Adopted Son Page 8

  Washington resigned his commission at the end of December 1758. His regimental officers regretted “the loss of such an excellent commander, such a sincere friend, and so affable a companion!” They remembered, “In our earliest infancy, you took us under your tuition, trained us up in the practice of that discipline which alone can constitute good troops.” They praised his impartiality, justice, and ability to recognize and reward merit, which encouraged them to succeed. “How rare it is to find those amiable qualifications blended together in one man!” they raved. “How great the loss of such a man!” His service in the regiment, he replied modestly, would always be “the greatest happiness” of his life, which would in the future give him “the most pleasing reflections.”29

  I AM NOW EMBARKED ON A TEMPESTUOUS OCEAN

  Washington suggested that any progress in the war made without his help could be credited to chance. “The scale of fortune in America,” he said of the fall of Quebec in 1759, “is turned greatly in our favor, and success is become the boon companion of our fortunate generals.” As for himself, “I am now, I believe, fixed at this seat with an agreeable consort of life, and hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling world.”30

  This “seat” was Mount Vernon. He had already begun to expand it into the stately mansion familiar to later generations, but it was some years yet in the building. The “consort” was his new bride, Martha Dandridge Custis, the richest widow in Virginia, whom he married on January 6, 1759. She was not the first potential wife he had courted, but she best suited him, affectionately as well as economically. She was a small, pretty woman with a rounded figure, tiny hands and feet, a noble brow and equally noble Roman nose, a strong chin, and large eyes beneath wide eyebrows. She had a retreating, almost timid manner, which cloaked steadfast courage. She bore up through a lifetime of personal losses and George’s frequent absences.

  After Washington died, at his request Martha burned their personal letters. All third-party evidence suggests that the two of them learned early on to love each other deeply. That was normal then, when love followed rather than preceded most marriages. Their union lasted forty years. George was a loving and devoted husband and an affectionate guardian to her two children. They had no children together, although she was obviously fertile. By the time she was past childbearing age, he had concluded that he was sterile. That gnawed at him, but he stoically accepted it. Instead, he indulged her children, grandchildren, and nieces and nephews.

  Martha’s chubby boy, John Parke (“Jackie”) Custis, grew up spoiled, provided with everything George had lacked in his own childhood. Washington gave the youngster a wealth of material goods and excellent tutors and formal education. Never having to struggle for anything, he refused to put out much effort on his own behalf, and failed in college. He married well at age nineteen, in 1773, and Washington set the couple up on one of the inherited Custis estates. The boy ran it into the ground and died in 1781. He left behind grandchildren whom George and Martha adopted.

  The girl, Martha Parke (“Patsy”) Custis, was a sadder story. She suffered epileptic seizures from an early age. Despite her stepfather’s best efforts to provide care through physicians and spas, one of the seizures killed her in 1773, when she was seventeen. Martha was devastated and wore mourning clothes for the next year.

  Besides the children, Martha brought to the marriage three plantations along the York River totaling 18,000 acres, worked by over 200 (eventually 300) slaves; she was worth at least £30,000. The marriage made Washington the owner of one of these “dower” plantations and, as guardian of the children, the manager of the other two. Added to Mount Vernon’s 3,000 acres, which he enlarged to 6,500 acres by 1775, the property made the Washington family one of the wealthiest in Virginia. Like his forebears, George had married up in the world, and like them, his lust for real estate kept him land-poor.

  Washington’s hunger for other goods did not help his situation. He went on a multiyear spending spree, outfitting Mount Vernon with the latest in luxuries imported from London. He kept Martha and himself elegantly clothed in English fashions. His lavish tastes outspent his income from tobacco sold on consignment in England, and by 1765 he was in arrears to his London agent. It was a rude awakening. Besides curbing his spendthrift ways, it made him think about the relation between Britain and her colonies. The economic system known as mercantilism, he concluded, was designed to exploit the colonists and keep them in debt.

  In 1766 Washington ceased to plant tobacco at Mount Vernon, although he continued to grow it on the Custis plantations. He turned to the production of wheat, corn, and flax and built a gristmill to produce flour and income from milling for others. He bought fishing boats and built a salting plant. He acquired sheep and set up a weaving mill to produce and sell linsey-woolsey, part linen (flax) and part wool. He even bought a small ship to carry his produce overseas, and systematically weaned himself from dependence on the mother country.

  This process had a political dimension. Washington claimed his veteran’s rights to land warrants west of the mountains, and bought warrants from other veterans. He helped to found the Mississippi Land Company, and made other ventures into wilderness real estate. He looked into opening a route to the West via the Potomac River. These activities ran afoul of King George III’s Proclamation of 1763, forbidding English settlement west of the Appalachians. “I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light,” Washington rightly observed, “than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.”31

  The royal government declared the land between the mountains and the Mississippi River a vast Indian reservation, to end a widespread Indian war that had broken out even before the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Settlers had crossed the mountains in growing numbers, and agents for speculators such as Washington also showed up in the West. The first to rise against the white tide were the Cherokees in the Carolinas. Soon there was a general war involving many tribes and nations, some of them in a confederation organized by the Ottawa leader Pontiac. To the government, Indians killing individual settlers was bad enough, but the power of the uprising was such that it wiped out several military posts. Pontiac came close to taking Detroit in the winter of 1763–64.

