The victory at Yorktown brought neither peace nor ease in affairs. The
revolution was indeed accomplished--that every man could see who had the
candor to look facts in the face; but its accomplishment brought tasks
harder even than the tasks of war. Hostilities slackened--were almost
wholly done with before another spring had come. No more troops came
over sea. The ministry in England were discredited and ousted. Every one
knew that the proud mother country must yield, for all her stout
defiance of the world. But a long year dragged by, nevertheless, before
even preliminary articles of accommodation were signed; and still
another before definitive peace came, with independence and the full
fruits of victory. Meanwhile there was an army to be maintained, despite
desperate incompetence on the part of the congress and a hopeless
indifference among the people; and a government to be kept presentably
afoot, despite lack of money and lack of men. The Articles of
Confederation proposed at the heart of the war-time (November 15th,
1777) had at last been adopted (March 1st, 1781), in season to create at
least a government which could sign treaties and conclude wars, but
neither soon enough nor wisely enough to bring order out of chaos. The
states, glad to think the war over, would do nothing for the army,
nothing for the public credit, nothing even for the maintenance of
order; and the Articles of Confederation only gave the congress written
warranty for offering advice: they did not make its shadowy powers real.
It was beyond measure fortunate that at such a critical time as this
Washington still kept his command, still held affairs under the steady
pressure of his will. His successes had at last given him a place of
authority in the thoughts and affections of his countrymen in some sort
commensurate with his capacity and his vision in affairs. He had risen
to a very safe footing of power among all the people as the war drew
towards its close, filling their imaginations, and reigning among them
as securely as among his troops, who for so long had felt his will
wrought upon them day by day. His very reserve, and the large dignity
and pride of his stately bearing, made him seem the more like a hero in
the people’s eyes. They could understand a man made in this ample and
simple kind, give them but time enough to see him in his full
proportions. It answered to their thought of him to find him too proud
to dissemble, too masterful to brook unreasonable faults, and yet slow
to grow impatient, though he must wait a whole twelvemonth to see a plan
mature, or coax a half-score states to get a purpose made good. And they
could not deem him cold, though they found him self-possessed, keeping
his own counsel; for was not the country full of talk how passionately
he was like to act at a moment of crisis and in the field? They only
feared to lose a leader so reckless of himself when danger was sharpest.
“Our army love their general very much,” one of his officers had said,
“but they have one thing against him, which is the little care he takes
of himself in any action”; for he had seen how Washington pressed at
Trenton and at Princeton to the points that were most exposed, thinking
of his troops, not of himself. The spirit of fight had run high in him
the whole war through. Even during those dismal weeks of 1776, when
affairs looked darkest, and he had but a handful of men about him as he
all but fled before Howe through New Jersey, he had spoken, as if in the
very pleasantry of daring, of what he would do should things come to the
worst with him. His thought turned to those western fastnesses he knew
so well, where the highlands of his own state lay, and he spoke calmly
of a desperate venture thither. “Reed,” he exclaimed, to one of his
aides, “my neck does not feel as though it was made for a halter. We
must retire to Augusta County, in Virginia, and if overpowered, must
pass the Alleghany Mountains.” And when the last movement of the war
came, it was still with the same feeling that he drew his lines about
Cornwallis. “We may be beaten by the English,” he said; “it is the
chance of war; but there is the army they will never conquer.”
“The privates are all generals, but not soldiers,” the gallant
Montgomery had cried, in his hot impatience with the heady militia-men
he was bidden command; but it was not so in the presence of Washington,
when once these men had taken his measure. They were then “rivals in
praising him,” the Abbé Robin declared, “fearing him even when he was
silent, and retaining their full confidence in him after defeats and
disgrace.” The singular majesty and poise of this revolutionary hero
struck the French officers as infinitely more remarkable than his
mastery in the field and his ascendency in council. They had looked to
find him great in action, but they had not thought to see in him a
great gentleman, a man after their own kind in grace and courtesy and
tact, and yet so lifted above the manner of courts and drawing-rooms by
an incommunicable quality of grave sincerity which they were at a loss
how to describe. No one could tell whether it were a gift of the mind or
of the heart. It was certain only that it constituted the atmosphere and
apotheosis of the man. The Marquis de Chastellux noted, with a sort of
reverent awe for this hero not yet turned of fifty, how perfect a union
reigned between his physical and moral qualities. “One alone,” he
declared, “will enable you to judge of all the rest.” “It is not my
intention to exaggerate,” he said; “I wish only to express my impression
of a perfect whole, which cannot be the product of enthusiasm, since the
effect of proportion is rather to diminish the idea of greatness.”
