Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (31 page)

The failure of logistics—by itself so serious as to imperil the American cause—was not the only failure that shook him to the point that he was willing to cast aside his usual silence. Washington had always been disposed to conceal his doubts about the prospects of success in whatever engaged him. His usual practice was to repress his feelings and to get on with the job. Why talk, or explain what one thought, if the task at hand could be done without words? Now he had to do more than explain or talk—he had to give his passions an expression that would force others to do what they did not wish to do.

That many of his officers did not share his resolve to keep going became clear late in the year. At that time they began leaving the army, resigning their commissions or simply going home. In these days surrounding the new year, he did not have an exact count of the number of officers who had resigned or taken leave. Early in 1778, he told Laurens that at least ninety had left the army; the number on leave had
increased so rapidly that he had issued orders that no leaves were to be granted without his permission. He also ordered two brigadier generals who had gone home to get themselves back to camp. But by March he was reporting that, since August 1777, “between two & three hundred officers have resigned their commissions and many others with difficulty dissuaded from it.”
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Whenever the opportunity came up to keep officers in the army he took it, but the opportunity was almost always limited and usually appeared in a letter of resignation sent in by the officer concerned. He answered such letters with degrees of conviction that varied with his judgment of the officer. If he thought well of the officer, he argued in his response that he should not resign. Some resignations he simply rejected. Most junior officers did not submit letters to him—many, perhaps most, simply took off, after telling their regiment’s commander that they had had enough.

Providing the army with able leadership was a part of a larger problem: the nature of the army itself—that is, its organization, skill, discipline, and fighting spirit. One of Washington’s strengths as a military commander was his sense of the need for the army to plan carefully—its operations, the organization of its units, and its relationship to civil authority. He was always a man who gave attention to detail; indeed, at times he appeared in his instructions to subordinates to micromanage their assignments. Such a man might have lost himself in details; Washington did not. Thinking about the Revolution in its largest terms, what was at issue in the war, as well as the problems of leading the army, occupied his consciousness—indeed never seemed to leave his awareness, even as he struggled to discover the means to keep his soldiers fed and clothed.

Moving the army to Valley Forge after its bloody engagements at Brandywine and Germantown brought an intensified focus to his sense of responsibility. His immediate problem was how to implant the same sense in Congress. By this time Congress had deteriorated as a body of legislators. Much of its talent had gone home by late 1777, if not earlier, tired by the slow pace of work and the poverty of decisions it made. Lacking power, Congress did not do much, though the best of its members recognized that inaction would not move the war toward
a victorious end. Then there was the personal side of service: Most delegates had families that needed them. If a delegate did not have a private fortune, keeping a family going at a distance was impossible. And finally, there was the loneliness of being far from home. Philadelphia at least was a city, with some of the attractions of urban life. But Congress had been forced to flee when Howe advanced in the summer, and of course he had captured the city in September. York, inland and small, proved to have little charm and, on top of everything else, was crowded and uncomfortable.

Washington tried to get along with the delegates in York, though he soon came to see them as difficult to contend with. Their lectures to him about seizing the abundant food supplies it supposed existed all around him in Philadelphia County tried his patience. The Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council, the upper house of the legislature, struck him as especially unreasonable. Several of its members blithely urged him to attack Philadelphia, and others accused him of wasting his time marching around rather than fighting the British.
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Washington held his anger at these absurdities, and took pains to explain himself to both Congress and the Pennsylvania authorities. His belief in the cause was such that he felt it necessary to listen to civilian authority and, more, to follow its instructions as faithfully as possible. Interpretation of what the Congress wanted gave him some freedom of action, however. Congress, Washington knew, would complain about his decision to station the army at Valley Forge, but it would not overturn it. On more complicated matters, such as reorganizing the commissary and quartermaster departments, it would delay. Money was involved in any matter concerning the supply service—money and politics. There was money to be made in running these agencies, whatever form they took, and there were men eager to make them return a profit. Washington argued for responsible action, knowing that he must compel or persuade Congress to create a workable system if the army was to survive.

Through all of his problems—food, logistics, officers who seemed to be willing to give up their commissions—he came to recognize that a major reorganization of the army was needed. If it could not be attained, the Revolution would fail. By the end of January 1778, he had a plan. Several senior officers, including Nathanael Greene, could claim to have written its big provisions. Months earlier, Washington
had canvassed the officers he trusted most for ideas about a reorganized army, and of course even before asking for advice, he and others had worried over the task of making the army an effective fighting force.

