Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (16 page)

By the end of the year there were fewer cases of unauthorized abandonment of posts or sleeping on duty. This circumstance reflected the imposition of tighter discipline and better training. Yet there were several instances in which courts-martial found soldiers guilty of “mutiny.” The largest instance—thirty-three riflemen of Colonel William Thompson’s Pennsylvania regiment—had acted on the evening of September 10, after one of their sergeants had been confined for neglecting his duty. These riflemen had joined the forces around Boston well after the siege began, and they seem to have come into the army thinking very well of themselves. Or, more likely, they simply had not been trained thoroughly and they resented the imposition of normal duty and discipline. Their company commander had not
seen fit to crack down on them when they refused to perform ordinary fatigue duties, including work on entrenchments and fortifications on Prospect Hill, in the northern sector that faced Bunker Hill. Their regiment lay under General Nathanael Greene’s command, and he had in the days before their outburst learned of their disaffection—they were, he wrote Washington, “very sulky,” but “there is little to be feared” from them.
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Greene was right in this judgment, though he must have wondered at it when he learned that some of the riflemen had set off with loaded muskets for the main guard in Cambridge to free one of their own from the guardhouse. Greene, Washington, and Charles Lee, with several companies from nearby, set out to stop them. One of the generals, probably Greene, ordered the mutineers to ground their weapons, which they did immediately. One of their colleagues who refused to take part, and who was thoroughly ashamed of his fellows, commented three days later that “these thirty-two rascals” had surrendered without a fight and were frightened at the “proceedings” they had set afoot.
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The courts-martial that followed in a few days recognized that, shocking as the affair might seem, no deep plot was involved, but apparently only troubled spirits. The punishments were light—twenty shillings per man in fines, with one man sentenced only to time in the guardhouse. Washington, who had an instinctive understanding of such upheavals, approved the sentences.

There was one other unspoken circumstance that encouraged light punishment in this case, and Washington felt it more acutely than anyone else: the morale of the army. The “greater Part of the Troops are in a State not far from Mutiny,” he reported to John Hancock. One source of poor morale was low pay—or no pay. If the troops were not paid soon, and if they were not paid “more punctually” in the future, “the Army must absolutely break up.” There were other reasons, of course, for the discontent of the soldiers. The army was not badly fed then, and its troops, though soon in need of winter clothing, were not ill clothed, but they needed uniforms; without them their appearance was not smart, not even military, and many of the men did not feel like soldiers. Sitting outside Boston often prevented them from marching or drilling, and the absence of such military actions robbed soldiers of the feeling that they were a sharp outfit fully prepared for anything.
Troops in trenches, behind breastworks, or standing watch in outposts undoubtedly recognized the danger in their positions, for they could see the British enemy, at times almost within musket range and usually never more than a mile away. Standing watch had few rewards, and Washington’s army, no more than most European armies, did not patrol vigorously. Had they done so, their spirits might have been higher, but after Bunker Hill there was not much fighting—few skirmishes that kept men on edge and gave them reason for what they were doing. In place, the army did not improve substantially—discipline continued to be elusive, and skills were undeveloped.
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Washington explained, at least in part, the disappointing character of the rank and file of the army as a consequence of the weak corps of officers. The officers he inherited on taking command of the New England Army had given him difficulties almost immediately. The trouble began at the top. Congress had reserved to itself the power to appoint all general officers. Legislatures or provincial congresses of the states were to appoint field- and company-grade officers. In the case of vacancies occasioned by the death or removal of a colonel or lower-ranked officer, Congress authorized Washington to appoint, by “brevet or warrant,” a replacement who would serve until the provincial congress chose someone else.
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Officers with the rank of general were another matter—Congress, attuned to the sensitivities of their constituencies in the states, reserved these appointments to themselves. The problem arose in the ranking of these officers, all of whom had reputations and standing locally. The most serious case involved John Thomas and William Heath, of Massachusetts, both appointed as brigadier generals, with Heath standing at fourth in the list of eight brigadiers and Thomas at sixth. This ranking conflicted with the order of the two in the Massachusetts service, where Heath was junior to Thomas. It so happened that the Massachusetts order reflected the competence and abilities of the two men, a fact apparently widely known. Thomas, convinced that he had been shabbily treated, threatened to resign. Washington did not know either man and, understandably, hesitated at first to resolve the conflict, but in a few days he came to see that Thomas’s abilities were greater than Heath’s. Fortunately, two powerful leaders in Massachusetts,
James Warren and Joseph Hawley, stepped in and persuaded Heath that Thomas deserved precedence. A means of changing the ranking presented itself when Seth Pomeroy, of Northampton, who had been placed first on the brigadiers’ list, failed to respond to his own appointment. Washington waited to hear from Pomeroy, and, when nothing was forthcoming from him, put Thomas in the top place. Congress itself had reconsidered the rankings at the instigation of representatives from Massachusetts and sent Thomas his commission in early August.
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Not all of the strife among officers arose from their ranking, and not all found solutions so easily. Rather, there were petty jealousies in evidence throughout the army. Many of them revolved around provincial rivalries and did not call for intervention by Washington, but the existence of these rivalries, and the local pride they revealed, troubled him. Washington wished in effect to erase state lines, to make the army truly continental. But at Boston, and especially in the first years of the war, he found that officers wished to remain with their own state’s troops. Their vision clearly was narrower than his, and the troops in the commands of the various states tended to agree with their officers.

