His Excellency: George Washington (19 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

Destiny’s Child

L
OOKING BACK
from the privileged perspective of the present, American victory in the War of Independence became inevitable after William Howe missed his chance to destroy Washington’s army in 1776, and then the disastrous British defeat at Saratoga the following year prompted France to enter the conflict on the American side. Space and time, so the story goes, then became the inexorable allies of independence, both swallowing up and wearing down British military pretensions. The decision by the British ministry to adopt a southern strategy in 1778–79 proved a futile effort, which bogged down in the Carolina swamps after a series of tactical British victories that, thanks to the inspired leadership of Nathanael Greene, added up to strategic defeat in a savage war of attrition. Eventually, Lord Cornwallis found his battered army marooned in the Yorktown peninsula, where Washington, with the invaluable assistance of the French fleet, delivered the decisive blow he had been dreaming about for six long years.

While this version of the Revolutionary War possesses all the seductive charm of a great adventure story with a happy ending, at least for the American side, it is not one that Washington himself would have recognized or endorsed. The problem is not simply that what we might call “hindsight history” glides smoothly toward preordained conclusions, whereas Washington was traveling a bumpy road toward an uncertain destination; the major problem is the presumption that time was an unalloyed American asset. In fact, to the extent that waging war was about raising money and men, time was on the British side, because the London government had developed, during the course of the eighteenth century, the most powerful and efficient machine for waging war in the world, fully capable of projecting and sustaining its power almost indefinitely.
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When Washington took his army into winter quarters at Valley Forge, on the other hand, the Continental Congress lacked the authority to supply either money or men, popular support for the war continued to decline, and few of the state governments were prepared to impose taxes on their residents or meet their enlistment quotas. “I am now convinced beyond a doubt,” Washington wrote to Henry Laurens, president of the Continental Congress, “that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that line, this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve—dissolve—or disperse.” The unpalatable and ironic truth was that the institutions that had alienated American colonists from the empire—Parliament’s taxing power and a well-equipped standing army—gave the British a significant advantage in a protracted war.
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How, then, did the improbable become the inevitable? Washington’s fullest answer, composed soon after victory was assured, suggested that historians would have a difficult time explaining the triumph.

If Historiographers should be hardy enough to fill the page of History with the advantages that have been gained with unequal numbers (on the part of America) in the cause of this contest, and attempt to relate the distressing circumstances under which they have been obtained, it is more than probable that Posterity will bestow on their labors the epithet and marks of fiction; for it will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed for eight years in Country could be baffled . . . by numbers infinitely less, composed of Men oftentimes half starved; always in Rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.
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More succinctly, Washington also observed that the war was won “by a concatenation of causes” which had never occurred before in human history, and which “in all probability at no time, or under any Circumstance, will combine again.” In the midst of the bedeviling concatenations, he called attention to one abiding core of perseverance, the officers and soldiers of the Continental army, whose sacrifices would never be fully understood or appreciated. He did not mention the other abiding presence—modesty forbade it.
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The crucial event, where the abiding pattern first emerged, was not Saratoga but Valley Forge. The heroes were not the mass of ordinary citizens, but rather a pathetically small collection of marginal men, the common soldiers of the Continental army. The main theme was not romantic but paradoxical; namely, the unattractive but irrefutable fact that the War of Independence had only been won by defying many of the values the American Revolution claimed to stand for. And the lesson Washington drew from that experience, learned not from books but from struggling on a day-by-day basis with its implications, was that the meaning of the American Revolution, at least as he understood it, had been transformed during the course of the war into a shape that neither he nor anyone else had foreseen at the start. It was a war not just for independence, but also for nationhood.

