Washington: A Life

by Ron Chernow

Responding to the Falmouth atrocities, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted legislation permitting American privateers to patrol the coast. With the war having idled much of the New England merchant fleet, Washington obtained congressional approval to arm several vessels as privateers that could keep one-third of the value of any British ships captured. Before long six such ships, dubbed “George Washington’s Navy,” prowled the eastern seaboard, marking the birth of the U.S. Navy.

On November 7 Lord Dunmore announced that slaves or indentured servants who had fled from their rebel masters could join his Royal Ethiopian Regiment and win their freedom. Eight hundred slaves soon flocked to his banner and were clad in British uniforms with the motto “Liberty to Slaves” stitched across them.

he was forced to recognize the competence of black soldiers. Whatever his motivations, it was a water-shed moment in American history, opening the way for approximately five thousand blacks to serve in the Continental Army, making it the most integrated American fighting force before the Vietnam War. At various times, blacks would make up anywhere from 6 to 12 percent of Washington’s army.

At midday on January 1, 1776, the atmosphere of the conflict abruptly lurched toward total war when Lord Dunmore torched Norfolk, Virginia. The fleet under his command pounded the town with cannonballs for seven hours, and the blackened ruins smoked for days. “Thus was destroyed,” wrote John Marshall, “the most populous and flourishing town in Virginia.”49 This conflagration banished any lingering traces of Anglophilia that Washington retained.

Martha spent between 52 and 54 months with her husband in a war that would drag on for 103 months; in other words, she spent about half the war with the Continental Army.62 At a minimum she stayed two or three months each winter, but some stays lengthened to seven, eight, or even nine months, until she jokingly referred to herself as “the great perambulator.”63 Because Washington couldn’t afford to abandon his army, Martha’s willingness to join him was of inestimable value. Due to his delicate position in the war, he had to keep his emotions bottled up. He couldn’t afford to show weakness or indecision and needed a wife to whom he could reveal his frustrations.

The arrival of the big Ticonderoga guns was providential. Washington remained dangerously short of gunpowder and firearms, and two thousand men lacked muskets or ammunition. Things had come to such a desperate pass that Benjamin Franklin suggested to General Charles Lee that the troops be furnished with bows and arrows. “Those were good weapons,”

At sunrise on March 5 the British saw that something wondrous had happened overnight: Dorchester Heights had been converted into a full-fledged fortress, making the British occupation of Boston seem untenable. Not a single American soldier had been lost in the operation. Legend maintains that, upon beholding the massed American guns, an incredulous General Howe exclaimed, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.”19 On this anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Washington strode among his men, shouting at them to “remember it is the fifth of March, and avenge the death of your brethren,” and the men roared back their assent.

More difficult to supervise were men frequenting the Holy Ground, the notorious red-light district near the Hudson River where up to five hundred prostitutes congregated nightly on land owned by Trinity Church. Venereal disease raced through several regiments, threatening to thin their ranks before the enemy arrived. As William Tudor of Boston wrote home, “Every brutal gratification can be so easily indulged in this place that the army will be debauched here in a month more than in twelve at Cambridge.”

On July 6 Hancock sent Washington a copy and asked him to have it read aloud to his army. The Declaration made the rebels’ treason official and reminded them of the unspeakable punishments the British government meted out for this offense. Only recently a British judge had handed down this grisly sentence to Irish revolutionaries: “You are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, where you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead, for while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads then cut off, and your bodies divided each into four quarters.”15 The British proved more lenient to captured American officers, but Washington knew that treason was a capital crime

Lieutenant Brown’s boat was intercepted between Governors Island and Staten Island by three American boats, whose crews demanded to know his business. When Brown said that he had a letter for Washington, the Americans instructed him to stay put while they sought instructions onshore. The three American officers who came out to handle the situation—Henry Knox, Joseph Reed, and Samuel Blachley Webb—had been well coached by Washington. They told Brown that they refused to touch the letter until he told them to whom it was addressed. When Brown retorted that it was addressed to “George Washington Esq., etc. etc.,” they said no such person existed and they couldn’t receive it. Somewhat mystified, Brown asked to whom it should be addressed, and his interlocutors replied that “all the world knew who Gen[era]l Washington was since the transactions of last summer.”34 Brown tried to strike a conciliatory tone. “I am sure Lord Howe will lament exceedingly this affair, as the letter is quite of a civil nature and not a military one.”35 Thus ended the initial standoff. Washington knew that this exchange involved much more than the fine points of decorum. He was now the de facto head of state of a newly minted country,

Under this strategy, the patriots would fortify a few strong, impregnable positions and invite the British to attack at their peril. Charles Lee wanted to fragment the army into nimble mobile units that could swoop down and harass the enemy as opportunities arose. Washington was slowly being forced to adopt a cautious strategy of trying to survive as best he could and attacking only when unusual chances emerged. The aim was to keep the Continental Army intact and wear down Britain through a prolonged war of attrition, hoping all the while to attract European allies who might deal a devastating blow to the enemy. The British, for their part, did have to win a military victory; a stalemate would be an expensive and humiliating defeat.

