none caused more controversy than the case of Captain Joshua Huddy, a member of the New Jersey militia. In April 1782 the British had captured Huddy at Toms River and handed him over to a civilian Tory group, the Associated Loyalists, who placed him in the custody of Captain Richard Lippincott. In a brutal act of reprisal, Lippincott decided to punish Huddy for the death of a Loyalist partisan named Philip White, who had been captured and executed by American militiamen after he killed one of his captors. Huddy was strung up from a tree with a note fastened to his chest that read “Up Goes Huddy for Philip White,” along with threats of further retribution.
⁸
Going through the motions of justice, Sir Henry Clinton subjected Captain Lippincott to a court-martial, which exonerated him on the ground that he had merely obeyed orders. This caused a furor on the American side because those orders had emanated from none other than William Franklin, the estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin Franklin.

Aghast that the perpetrator of such a “horrid deed” was freed, Washington ordered Brigadier General Moses Hazen to choose by lot a British officer to be executed in retaliation for Captain Huddy. Palpably torn by this decision, Washington instructed Hazen that “every possible tenderness that is consistent with the security … should be shown to the person whose unfortunate lot it may be to suffer.”
⁹
The person selected at random to die powerfully enlisted his captors’ sympathy. Captain Charles Asgill of the First British Regiment of Foot was only nineteen and of distinguished parentage; his father, a former lord mayor of London, had been a Whig sympathetic to American grievances. Making the decision still more agonizing was that Asgill had been captured at Yorktown, where Washington had guaranteed the safety of prisoners in the articles of capitulation. A conflicted Washington admitted that Captain Asgill was a young man “of humor and sentiment” and that his plight engendered the “keenest anguish.”
¹⁰

The projected execution blossomed into a cause célèbre as protests flooded in to Washington from abroad. Congress approved the execution, and public opinion overwhelmingly favored it. The brouhaha reawakened memories of the Major André affair and enlisted some of the same partisans. Evidently, some coolness still existed between Hamilton and Washington, for Hamilton protested the execution via Henry Knox rather than directly to Washington. Of the scheduled hanging, Hamilton insisted that “a sacrifice of this kind is entirely repugnant to the genius of the age we live in and is without example in modern history … It is a deliberate sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty and must be condemned.”
¹¹

Still haunted by André’s execution, Washington didn’t care to execute another sensitive young British officer and protested to one general that “while my duty calls me to make this decisive determination, humanity dictates a fear for the unfortunate offering and inclines me to say that I most devoutly wish his life may be saved … but it must be effected by the British commander-in-chief.”
¹²
Interestingly enough, the unsentimental Benjamin Franklin favored a tough, uncompromising stand. “If the English refuse to deliver up or punish this murderer,” he wrote, “it is saying that they choose to preserve him rather than Captain Asgill.”
¹³
Aware that he might be the target of patriotic reprisals, William Franklin fled to London.

In the end Washington handled the matter shrewdly and temporized instead of rushing to judgment. In an unexpected development, Lady Asgill pleaded her son’s case so eloquently at the court of Versailles that the king had his foreign minister request mercy for Captain Asgill. That November Congress obliged France by passing a resolution that granted clemency to the young British captain. It was a neat solution to a ticklish dilemma: Captain Asgill would be released at the behest of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Undoubtedly with enormous relief, Washington issued a pass that would take Captain Asgill to New York, thus ending the affair. He had dealt with it the way he would with many controversies during his presidency: by letting them simmer instead of bringing them to a premature boil.

The French partnership, however useful most of the time, was awkward at others, requiring Washington to pay homage to the French monarchy even as Americans fought against King George III. In the spring of 1782, when Louis XVI had a male heir, Washington was duty-bound to celebrate “the auspicious birth of a dauphin” and hope divine providence would “shed its choicest blessings upon the King of France and his royal consorts and favor them with a long, happy, and glorious reign.”
¹⁴
Having fought for independence, Americans still had no idea what sort of government would emerge in the aftermath of a successful war. Thus far the new nation had no real executive branch, just a few departments; no independent judiciary; and only an ineffectual Congress. For most Americans, the idea of royalty was still anathema. On the other hand, at least a few Americans feared chaos and touted monarchy as a possible way to fill the dangerous vacuum of executive power.

