George Washington in 1775-1776
James Thomas Flexner (1966)

For Washington, command of the Continental Army in 1775-1776 required a difficult series of judgment calls – how harshly to deal with Tories, whether troops from Connecticut should invade Tory-leaning New York, whether it would be necessary to enlist troops for durations beyond the end of 1776. Washington biographer James T. Flexner details how Washington’s decision-making grew more aggressive as his thinking – and that of other Revolutionary leaders – followed Thomas Paine in moving toward independence, rather than reconciliation and reform, as the ultimate goal . Flexner’s draft book excerpt also details Martha Washington’s trip to join her husband in Boston and the organization and workings of the Headquarters household staff.

I am honored to be here today on Washington’s Birthday. I might say that I was somewhat frightened when I was told that these speeches are subsequently published. I am an individual who fusses tremendously about style, and I feel that I speak a little worse, shall I say, than I write. However, I finally discovered a way to get around this problem.

I am now working on a three-volume biography of Washington. The first volume has been published, and the second volume is in process of being prepared. I thought that I would try on this distinguished company one of the chapters of my second volume, which has not yet seen the light of day.

Maybe I should say something very briefly about what I am trying to do in writing on Washington. Everybody says to me, “How did you get so all-fired-up writing a book on Washington after so many others have been written?” They always ask me what aspect I am concentrating on. Am I writing about Washington as a fox hunter and squire, or a general, or a politician? As a matter of fact, I have no angle except a desire to try to bring Washington more to life as a human being. It seems to me that Washington the man has got lost.
I came across the following description of how biographers write about other people. “They obliterate the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness and imperfection. Thus, they present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related.” This quotation, by the way, is from Freud.

I would like very much to do what I can to restore the feeling of Washington as he lived, rather than as the marble image now too often envisaged.

I wish I could read you a chapter on Washington in Morristown. Although I have got that in first draft, I have not got it in the second. The chapter I shall read you — you will be glad to know it is not very long — deals with Washington’s activities in the winter of 1775 to 1776, when he was in Cambridge, in Massachusetts. Independence had not yet been declared. Washington insisted all his life, and he was rather strangely insistent on this, that when he originally took up arms for the cause, he had no idea of establishing independence. As you will see, this chapter goes to some extent into the question of how he changed his mind.

Anyway, here we are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1775 to 1776:

Washington had hoped for so long that the crisis would ease before winter, enabling him to return at once to Mount Vernon, that he had allowed the season to become too far advanced, raising the danger of snow-clogged roads, before he wrote his wife to come from Virginia and join him.

Martha Washington had never been far from home. Even in a familiar countryside she awoke with terror when the dogs barked. Now the timid housewife procrastinated about obeying her husband’s summons until his estate manager, Lund Washington, wrote censuring her “ill-judged” behavior. “I suppose in one way or another she will make it the 20th of November before she will get off.”
When Martha did finally get off, she surrounded herself with friends. Near her head in the rocking coach bobbed the heads of her son, John Parke Custis, and his wife; of General Gates’s wife; and of Martha’s nephew, George Lewis, who wished to serve his uncle as aide. The attention that they were accorded on the road surprised Martha. She was met on the outskirts of Philadelphia with “as great pomp as if I had been a great somebody.” A military escort of horsemen led her into town.

After the untraveled lady had settled in her lodgings, she was subjected to a severe test on how she would get on in a strange environment with people whose ideas differed radically from her own. She had been invited to a ball to be given in her honor by leading citizens. She was enjoying anticipations of the dance and had her mind (so we may assume) half on what she would wear, when callers were announced. In came a delegation, four soberly dressed citizens who were obviously torn between embarrassment and a sense of their own importance. The plump, diminutive Virginian chatted with them good-humoredly till they found their tongues. Then they expressed “great regard and affection to her.” She thanked them prettily. They requested her “to accept their grateful acknowledgment and respect due to her on account of her near connection with our worthy and brave general, now exposed in the field of battle in the defense of our rights and liberties.” She thanked them again. Then came a tightening of their faces. They had come to “request and desire her not to grace that company to which, we are informed, she had an invitation that evening.”