  The proclamation was supposed to reassure the Indians, but the renewed peace was short-lived, and it provoked American disrespect for the king’s authority. Washington was not the only colonial who treated this attempt to stop history as a joke. He and others proceeded with their plans in the West, the Indians be damned. By 1770 he had claimed 20,000 acres in the Great Kanawha River valley, and sent settlers there to hold the land.

  The king’s standing in America was further eroded by a series of parliamentary blunders that began in 1765 with the Stamp Act. Each in turn was defied in the colonies and had to be repealed. The home government, heavily in debt from the Seven Years’ War, was desperate to raise money and had gone about as far as it could in Britain without provoking rebellion there. The colonists were told that they must help pay for the war and for their own defense. They believed that they had already paid their share, in blood and treasure alike. Moreover, they did not feel themselves obliged to honor taxes imposed on them without their having a say in Parliament—the “taxation without representation” issue.

  By the late 1760s, people in several colonies were attacking tax collectors. Parliament reacted to suppress colonial unrest, but each time it retreated, making the situation worse. Washington served in the Virginia Assembly during the whole period. In May 1769, he submitted a proposal for a colony-wide boycott of trade with England. The law passed, but it was not widely observed.

  Washington emerged as a conscience of his colony. Men worried about Britain’s colonial policies gravitated toward Mount Vernon. British backpedaling on nearly all its acts postponed a crisis, until in 1773 the Boston Tea Party defied one revenue measure that Parliament had not repealed. In 1774, to punish the home of that riot, the gove
rnment passed what became known as the Intolerable Acts. They closed the port of Boston, imposed martial law on Massachusetts, and sent an occupation force.

  Washington, along with other Americans—they were becoming that at this point—was outraged. He told George Fairfax that “the cause of Boston…ever will be considered as the cause of America.” There was a conspiracy, he alleged, “to fix the right and practice of taxation” on the colonists. To Fairfax’s brother he charged that the government planned to “make us as tame, & abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.” He knew slavery firsthand and did not want to be reduced to it.32

  Washington was by August 1774 a leader of the protest movement in Virginia and could be counted on to do the right thing. He became one of seven delegates from the province to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. There he mostly kept his silence during the debates, as he had in the House of Burgesses, but he opposed the Intolerable Acts and favored as retaliation a continent-wide boycott of British imports. Before he left town, he looked into the price of muskets, bought new trim for his uniforms, and ordered some military books.

  Back home at Mount Vernon, Washington tended to his affairs, pursued his claims in the West, and sent a party of slaves to start dredging the upper Potomac. In March 1775 a second Virginia Convention assembled, heard Patrick Henry deliver his “liberty or death” tirade, and sent Washington to the Second Continental Congress, which considered how to respond to the British invasion of Massachusetts. Wearing his uniform, he sat on Congress’ military committees, and gave his professional advice.

  Shooting broke out at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. On May 10, renegade forces under Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold seized Fort Ticonderoga, in northern New York, from its British caretakers. Alarmed delegates wanted it returned to royal authorities. Members from New England blocked that—Ticonderoga sat on the main invasion route from Canada to their territory.

  Congress considered the appointment of a commander in chief—the title was Washington’s suggestion—to lead colonial resistance. Various colonies were sending volunteers to Massachusetts, but what became the Continental Army had not yet been settled on. Besides Washington, there were not many candidates for the post. Washington had the background, the costume, and the bearing—John Adams pointed out that he was the tallest man in the room. In addition, a Virginian commander would make Massachusetts’ struggle a continental one.

  On June 14, 1775, Congress authorized the first parts of what would become the Continental Army—six companies of frontier riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Adams moved that Washington be appointed commander in chief, debate began, and Washington modestly retreated to his boardinghouse. The next day he was unanimously elected commander. He returned to Congress on the sixteenth and learned that Congress had assumed control “of the forces raised and to be raised in the defense of American liberty.” Then he was asked if he would accept “supreme command.”

  Washington rose, took a paper from his pocket, and read his acceptance. He pledged to fulfill his duties to the full extent of his powers. “But,” he cautioned, “lest some unlucky event should happen, unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered, by every gentleman in this room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” He concluded by refusing to accept pay, asking only that Congress reimburse his expenses.33

  This display of modesty overwhelmed its audience. When it was printed in the newspapers it electrified the world. This was no self-appointed rebel general, waving a flag and howling for blood. This was George Washington, leader of his people, talking in a voice they trusted, ready to defend their homes, forced to do so against his better nature.