Whatever its origins, the document he presented to the camp committee covered a variety of problems in the army at hand. Its most important provisions had something to say about how the army should be recruited and how its men should be organized, as well as how they should be equipped, fed, and cared for. Several matters bore Washington’s forceful and familiar impress. The first, which in a sense underlay all the others, concerned the social psychology of the army. Patriotism might bring men together, according to Washington, but it could not sustain them for long. Soldiers, like all men, were moved by self-interest. This was an assumption that he had insisted on when the Revolution began, and he never abandoned it. In the plan, he began by noting that the officers of the army were leaving its service largely because their service imperiled their own interests. They were, after all, badly paid, and they had no assurance that they would have any income when they returned to civilian life. The expectation had been that they would remain in the army until the war was won. Most had no thought of becoming professional soldiers, and if they had such ambitions, they were holding commissions far different from those of their enemies. Most British officers were professionals and had bought their commissions, and when they left the army they might sell them. Americans had no such opportunities. If they should die during their service or suffer disabling wounds, their families would be bereft of any support. The American army was a fresh creation—it lacked conventional commissioned officers and possessed no pension system or, indeed, any means of taking care of its servants during or after their duty ended.
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Though Washington acted as a professional and had once aspired to an officer’s place in the king’s army, he understood and sympathized with the men who served under him in a way a European officer would not. His was a strange set of sympathies by old-world standards. On the one hand, he demanded that his officers conduct themselves in a fashion expected of their European peers. They should lead their men in battle as if their own lives were of little importance. Courage, sacrifice of self, and gallantry should shape their actions; but
they should regard the Revolution as a contest different from those fought in Europe. It was a “glorious cause,” created in the name—and defense—of liberty, a cause, in other words, different from those in ordinary wars. Such wars were fought for narrow purposes: royal glory and imperial power and territory. The American Revolution, he once said, and repeated on several occasions, was different, “a Defence of all that is dear & valuable in Life,”
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a war, in other words, that put at odds the American people and a monarch who was interested only in his prerogatives and reach. A British officer would have said the same thing about his army’s relationship to its king—that it was fighting for him and for royal interests. Their own glory arose from that purpose, and their pride in it made their sacrifice glorious. The Americans, by contrast, as Washington pointed out early in the war, saw themselves engaged in an effort in which “every Post ought to be deemed honourable on which a Man can serve his country.”
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A definition of patriotism resides in this statement, and Washington never retreated from his insistence that officers should regard their service in these terms. Neither did he disavow his contention that officers, like all men, were moved by their sense of self-interest. Those two assumptions are not easily reconciled, and he never tried to bring them together in one coherent statement.

The plan of January 29 put its emphasis on the leadership provided by the army’s officers. In this emphasis, the plan reads like an elementary primer: “without officers no army can exist,” and unless steps were taken to put Continental Army officers “in a more desireable situation, few of them would be able, if willing, to continue in it.” The argument underlying this conclusion, familiar to many delegates and officers who knew Washington, was that “Motives of public virtue” may lead men to “conduct purely disinterested”—but not for long. For “few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the Common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account—the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it.”
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Washington then gave a history of the army’s officers in the Revolution. At first they were full of zeal, assuming that the war would not last long. (He himself, he might have added, had held this assumption about the length of the war.) But as time passed, their ardor diminished as they received little compensation and their worry rose about
their families. They naturally thought ahead, and, lacking an income “even of a competency to supply their wants,” they inevitably feared the future. They were, he argued, “losers by their patriotism.”
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Their subsequent actions could not have been a surprise given Washington’s essential assumptions. Officers had begun resigning in considerable numbers when he wrote; others announced they would follow their colleagues out of the army. Still others awaited congressional action, and if Congress did not begin to meet their demands, they too would return to civilian life.

The loss of ardor for service in the Revolution found its way into the ranks, where disenchantment with the army was high anyway. The defeats in Pennsylvania, at Brandywine and Germantown, undoubtedly figured in enlistments and soldiers’ attitudes, though Washington did not mention this possibility in his plan. But he did call attention to the “apathy, inattention and neglect of duty which pervade[d] all ranks.” There was not much that could be done about the decline in morale within the ranks, though Washington had sought better logistical support for many months.

The plan proposed new means of filling up the regiments, however; the principal tactic would be to draft from the militias and in ways that would obligate men to serve for longer periods. Longer service coupled with better pay and a reliable system of feeding, clothing, and arming the troops would of course allow a tighter discipline, a means of fostering a more effective fighting army.

The officers offered a different problem—and solution. Discussions of a pension system had occurred before the army moved to Valley Forge. They grew more intense there, and the January plan proposed a system that included half pay after the completion of service, compensation that would be extended to families after the death of an officer. Exactly how this system would work was not clear in the plan, but its outline there was meant to reassure officers and their families that military service would not end in financial want.

The bulk of the plan concerned the organization of infantry regiments, the cavalry, and artillery. The number of regiments would be increased, and special provisions for the specialized units added. The sum of effects of the changes proposed would lead to a more unified army, though shifting the structural base from the states to the nation—or “continent”—was not done. Washington would have been
delighted by any changes that involved shifting authority over state units, in all respects, to Congress. Such a change would have brought these regiments under his control, from their enlistment to their discharge. A change of this sort was not in the cards, and no serious planning was undertaken to make it possible. Congress itself was a creation of the states, and until it could draw significant power from the states, no comparable change could be made in the army.

Leaving Valley Forge had been discussed for weeks before it occurred. The occasion for departure turned out to be decisions taken in Britain and America. In Britain, the ministry decided in January 1778 to replace Howe with General Henry Clinton, his second-in-command throughout his service in America. The ministry acted in the knowledge that Howe wanted to resign his command, and that arrangements in America to cope with the anticipated war with France called for drastic change. The French decision in March to come into the war transformed British policy and made the Revolution into a world war.