It developed that the more radical patriots had threatened to wreck the tavern where the ball was to be held rather than permit the more conservative patriots to involve the commander in chief’s wife in an excess they considered unsuited to “these troubled times.” Robert Hanson Harrison of Maryland, the aide Washington had sent to Philadelphia to meet Martha, was to engage in an angry argument with Samuel Adams of Massachusetts about such blue-nosed proceedings. But Martha responded to the request of her gimlet-eyed callers with, as one of them remembered, “great politeness.” She sent her “best compliments” to those objecting to the ball, with assurance “that their sentiments on this occasion were perfectly agreeable unto her own.”

Martha and her party reached Cambridge in mid-December, heralded by a letter from Washington’s former aide, Joseph Reed, stating that Mesdames Washington, Custis, and Gates were “very agreeable ladies ... Not a bad supply, I think, in a cold country where wood is scarce ... The face of your camp will be changed.”

Washington had by now moved into the house of a rich Tory, John Vassall, who had fled to Boston leaving fine furniture behind. As was always the case at his headquarters, his aides lived in, sleeping several to a room. Through the front hall there was a perpetual bustle; the drawing room was the Commander in Chief’s office. When a vast quantity of papers had to be prepared, Martha lent a hand, but for the most part she brought what her husband called “the softer domestic virtues” to a household which had previously been altogether masculine. In particular, ladies could now be better entertained. They were “treated with oranges and glass of wine” in mid-morning, or asked to dinner which was held fashionably at two.

When Mercy Warren, who was not only a housewife like Martha, but also a bluestocking, authoress, and politician, came to call, the Virginia matron received her terrifying visitor, so Mrs. Warren wrote, “with the politeness and respect shown in a first interview among the well-bred, and with the ease and cordiality” of older friendship. “The complacency of her manner speaks at once of the benevolence of her heart and her affability, candor, and gentleness qualify her to soften the hours of private life, or sweeten the cares of the hero, and smooth the rugged pains of war.”

Martha wrote one of her lady friends at home: “Every person seems to be cheerful and happy here ... I confess I shudder every time I hear the sound of a gun ... To me that never see anything of war, the preparations are very terrible indeed, but I endeavor to keep my fears to myself as well as I can.” She added cattily that “there are but two ladies in Cambridge who get much attention from men, but neither of them is pretty, I think.”

Headquarters was, even before it had to take to the road with an Army on the move, a most complicated domestic operation. However, it was organized to run independently of Martha. The purse was always held by one of Washington’s aides, who paid bills and kept accounts for presentation to Congress. Unless one left before another could be found, there was a steward: in Cambridge, Ebenezer Austin, who got on (as some others did not) without the assistance of a housekeeper.

At the moment, Washington employed two cooks. Adam Foutz had the panache of being French, but he soon shifted to guarding Headquarters with a musket on his shoulder, we know not whether because he yearned for gunpowder or his sauces did not please. The other cook was called Edward Hunt. Mrs. Morrison served as kitchen maid. The washerwoman, Mary Kettel, probably only did rough work as large bills were paid for outside washing. Washington was soon to acquire a tailor, Giles Alexander, who seems to have traveled with Headquarters throughout the war.

The duties of Eliza Chapman, Timothy Austin, James Munroe, and the negroes, Dinah and Peter, were not specified. This staff was soon augmented by more negroes: Servant Jack and Sailor Jack; Hannah who belonged to a minister and was working to buy her freedom; and a seamstress who appeared in February 1776, and became more entwined with Washington’s life than he found agreeable.

She was Margaret Thomas, a free mulatto. Her charms smote the heart of Washington’s mulatto body servant, Billy Lee, a slave whom he had bought in 1768 for 61 pounds, and who had become inseparable from his owner. Billy claimed that he had actually married the charmer. This Washington doubted, but as long as the servant who had “followed my fortunes” for so long with such “fidelity” remained attached to the lady, he could not ban her from his family, although he came to long for the happy day when he would “see her no more.”

Since he rose with the dawn, Washington was usually through with routine business by dinner time. Each day his table was more crowded than it had been at Mount Vernon, and food being plentiful in Cambridge, a large variety of meats and vegetables tempted the guests. In the presence of the ladies, Washington was always courtly, lighthearted, if sometimes a little formal. When the dessert was finished, the ladies withdrew. Then Washington, his aides, the other officers, and what male citizens were present, sat over their wine.
Madeira wine flowed plentifully. The largest single item in the Headquarters’ accounts for September 1775 was £ 35.6.11 for this liquid necessity. More was bought on October 6 for £ 28.

