The war continued to serve as Washington’s political schoolroom. Once again a harrowing winter forced him to think analytically about the nation’s ills. On both the civilian and the military side of the conflict, he condemned slipshod, amateurish methods. America needed professional soldiers instead of men on short enlistments, just as it needed congressmen who stayed in office long enough to gain experience. Most of all Americans had to conquer their excessive attachment to state sovereignty. “Certain I am,” Washington told Joseph Jones, a delegate from Virginia, “that unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone, unless they are vested with powers by the several states competent to the great purposes of war . . . our cause is lost.”62 “I see one head gradually changing into thirteen,” he confessed to Jones. “I see one army branching into thirteen and, instead of looking up to Congress as the supreme controlling power of the United States, [they] are considering themselves as dependent on their respective states.”63

Washington viewed the restoration of American 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. “Though the [British] government is deeply in debt and of course poor, the nation is rich and their riches afford a fund which will not be easily exhausted. Besides, their system of public credit is such that it is capable of greater exertions than that of any other nation.”64 This letter prefigures the Hamiltonian program that would distinguish Washington’s economic policy as president. It took courage for Washington, instead of simply demonizing Great Britain, to study the secrets of its strength. Throughout the war, he believed that an American victory would have been a foregone conclusion if the country had enjoyed a strong Congress, a sound currency, stable finances, and an enduring army. Not surprisingly, many other officers in the Continental Army became committed nationalists and adherents of a robust central government. One virtue of a war that dragged on for so many years was that it gave the patriots a long gestation period in which to work out the rudiments of a federal government, financial mechanisms, diplomatic alliances, and other elements of a modern nation-state.

The hardship of the Morristown winter persisted well into the spring. On May 25 two mutinous regiments of the Connecticut Line, defying Washington’s orders, burst from their huts at dusk, flashing weapons, and declared they would either return home or confront local farmers to “gain subsistence at the point of the bayonet.” 65 These men, not having been paid in five months, saw no relief in sight. The officers calmed them down without further incident, but they were no less distraught than their men. Instead of feeling resentful toward his rebellious troops, Washington directed his anger at apathetic citizens who permitted this deplorable state. “The men have borne their distress with a firmness and patience never exceeded . . . but there are certain bounds beyond which it is impossible for human nature to go,” Washington warned Congress.66

In coping with this high-pressure situation, Washington receded deeper into himself, as if afraid to voice his true feelings aloud, lest it demoralize his men. “The great man is confounded at his situation,” Greene reported to Joseph Reed, “but appears to be reserved and silent.”67 Martha Washington, who stayed in Morristown until June, told her brother-in-law that “the poor General was so unhappy that it distressed me exceedingly.”68 At times Washington pretended to a deeper philosophic serenity than he could honestly claim. “The prospect, my dear Baron, is gloomy and the storm thickens,” he told Steuben, then went on to say, “I have been so inured to difficulties in the course of this contest that I have learned to look on them with more tranquillity than formerly.”69 In a revealing letter to Robert Morris that May, Washington noted, with restrained jollity, that in the absence of wine, he had been forced to substitute grog made from New England rum and drink it from a wooden bowl. Then he made a comment that suggested how his wartime experience had dampened his general experience of things. When his “public duty” ended, he told Morris, “I may be incapable of . . . social enjoyments.”70

What lifted Washington from the worst depths of dejection was the extraordinary heroism of his army, which had been reduced to eight thousand men, one-third still unfit for duty. Looking back upon the ghastly conditions of that winter, he found the army’s survival almost beyond belief. To brother Jack, he expressed amazement: “that an army reduced almost to nothing (by the expiration of short enlistments) should sometimes be five or six days together without bread, then as many without meat, and once or twice two or three without either; that the same army should have had numbers of men in it with scarcely clothes enough to cover their nakedness and a full fourth of it without even the shadow of a blanket, severe as the winter was, and that men under these circumstances were held together, is hardly within the bounds of credibility, but is nevertheless true.”71

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The Traitor

IN THE SPRING OF 1780 Washington’s most immediate concern was the uncertain fate of the threatened American garrison in Charleston, South Carolina. Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis had set sail with a large flotilla from New York and besieged Charleston as the main theater of war shifted irreversibly to the South. The American force was commanded by Major General Benjamin Lincoln, a husky former farmer from Massachusetts. Lincoln was popular and widely respected, and Washington credited him with being “an active, spirited, sensible man.”1 The commander in chief remained a far-off observer of the Charleston deadlock, however, since Congress and the Board of War had deprived him of jurisdiction over the southern department, and he didn’t care to quarrel with this blatantly political decision.

Queasily aware of what the loss of a major seaport would mean, Washington prophesied that the fall of Charleston would probably “involve the most calamitous consequences to the whole state of South Carolina, and even perhaps beyond it.”2 At the very least it would expose the Carolinas to merciless British raids. By massing his men in the coastal city, Lincoln had left the interior pretty much defenseless. “It is putting much to the hazard,” Washington confided to Steuben. “I have the greatest reliance on General Lincoln’s prudence, but I cannot forbear dreading the event.”3 Washington’s dread was not misplaced. On May 12, 1780, Charleston capitulated to the British, and 2,571 Continental soldiers, 343 artillery pieces, and almost 6,000 muskets fell into enemy hands. Under the arcane rituals of eighteenth-century warfare, defeated forces were typically allowed to surrender with dignity and march out with their colors flying proudly. To shame the Americans, the British forbade them this customary honor, forcing them to lay down their arms in humiliated silence. The defeated soldiers then faced the unpleasant choice of either becoming prisoners of war or returning home with a solemn vow to refrain from further fighting, reverting to loyal British subjects.

As he reflected on this devastating blow, Washington sounded alternately bitter and philosophical. He believed the British had expertly timed their campaign to exploit his army’s weakness at Morristown and knew this resounding victory would “ give spirit to our enemies.”4 He also suspected the British would use Charleston as a springboard to launch incursions into the Carolinas and Virginia. True to his prediction, Clinton, while steering a large portion of his forces back to New York, left Cornwallis with a sizable force to terrorize the South. At the same time Washington wondered whether the British had now stretched themselves too thin, forcing them to pay a steep price in blood and treasure to maintain this faraway outpost.