On May 22, 1782, Colonel Lewis Nicola of the Continental Army had the effrontery to suggest to Washington that he reign as America’s first monarch. He sent him a seven-page diatribe, citing “the weakness of republics” and the Continental Army’s privations at the hands of a feckless Congress, then conjured up a benevolent monarchy with Washington seated splendidly on the throne. “Some people have so connected the ideas of tyranny and monarchy as to find it very difficult to separate them … but if all other things are once adjusted, I believe strong arguments might be produced for admitting the title of king.”
¹⁵

While he had roundly berated congressional ineptitude, Washington had never entertained the idea of a monarchy and was left to wonder whether Nicola was the instrument of a covert army faction that favored a king. His reply, sent the same day, fairly breathed with horror. What makes the letter so impressive is its finality—this serpent must be killed in the egg: “Be assured, sir, no occurrence in the course of the war has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the army as you have expressed and [that] I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity.”
¹⁶
He didn’t dare tell a soul about Nicola’s letter, he said, lest it contaminate men’s minds: “I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country. If I am not deceived in the knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable … Let me conjure you then, if you have any regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind.”
¹⁷
Washington set such store by this momentous letter that, for the only time in the war, he demanded proof from his aides that his response was sealed and posted. Stunned, Nicola stammered out three replies in as many days, offering apologies for broaching the taboo subject.

During the summer of 1782 Washington showed his willingness to accept recognition of a more democratic sort when the newly incorporated Washington College was named in his honor in Chestertown, Maryland. Washington seldom allowed the use of his name, suggesting that he was flattered by this distinction. “I am much indebted for the honor conferred on me by giving my name to the college at Chester,” he wrote to the Reverend William Smith, the school’s first president, a Scottish Anglican clergyman. Washington donated fifty guineas to the school—promptly used to purchase optical instruments—and also served on its board.
¹⁸
Always regretting his own lack of a college education, Washington had surrounded himself with college-educated men, and his patronage of Washington College was perhaps a final way of wiping away that ancient stigma. In 1789 he received an honorary degree from the school.

At times during this uneventful year, Washington sent halfhearted letters to Rochambeau, proposing operations against New York or Charleston—suggestions that came to naught. Suspecting a British ploy, Washington scoffed at rumors of a negotiated peace in the offing and grew especially vigilant after Admiral Rodney defeated de Grasse in the Caribbean in April, sending London into a delirium of joy. Even when official word came in August from the British command in New York that peace talks had been opened in Paris, Washington still couldn’t conquer his ingrained suspicion. “That the King will push the war as long as the nation will find men or money admits not of a doubt in my mind,” he said flatly.
¹⁹
A thoroughgoing skeptic in foreign policy, Washington denigrated the British as devoid of idealism and driven only by pride and self-interest. Before setting aside arms, he wanted nothing less than “an absolute, unequivocal admission of American independence,” he told Thomas Paine.
²⁰
After all these years of war, Washington was still a hot-blooded militant and railed against “the persevering obstinacy of the king, the wickedness of his ministry and the haughty pride” of the British nation.
²¹
Such moral fervor had sustained him during the prolonged conflict.

