Washington's Revolution: The Making of America's First Leader (39 page)

Arnold had not done any such thing. He was a skillful fighter on the battlefield, but a neglectful plotter, who was much more interested in collecting his sale price than in the details of what the British buyers would obtain. The British, in fact, were surprised when he appeared on the deck of the
Vulture
to make his way to Clinton’s headquarters. Clinton had watched the negotiations conducted by Major André but he, no more than anyone on the American side, expected things to come to a climax on September 25. The capture of André had propelled Arnold’s flight, exposing the betrayal as the defection of an important American general who offered himself, but nothing more.

For the American army, the question asked in the last few days of September concerned what should be done with André. He, his captors soon discovered, behaved just as an ideal gentleman should. He
stood accused of being a spy, a charge he refused to agree to, but he remained calm and, in his conversations with the American officers in Washington’s family, revealed that he was a man of honor, simple eloquence, and great charm. He soon had these officers on his side: They did not doubt his guilt as a spy, but they admired his presence and his style. More than anything, they saw in him a manifestation of character and courage.

Washington shared much of this feeling, but he could not bring himself to allow it to soften what had to be done. He convened a board of general officers to review the case—to try André—and to recommend punishment. Nathanael Greene served as president of the group, which included five other major generals and eight brigadiers. The trial confirmed that André had come ashore “in a private and secret manner,” that he had not stayed in uniform but had worn a disguise, and that he had carried papers when captured that would have been of value to the enemy.
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André did not claim that he had come under the sanction of a flag, a claim made for him by Henry Clinton and Arnold shortly after they learned of his capture. If he made no such defense, neither did he concede that he was a spy. Rather, he had been sent out by Clinton apparently as a kind of agent to deal with Arnold. He did not explain exactly what his dealings were to be. He might have argued that his status as a representative of General Clinton was inherent in Clinton’s order that he wear his uniform, not civilian dress, on this mission, but he made no such statement. However, he clearly did not consider himself a spy—a role much beneath a gentleman. His self-defense rested on the assumption or hope that his captors would consider him a prisoner of war.

The board’s verdict was that André had come as a spy, and, in keeping with the usual punishment, decided that he should be executed. It was a decision that Washington upheld, but with regret. André had written him after his capture, identifying himself and explaining that he had come ashore to “meet a person who was to give me intelligence.” The “person” was not identified in this letter. André, without giving any details, stated that he had been “betrayed … into the vile condition of an enemy in disguise within your posts.” He also asked that he be “branded with nothing dishonourable, as no motive could be mine but the service of my king, and as I was involuntarily an impostor.”
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André’s defense, as Carl Van Doren would write, rested on the contention
that he should be judged by his “intentions” rather than his “outward actions.” Though his conduct while being held impressed the officers around Washington, none seemed to have been moved by such an argument. His sentence mandated that he be hanged, a requirement that many of these officers despised. Washington knew of this feeling and probably shared it. But he did not hesitate to see that it was carried out, and André went to his fate on October 2, a week after his capture.

Arnold’s betrayal shook Washington, but it did not lead him to a fresh understanding of the Revolution or the war. He had thought deeply about the nature of the conflict with Britain in the years leading to independence. After the colonies declared themselves an independent nation and proved capable of a sustained effort, a circumstance well established by late 1776, his mind turned to the character of the war itself. But even as he plunged into all the complexities of making war, even the bloodletting itself, he could not divorce the war from the Revolution. Nor did he even attempt to make such a separation. While it was going on, the war
was
the Revolution for him.

This equation did not please him, for in the autumn of 1780 the war was going badly. Much the same could have been said about it from 1776 on. His own analysis led him to this conclusion as the campaign of 1779 gave way to that of 1780. At that time the army found itself in familiar straits: It was undermanned, poorly fed, usually inadequately clothed, and often short of gunpowder, muskets, tents—indeed, of equipment of all sorts, including wagons, picks, and shovels. It also lacked horses and the forage to sustain them.

The shortage of men headed Washington’s list of deficiencies throughout the war. Most of his analysis of this problem led him to conclude that short enlistments were at its root. The army consisted of “comers and goers,” he often noted, men who served in the militia from six weeks to six months at the most, or regulars who came in for a year. It took time to train such men, periods, in the case of militias, that often included the time taken between leaving home and arriving in camp. Once there, soldiers might find their training impaired by shortages of weapons and other equipment, and the lack of availability of experienced officers. The army from any perspective was an inefficient
organization. That it often did not fight well hardly surprised anyone, and Washington, a professional of high standards, felt its failures with pain.

What made the pain even worse was the knowledge that the army’s many flaws cost money. By itself, failure was a terrible matter, with ramifications extending to the economy. The army, he knew, would drain the productive power of the country in a variety of ways; indeed, an army in the process of almost constant formation and dissolution could be almost more than the economy could stand. Washington pointed to the depreciation of Continental currency as one of the most severe effects of maintaining such a wasteful institution.

The flaws exposed in the army could be traced to Congress. Washington reported to this body, of course, and he took care in protecting its reputation. He cast his letters to its president in a form that conveyed his belief that the Congress embodied the sovereignty of the new republic. He knew that this conception of the relationship of Congress to the states embraced a fiction, for the reality of politics in America was that the states were independent bodies and that sovereignty lay with them. Yet these states had created a Congress to act for them in matters relating to the war, and in this situation the Congress exercised a power that seemed to define a genuine sovereignty. Washington wrote to this body as if it were the final authority in the war; yet he also wrote to the states, to governors, and sometimes to legislatures as well. But in these instances he managed not to undercut his master, the Congress of the United States.