Strangers who had noted his appearance in the earlier years of the war
had remarked the spirit and life that sat in Washington’s eyes: but when
the war was over, and its strain relaxed, they found those eyes grown
pensive, “more attentive than sparkling”; steady still, and noble in
their frankness and good feeling, but touched a little with care, dimmed
with watching. The Prince de Broglie found him “still as fresh and
active as a young man” in 1782, but thought “he must have been much
handsomer three years ago,” for “the gentlemen who had remained with him
during all that time said that he seemed to have grown much older.”
’Twould have been no marvel had he broken under the burden he had
carried, athletic soldier and hardened campaigner though he was. “This
is the seventh year that he has commanded the army and that he has
obeyed the congress: more need not be said,” the Marquis de Chastellux
declared, unconsciously uttering a very bitter gibe against the
government, when he meant only to praise its general.
Such service told the more heavily upon Washington because he had
rendered it in silence. No man among all the Revolutionary leaders, it
is true, had been more at the desk than he. Letters of command and
persuasion, reports that carried every detail of the army’s life and
hopes in their careful phrases, orders of urgency and of provident
arrangement, writings of any and every sort that might keep the hard war
afoot, he had poured forth incessantly, and as if incapable of fatigue
or discouragement. No one who was under orders, no man who could lend
the service a hand or take a turn at counsel, was likely to escape
seeing the commander-in-chief’s handwriting often enough to keep him in
mind of his tireless power to foresee and to direct. Washington seemed
present in every transaction of the war. And yet always and to every one
he seemed a silent man. What he said and what he wrote never touched
himself. He spoke seldom of motives, always of what was to be done and
considered; and even his secretaries, though they handled the multitude
of his papers, were left oftentimes to wonder and speculate about the
man himself--so frank and yet so reserved, so straightforward and simple
and yet so proud and self-contained, revealing powers, but somehow not
revealing himself. It must have seemed at times to those who followed
him and pondered what they saw that he had caught from Nature her own
manner while he took his breeding as a boy and his preparation as a man
amidst the forests of a wild frontier; that his character spoke in what
he did and without self-consciousness; that he had no moods but those of
action.
Nor did men know him for what he really was until the war was over. His
own officers then found they had something more to learn of the man they
had fought under for six years--and those six, all of them, years such
as lay bare the characters of men. What remained to be done during the
two trying, anxious years 1782 and 1783 seemed as if intended for a
supreme and final test of the qualities of the man whose genius and
character had made the Revolution possible. “At the end of a long civil
war,” said the Marquis de Chastellux, with a noble pride for his friend,
“he had nothing with which he could reproach himself”; but it was these
last years which were to crown this perfect praise with its full
meaning. In the absence of any real government, Washington proved almost
the only prop of authority and law. What the crisis was no one knew
quite so thoroughly or so particularly as he. It consisted in the
ominous fact that the army was the only organized and central power in
the country, and that it had deep reason for discontent and
insubordination. When once it had served its purpose greatly at
Yorktown, and the war seemed ended at a stroke, the country turned from
it in indifference--left it without money; talked of disbanding it
without further ceremony, and with no provision made for arrears of pay;
seemed almost to challenge it to indignation and mutiny. It was
necessary, for every reason of prudence and good statesmanship, to keep
the army still upon a war footing. There were sure signs of peace, no
doubt, but no man could foretell what might be the course of politics
ere England should have compounded her quarrel with
[Illustration: THE BUST BY ECKSTEIN
(Owned by Frederick McGuire, Esq., Washington)]
France and Spain, and ended the wars with which the Revolution had
become inextricably involved. ’Twere folly to leave the English army at
New York unchecked. Premature confidence that peace had come might bring
some sudden disaster of arms, should the enemy take the field again. The
army must be ready to fight, if only to make fighting unnecessary.
Washington would have assumed the offensive again, would have crushed
Clinton where he lay in New York; and the congress was not slack--as
slackness was counted there--in sustaining his counsels. But the
congress had no power to raise money; had no power to command. The
states alone could make it possible to tax the country to pay the army:
their thirteen governments were the only civil authority, and they took
the needs and the discontents of the army very lightly, deemed peace
secure and war expenses unnecessary, and let matters drift as they
would.