Early in December there is another entry, £37.18.10 for 108 bottles delivered on October 11 and 109 on October 22. Washington believed that wine brought “cheerfulness” to his table.

The pitfalls of ordinary living, rather than fantasy or exaggeration, most amused Washington. We may thus credit an anecdote that comes to us via gossip rather than document. He was sitting, so the story runs, with his generals over wine when they heard, echoing from the distant lines, gunshots and alarm bells. As they sprang to their feet and started for the door, General Greene cried out that he could not find his wig. He was much agitated. By contrast, a monument of martial coolness, General Lee urged, “Look for it behind the mirror, sir!” Greene hurried to the mirror and saw in the glass the missing wig firmly on his own head, and behind him General Washington doubled up with mirth.

However, Washington did not countenance excesses that undermined discipline. Another believable anecdote is that when he heard some drunken soldiers squabbling in the yard outside his Headquarters, he rushed out and flattened a few of the brawlers with his own fist. One of his general orders read, “The vile practice of swallowing the whole ration of liquor at a single draught is also to be prevented by causing the sergeants to see it mixed with water. In which case, instead of being pernicious, it will become very refreshing and salutary.”

Washington was now regularly offering hospitality to the New England politicians, particularly John Adams who was temporarily back from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The Massachusetts men were charmed by the gracious Southern commander and his equally gracious wife, charmed by the high spirited young outlanders on his staff who could propose a toast so elegantly and hold their liquor like gentlemen; but yet the attitude that had opposed Martha’s ball in Philadelphia made this society seem, in its very seductiveness, disturbing.

John Adams had actually heard that there was a whispering in coffee houses that the people wanted an American king. He wrote half playfully to Mercy Warren: “Monarchy is the genteelest and most fashionable government, and I don’t know why the ladies ought not to consult elegance and the fashion.” For his part, he preferred a republican “virtue and simplicity of manners.” Monarchy entailed “so much elegance in dress, furniture, equippage, so much music and dancing, so much fencing and skating, so much cards and backgammon, so much horse racing and cockfighting, so many balls and assemblies, so many plays and concerts, that the very imagination of them makes me feel vain, light, frivolous, and insignificant.”

Untraveled John Adams had no conception of what life was really like at a royal court; his vision much more closely resembled a gay week at Mount Vernon broken with a visit to the Annapolis races. He felt that this was the life with which George Washington was familiar and the very thought of that life made him feel what he most hated to be: insignificant.

Although Washington would have liked to give to the press, “as a compliment to the poetess,” an ode to him by the colored versifier Phyllis Wheatley, he decided it was wiser to suppress the effusion which ended:

A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine
With gold unfailing, Washington, be shine!

However, arguments concerning a native royalty were mere anticipations of distant possibilities. The immediate issue was what to do about enthusiastic supporters of the existing royal government. They were legally justified in continued allegiance to George III, since independence had not been declared, but such Tories presented active dangers to the cause.

The Massachusetts loyalists were for the most part in Boston with the British, and whatever problems of subversion remained were being efficiently handled by the local government. It was not until the British threatened to spread out the war that the handling of Tories rejoined the crowd of quandaries that were ranked around Washington.

The Royal Navy burned Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) and announced that similar destruction awaited New England’s other seaports. No one could foresee that this would prove to be an empty threat. Calls poured in on Washington for soldiers. Although he could not send the various towns Continental garrisons without tearing up his Army and violating an order of Congress that local defense should be undertaken by local militia, he dispatched to the communities most menaced a few of his magic makers, the riflemen, and also high officers to superintend the defenses. These officers found, resident in the towns they were supposed to protect, Royal officials surrounded with Tory supporters.

The matter should have been handled by the provincial authorities. However, in this early stage of the war when compromise had not yet been ruled impossible, almost all of the civilian governments lacked the unanimity to act with effect.

As Washington realized, the fundamental danger, more menacing even than the ministerial soldiers and ships, was the fact that the cause was not monolithic but double. Two quite different issues were clasped together like a pair of hands which, if pulled apart, would become fists, striking at each other. Ostensibly, the cause was no more than a protest against injustice coming in from England. However, the seas on which the cause had been launched were unexplored, and no one knew what port would in the end be found.
Rebellions appeal naturally to pushing spirits whom the status quo least favors, but tend to frighten those who have the most to lose.