The Howe brothers imagined that they could now deliver the coup de grâce to Washington by slipping warships behind him in the East River, catching him in a vise between royal sailors and soldiers. Once again the weather rescued Washington. On August 28 a chill drizzle descended steadily on Brooklyn, soaking already-soggy ground. Since many American soldiers lacked tents, they had difficulty keeping clothes and munitions dry. The next day grew even darker and wetter as Washington, riding among his men and peering through the mist, saw that British troops had inched forward overnight, digging trenches to within six hundred yards of his outermost position.

On the pretense of bringing over fresh troops from New Jersey, he had instructed General Heath to collect boats of every description that he could find. Now, right after dark, the Continental Army lined up to begin its silent retreat across the water. Washington himself, an indomitable presence, presided at the ferry landing. At first the crossing was impeded by rough winds, and only rowboats could be used, their oars covered with cloth to mute sounds. Then winds rose from the southeast, and sailboats could be used as the river turned smooth as glass. In another piece of deceptive theater, Washington kept campfires going in Brooklyn Heights to conceal the evacuation.

Once the American defenses were demolished, British and Hessian troops waded ashore in neat rows, their bayonets flashing. As in the Battle of Brooklyn, the Hessians took no prisoners and oversaw mass executions, shooting in the head dozens of young Americans who tried to surrender; one Hessian decapitated an American prisoner and posted his head on a pike. These atrocities spread contagious fear among the American troops, but officers lost their nerve as well, abandoning their men. Joseph Plumb Martin bluntly parceled out blame: “I do not recollect of seeing a commissioned officer from the time I left the lines on the banks of the East River in the morning until I met . . . one in the evening.”

For all that, the British and the Hessians suffered 276 casualties, or twice as many as the Americans. Once again General Howe dawdled after victory and bungled a major opportunity. In later testimony before Parliament, he traced his sluggish behavior to an aversion to unnecessary combat losses but also cited unnamed “political reasons”—perhaps his preference for a negotiated solution rather than outright conquest of the Continental Army.

despite the calamities at Forts Washington and Lee, the British had done Washington an inadvertent favor. They had shown him the futility of trying to defend heavily fortified positions along the seaboard and forced him out into the countryside, where he had mobility and where the British Army, deprived of the Royal Navy, operated at a disadvantage. For political reasons, Washington hadn’t been able to countermand the congressional decision to defend New York City and the Hudson River, but now that he had done so and suffered predictable defeats, he would have more freedom to pick and choose his targets. With his drastically diminished army and depleted supplies, it was no longer a question of standing and confronting the British with their vastly superior troops and firepower.

Washington knew perfectly how to wield silence as a weapon. The letter was conspicuous for what it omitted, not for what it said, allowing Reed to imagine Washington’s wrath rather than experience it, leaving him in a torment of uncertainty. The refusal to berate Reed only shamed him more. By not fulminating against Reed, Washington concealed what he knew about his machinations with Lee, a cunning device he employed many times in his career. And his response showed how highly he regarded the gentlemanly code of honor. Before anything else, he wanted to account for having opened and read the letter, lest it seem a wanton violation of privacy. It was a mark of Washington’s psychological subtlety that he sent a note of apology to a man who owed him an apology. Finally, by alluding to Reed’s taxing journey and sending regards to Mrs. Reed, Washington stressed that he wouldn’t stoop to anger in the face of provocation.

To honor the thirteen states, he published thirteen essays in a collection entitled The Crisis. Scratched out by candlelight and campfire, these essays appeared in pamphlet form on December 23, and Washington had them read aloud to small clusters of men up and down the Delaware. The shivering listeners surely glowed with pride at the words: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”11 Washington had befriended the radical firebrand during the Jersey retreat, and Paine now celebrated his stoic fortitude: “Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him.”

The mythology of the Battle of Trenton portrays the Hessian mercenaries as slumbering in a drunken stupor after imbibing late-night Christmas cheer. In fact, Colonel Johann Gottlieb Rall had kept his men on high alert, and they felt frazzled and exhausted from constant drills and patrols. Quite shrewdly, Washington had worn them down by irregular raids and small skirmishes in the surrounding countryside.

