Read His Excellency: George Washington Online
Authors: Joseph J. Ellis
Tags: #General, #Historical, #Military, #United States, #History, #Presidents - United States, #Presidents, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Biography & Autobiography, #Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), #Biography, #Generals, #Washington; George, #Colonial Period (1600-1775), #Generals - United States
THE SELF-EVIDENT EXCEPTION
O
NCE BACK
at Mount Vernon his mind moved along two separate tracks. While a political crisis of enormous magnitude was obviously in the air, there had been crises before, and each time the British government had stepped back from the precipice. Although newspaper reports were hardly encouraging, with some suggesting that George III had ordered his European ambassadors to regard the American colonies as already in a state of rebellion, Washington remained cautiously optimistic that cooler heads in London would again prevail. “There is reason to believe,” he explained in February 1775, that “the Ministry would willingly change their ground, from a conviction the forcible measures will be inadequate to the end designed.” Now at any rate was not the time for rash or provocative decisions. “A little time must now unfold the mystery,” he cautioned, “as matters are drawing to a point.”
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Washington chose to use that time to recover familiar rhythms. He chaired meetings of the Potomac Company, where fifty “Negro Men” were hired to dredge the upper reaches of the river. He worked extensively on settling business associated with the now empty Fairfax estate at Belvoir. He outfitted a new expedition to occupy and develop his large tract of land on the Great Kanawha, this despite the fact that Lord Dunmore, the new governor of Virginia, apprised him that all his surveys of the land in the Ohio Country had been voided. Even more defiantly, he decided to go forward with another major renovation of Mount Vernon, the one that gave the mansion the size and style we recognize today. The decisions to pursue his land claims and renovate Mount Vernon on the cusp of an imperial crisis seem to suggest more than a guarded hope that the crisis would pass. They constitute a personal statement that his own agenda would not be dictated by men he had contemptuously described as those “Lordly Masters in Great Britain.”
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The other track, just the opposite of his defiant recovery of routine, led toward war and what turned out to be destiny. During the winter and spring of 1775, county militia units, calling themselves “independent companies,” were being organized throughout the colony. As Virginia’s most famous war hero, Washington was the obvious choice as commander, and by March five independent companies had invited him to lead them. Also in March, a second Virginia Convention was called, this time in Richmond, and ordered that the colony “be immediately put into a posture of Defence.” This was the occasion when Patrick Henry gave his famous “liberty or death” speech, but it also marked the moment when military preparation replaced political argumentation in Virginia as the highest priority. With that change, Washington succeeded orators like Henry as the most crucial figure. In the balloting to select delegates to the Second Continental Congress he received 106 of the 108 votes cast.
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Throughout April and May, Mount Vernon became the unofficial headquarters for planning Virginia’s response to the burgeoning crisis and Washington became the acknowledged central player. One small event captured the headiness of the times, as well as Washington’s emerging role as the singular, soon to become transcendent, leader. Mason had drafted a proposal for the Fairfax Independent Company, recommending that all officers be elected annually and rotate between officer and enlisted status on a regular basis. The notion that an army should be organized democratically was a truly radical suggestion, and one that Washington himself regarded as ridiculous, but Mason coupled his proposal with a corollary designed to disarm critics who doubted that such an arrangement could ever work: namely, that Washington would be the exception to the rotation principle, thereby providing the enduring stability required. As Mason put it, “the exception made in favor of the gentleman who by the unanimous vote of the company now commands it, is a very proper one, justly due to his public merit and experience . . . , peculiarly suited to our circumstances, as was dictated, not by compliment, but conviction.” It was a prophetic premonition of Washington’s abiding role throughout his subsequent career as the elite exception that proved the egalitarian rule.
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The late spring of 1775 was an intense time for both American independence and the public career of George Washington, a crowded moment when a great deal of history happened quickly, when events dictated decisions that in turn determined the direction of an emerging nation and the character of its preeminent hero. For all those reasons, this is an extended moment worth lingering over, searching through the dizzying details of the story for at least the outline of answers to the three most salient questions: First, when did Washington conclude that war with Great Britain was inevitable? Second, how and why was Washington singled out to lead what soon became known as the Continental army? And third, what was Washington’s response, not just publicly, but personally, to this assignment?
The answer to the first question is reasonably if not perfectly clear. When the British troops occupied Boston in 1774, Washington believed an important line had been crossed. After that date, war became a distinct possibility that could only be avoided if the British ministry altered its course. Over the course of the following year, as the evidence mounted that George III and his ministers fully intended to make Massachusetts an object lesson of where sovereign power resided within the British Empire, Washington believed that war had become a probability. When he departed Mount Vernon for Philadelphia on May 4, 1775, he took along his military uniform, both a sign and a statement of his aggressive intentions.
But the truly clinching evidence came in mid-May, when reliable news of the actions at Lexington and Concord reached Philadelphia, along with reports from London that a major British force was on the way to support General Thomas Gage’s beleaguered garrison in Boston. As he wrote to George William Fairfax in London, Washington’s mind was made up: “Unhappy it is though to reflect, that a Brother’s Sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in this choice?” His cash accounts for early June show purchases of a tomahawk, several cartouch boxes, new coverings for his holsters, and five books on the military art. He was preparing to go to war.