Thus, despite innumerable exceptions like Washington himself, the more determined patriots usually came from the middle or lower strata, while loyalist sympathies moved the socially correct and the well-to-do. In between was the majority of the population. They were still undecided. They needed time to make up their minds. If too greatly hurried, they might scurry in panic toward the haven most obviously indicated by their social and economic ranks. Thus, there was ever present the danger that the cause would break in half, the prosperous fleeing for protection into the arms of the ministry as the revolt was taken over by the lower classes and directed against American as well as British men of property.

Washington’s problem was to deal with the present without upsetting the future. Since the civil governments could not take the lead, it devolved on him to find the best middle ground between leniency that would permit damaging aid to the enemy and stringency that would disgust and frighten the moderates. His ratiocinations were further troubled by a moral issue. He did not believe that men should be persecuted for beliefs which had not led to overt inimical actions.

This he explained some years later in writing to a former neighbor and present Tory sympathizer, Bryan Fairfax: “The friendship I ever professed and felt for you met with no diminution from the difference in our political sentiments. I know the rectitude of my own intentions, and, believing in the sincerity of yours, lamented, though I did not condemn, your renunciation of the creed I adopted. Nor do I think any person or power ought to interfere with you whilst your conduct is not opposed to the general interest of the people, and the measures they are pursuing. Our actions, depending upon ourselves, may be controlled, whilst the powers of thinking, originating in higher causes, cannot always be molded to our wishes.”

The mildest possible step in relation to the Tories seemed to Washington the most advisable. As he sent off the New Hampshire brigadier, John Sullivan, to lead the defense of Portsmouth, he urged the Legislature of New Hampshire and, indeed, “every other government on the continent” to arrest officials of the Crown who had given “pregnant proofs of their unfriendly disposition.” They were to be banished to the interior and their paroles taken that they would stay where they would do no harm. Other suspected Tories were only to be warned.

This seemed milk-and-waterish to the Massachusetts leaders and their intimate, the English radical, General Charles Lee. When Lee was sent to arrange the defense of Newport, he, on his own authority, demanded that all suspected Tories sign an oath stating that they would not assist the enemy. Three who refused were arrested. Washington recognized, probably with reluctance, the expediency of Lee’s action, writing Congress that to imitate it in every province would have “a good effect.”

At the very end of 1775, shocking news came in across the ocean. The colonists had pinned their hopes on George III intervening for them with his ministry. But the King had now publicly declared that, having received, as he put it “the most friendly office of foreign assistance,” he was determined to smash by force “a rebellious war” manifestly being carried on for the purpose of establishing “an independent empire.” This speech was a turning point in American history for it forced into innumerable reluctant minds the unwelcome conclusion that “an independent empire” might, indeed, become necessary. Washington was to remember that the speech made a great change in his own thinking.

Early in January, spies reported that the British in Boston were preparing an expeditionary force. General Lee thereupon wrote Washington that “the consequences of the enemy’s possessing themselves of New York have appeared to me so terrible that I have scarcely been able to sleep.” The city, Lee continued, was controlled by Tories who would welcome any invader, and Tory bands were actually operating on Long Island. Congress, with its powerful delegation of New York conservatives, could take no steps, but Lee (who was in daily contact with the Massachusetts leaders) believed that “the best members” of Congress expected Washington to step into the breach by ordering that the city be secured and its Tories suppressed or expelled. Lee now proposed that he collect Connecticut volunteers, secure aid perhaps from New Jersey, and march into New York.

Having consulted John Adams, who vehemently backed the suggestion, Washington ordered Lee to proceed. By thus authorizing a Connecticut force to enter New York and disarm any persons “whose conduct and declarations have rendered them justly suspected of designs unfriendly to the views of Congress,” Washington, on the advice of members of the radical wing, took the responsibility for what could be considered the invasion of a middle colony by New England. He was every day thinking more in continental than in regional terms.

