George Washington Read online

  George Washington

  George Washington

  Gentleman Warrior

  Stephen Brumwell

  New York • London

  © 2012 by Stephen Brumwell

  Maps © 2012 by William Donohoe

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  e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-101-5

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  For Laura, Milly, and Ivan

  Contents

  Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1: Finding a Path

  2: Hearing the Bullets Whistle

  3: Defending the Frontier

  4: Tarnished Victory

  5: Between the Wars

  6: His Excellency General Washington

  7: The Times That Try Men’s Souls

  8: Victory or Death

  9: Treason of the Blackest Dye

  10: The World Turned Upside Down

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Illustrations

  List of Illustrations

  George Washington, by Charles Willson Peale, 1772. © Washington University, St. Louis / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Lawrence Washington, by anonymous artist, c. 1740-50. © Courtesy of Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association

  Sarah ‘Sally’ Cary Fairfax, by Duncan Smith, 1916, after anonymous artist. © Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Captain Robert Orme, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1756. © The National Gallery, London / Scala, Florence

  John Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, by Allan Ramsay, 1754. © Fort Ligonier

  Battle of Princeton on 3rd January 1777, by William Mercer, c. 1786. © Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent / Courtesy of Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library

  The Battle of Germantown, 4th October 1777, by Xavier della Gatta, 1782. © Valley Forge Historical Society / The Bridgeman Art Library

  George Washington at Princeton, by Charles Willson Peale, 1779. © Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia / The Bridgeman Art Library

  General Nathanael Greene, by Charles Willson Peale, 1783. © Private Collection / Peter Newark Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library

  General Henry Knox, by Charles Willson Peale, 1783. © The City of Philadelphia

  General Sir William Howe, mezzotint published by John Morris, c. 1777. © Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection

  General Sir Henry Clinton, by John Smart, 1777. © National Army Museum, London / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquis Cornwallis, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783. © Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library

  General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, by James Peale, c. 1799. © Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Joseph Brant, Chief of the Mohawks, by George Romney, c. 1776. © National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Washington at the Battle of Monmouth, 28 June 1778, by H. Charles McBarron Jr. © Private Collection / Peter Newark American Pictures / The Bridgeman Art Library

  Self Portrait, by Major John André, 1780. © Yale University Art Gallery

  The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, October 19, 1781, by John Trumbull, 1787-1828. © Yale University Art Gallery / Art Resource, New York / Scala, Florence

  The Surrender at Yorktown, October 19, 1781, by Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe, 1785. © Chateau de Versailles, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

  George Washington, by Gilbert Stuart, 1796. © Museum of the City of New York / Corbis

  Washington Reviewing the Western Army at Fort Cumberland, Maryland, attributed to Frederick Kemmelmeyer, after 1794. © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

  George Washington, by John Trumbull, 1780. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence

  Introduction

  During the late summer of 1777, Major Patrick Ferguson was, by common consent, the best marksman in the formidable British army bent upon breaking the back of American rebellion against King George III. Early on the morning of September 11, while observing the rebel forces arrayed in a defensive position along Brandywine Creek, southwest of the revolutionaries’ capital of Philadelphia, Ferguson identified a tempting pair of targets. Some 100 yards off, in clear sight, were two horsemen. One wore the flamboyant uniform of a French hussar officer. The other, who rode a fine bay, was far more soberly dressed in a dark coat and an unusually large and high cocked hat. Like Ferguson himself, both riders were plainly engaged in reconnoitering their enemy’s dispositions.

  Against individual targets, 100 yards was long range for the muzzle-loading smooth bore muskets carried by most of the soldiers assembling along either side of the creek. Yet the major was not squinting down the barrel of a simple “firelock,” but over the sights of a sophisticated breech-loading rifle of his own invention. Its seven-grooved bore could spin a ball with far greater accuracy than a common musket and over a longer distance. A year before, at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, London, Ferguson had demonstrated that fact before a panel of skeptical high-ranking officers, firing off four shots a minute to pepper a target set 200 yards away:1 the riders he now contemplated were sitting ducks.

  The dark-clad horseman was obviously a general officer, the dashing hussar his aide-de-camp. The hussar turned back, but his companion lingered. Moving out from the trees that sheltered him and a score of his corps of riflemen, Ferguson shouted a warning. The rider stopped, looked, and then calmly continued about his business. The major called again, this time drawing a bead upon the heedless horseman. The distance between them was, as Ferguson reported, one at which during even the most rapid firing he had “seldom missed a piece of paper,” and he “could have lodged a half a dozen of balls in or about him” before he could ride out of range. But something stopped him from squeezing the trigger. Ferguson was an officer and a gentleman. As he conceded with unconcealed admiration, his proposed target was conducting himself with such coolness that to have shot him in the back would have seemed an unsporting, “unpleasant” action. And so the major let him trot off unmolested.