The American triumph was accomplished in less than an hour.“It may be doubted,” wrote George Trevelyan, “whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.”33 The battle toll was a bloody one for the Hessians: 22 killed, 84 wounded, and nearly 900 captured (500 escaped to safety) versus only 2 American deaths in combat plus another 4 or 5 from exposure to cold.

granted extraordinary powers to Washington for six months, allowing him to muster new troops by paying bounties, to commandeer provisions, and even to arrest vendors who didn’t accept Continental currency. These powers, breathtaking in scope, aroused fears of a despot in the making—fears that Washington quickly laid to rest. He understood that liberties should be affirmed even as they were being temporarily abridged, and he planned to set aside emergency powers the instant they were no longer needed. As he informed Congress, “I shall constantly bear in mind that, as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first thing laid aside when those liberties are firmly established.”39 In this manner, Washington strengthened civilian authority over the military.

The Battle of Princeton gave Washington another chance to show that he was the army’s chief warrior in the antique sense. The eighteenth-century battlefield was a compact space, its cramped contours defined by the short range of muskets and bayonet charges, giving generals a chance to inspire by their immediate presence. When Mercer’s men began to retreat, harried by redcoats flashing bayonets, General Greene directed Pennsylvania militia into the fray, only to have them collide with Mercer’s fleeing men amid “a shower of grapeshot.”53 The American panic was stemmed by Washington himself, who suddenly circled into view and exhorted his rattled men to stand and fight. “Parade with us, my brave fellows!”

Washington’s tenure as commander in chief featured relatively few battles, often fought after extended intervals of relative calm, underscoring the importance of winning the allegiance of a population that vacillated between fealty to the Crown and patriotic indignation. The fair treatment of civilians formed an essential part of the war effort. Washington had a sure grasp of the principles of this republican revolution, asserting that “the spirit and willingness of the people must in a great measure take [the] place of coercion.”8 No British general could compete with him in this contest for popular opinion. With one eye fixed on the civilian populace, Washington showed punctilious respect for private property and was especially perturbed when American troops sacked houses under the pretext that the owners were Tories. His overriding goal was to contrast his own humane behavior with the predatory ways of the enemy.

During the long Morristown winter, Washington made notable advances in organizing a spy network under his personal supervision. This operation had enjoyed a top priority from the moment he arrived in Cambridge in 1775. With his natural reticence and sphinxlike personality, Washington was a natural student of espionage.

Thomas Jefferson traced Washington’s strengths and weaknesses as a general to a persistent mental trait. He prepared thoroughly for battles and did extremely well if everything went according to plan. “But if deranged during the course of the action,” Jefferson noted, “if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in readjustment.”26 With a mind neither quick nor nimble, Washington lacked the gift of spontaneity and found it difficult to improvise on the spot. Baron Johann de Kalb, who came to America with Lafayette, echoed Jefferson’s critique when he said of Washington after the Brandywine defeat, “He is the most amiable, obliging, and civil man but, as a general, he is too slow, even indolent, much too weak, and is not without his portion of vanity and presumption.”27 Even Washington’s faithful ally Nathanael Greene confided to Pickering that he found Washington indecisive. “For my part,” he boasted, “I decide in a moment.”28 Washington’s inestimable strength, whether as a general, a planter, or a politician, was prolonged deliberation and slow, mature decisions, but these were luxuries seldom permitted in the heat and confusion of battle.

Although Germantown ended in defeat, Washington had shown extraordinary audacity. With grudging admiration, Howe conceded that he didn’t think “the enemy would have dared to approach after so recent a defeat as that at Brandywine.”51 The French foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes, who was pondering an alliance with America, claimed that “nothing struck him so much” as the Battle of Germantown. 52 He was impressed that Washington, stuck with raw recruits, had fought two consecutive battles against highly seasoned troops. In writing about the battle, Washington stressed how bravely his men had fought and how narrowly victory had eluded them.

Many assigned the true credit for Saratoga to the impetuous Arnold, who had fought “inspired by the fury of a demon,” one eyewitness said, suffering a severe gash in one leg from a musket ball.7 Despite Arnold’s contribution, Gates grew puffed up with his own power after the victory. If “old England is not by this taught a lesson of humility,” he told his wife, “then she is an obstinate old slut.”

On November 2 Gates at last deigned to send him a short note, saying he was returning Colonel Morgan and his band of marksmen. Clearly, Gates had heard through the grapevine that Washington was agitated about not having heard from him and disposed of the matter in a cavalier line: “I am confident Your Excellency has long ago received all the good news from this quarter.”15 Never one to react on the spot, Washington bided his time to take his revenge upon Horatio Gates.