BLOOD ON THE SNOW

T
HE MOST GRAPHIC
piece of visual evidence about the legendary winter at Valley Forge happens to be true. No less a source than Washington himself described the shoeless soldiers tracking blood on the snow. “To see Men without Cloathes to cover their nakedness, without Blankets to lay on, without Shoes, by which their Marches might be traced by the Blood from their feet,” he recalled, “is a mark of Patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be parallel’d.” Most of the horses died from starvation or exposure, and their decaying carcasses filled the air with a stench that joined with the blood in the snow to create sensory scenes that Washington never forgot. When other leading members of the revolutionary generation subsequently spoke or wrote about the importance of virtue during the American Revolution, they invariably described a classical ideal enshrined in political treatises by prominent philosophers like Montesquieu. Washington’s understanding of virtue was more palpable and primal, shaped by direct exposure to scenes of mass suffering that, as he put it, “will not be credited but by those who have been spectators.” Nearly a century later, when Abraham Lincoln referred in his first inaugural to those “mystic chords of memory” that linked his Civil War generation with those predecessors who had created the American republic, the haunting imagery suggested a shared political idea. Washington’s memory was less mystic but equally haunting; it was men shedding blood.
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The men shedding most of the blood at Valley Forge, and throughout the remaining years of the war, came from the lowest rung of American society. “When men are irritated, and the Passions inflamed,” Washington observed somewhat caustically, “they fly hastily and chearfully to Arms.” Those exuberant days of popular enthusiasm for the war were now gone forever, as were the enlistments by yeoman farmers and men of “the middling sort” who had manned the barricades during the Boston siege. Their places in the ranks of the Continental army were now filled by indentured servants, former slaves, landless sons, and recent immigrants from Ireland and England. These were the young men, usually between fifteen and twenty-five years of age, who lived in the makeshift log huts at Valley Forge and signed on “for the duration” of the war because, in most cases, they had no brighter prospects.
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Washington harbored no romantic illusions about these ordinary soldiers, claiming that “to expect, among such People, as comprise the bulk of an Army, that they are influenced by any other principles than those of Interest, is to look for what never did, and I fear never will happen.” He was prepared to string them up if they attempted to desert or fell asleep on sentinel duty, and order one hundred lashes to their bare backs for minor infractions. For their part, the soldiery (as he called them) routinely defied regulations about hair length and decorated their uniforms with ribbons, feathers, and fur in order to make the very term “uniform” a standing joke. Despite the distance between them, which Washington regarded as an accurate reflection of the social hierarchy that God intended and all his experience as a Virginia planter-aristocrat confirmed, the general and his troops enjoyed a mutual sense of admiration. The soldiers were known to chant the singsongy tune “War and Washington” so endlessly that visiting civilians complained of mental paralysis. And Washington not only saluted their silent suffering at Valley Forge but also recognized their staying power as the decisive factor in the eventual American victory.
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Given the potent (if latent) egalitarian convictions of the American Revolution, the camp culture at Valley Forge was richly ironic: a near-perfect embodiment of the Aristotelian hierarchy—the one, the few, and the many. The enlisted men were obviously the many, a faceless multitude of castoffs that one soldier described, on the march, as “a cavalcade of wild beasts.” Washington was obviously the one, the singular figure whose birthday was about to be celebrated as a national holiday, like European monarchs, and who was first described in a Pennsylvania almanac for 1778 (albeit in German) as “The Father of His Country.” That left the officers as the designated few.
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During the Valley Forge encampment the officers of the Continental army began to assume the manners and trappings of a self-conscious American aristocracy. Their claim to elite status was not inherited bloodlines, though a few officers (i.e., Lord Stirling, Baron de Kalb) did affect full-fledged European titles. Their presumed superiority was based on their revolutionary credentials as the ultimate repository of commitment to the cause of American independence. They had come to see themselves—and Washington encouraged this perception—as the chosen few who preserved and protected the original ethos of 1775–76 after it had died out among the bulk of the American citizenry; they were the “band of brothers” that sustained the virtuous ideal amidst an increasingly corrupt and disinterested civilian society.

Whereas English aristocrats could rest comfortably in their privileged role—it was, after all, a socially sanctioned birthright—the officers at Valley Forge were constantly trying to prove they deserved their elite status. Washington spent countless hours overseeing questions of rank between officers who refused to serve under anyone they considered junior. Officers frequently demanded court-martials to answer hearsay accusations of negligence or cowardice bandied about at the campfires. General officers vied with each other for status by employing multiple servants to handle their horses and baggage. And in this honor-driven world of fragile egos, the ultimate recourse when one’s reputation was impugned was the duel. Although dueling was officially illegal in the Continental army, it became commonplace at Valley Forge. (John Laurens felt the obligation to defend Washington’s honor against the libels of Thomas Conway, challenged him, and gained satisfaction by shooting Conway in the mouth.) As the soldiers shivered and starved in silence, their officers, who enjoyed more comfortable quarters and warmer clothing, made Valley Forge into a noisy arena for their personal pretensions.
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And if we think of Valley Forge as a stage, three men destined to have a significant impact on Washington’s career made their appearance on it at this time. The first was a young lieutenant attached to Daniel Morgan’s elite corps of Virginia sharpshooters named John Marshall. Even though he was recovering from a wound in the hand received at Brandywine, Marshall’s athletic prowess in footraces and jumping contests—he could supposedly leap over obstacles six feet high—caught the attention of the troops and earned him the nickname “Silverheels.” Though there is no record that Washington noticed him, Marshall certainly noticed Washington, and at Valley Forge began his lifelong role as the champion of Washington’s legacy in American history. Marshall wrote the definitive Washington biography of his time and subsequently imposed, for all time, Washington’s version of America’s original intentions in his landmark decisions as the nation’s preeminent jurist and most influential interpreter of the Constitution.
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Then there was the Marquis de Lafayette, a nineteen-year-old French nobleman who was also recovering from a wound suffered at Brandywine. Lafayette came by his title the old-fashioned European way: he inherited it. Initially Washington looked upon Lafayette as another of those imperious and unqualified French volunteers who kept showing up in camp and demanding to be made a general. But his personal courage in battle (“The Marquis is determined to be in the way of danger”) and willingness to serve at any rank endeared him to Washington, making Lafayette the French exception and eventually the chief symbol of the gloriously effective Franco-American alliance.
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More than his military contribution, which proved crucial in the early stages of the Yorktown campaign, Lafayette’s importance to Washington was deeply personal. The bond of cordial affection established at Valley Forge grew into a mutual affinity and emotional attachment that made Lafayette, even more than aides like Hamilton and Laurens, Washington’s surrogate son. In the presence of Lafayette the famous Washington aloofness melted into pools of candor and intimacy, and the letters addressed to “My Dear Marquis” are the most expressive, playful, and unprotective in the entire Washington correspondence. (Presumably, the letters to Martha were equivalently revealing, all the more reason to decry their destruction.) Washington liked to tease Lafayette, for example, with the accusation that his failure to bring his young wife to America was rooted in a silent fear that she would fall in love with an older man, namely Washington himself. Lafayette was the major outlet for Washington’s human side, and their letters provide the clearest evidence that he had one.
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