  Later that same day the rival armies clashed in earnest. After a stubborn fight, British discipline prevailed, pushing back the rebels and increasing the threat to Philadelphia. Ferguson, who had been badly wounded in the right hand during the fighting, spoke with a doctor busy treating the wounded of both sides. From the surgeon’s recent conversation with a group of enemy officers, it seemed that the two distinctively clad riders Ferguson had seen earlier were none other than General George Washington, the commander in chief of t
he revolutionaries’ Continental Army, and the French officer attending him that day. As Ferguson freely acknowledged, he was “not sorry” to have remained oblivious of their identity.2

  Had he known what the future held, both for him personally and for the cause in which he soldiered, the gallant major may have thought—and acted—differently. And if ever a single shot could have changed the course of history, an unwavering ball sped from Ferguson’s rifle would surely have done so.

  “I am a warrior.” These were the uncompromising words that George Washington chose to describe himself in May 1779, at the height of the Revolutionary War. Washington was addressing the “Chief Men” of the Delaware nation of Indians, and his language was calculated to strike a chord with listeners who were themselves first and foremost tribal fighters—warriors in the purest sense. Yet even allowing for Washington’s deliberate use of the rhetoric and vocabulary of Indian diplomacy, his self-characterization is telling. In 1779, George Washington was a warrior, “the commander in chief of all the armies in the United States of America,” as he put it. In his message, Washington made a point of distancing himself from the revolutionary movement’s political leaders while at the same time emphasizing what he shared with the Delawares: there were some matters about which he would not speak, “because they belong to Congress, and not to us warriors.”3

  Washington had established his martial credentials a quarter of a century before, during another war, in which he had fought alongside the British against the French and their Indian allies, who then included the Delawares. The military reputation that the young Washington forged during four years of fighting on the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania underpinned his subsequent selection as commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Army in 1775, when Britain’s North American empire was sundered by rebellion. It was likewise Washington’s role as the revolutionaries’ foremost soldier throughout the long, bloody, and bitter War of American Independence that bestowed the prestige that ensured his selection as first president of the new United States of America in 1789. Indeed, in January 1782, before that war had formally ended, the largest circulating newspaper in Europe, the London Chronicle, was already convinced that Washington had done enough as the military champion of American liberty to be “received by posterity as one of the most illustrious characters of the age in which he lived.”4

  While Washington’s international reputation was, to a very large extent, the direct result of his exploits as a pugnacious fighting man, this aspect of his character is today curiously neglected: instead, he is seen as the calm, dignified leader providing the ballast that kept the revolutionary cause steady. There is, of course, much truth in this picture, but it is only part of the story. When Major Patrick Ferguson viewed Washington over the sights of his rifle at Brandywine in 1777, he clearly recognized a kindred spirit, possessing the key qualities expected of an eighteenth-century officer: bound by an unswerving code of honor, Washington was not simply a “gentleman,” but a warrior who instinctively led his men from the front. In 1778, a British officer who had served with Washington twenty years earlier during the “French and Indian War” remained convinced that the man who now commanded the Continental Army was, above all else, motivated by a hunger for glory on the battlefield. In a widely read newspaper article, he bluntly observed: “His ruling passion is military fame.”5

  Washington’s martial side—so obvious to those soldiers who fought alongside and against him—has been underplayed for several reasons. First, Americans of Washington’s own generation, like their British contemporaries, held a deep-seated dislike of professional soldiers: this ingrained antipathy was rooted in fears of the threat posed by a strong standing army and the uses to which such a permanent force could be put by a power-hungry and unscrupulous military dictator. Soldiers were fundamentally unpopular: once they had won their battles and the patriotic spasms of public acclaim had subsided, the old antimilitary prejudices swiftly returned. In peacetime, armies were pared to the bone; such soldiers as remained in service were expected, like Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy,” to maintain a low profile until they were needed again.

  Given such suspicions, it suited Washington’s countrymen to see him as a patriotic amateur soldier, a peaceful farmer who, like the Republican Roman hero Cincinnatus, returned to his plow once the war was won. The fact that George Washington took pains to disassociate himself from any suggestion that he might assume the mantle of military dictator, wielding his experience, prestige, and corps of battle-hardened veterans like a latter-day Oliver Cromwell—a gentleman farmer turned general who neglected to resume his plowing—does not mean that he lacked the inclinations of a thoroughly professional officer while in command of his troops.