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But how was he selected to lead the entire American army? That question has provoked a lively debate across several generations of biographers and historians. In his autobiographical recollection of the decision, John Adams claimed the lion’s share of credit for choosing Washington, suggesting that he overruled the New England delegation in the Continental Congress, which had presumed that one of their own would be chosen because the current battle was raging around Boston. Adams’s claim is almost surely a self-serving piece of mischief designed to exaggerate his own influence; it obscures the more elemental fact that, once the members of the Congress realized that they were facing a military as well as political crisis, the selection of Washington as the military commander was a foregone conclusion. In fact, at that confused and highly improvisational moment within the Congress, more delegates could agree that Washington should lead the American army than that there should be an American army at all. His unanimous elevation to the position as commander in chief actually preceded the creation of a national military force that he could command.
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Why did the choice seem so obvious? The short answer is that the appointment of a Virginian was politically essential in order to assure the allegiance of the most populous and wealthiest colony to the cause, and Washington was unquestionably the most eligible and qualified Virginian. Another short answer, subsequently offered by Adams as a joke, was that Washington was always selected by deliberative bodies to lead, whatever the cause, because he was always the tallest man in the room. Even as a joke, however, Adams was making a serious point that a veritable legion of his contemporaries made, especially upon first meeting Washington; namely, that he was physically majestic. As Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and staunch revolutionary, put it: “He has so much martial dignity in his deportment that you would distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among ten thousand people.” First impressions and appearances are often described as misleading, but in Washington’s case they established the favorable initial context for all subsequent judgments. In the highly charged atmosphere of the Continental Congress, where nervous men—all prominent figures in their own respective colonies—tended to talk too much, Washington’s sheer physicality made his reserve and customary silence into a sign of strength and sagacity.
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Looking backward from June 1775, with all the advantage of hindsight, one can see it coming. During the sessions of the Congress in May, Washington was the only delegate to attend in military uniform and was asked to chair four committees charged with military readiness. (In the First Continental Congress he had been given no committee assignments at all.) When he approached Philadelphia in his custom-built chariot in early May, a throng of five hundred riders escorted him into the city, a tribute accorded no other delegate. Nearly a year earlier, at the First Continental Congress, he had been the beneficiary of a widely circulated rumor that Adams recorded in his diary: “Coll Washington made the most eloquent Speech at the Virginia Convention that ever was made. Says he, ‘I will raise 1000 Men, Subsist them at my own Expence, and march myself at their Head for the Relief of Boston.’ ” This was a complete fabrication. Washington had made no such speech, in fact had made no speech at all. But the mythology was already starting to build. As the need intensified for a symbol of inter-colonial unity who could consolidate the disparate and even chaotic response of thirteen different colonies to the British military threat, he satisfied the requirements visually and politically more completely than anyone else.
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Finally, what was going on inside Washington’s own mind and heart? His diary entries for June 15 and June 16, respectively the day he was appointed and the day he delivered his brief acceptance speech to Congress, are characteristically unhelpful, telling us only where he dined and spent his evenings. The speech itself makes two distinctive points: that he did not feel qualified for the position, and that he would serve without pay. Here is the most revealing passage: “But lest some unlucky event should happen unfavourable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered by every Gentn in the room, that I this day declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I (am) honoured with.”
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One is tempted to read this kind of public modesty with a skeptical eye, as a ritualized statement of humility designed to demonstrate gentlemanly etiquette, rather than as a candid expression of what he truly felt. After all, Washington had been talked about as the leading candidate for the job of military commander for several weeks, had done nothing to discourage such talk, and had been wearing his uniform as a rather conspicuous statement of his candidacy. But in his private correspondence to his wife and brother Washington also described his appointment as “a trust too great for my capacity” and even claimed that he had done everything in his power to avoid it. He said much the same thing to his brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett:
I am now Imbarked on a tempestuous Ocean from whence, perhaps, no friendly harbour is to be found. . . . It is an honour I wished to avoid. . . . I can answer but for three things, a firm belief of the justice of our Cause—close attention to the prosecution of it—and the strictest Integrity—If these cannot supply the places of Ability & Experience, the cause will suffer & more than probably my character along with it, as reputation derives its principal support from success.
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What, then, is going on here? It helps to recognize that Washington engaged in the same pattern of postured reticence on two subsequent occasions: when he agreed to chair the Constitutional Convention; and when he accepted the office of the presidency. In all three instances he denied any interest in the appointment, demeaned his own qualifications, and insisted that only a unanimous vote left him no choice but to accept the call. The pattern suggests he had considerable trouble acknowledging his own ambitions. His claim that he had no interest in the commander-in-chief post was not so much a lie as an essential fabrication that shielded him from the recognition that, within a Continental Congress filled with ambitious delegates, he was the most ambitious—not just the tallest—man in the room. He needed to convince himself that the summons came from outside rather than inside his own soul.
If Washington was playing hide-and-seek within himself on the question of his own ambition, he was being honest and realistic about his qualifications to lead the American army to victory. Though a battle-tested veteran, he had never commanded any unit larger than a regiment. He had no experience deploying artillery or maneuvering cavalry and no background whatsoever in the engineering skills required to construct defensive positions or conduct sieges. Compared to the British officers he was sure to face on the battlefield, he was a rank amateur. We do not know the specific titles of the military books he purchased before departing Philadelphia, but they represented his effort to teach himself how to organize an army. The misgivings he expressed in the wake of his appointment, then, were not affectations of false humility, but rather rigorously realistic assessments during an intense moment of self-evaluation in which he was mercilessly honest about his prospects for success. While everyone around him was caught up in patriotic declarations about the moral supremacy of the American cause, Washington remained immune to the inflated rhetoric, keenly aware that a fervent belief in the worthiness of a crusade was no guarantee of its ultimate triumph.