On October 30 Washington handed Hamilton his marching orders, which stipulated that he should inform Gates of “the absolute necessity that there is for his detaching a very considerable part of the army at present under his command to the reinforcement of this.”21 When Hamilton arrived in Albany, Gates was predictably outraged to have to bargain with the youthful aide.

In late November Congress reorganized the Board of War, and Richard Henry Lee saw to it that Mifflin was named to it. Mifflin then confirmed Washington’s worst fears by securing the appointment of Horatio Gates as its president.

The various efforts of Gates, Conway, Mifflin, et al. to discredit and even depose Washington have been known to history as the Conway Cabal. Cabal is much too strong a word for this loosely organized network of foes.

“I can assure those gentlemen,” Washington wrote testily, “that it is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fireside than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets. However, although they seem to have little feeling for the naked, distressed soldiers, I feel superabundantly for them and from my soul pity those miseries which it is neither in my power to relieve or prevent.”4 This was a new voice for Washington, reflecting a profound solidarity with his men that went beyond Revolutionary ideology and arose from the special camaraderie of shared suffering.

What made Valley Forge so bitterly disenchanting for Washington was that selfishness among the citizenry seemed to outweigh patriotic fervor. In choosing winter quarters at Valley Forge, he had surmised, correctly, that the surrounding countryside possessed ample food supplies. What he hadn’t reckoned on was that local farmers would sell their produce to British troops in Philadelphia rather than to shivering patriots.

Those Loyalists in Philadelphia who had curried favor with the British were thrown into a panic by their decision to quit the city and made bootless attempts to travel north with the army. By failing to safeguard these turncoats, the British committed a major propaganda blunder.

In his self-serving view of events, Lee believed that he had performed a prodigious feat, rescuing his overmatched army from danger and organizing an orderly retreat. “The American troops would not stand the British bayonets,” he insisted to Washington. “You damned poltroon,” Washington rejoined, “you never tried them!”28 Always reluctant to resort to profanities, the chaste Washington cursed at Lee “till the leaves shook on the tree,” recalled General Scott. “Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since.”

Ever since Valley Forge, Washington had lamented the profiteering that deprived his men of critically needed supplies, and he remained contemptuous of those who rigged and monopolized markets, branding them “the pests of society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America,” as he erupted in one fire-breathing letter. “I would to God that one of the most atrocious of each state was hung in gibbets upon a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman.”

Broadening his critique of the political situation, Washington traced the source of the nation’s problems to the very structure of the Articles of Confederation. Deprived of taxing power, Congress had to rely on requests to the states. Instead of dealing with such structural defects, the legislature had deteriorated into partisan backbiting.

By this point, with a heavy influx of black soldiers from New England, the Continental Army had become a highly integrated force. But Washington knew that it was one thing to train and equip blacks from the northern states and quite another those from the South. He must have wondered whether such an action might someday sound the death knell for slavery at Mount Vernon. Like many southern slaveholders who were uncomfortable with slavery in principle, Washington hoped the institution would wither away on some foggy, distant day. By contrast, the Laurens plan was radical and immediate, with incalculable consequences.

credit as the country’s foremost political need, and he supported loans and heavy taxation to attain it. While fighting Great Britain, he pondered the source of its military power and found the answer in public credit, which gave the enemy inexhaustible resources. “In modern wars,” he told Joseph Reed, “the longest purse must chiefly determine the event,” and he feared that England, with a well-funded debt, would triumph over America with its chaotic finances and depleted coffers.

Unbeknownst to Washington, Arnold had by now established contact with Major John André, adjutant general of the British Army, and was prepared to assist Sir Henry Clinton in a secret plan to seize West Point. Peggy Arnold, having befriended André during the British occupation, was a full-fledged confederate of the plot. Heavily in debt, the mercenary Arnold brokered a rich deal for his treachery, charging the British six thousand pounds sterling and a commission in the British Army for delivering West Point into their hands.

That September, not realizing that Arnold was in league with the enemy, Washington enjoined him to improve West Point’s defenses. Arnold pretended to embark on a whirl of improvements at the fortress, while continually weakening them. He made it seem as if hundreds of men were hard at work when mere dozens were enlisted. When Washington alerted Arnold that he would pass through the Hudson Valley on the way to Hartford—“I want to make my journey a secret,” Washington stressed—Arnold relayed this letter to his British accomplices, listing places Washington would spend the night.45 Had the letter not been delayed, Washington might well have been taken by the British.