  Second, Washington’s military reputation is dominated by his enduring image as the cautious “Fabian” general of the Revolutionary War’s darkest days: averse to risk, he followed the strategy of the Roman commander Fabius Cunctator when faced by the Carthaginians, carefully avoiding confrontation and hoarding his scanty manpower until the chance to attack was too propitious and tempting to resist. This view of Washington was already ingrained during the war’s early years: in its survey of the key events of 1777, the popular British Annual Register observed that Washington’s conduct justified “that appellation, which is now pretty generally applied to him, of the American Fabius.”6 However, while often obliged to adopt a defensive stance, throughout his military career Washington’s instincts were those of the warrior anxious to prove himself on the battlefield, and, when granted an outlet, his aggression was readily apparent. This aspect of Washington’s generalship and character has been acknowledged by historians;7 yet less attention has been given to the background influences that not only fired his “ruling passion” but ensured that it would be channeled more effectively within the strict bounds of gentlemanly behavior.

  Third, and no less significantly, for a military leader of such undeniable front-rank importance, George Washington was singularly unfortunate in the artists who sought to capture his likeness as a soldier. Almost without exception, they portrayed an essentially passive Washington rather than the man of action that he undoubtedly was. This limitation is especially true of the work of the prolific Charles Willson Peale, who painted Washington seven times between 1772 and 1787 without, it can be argued, ever capturing his true character. Peale’s work is instantly recognizable, not least because he had the knack of making all his subjects look strangely alike: from the portly Boston gunner Brigadier General Henry Knox to the scrawny French volunteer Marie-Joseph, Marquis de Lafayette, Peale’s sitters share the same almond-shaped eyes, the same relaxed posture.

  Peale’s shortcomings are all the more regrettable because he knew Washington well and had actually fought under his command during the crucial Trenton-Princeton campaign of 1776–77. The work widely regarded as Peale’s best portrait of Washington was painted in 1779 and depicts the commander of the Continental Army at Princeton, with Hessian standards captured days earlier at Trenton strewn at his feet. But even here the overriding mood is languid: rather than urging on his men to the attack, as eyewitness evidence testifies that he did, Washington is posed casually—legs crossed, right hand on hip, left lying upon a cannon barrel. Much later, in 1792, another Continental Army veteran, John Trumbull, chose to paint Washington on the eve of his Princeton triumph. The Connecticut-born Trumbull, who abandoned the military struggle in 1777 to concentrate upon recording the Revolution’s pivotal military and political episodes in a series of huge canvases, was immensely proud of his full-length portrait of his old commander, considering it to be not only the best study of George Washington that he had painted, but the best of any picture to show him “in his heroic and military character.” Despite this claim, as with Peale’s interpretation, all is dignified calm; while a charger plunges and fighting rages in the background, its subject does nothing more vigorous than extend an arm clutching a half-closed telescope.8

  It is interesting
to speculate how the contemporary English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, who excelled in painting dramatic, dynamic, and innovative portraits of soldiers and sailors, would have tackled Washington in his prime: given the iconic status his talent bequeathed to relatively minor players like the British cavalry leader Colonel Banastre Tarleton, Reynolds would surely have captured something at least of Washington’s steely resolution and fiery spirit.

  Washington’s generation of fellow Americans also produced artists who could have done equal justice to his true character. Before Washington acquired global fame, the Pennsylvanian Benjamin West had already revolutionized “history” painting with his 1770 depiction of the death of the leading British military hero of the Seven Years’ War, Major General James Wolfe. That, and other works, led to West’s appointment as “history painter” to King George III himself, permanent residence in London, and the prestigious presidency of the Royal Academy. But it was West’s fellow Academician the Massachusetts-born John Singleton Copley who pushed his artistic revolution further, injecting true drama into military portraits and such scenes as The Death of Major Pierson. Copley, like West, was sympathetic to the cause of his rebellious countrymen, but, as an American artist working in London, he, too, was obliged to focus upon subjects unlikely to jar with the sentiments of patriotic Britons; hence his Pierson, while set during the American Revolutionary War, celebrated a British victory, one scored over the French on the Channel Island of Jersey. Given their delicate professional positions, Copley and West alike were obliged to express their true sympathies through analogy or veiled symbolism, rather than full-blooded pro-American treatments of key events and personalities.9

  Whatever else Americans won in 1783, it was not the battle of the brushes, and Washington’s image as a soldier has suffered ever since. Washington was equally unlucky in the portraiture of his postwar presidential days. This was not due to any limitations on the part of the era’s leading portraitist, Gilbert Stuart; far from it. Stuart was a gifted artist and a perfectionist to boot. As Charles Willson Peale’s son Rembrandt recalled in 1859, both he and Stuart painted Washington’s portrait in the autumn of 1795. Stuart’s effort, known as the Vaughan portrait, won public admiration, but he was dissatisfied with the result and persuaded Washington to sit for him again in the spring of 1796. The resulting “head,” the so-called Athenaeum portrait, was destined to become perhaps the best-known likeness of Washington. Unfortunately for posterity, as Stuart recalled, “When I painted him he had just had a set of false teeth inserted, which accounts for the constrained expression so noticeable about the mouth and lower part of the face.”10