In late November 1780 Washington sent his army into winter quarters, assigning the bulk of them to West Point, while he lodged in a cramped Dutch farmhouse overlooking the Hudson River at New Windsor, New York. Depressed by this “dreary station,” he had to requisition supplies from nearby residents to set his meager table and pleaded with Congress for emergency funds.3 “We have neither money nor credit,” he wrote, “adequate to the purchase of a few boards for doors to our log huts . . . It would be well for the troops if, like chameleons, they could live upon air, or, like the bear, suck their paws for sustenance during the rigor of the approaching season.”4 Things grew so grim that Washington’s own horses were starving for want of forage.

Perhaps it was the aborted plan to kidnap Benedict Arnold that planted the idea in Washington’s mind of attempting a daring abduction of Sir Henry Clinton. On Christmas Night he gave the go-ahead to Lieutenant Colonel David Humphreys to row down the Hudson to New York with a small band of men, their oars muffled to avert detection. The nature of the top secret mission was disclosed only to participants, right before they shoved off. “I prefer a small number to a large one,” Washington said, “because it is more manageable in the night and less liable to confusion.”5 The party was supposed to land at Clinton’s house on the Hudson, disarm the guards, pinion Clinton, then hurry back up the Hudson with their high-ranking prize. In the event, a brisk wind sprang up and blew the boats into the bay, scuttling the operation.

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.

The ranking officer on the scene was the valiant but hot-blooded Anthony Wayne. Washington encouraged him to stick close to his men as they marched and not brake their movement until they crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania. Washington experienced an overriding fear of massive desertion or even full-blown defection to the British—Sir Henry Clinton sent emissaries to entice them into exactly such treachery—and he thought it would help tostem such flight if the river stood behind the mutineers. Because his officers warned of smoldering discontent among the New Windsor troops, Washington feared abandoning them and tried to screen them from inflammatory news of the mutiny. Taking personal charge of the situation, he also worried about a loss of face if he ordered mutineers to desist and they ignored him. Bypassing Congress, Washington wrote directly to the states and demanded more provisions along with three months’ pay for the troops. Sympathetic to their complaints, if aggrieved by their methods, he spluttered in wrath that “it is in vain to think an army can be kept together much longer under such a variety of sufferings as ours has experienced.”6

The Pennsylvania Line stopped at Princeton and Trenton and never reached Philadelphia. To squash the uprising, Wayne drew on New Jersey soldiers and summoned additional militia. He negotiated a settlement with the mutineers under which half would be discharged and another half furloughed until April. The soldiers would receive certificates to compensate them for their depreciated currency and would be issued extra clothing. Although Washington accepted the expediency of this bargain, he hated negotiating with disobedient soldiers. Wayne also decided, with Washington’s blessing, to make an example of the ringleaders. He called out twelve refractory members of the revolt and lined them up in a farmer’s field before firing squads made up of their fellow soldiers. One fifer described this brutal scene: “The distance that the platoons stood from [the condemned men] at the time they fired could not have been more than ten feet. So near did they stand that the handkerchiefs covering the eyes of some of them were set on fire . . . The fence and even the heads of rye for some distance within the field were covered with the blood and brains.”7 When one firing squad victim lay bleeding but still alive, Wayne ordered a soldier to bayonet him to death. The soldier balked, saying he couldn’t kill his comrade. With that, Wayne drew his pistol and said he would kill the man on the spot if he didn’t obey orders. The hapless soldier then stepped forward and plunged his bayonet into the writhing man. To ensure that the bloody message of these deaths lingered, Wayne ordered the entire Pennsylvania Line to circle around the dead soldiers.

Anthony Wayne had no qualms about his action and wrote proudly to Washington that “a liberal dose of niter [gunpowder] had done the trick.”8 Washington, who could be extremely tough when necessary, didn’t second-guess Wayne’s reprisals. Months later he told Wayne, “Sudden and exemplary punishments were certainly necessary upon the new appearance of that daring and mutinous spirit which convulsed the line last winter.”9 Washington had long believed that mutinies, if not stamped out vigorously, would only multiply.

No sooner was the Pennsylvania mutiny suppressed than the contagion spread to the New Jersey Line in Pompton. As two hundred mutinous troops, giddy with liquor, headed for the state capital at Trenton, Washington decided he had had enough. He refused to negotiate with the rebels, demanded unconditional submission, and vowed to execute several of the leaders. To quell the uprising, he ordered five hundred or six hundred troops under Major General Robert Howe to march from West Point toward New Jersey. He also tried to impress upon the loyal troops “how dangerous to civil liberty the precedent is of armed soldiers dictating terms to their country.”10 Sending troops was a high-stakes gamble, since Washington didn’t know whether they would fire upon rowdy fellow soldiers, “but I thought it indispensable to bring the matter to an issue and risk all extremities,” he told Congress.11 On January 27 General Howe surrounded the mutineers, snuffed out the revolt, and made an example of several instigators. He lined up a firing squad composed of a dozen mutineers and ordered them to execute two mutinous sergeants. Three of the executioners were told to shoot at the head and three at the heart, while the other six stood ready to finish off victims that lay squirming on the ground. Once again Washington feared he would squander his authority if men disobeyed him, and he kept his distance from the scene at Ringwood, New Jersey. Once he heard that the New Jersey men had surrendered and repented, he took up their crusade to lobby politicians for better pay, food, and housing.

A critical element of the relief effort lay in soliciting fresh money from France. In December Congress drafted John Laurens as a special envoy to France, where it hoped he would team up with Benjamin Franklin to wrest a huge loan from the court at Versailles. Laurens, with Thomas Paine acting as his secretary, was to fire up French enthusiasm through compelling eyewitness accounts of the war. Because of Washington’s renown in France, Congress also hoped that a certified member of his military family would receive an effusive welcome. For three days Washington huddled with Laurens and Paine to forge a strategy. “We are at the end of our tether,” Washington told them, “and now or never our deliverance must come.”12 He deemed a foreign loan essential, since America had only a tiny moneyed elite and Congress had mismanaged its finances. If he had to keep confiscating produce from farmers, Washington feared that supporters would find the Continental Army’s methods “burdensome and oppressive,” defeating the idea of a fight for liberty.13