They came very near drifting to another revolution--a revolution such as
politicians had left out of their reckoning, and only Washington could
avert. After Yorktown, Washington spent four months in Philadelphia,
helping the congress forward with the business of the winter; but as
March of the new year (1782) drew towards its close, he rejoined the
army at Newburgh, to resume his watch upon New York. He had been
scarcely two months at his post when a letter was placed in his hands
which revealed, more fully than any observations of his own could have
revealed it, the pass to which affairs had come. The letter was from
Colonel Lewis Nicola, an old and respected officer, who stood nearer
than did most of his fellow-officers to the commander-in-chief in
intimacy and affection, and who felt it his privilege to speak plainly.
The letter was calm in temper, grave and moderate in tone, with
something of the gravity and method of a disquisition written upon
abstract questions of government; did not broach its meaning like a
revolutionary document. But what it proposed was nothing less, when read
between the lines, than that Washington should suffer himself to be made
king, and that so an end should be put to the incompetency and
ingratitude of a band of weak and futile republics. Washington met the
suggestion with a rebuke so direct and overwhelming that Colonel Nicola
must himself have wondered how he had ever dared make such a venture.
“Be assured, sir,” said the indignant commander, “no occurrence in the
course of the war has given me more painful sensations than your
information of there being such ideas existing in the army.... I am much
at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given
encouragement to an address which to me seems big with the greatest
mischiefs that can befall my country. If I am not deceived in the
knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person to whom your
schemes are more disagreeable.... Let me conjure you, if you have any
regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect
for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate,
as from yourself or any one else, a sentiment of the like nature.” He
was cut to the quick that his own officers should deem him an
adventurer, willing to advance his own power at the expense of the very
principles he had fought for. His thought must have gone back at a bound
to his old comradeship with his brother Lawrence, with the Fairfaxes,
George Mason, and the Lees, and all that free company of gentlemen in
the Northern Neck who revered law, loved liberty, and hated a usurper.
But he could not blink the just complaints and real grievances of the
army; nor did he wish to. Though others were angry after a manner he
scorned, no man’s grief or indignation was deeper than his that the army
should be left penniless after all it had suffered and done, and be
threatened, besides, with being turned adrift without reward or hope of
provision for the future. “No man possesses a more sincere wish to see
ample justice done to the army than I do,” he had declared to Colonel
Nicola; “and as far as my power and influence, in a constitutional way,
extend, they shall be employed to the utmost of my abilities to effect
it.” The pledge was fulfilled in almost every letter he wrote, private
or public. He urged the states, as he urged the congress, in season and
out of season, to see justice done the men who had won the Revolution,
and whom he loved as if they had been of his own blood. But even his
great voice went too long unheeded. “The spirit of party, private
interest, slowness, and national indolence slacken, suspend, and
overthrow the best concerted measures,” the Abbé Robin had observed,
upon his first coming with Rochambeau; and now measures were not so much
as concerted until a final menace from the army brought the country to
its senses. A troubled summer came and went, and another winter of
anxious doubt and ineffectual counsel. The very approach of peace, as it
grew more certain, quickened the angry fears of the army, lest peace
should be made a pretext, when it came, to disperse them before their
demands could be driven home upon the demoralized and reluctant
government they were learning to despise. Another spring and the
mischief so long maturing was ripe; it looked as if even Washington
could not prevent it. It had been rumored in Philadelphia, while the
winter held, “that the army had secretly determined not to lay down
their arms until due provision and a satisfactory prospect should be
afforded on the subject of their pay,” and that Washington had grown
unpopular among almost all ranks because of his harshness against every
unlawful means of securing justice. “His extreme reserve, mixed
sometimes with a degree of asperity of temper, both of which were said
to have increased of late, had contributed to the decline of his
popularity”--so ran the report--and it grew every week the more unlikely
he could check the treasonable purposes of his men.
In March, 1783, the mine was sprung; and then men learned, by a new
sign, what power there was in the silent man: how he could handle
disaffection and disarm reproach. An open address was spread broadcast
through the camp, calling upon the army to use its power to obtain its
rights, and inviting a meeting of the officers to devise a way. “Can you
consent to be the only sufferers by this Revolution?... If you can, ...
go, ... carry with you the ridicule, and, what is worse, the pity of the
world. Go, starve, and be forgotten.... But if you have sense enough to
discover, and spirit enough to oppose, tyranny, ... awake; attend to
your situation, and redress yourselves.” Such were its kindling phrases;
and no man need deceive himself with thinking they would go unheeded.