Washington scrutinized West Point’s defenses and was shocked by their decrepit state, which showed none of the strenuous attention promised by Arnold. “The impropriety of his conduct, when he knew I was to be there, struck me very forcibly,” Washington later said. “I had not the least idea of the real cause.”

In cahoots with her husband, Peggy Arnold played her mad scene to perfection. Blinded by chivalry, Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette were duped by her lunatic ravings, if not aroused by her immodest getup. They assumed that Arnold had confessed his guilt to her before fleeing and that she was still reeling from the shock. Lafayette wrote tenderly about Peggy Arnold, “whose face and whose youthfulness make her so interesting.”54 Hamilton proved especially susceptible to her wiles. “It was the most affecting scene I ever was witness to,” he wrote to Elizabeth Schuyler. For a considerable time Peggy Arnold had “entirely lost her senses . . . One moment she raved, another she melted into tears. Sometimes she pressed her infant to her bosom and lamented its fate, occasioned by the imprudence of its father, in a manner that would have pierced insensibility itself.”55 In dealing with Arnold’s wife, Washington and Hamilton left something to be desired as psychologists.

On New Year’s Day 1781 Washington’s worst nightmares were realized when thirteen hundred troops from the Pennsylvania Line, encamped near Morristown, mutinied and killed several officers. Much inflamed by rum, these men aired a host of legitimate grievances: insufficient food, clothing, and pay. After grabbing every musket in sight and six cannon, they angrily stormed off toward Philadelphia, where they intended to intimidate Congress into providing relief. The insurgents stressed that they acted under duress—“We are not Arnolds” was a favorite battle cry—but they could no longer stomach the inhumane treatment inflicted on them by politicians. Among other things, they could not tolerate that newly enlisted men were being paid cash bounties while they had received no pay in more than a year.

Although Hamilton subscribed to Washington’s values and principles—which was why he could mimic him so expertly in letters—he expressed misgivings about his personality. Hamilton had taken a long and searching look at George Washington. Working in daily contact with a man burdened by multiple cares, Hamilton inevitably was exposed to Washington’s bad-tempered side. A stoic figure who strove to be perfectly composed in public, Washington needed to blow off steam in private, and the proud, sensitive young Hamilton grew weary of dealing with his boss’s varying moods.

Technically a British victory, the battle cost Cornwallis dearly: 532 dead and wounded soldiers, more than a quarter of his force. As Charles James Fox pointed out in Parliament, “Another such victory would ruin the British Army.”2 Nathanael Greene concurred: “They had the splendor, we the advantage.”3 Cornwallis decided to move his bruised and exhausted troops into Virginia to link up with Benedict Arnold. He was being worn down by the wily, resourceful Greene, who came into his own during the campaign. Washington understood that Greene, despite the defeat, had acquitted himself nobly. “Although the honors of the field did not fall to your lot,” Washington told him, “I am convinced you deserved them.”

Captain Thomas Graves had burned homes on the Maryland side to soften up his victims on the Virginia bank. Then he sent ashore a party to Mount Vernon to demand a large store of food and offered asylum to any slaves; seventeen of Washington’s slaves—fourteen men and three women—fled to the ship’s freedom, embarrassing the leader of the American Revolution.

Their interpreter at Wethersfield, the Chevalier de Chastellux, a man of many parts—soldier, philosopher, member of the French Academy, intimate of Voltaire—was well placed to study their complex interaction. A handsome fellow with watchful eyes, he was gathering material for a book about the United States and was immensely taken with the forty-nine-year-old Washington, applauding him as “the greatest and the best of men.”18 He was chagrined by the treatment Washington received from his French counterpart. Rochambeau, he claimed, handled the Virginian with “all the ungraciousness and all the unpleasantness possible,” and he worried that Washington would be left with “a sad and disagreeable feeling in his heart.”19 Washington secretly carried this grief but exposed it to no one outside a small circle of advisers.

The man who had shuddered at the thought of prolonged separation from his restive army spent four leisurely winter months in Philadelphia, nestled in a town house on Third Street. From the moment he descended on the capital, Washington was lionized at every turn. Two artistic residents, Charles Willson Peale and Alexander Quesnay, unrolled giant transparent paintings of him in windows that, when lit from the back, projected his glowing vision into the night, showing laurel wreaths crowning his brow and an antique spear grasped in his hand as he crushed a British crown underfoot.

During the war, encouraged by the idealistic camaraderie of Laurens, Hamilton, and Lafayette, Washington may have entertained occasional thoughts of abolishing slavery. Now the war’s imminent end turned the question of runaway slaves into an urgent practical matter. Deeply ambivalent, he straddled both sides of the issue.