  It took Washington two days to work up enough nerve to tell Martha what he had agreed to, and apologize for the burdens it would put on her. He did not know how long it would be before he returned home.

  “I am now embarked on a tempestuous ocean,” the commander in chief told another relative, “from, whence, perhaps, no friendly harbor is to be found.”34

  THREE

  This Great Military Arrangement

  (JULY 1775–JUNE 1777)

  There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the state preserves of loaves and fishes that things in general were settled forever.

  —CHARLES DICKENS

  Washington reached the army around Boston on July 3, 1775. It was strung along an arc from the Mystic River above Charlestown on the left to the Dorchester Heights southeast of Boston on the right. After the Battle of Bunker Hill two weeks earlier, the British commander, General Thomas Gage, was not inclined to make another sally. Washington had known Gage during the Monongahela campaign, where he commanded a battalion. Now the English general had become passive. That was difficult to understand, because the British faced not an army but a mob.

  To begin with, there was the unmilitary way the Americans housed themselves, in holes in the slopes or in “booths and huts of various shapes and sizes” scattered among the earthworks. As one of them described the rebel quarters, some were made of boards or sailcloth or a combination of the two, others of stone and turf, yet others of brush. “Some are thrown up in a hurry,” he said, “and look as if they could not help it.”1

  The commander in chief needed to know how many men lived in the slovenly housing. He had been told to expect 24,500 troops. He asked for an exact figure and heard that somewhere between 18,000 and 20,000 men were on hand. He insisted on a precise count and kept insisting. There were 16,600 enlisted men, but only 14,328 were present and fit for duty. “Could I have conceived,” he roared, “that what ought, and, in a regular army, would have been done in an hour, would employ eight days,” he would have reported his strength to Congress immediately. Instead, he had been “drilled on from day to day” until he was “ashamed to look back at the time which has elapsed.”2

  The truth hit him like a rock: this was going to be either a very short war or a very long one.

  THEY WERE BRIBED INTO THE PRESERVATION OF THEIR LIBERTIES

  The day after he arrived Washington announced that the “Troops of the United Provinces of North America” were thereafter under the authority of the Continental Congress. Congress’ appointed commander in chief was taking charge.3

  He gave early attention to uniforms. “To prevent mistakes” in telling officers apart, he ordered that the general officers and their aides each wear a “ribband” across his breast, between his coat and waistcoat. Each rank had its own specified color. Until Congress provided clothing, the “ribbands” (sashes) were as far as he could go on uniforms.4

  On July 25, the ten companies of frontier riflemen authorized by Congress began to arrive in camp. They were as tough as men came—some had marched 600 miles in three weeks. Their weapons—rifles rather than smoothbore muskets—caused a sensation. They were slow to load, but their balls traveled more accurately and three times as far as a musket ball.5

  The riflemen’s long arms were not what impressed Washington, however. Rather, it was their clothing—off-white, knee-length frocks called “hunting shirts,” made of linen or linsey-woolsey, topped off by wideawake hats. On August 7, 1775, he asked Congress to give each man a hunting shirt, and spent the next few years badgering the legislature to outfit the army in the practical frocks. They were replaced officially after 1779 by the familiar blue-and-buff uniform, but until late in the war if the Continental Army had any uniformity at all, it was hunting shirts.6

  Washington’s greater problem was to make an army out of a mob. The New England troops were mostly militiamen, accustomed to electing and firing their own officers. He recast them into something resembling military formations and fired and appointed regimental officers on his own. Co
ngress had granted him a modified version of Britain’s articles of war, and he imposed fierce discipline. He ordered improvements to the fieldworks, and foot and boat patrols. He issued orders for drills and other training, with indifferent results. The low quality of the officer corps hampered him at every step. Congress let him appoint his own staff, but it retained the power to commission general officers; they were a mixed bunch throughout the war. Washington’s own military experience was in the past, and he pored over books and treatises, trying to become a proficient supreme commander.7

  Before he left Philadelphia Washington talked two men into joining his personal staff, the first of thirty-two aides who would serve him during the war. Joseph Reed, a well-educated Philadelphia lawyer, became his military secretary. Thirty-four years old, he was intelligent, energetic, and a craftsman with the language. But he was torn between the army and his family and business at home. He came and went until he became adjutant general in June 1776. A few months later, he became the first trusted officer to betray his commander in chief.8

  Thomas Mifflin was Washington’s first aide-de-camp. From a family of Philadelphia merchants, he was thirty-one when he accompanied the general to Boston. His business experience caused Washington to appoint him quartermaster general in August, but he turned out to be incompetent. A born schemer and an ambitious politician, he too betrayed his commander.9

  Washington soon became a better judge of character in choosing his closest aides. He surrounded himself with much younger, bright, energetic assistants. Known as “His Excellency’s boys,” they were loyal to a fault, captured by the general’s commanding personality. Some of them caused him problems, however.