Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (34 page)

While this first collaborative effort with d’Estaing was in progress, Washington faced a problem presented by French officers who had begun arriving in America on their own almost from the beginning of the Revolution. With the French alliance, they seemed to come in droves. Serving in the American cause appealed to the idealism of many, perhaps most, for its identification with liberty and the opportunity to strike the British, an ancient enemy. Some—Washington came to believe that there were many—arrived with the expectation of collecting pay for their service and enjoying military rank not available to them at home. Many in this self-regarding group did not have much, or any, military experience; what they had, Washington believed, was an absurd sense of their own talents and a desire to run things.

Congress did not share his skepticism of these exotics and too often took their descriptions of themselves at face value. Out of such assessments came commissions to men whom Washington found lacking and his American colleagues abhorred. The American officers objected openly to such appointments; hardly a day passed without such protests coming to him. At first they had little effect, but by late July 1778 he was telling Laurens and Gouverneur Morris, a friend in Congress, that the practice of accepting “military fortune hunters”
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had to end. His own revulsion from such men was increased by his officers’ threat to leave the army. Rank had been a sensitive issue among American officers since 1775—they were often jealous of one another, and the additional example of inequities in both appointments and promotions not only subverted morale, but thinned the cohort of officers.

For Laurens’s edification, Washington identified a number of French interlopers by name, with details about their self-seeking actions. In this summer after Monmouth, perhaps the self-promoter who most irritated him was Louis-Pierre Penot Lombart, chevalier de La Neuville, a major in the French army. He and his younger brother Noirmont de La Neuville had come to America in late summer of the year before. Their presence did not alarm Washington at first, but when the elder Neuville sought appointment by Congress as a brigadier general, his earlier irenic reaction disappeared. He was shown “a very handsome certificate … in favour of Monsr. Neuville written (I believe) by himself,” an endorsement that made him suspicious immediately. The chevalier fell into the way of one of those “Men—who in the first instance tell you, that they wish for nothing more than the honour of serving in so glorious a cause, as Volunteers—The next day solicit rank without pay, the day following want money advanced them—and in the course of a Week want further promotion, and are not satisfied with any thing you can do for them.”
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When Baron Steuben, whom Washington admired for his service at Valley Forge, went off to Philadelphia in search of a line appointment at about the time that the Neuvilles made their move for advancement, Washington had had enough. He wrote his friend Gouverneur Morris that, though he considered Steuben an “excellent officer,” he thought such a move for an appointment so widely prized would only add to the discontent of the army’s brigadier generals. Washington summed up his feelings at this time, saying, “I do most devoutly wish
that we had not a single Foreigner among us, except the Marquis de la Fayette, who acts upon very different principles than those which govern the rest.”
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In writing Henry Laurens in late July about the discontent in the army over the appointment of foreign officers, Washington referred to himself as a “Citizen of the World.” He was obviously concerned that Laurens not think of him as a provincial, bound so tightly to local interests that he missed the importance of the Revolution to the world. But if he was not, as he said, “easily warped or led away by attachments merely local or American,” he had to “confess,” he wrote, that “I am not entirely without ’em, nor does it appear to me that they are unwarrantable, if confined within proper limits.”
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Washington was always a harsh critic of those in the army who failed to do their duty; he hated slackness and lack of discipline, and despised action on behalf of the self when sacrifice for the public interest was called for. Yet he also felt enormous sympathy for officers and men who were reduced to wearing rags and who had families at home who suffered in their absence. And then there was the matter of justice not done for American officers who witnessed incompetent foreigners attaining high rank and commands simply because they were foreign. As he pointed out to Congress, complaints about such circumstances assailed him every day.

He did not propose to expel French officers from the army, and cited “principles of policy” as one of the reasons for welcoming them to service in the Continental Army. The principles he had in mind all came down to a recognition that French aid was essential in the war. Thus, though he yearned for simpler arrangements in American command, he exerted himself in justifying the inclusion of French officers in important assignments—Lafayette was the primary example—and acted to protect them whenever he could. Was d’Estaing going to give up the campaign in Rhode Island and repair his ships in Boston? Then he, Washington, would move his army from the North River to head off any attacks the British might make on the French in Boston from the land. Were the French likely to sail off from Boston to the West Indies when their vessels were fit? If they did, he said, Americans should accept their strategy because of the importance of the French islands. To John Sullivan, the American general in Rhode Island who found d’Estaing’s movements hard to understand, Washington furnished
a short introduction to the realities of Franco-American foreign relations.

The recognition of the importance of France to the American cause was only a part of what underlay Washington’s reference to himself as a citizen of the world. He held the prevalent belief that the movement for independence expressed a sense of the American nation as a free people. Since the beginning of his first uneasiness with Britain’s attack on the old imperial constitution in the 1760s, Washington’s affections had become enlarged with a conception of the American cause. What constituted that cause had changed as a national feeling came to life. In Washington’s thought at this time, the nation’s independence assumed a far greater importance than the individual’s liberty. He was not indifferent to the individual’s concerns, but in his mind the individual was far less important than the union. This sense of proportion is not surprising, given that he conceived his assignment as commander of the army as one requiring him to cultivate joint or collaborative action, not the freedom of the individual to express himself. Justice also seemed to him much more essential in a free nation than equality. He was a slave owner in a society that thought about men in a vertical order, and though he felt uneasy about owning slaves, his uneasiness did not undermine his belief that the vertical order of men in society was a natural order. He saw slaves as occupying the bottom of that order.