Afraid that his army might relax its guard prematurely, he kept drilling troops on the parade ground, demanded that his men look sharp, and barked out a steady stream of instructions: “The commander in chief recommends to the officers to pay particular attention to the carriage of their men either upon parade or marching … Nothing contributes so much to the appearance of a soldier, or so plainly indicates discipline, as an erect carriage, firm step, and steady countenance.”
²²
He indicated his displeasure that soldiers didn’t “step boldly and freely, but short and with bent knees.”
²³
Not only did he want his men to look bright and snappy, but he wanted them housed in style, insisting that “
regularity, convenience,
and even some degree of
elegance
should be attended to in the construction of their huts.”
²⁴

To maintain the fighting spirit of his army, Washington introduced a decoration that came to be known as the “Purple Heart.” In cases of “unusual gallantry” or “extraordinary fidelity and essential service,” soldiers would receive a purple heart-shaped cloth, to be worn over the left breast.
²⁵
Since it was to be conferred on noncommissioned officers and ordinary soldiers, the decoration supplied further proof of Washington’s growing egalitarian spirit during the war. (After a lapse in its use, the Purple Heart was revived by presidential order in 1932, and anyone in the U.S. Army became eligible for it.) At the time when Washington inaugurated the honor, fighting had largely ceased, and only isolated deaths remained in the war. One of the last victims was his sparkling young aide John Laurens, who had hoped to raise black troops in the South. “Poor Laurens is no more,” Washington wrote glumly to Lafayette that October. “He fell in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina, attempting to prevent the enemy from plundering the country of rice.”
²⁶

Washington didn’t know that on November 30, 1782, a preliminary peace treaty had been signed in Paris and that the American side had won everything it could have wished, including recognition of independence and broad borders stretching north to the Great Lakes and west to the Mississippi. Washington got a glimmer of the truth in mid-December when the British general Alexander Leslie and his troops sailed from Charleston, South Carolina; a few hours later Nathanael Greene entered the city, bringing the southern war to a close. Washington congratulated Greene “on the glorious end you have put to hostilities in the southern states.”
²⁷
Whenever Washington lauded Greene, his praise never contained even a twinge of envy, only unmistakable pride. In marking the conclusion of southern combat, he paid lavish tribute to Greene, stating that “this happy change has been wrought, almost solely, by the personal abilities of Major Gen[era]l Greene.”
²⁸
This rosey outcome justified the faith Washington had shown early in the war, when Greene had blundered at Fort Washington and another commander might have lost all confidence in him.

What should have been a joyous moment for Washington turned into a troubled one. The national treasury had again run empty, the states having failed to make their requisite payments. As another icy winter loomed, Washington sensed deep discontent roiling his troops. Suddenly reluctant to leave them alone in Newburgh, he relinquished his cherished hope of returning to Mount Vernon. At first he even declined to ask Martha to make her annual pilgrimage to the camp, although he relented and she arrived in December. “The temper of the army is much soured,” he told one congressman in mid-November, “and has become more irritable than at any period since the commencement of the war.”
²⁹
Girding himself for disturbances, he vowed to stick close to his men and “try like a careful physician to prevent if possible the disorders getting to an incurable height.”
³⁰

Sitting in his snowbound Newburgh quarters, Washington wouldn’t hear about the provisional peace treaty until February. In the meantime, he knew the time “will pass heavily on in this dreary mansion in which we are fast locked by frost and snow.”
³¹
Affected by the frigid weather and isolation of Newburgh, Washington sounded a somber note in his letters. He wrote to General Heath, “Without amusements or avocations, I am spending another winter (I hope it will be the last that I shall be kept from returning to domestic life) among these rugged and dreary mountains.”
³²

The army’s sullen discontent revolved around the same stale complaints that had beset Washington throughout the war. As he recounted them to Major General John Armstrong, “The army, as usual, are without pay and a great part of the soldiery without shirts. And tho[ugh] the patience of them is equally threadbare, the states seem perfectly indifferent to their cries.”
³³
The soldiers were so famished that when local vendors peddled produce at their huts, they often plundered these simple country folk. Once again Washington couldn’t locate forage for his starving horses, complaining at Christmas that they “have been four days without a handful of hay and three of the same without a mouthful of grain.”
³⁴
The upshot of this outrageous situation was that officers canceled business that could be conducted only on horseback and found it impossible to confer with Washington at headquarters.