Washington showed his tact and mastery by assuming immediate control of
the movement, with a sharp rebuke for such a breach of manly propriety
and soldierly discipline, but with no thought to stay a righteous
protest. He himself summoned the officers; and when they had come
together stepped to the desk before them, with no show of anger or
offended dignity, but very gravely, with a sort of majesty it moved one
strangely to see, and taking a written paper from his pocket, adjusted
his spectacles to read it. “Gentlemen,” he said, very simply, “you will
permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but
almost blind, in the service of my country.” There were wet eyes upon
the instant in the room; no man stirred while he read--read words of
admonition, of counsel, and of hope which burned at the ear; and when he
was done, and had withdrawn, leaving them to do what they would, they
did nothing of which he could be ashamed. They spoke manfully, as was
right, of what they deemed it just and imperative the congress should do
for them; but they “_Resolved_, unanimously, that at the commencement of
the present war the officers of the American army engaged in the service
of their country from the purest love and attachment to the rights and
liberties of human nature, which motives still exist in the highest
degree; and that no circumstances of distress or danger shall induce a
conduct that may tend to sully the reputation and glory which they have
acquired at the price of their blood and eight years’ faithful
services.”
Washington knew, nevertheless, how black a danger lurked among these
distressed men; did not fail to speak plainly of it to the congress; and
breathed freely again only when the soldiers’ just demands had at last
in some measure been met, by at any rate the proper legislation. He grew
weary with longing for peace, when the work seemed done and his thoughts
had leisure to turn towards his home again. But once in all the
lengthened days of fighting had he seen Mount Vernon. He had turned
aside to spend a night or two there on his way to Yorktown, and he had
seen the loved place again for a little after the victory was won. Now,
amidst profitless days at Newburgh, or in counsel with the committees of
the congress upon business that was never finished, while affairs stood
as it were in a sort of paralysis, waiting upon the interminable
conferences of the three powers who haggled over definitive terms of
peace at Paris, home seemed to him, in his weariness, more to be desired
than ever before. Private griefs had stricken him at the very moment of
his triumph. Scarcely had the victory at Yorktown been celebrated when
he was called (November, 1781) to the death-bed of Jack Custis, his
wayward but dearly loved step-son, and had there to endure the sight of
his wife’s grief and the young widow’s hopeless sorrow added to his own.
The two youngest children he claimed for himself, with that wistful
fatherly longing that had always marked him; and Mount Vernon seemed to
him more like a haven than ever, where to seek rest and solace. The two
years he had yet to wait may well have seemed to him the longest of his
life, and may have added a touch of their own to what strangers deemed
his sternness.
He had seldom seemed so stern, indeed, as in one incident of those
trying months. An officer of the American army had been taken in a
skirmish, and the English had permitted a brutal company of loyalists,
under one Captain Lippincott, to take him from his prison in New York
and wantonly hang him in broad daylight on the heights near Middletown.
Washington at once notified the British commander that unless the
murderers were delivered up to be punished, a British officer would be
chosen by lot from among his prisoners to suffer in their stead; and,
when reparation was withheld, proceeded without hesitation to carry his
threat into execution. The lot fell upon Captain Charles Asgill, an
engaging youth of only nineteen, the heir of a great English family.
Lady Asgill, the lad’s mother, did not stop short of moving the very
French court itself to intervene to save her son, and at last the
congress counselled his release, the English commander having disavowed
the act of the murderers in whose place he was to suffer, and Washington
himself having asked to be directed what he should do. “Captain Asgill
has been released,” Washington wrote to Vergennes, in answer to the
great minister’s intercession. “I have no right to assume any particular
merit from the lenient manner in which this disagreeable affair has
terminated. But I beg you to believe, sir, that I most sincerely
rejoice, not only because your humane intentions are gratified, but
because the event accords with the wishes of his Most Christian
Majesty.” It lifted a great weight from his heart to have the innocent
boy go unhurt from his hands, and he wrote almost tenderly to him in
acquainting him with his release; but it was of his simple nature to
have sent the lad to the gallows, nevertheless, had things continued to
stand as they were at the first. He was inexorable to check perfidy and
vindicate the just rules of war. Men were reminded, while the affair
pended, of the hanging of André, Arnold’s British confederate in
treason, and how pitiless the commander-in-chief had seemed in sending
the frank, accomplished, lovable gentleman to his disgraceful death,
like any common spy, granting him not even the favor to be shot, like a
soldier. It seemed hard to learn the inflexible lines upon which that
consistent mind worked, as if it had gone to school to Fate.