That the Congress was his master was in some sense ultimately untrue. The real masters in the new nation were the states, and everyone knew it. Congress in early 1780 had in effect confessed to its impotence by shifting the responsibility and costs of maintaining troops directly to each state, without an intermediate stage provided by the Congress. Though several states and the Continental Army’s quartermaster department strove mightily to make this new system work, in reality it was as hit-or-miss as what it attempted to supersede. Washington was thinking of the American side of the entire war when he summed it all up as “a history of false hopes and temporary devices.”
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While Washington only occasionally criticized Congress, by 1780 he had shed his inhibitions about the states. In most of his ruminations on the war—an almost desperate attempt to understand it—Washington
returned to his dissatisfaction with the thirteen states. When they were asked for the means to maintain the army, he pointed out, their response was to delay. The purpose of this inaction was to do as little as possible. And even in the midst of a war for freedom, they rarely rose to the needs of the occasion, but remained mired “in local views and politics.”
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Washington had assumed command of the army in 1775 convinced that only unity of effort and organization of the individual states could bring success. Five years later, that conviction had grown into something approaching an obsession. But he believed that unity of this kind had eluded all efforts to seize it, and he confessed his disillusionment to Fielding Lewis that, as things stood, “we shall become” and perhaps already have become “a many headed Monster, a heterogeneous mass that never will or can steer to the same point.”
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This was a statement made by a weary man rarely given to extravagance in expression, tired indeed of the problems that had bedeviled him since 1775.

He did not look for rescue from these problems to emerge from the people, though he wrote John Cadwalader that the Revolution would survive if there were “virtue” among the people and “wisdom” among its leaders. But the people would have to send a full representation to Congress before anything would be done, and they would have to disabuse themselves of the hope they entertained that the war would soon end. This hope was a fantasy, but every winter, Washington noted, the American people somehow came to believe that the war would end soon.
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Washington himself held no such belief; he also deplored the people’s distrust of a standing army. He had remarked on this attitude early in the war, and may have detected it first in Pennsylvania, when he felt the opposition of the Quakers and other religious radicals to the fighting. By the time the army was settling into its positions around New York City, he found—or projected—such animus in Americans everywhere. And, of course, in the years leading up to the war and after its beginning, a rich pamphlet literature had emerged in America that pointed to the connection between standing or professional armies and tyrannies throughout human history. This belief that power in the form of the standing army oppressed liberty was widespread in America and, he failed to note, in Britain, too.

These assumptions about the failure of Congress, the states, and the
people in America depressed his spirits when the campaign of 1780–81 began. These failures seemed to define the nation and the way it organized its political life, and seemingly offered little hope. Early in the campaign, he had interpreted another set of circumstances that boded well for American victory: the French entry into the war, troubles for the British Crown at home and on the Continent, and the apparent disposition of the European powers to give some support to the American cause.

By late 1778, the trust invested in the French had begun to fade. When Spain joined the war the next year, some confidence in the glorious cause returned, but the long slog through the bitter days of these years, with little accomplished, undermined his spirit. Though he hardly gave up belief that the French would make a decisive difference, his confidence in them seeped out at a rapid rate. D’Estaing’s departure for the West Indies took some of the shine off the French, and their delay in a major resupply of troops hastened his sense of loss. The Spanish entry into the war seemed to make little difference, and that country did not recognize the new United States. Washington felt suspicious not only of them as the war proceeded—he questioned the reliability of all monarchs. George III had set this process of doubt in motion in the 1760s, when the American crisis began. Americans, not just Washington, had taken a hard look then.

By 1780, realism in American attitudes toward the European powers was clear and firm. Washington never believed the British would simply give up their attempts to conquer the colonies, unless they suffered massive defeat. His darkest assumptions held that for the British, the bankruptcy of their government would be “less terrible to the King than giving up the contest”; and if they succeeded in winning the war, the Crown might emerge with even “greater influence and power, a purpose that he suggested might be “the object of the present reign.”
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The evidence in Washington’s letters shows that he read the English newspapers whenever he could get them and that he sought information about the British enemy from traitors and indeed from any source coming into his hands. He did not always have the most exact information about the enemy, but he strained to understand their intentions and speculated when he lacked precise knowledge. He read desperation into the British ministry’s “concessions” to the Irish people, seeing
them as an effort to hold those patriots down while the government proceeded with the business of breaking the American Revolution. With triumph in the Revolution, he wrote, the next British Parliament would be as “obsequious as the last.” The North ministry, he seemed to say, would endure.

As for the rest of Europe, its favorable disposition toward America promised “no security that it will remain so.” It was this transitory character that impressed him, and he saw that the “change” or “caprice” of a single ministry could “alter the whole system of Europe.” Nor could the sovereigns of the Continent guarantee steadiness in policy. The death of a king could turn things upside down, and he confessed that he expected that, given the advanced ages of the three most powerful monarchs on the Continent, the chances were greater that “one will die in the course of a year” than that all three will survive it. The three he presumably had in mind were Charles III of Spain (age 64), Frederick the Great of Prussia (68), and Catherine the Great of Russia (51).
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