Washington attempted in these milieus to banish provincialism in favor of unity. With his army surrounding Boston, it was more than unity of command he sought—it was unity of feeling and morale, and indeed a unity that implied the existence of a national union. He did not mean to destroy provincial loyalties, and he remained a Virginian to the core throughout his life. But he believed that the preservation of American freedom—his most profound purpose—could not survive policies that placed the states first.

Transcending state loyalties and their expression in the army and the Congress required careful diplomacy. Working his will in his command found him dealing with the states, usually governors and provincial congresses, with sensitivity and care. If Washington realized that he was widely regarded with something approaching awe throughout America, he gave no hint of it. There was no talking down to the governors or the various members of the Continental Congress whom he met or corresponded with. All were regarded with respect, their concerns listened to and responded to when a response was possible.

Congress had made Washington commander of the Continental Army and charged him with defending the American states; it had
not given him complete jurisdiction or power over all military matters. It could not have made such a grant had it wished to, for the thirteen states would not have allowed it. Washington’s dealings with the variety of powers on the American side revealed his own recognition that much was expected of him both in using his power and in making room for the states to use theirs. His understanding of these realities—political realities—is nowhere better illustrated than in his careful attempts to supply his army with the materials it needed to maintain itself and to fight the enemy in Boston.
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The lack of gunpowder was one of the realities. Shortly after his arrival in the Cambridge headquarters, Washington was given a report that was mildly reassuring, but a month later a second report, stating that the total amount of powder would provide “not more than 9 rounds per Man,” caused him to describe the army’s situation as “melancholy.” This term, he soon realized, might properly be applied to almost the entire stock of supplies available to his army. In the months that followed, he used every means he could think of to equip and supply his army without revealing to the British across the lines his woeful circumstances.

It was the Continental Congress and its president, John Hancock, to whom he turned most often. His letters to Hancock and nearby governors, especially Nicholas Cooke, of Rhode Island, and Jonathan Trumbull, of Connecticut, betray neither panic nor uncertainty concerning the American cause, and they are devoid of any expression of disappointment in Congress or the governors and their states. But while these accounts never wander into the personal, they are rich in facts that made clear to Congress that Washington regarded the army’s circumstances as unsatisfactory for a fighting force.
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Hancock, in Philadelphia, did not have to question Washington about what was going on around Boston, for Washington took pains to keep him informed of the circumstances of the army as well as the condition of British entrenchments, their supplies, and the movements of their ships in and out of Boston Harbor. These letters to Hancock made him in effect almost a brother officer at headquarters, a trusted colleague, and a friend. Yet they were always respectful and offered reassurance, if any was needed, that Washington, the commanding general, knew where power lay in the young republic and was determined to carry out the policies of its government.
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The lines of his authority were not as clear as his responsibility for the American military effort, and in the exchanges between him and Hancock, they were only gradually made clear. If Washington’s restraint was much in evidence in these letters, he used them to gently educate his superior. His sense of the importance of concerted action by all of the states was frequently a subtext in his reports to Hancock when he did not disclose explicitly his concern.

Yet it may not have been clear to his masters in Philadelphia what Washington was actually doing in the siege of Boston: giving the army its form and being. The Congress understood enough to join in deciding on the regimental organization. A regiment, one of its committees decided after conferences in camp with Washington, would have 728 officers and men. An infantry regiment would differ from an artillery regiment in numbers of officers and men. (The numbers specified changed throughout the war.) Washington proved receptive to such definitions coming from a civilian body, and not simply because he helped it decide on such matters. He believed in civilian control, and he also saw that implicating civilians in such decisions gave them a stake in the support of their creation.
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Sometimes in these months Washington explicitly taught Hancock to understand what else was required if an army was to be a whole—a rounded and complete institution. In an army “properly organized,” he wrote about three weeks after his arrival, “there are sundry officers of an Inferiour kind, such as Wagon Master, Master Carpenter.” He confessed that he did not know whether his powers “are sufficiently extensive for such Appointment,” but if they were he would—he promised—establish such places and fill them with “a strict Regard to Oeconomy, & the public Interest.” There is in this letter a fusion of tact and determination—no talking down to Congress, or its president, but a thoughtful explanation of how things should work in an army, with an implicit question (or request) that he might possess the authority to take an administrative action.
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The letters Washington wrote to Congress and others in the six months after he assumed command might be read as statements crowded with administrative and political matters. Such a reading would be fair, but not altogether accurate. For though Washington gave almost all of his time to the creation of an army, he yearned for the opportunity to use it, to drive the British from Boston. Neither
he nor anyone else on the American side anticipated with any sureness how the crisis with Britain might end. He was not alone in supposing that force would end the conflict, but others, including some in Congress, believed that simply holding on in Boston would compel the British government to come to accept the colonies’ desire to govern their own affairs, with the exception of those that pertained to some vague idea of imperial interests. For several months into the new year, 1776, some Americans clung to the fiction that the crisis was between themselves and the British ministry, sans the king. This feeling found expression in such terms as “ministerial” troops—not the king’s, or even the Crown’s. Some even expected the king to step in and ease recalcitrant ministers out of office. But when the king agreed to the Prohibitory Act, which barred trade with the colonies and then issued the proclamation that declared them in rebellion, such feeling in America largely vanished. For his part, Washington had given up on peace within the empire when he assumed command of the army, and he had in letters to friends berated British actions as the king’s actions. He faced many men who still cherished ideas of accommodation, but there was in him a growing clarity that nothing important could be accomplished until he drove the British out of Boston. Doing so, however, would not be easy, and his first steps toward fighting were taken to secure his army’s defense.
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