But no one deemed him hard or stern, or so much as a thought more or
less than human, when at last the British had withdrawn from New York,
and he stood amidst his officers in Fraunce’s Tavern to say good-bye. He
could hardly speak for emotion: he could only lift his glass and say:
“With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take my leave of you,
most devoutly wishing that your latter days may be as prosperous and
happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.... I cannot
come to each of you and take my leave,” he said, “but shall be obliged
if you will come and take me by the hand.” When General Knox, who stood
nearest, approached him, he drew him to him with a sudden impulse and
kissed him, and not a soldier among them all went away without an
embrace from this man who was deemed cold and distant. After the parting
they followed him in silence to Whitehall Ferry, and saw him take boat
for his journey.
And then, standing before the congress at Annapolis to resign his
commission, he added the crowning touch of simplicity to his just repute
as a man beyond others noble and sincere. “I have now the honor of
offering my sincere congratulations to congress,” he said, as he stood
amidst the august scene they had prepared for him, “and of presenting
myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to
me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of my
country. Happy in the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty,
and pleased with the
[Illustration: FRAUNCE’S TAVERN, NEW YORK]
opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable nation,
I resign with satisfaction the appointment I accepted with diffidence--a
diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which,
however, was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our cause,
the support of the supreme power of the Union, and the patronage of
Heaven. The successful termination of the war has verified the most
sanguine expectations; and my gratitude for the interposition of
Providence and the assistance I have received from my countrymen
increases with every review of the momentous contest.... I consider it
my indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life
by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of
Almighty God, and those who have the superintendence of them to His holy
keeping.” It was as if spoken on the morrow of the day upon which he
accepted his commission: the same diffidence, the same trust in a power
greater and higher than his own. The plaudits that had but just now
filled his ears at every stage of his long journey from New York seemed
utterly forgotten; he seemed not to know how his fellow countrymen had
made of him an idol and a hero; his simplicity was once again his
authentic badge of genuineness. He knew, it would seem, no other way in
which to act. A little child remembered afterwards how he had prayed at
her father’s house upon the eve of battle; how he had taken scripture
out of Joshua, and had cried, “The Lord God of gods, the Lord God of
gods, He knoweth, and Israel he shall know; if it be in rebellion, or if
in transgression against the Lord (save us not this day).” There was
here the same note of solemnity and of self-forgetful devotion, as if
duty and honor were alike inevitable.
On Christmas Eve, 1783, he was once more at Mount Vernon, to resume the
life he loved more than victory and power. He had a zest for the means
and the labor of succeeding, but not for the mere content of success. He
put the Revolution behind him as he would have laid aside a book that
was read; turned from it as quietly as he had turned from receiving the
surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown--interested in victory not as a
pageant and field of glory, but only as a means to an end. He looked to
find very sweet satisfaction in the peace which war had earned, as
sufficient a scope for his powers at home as in the field. Once more he
would be a Virginian, and join his strength to his neighbors’ in all the
tasks of good citizenship. He had seen nothing of the old familiar
places since that far-away spring of the year 1775, when he had left his
farming and his fox-hunting, amidst rumors of war, to attend the
congress which was to send him to Cambridge. He had halted at
Fredericksburg, indeed, with the Count de Rochambeau, two years ago, ere
he followed his army from York to its posts upon the Hudson. Mrs. Lewis,
his sister, had returned one day from visiting a neighbor in the quiet
town to look in astonishment upon an officer’s horses and attendants at
her door, and had entered to find her beloved brother stretched upon her
own bed within, sound asleep in his clothes, like a boy returned from
hunting. There had been a formal ball given, too, in celebration of the
victory, before the French officers and the commander-in-chief left
Fredericksburg to go northward again, and Washington had had the joy of
entering the room in the face of the gay company with his aged mother on
his arm, not a whit bent for all her seventy-four years, and as quiet as
a queen at receiving the homage of her son’s comrades in arms. He had
got his imperious spirit of command from her. A servant had told her
that “Mars George” had put up at the tavern. “Go and tell George to come
here instantly,” she had commanded; and he had come, masterful man
though he was. He had felt every old affection and every old allegiance
renew itself as he saw former neighbors crowd around him; and that
little glimpse of Virginia had refreshed him like a tonic--deeply, and
as if it renewed his very nature, as only a silent man can be refreshed.
But a few days in Fredericksburg and at Mount Vernon then had been only
an incident of campaigning, only a grateful pause on a march. Now at
last he had come back to keep his home and be a neighbor again, as he
had not been these nine years.
FIRST IN PEACE