The Connecticut revolutionaries, who had already made one unofficial (and deeply resented) foray into New York City, flocked to Lee’s banners. But the Continental Congress acted quickly to protect New York’s independence. They ruled that any troops who went into that colony to arrest Tories became subject, the instant they crossed the border, to the orders of the local authorities.
In commanding Lee to disband his force, Washington expressed his continuing belief that “the period is arrived when nothing less than the most decisive and vigorous measures should be pursued.” To Congress, he wrote that he was not fond of stretching his powers and wished they would say, “thus far and no further you shall go.”

Lee, about whom farce always hovered, came down with gout and had to be carried into New York City, where he met with the local authorities and a committee Congress had sent there. He instantly changed his mind about the New Yorkers: “I really believe that the generality are as well affected as any on the continent.” John Adams thereupon wrote Lee. “A luckier, happier expedition than yours to New York never was projected. The whole Whig world is blessing you for it.” As for Washington, he expunged New York from his immediate, compulsive worries. He had plenty of others.

Trying not to enlarge but to shrink his responsibilities, he urged Congress to appoint anyone they pleased as an additional Brigadier General; and he did not object when that body set up two military commands semi-independent of his own. The “middle department” under General Philip Schuyler, was to include, in addition to New York and Canada, all the states between New Jersey and Maryland. A “southern department” was to extend from Virginia through Georgia.

As usual, Washington was responding to needs rather than precedents. When he heard in mid-January that the Canadian Army had been shattered in an unsuccessful assault on Quebec — Generals Richard Montgomery killed and Benedict Arnold wounded — he felt the crisis was too great to wait on action from Congress or the Commander of the Middle Department. He urged the three major New England states each to raise a regiment and rush it northward.

Montgomery and Arnold had been forced to attack when they did because the enlistments of their men were due to expire in a few days with the New Year. Washington himself had lived through a desperate New Year’s Eve, and he no longer saw much hope that the war would be over before the end of 1776, when his whole existing army would be free to go home.

How everything had changed since George III’s truculent speech! During the previous October, Washington had, in his optimism, lightly dismissed a Congressional suggestion that two companies of Marines be enlisted not just for a year, but for “the continuance of the war.” Now he wrote Congress that all troops should be enlisted for that continuance.

Even if high bounties had to be paid to secure such soldiers, the cost, Washington argued, would in the end be less than paying smaller sums perpetually for replacements; and surely the army would be more effective. It took time to establish “such a subordinate way of thinking as is necessary for the soldier. Furthermore, men who are familiarized to danger, meet it without shrinking, whereas those who had never seen service, often apprehend danger where no danger is.” Three things kept men regular in action: Natural bravery, hope of reward, and fear of punishment. Recruits might have the first two, but fear of punishment distinguished the veteran.

The Adamses were strong in disapproval. John stated that he did not know what the transported convicts and indentured servants who inhabited other colonies might accept, but it was inconceivable that free-born New Englanders would give up for so indefinite a term as the duration of the war “better living, more comfortable lodgings, more than double the wages.” Samuel Adams added that standing armies were “always dangerous to the liberties of the people.”

In subsequent years, Washington was to blame what then seemed to be an interminable prolongation of the war on Congress’ refusal to authorize, when “the passions were enflamed” and men flew “hastily and cheerfully to arms,” long terms of service. Those early months of 1776 were, indeed, for the more convinced patriots, months of great excitement when a new sun seemed to be bursting into the sky.
Like his lesser contemporaries, Washington read Thomas Paine’s just published Common Sense with the feeling that the arguments for establishing an independent nation were being spoken by an eloquent voice in his own mind. And, as if to confirm this rising surge of feeling, Governor Dunmore of Virginia, who had once been Washington’s friend, initiated war in Washington’s home province: He superintended the bombing and burning of Norfolk. And he announced that this was just a beginning. It was hard to doubt that Mount Vernon, so easily available to British warships operating up the Potomac, would suffer from British spite. Well, if the past must go up in flames, it must: there remained the future.

On January 31, 1776, Washington first acknowledged in writing the possibility of independence: “A few more such flaming arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk, added to the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contained in the pamphlet ‘Common Sense’ will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation.” He added ten days later that Congress should tell the ministers of Great Britain that “The spirit of freedom beats too high in us to submit to slavery, and that, if nothing else can satisfy a tyrant and diabolical ministry, we are determined to shake off connections with a state so unjust and unnatural.”