As far as can be established, Washington did not give much thought to nature as a source of men’s rights. The rights he was accustomed to were simply a part of the social order, and if rights expressed anything about society, they owed their value to the claim to real property that they embodied. Thus, it had been easy for him to join in resistance to parliamentary taxation that, after all, threatened not just the free individual’s rights but the collective character of a free society as well. But there had been nothing in his early commitment to the opposition to parliamentary oppression that suggested that he valued individual liberty over that of the Virginia planting class. He enlisted in the cause of men like himself—free men who owned land and men. He was anything but the champion of the lone, free individual.

As a citizen of the world, he had no idea that the principles he and
other leaders of the American Revolution espoused would eventually lead to democracy and individualism. A citizen of the world, by his definition, did not conceive of the world stretching to include the mass of men, except in certain limited ways. But he did not see it as a closed order, either, one that oppressed men without property or intelligence. His characterization of most men—unthinking men, he called them—as unable to judge well in most matters that served virtue or even affected their own interests was an insight shared by most such citizens of the world.

Washington had few illusions about human conduct. What he himself had in abundance was virtue—and virtuous standards. At times his sense of honor or virtue in action threatened to separate him from other, less virtuous men. Yet even as his principles strengthened him under pressure, the experience of the Revolution broadened his outlook, and if it did not make him more tolerant, at the least it induced patience in the face of terrible adversity.

This patience and tolerance proved their worth often to Washington, a commander facing daunting challenges, but they did not extend to slaves or provide the strength to banish inequality of opportunity in a society claiming freedom for its citizens. Washington recognized early in the conflict with Britain that he and others like himself, slave owners, stood on ironic ground. They claimed liberty for themselves and all the rights of free men while they held hundreds of thousands of blacks in slavery.

Washington had been a slave owner since the mid-1750s. He was a conventional master in most respects: He looked upon his slaves as property and took care of them in the usual ways; he fed them the usual diet; when they were sick, he treated them himself or summoned a medical doctor; he did not ordinarily have them whipped when they resisted their condition, but he did sometimes sell those he could not control or have them shipped off to the West Indies.

There is not much comment about his slaves in his letters, and he did not admit the horror of their condition until the beginning of the crisis with Britain. At that time, having become engaged in measures of resistance, he admitted to himself and to others that what he was doing could not really be reconciled with owning slaves. To some extent, George Mason, his neighbor and friend, helped him see the anomaly of a slaveholder’s position. Mason in 1774 wrote the Fairfax
Resolves, Fairfax County’s declaration of opposition to British policy following the Boston Tea Party. He condemned the trade in slaves in the seventeenth article of the resolves, declaring there that planters in the county wished “to see an entire Stop for ever put to such a wicked cruel and unnatural Trade.”
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There was, however, no resolve in the document calling for an end to slavery. Washington willingly signed the Fairfax Resolves and played an important role in gaining their approval by the county. At about this time, in a letter to Bryan Fairfax, he revealed that the terrible lesson of black slavery had bitten into his mind. Somewhat ruefully, he explained Virginia’s reaction to British policy by insisting that “we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”
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Planters’ rule over their slaves may have been recognizably “arbitrary,” as he wrote, but he did not disavow such rule.

There were blacks in the New England Army when he took it over in summer 1775, but they were freemen, and their service was given far from the southern states where, had they appeared with muskets, they would have been thrown back into slavery or killed. In the following years, an occasional northerner proposed that blacks, free or slave, be enlisted, and a Rhode Island regiment took shape with most of its numbers coming from black freemen.
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Washington accepted these regiments without comment on the status of their black soldiers. The blacks were free when they were recruited, and they would remain so after they fought the British. They were fighting for the Revolution, his purpose as well as theirs, though he left unsaid what he might have felt about black freemen in America.

The example of such regiments did not stimulate emulation, and the ranks of the Continental Army remained predominantly white. By the middle of 1778 the ranks had grown thin of any men of color, and Washington wondered if he could maintain an army in the field large enough to carry on the war. The problems he faced in luring men into joining the army did not arise simply from weariness with war, though that certainly increased. Lack of pay for months took some men out
of service and made finding their replacements extraordinarily difficult; these same men had also wearied of the rags they wore, the lack of shoes, blankets, tents—a multitude of lacks. The same insufficiencies kept men from enlisting and perhaps even more men from staying in when their terms ended. The bounties offered by Congress were not great, but Congress increased them, and the states tried the same inducement. Patriotic men had once joined because they believed in the “glorious cause,” as Washington did, but that motive gradually faded as the war ran on, and the depreciation of the currency with which they were paid almost killed it. A bounty of twenty to fifty dollars held little appeal when paid in useless currency.
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To say that Washington suffered from the depreciation of currency in the way his soldiers did would be a gross exaggeration. But he was affected by the collapse in the value of the local currency. His difficulty was different from most: He was a creditor who had lent money and conducted business buying and selling land. Washington did not take kindly to such transactions that saw him paid in Virginia currency when what he was owed was in sterling. He was, like most men of business in Virginia, both a debtor and a creditor.

For months in 1778, he thrashed about over this problem. Even in the midst of a war that he was fighting, he had maintained a close watch over his financial affairs, though at times his plantations in Virginia and what he owed and was owed had to be thrust aside. His estate manager in Virginia, Lund Washington, showed no great flair or imagination in his handling of his master’s money, having had more of a feel for the ground and crops than for money obligations and debt. He clearly hesitated in acting in such matters, and he had little insight to offer.