His Excellency: George Washington (15 page)

Finally, the siege of Boston afforded the first extended glimpse at Washington’s cast of mind as a military strategist. His motives for supporting American independence were always more elemental than refined. Essentially, he saw the conflict as a struggle for power in which the colonists, if victorious, destroyed British presumptions of superiority and won control over half a continent for themselves. While it would be somewhat excessive to say that his central military goal was an equally elemental urge to smash the British army in one decisive battle, there was a discernible
mano a mano
dimension to his thinking, a tendency to regard each engagement as a personal challenge to his own honor and reputation. At Cambridge it took the form of several risky offensive schemes to dislodge the British regulars, once it became clear that Howe was unwilling to come out from behind his Boston redoubts and face him in open battle. On three occasions, in September 1775, then again in January and February 1776, Washington proposed frontal assaults against the British defenses, arguing that “a Stroke, well aim’d at this critical juncture, might put a final end to the War.” (In one of the plans he envisioned a night attack across the ice with advanced units wearing ice skates.) His staff rejected each proposal on the grounds that the Continental army lacked both the size and the discipline to conduct such an attack with sufficient prospects for success. Eventually Washington accepted a more limited tactical scheme to occupy Dorchester Heights, which placed Howe’s garrison within range of American artillery, thereby forcing Howe’s decision to evacuate or see his army slowly destroyed. But throughout the siege Washington kept looking for a more direct and conclusive battle, suggesting that he himself was ready for a major engagement even if his army was not.
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His most aggressive proposal, which
was
adopted, called for a separate campaign against Quebec. Once it was clear that Howe did not intend to oblige him by coming out of Boston, Washington decided to detach twelve hundred troops from his Cambridge camp and send them up the Kennebec River into Canada under the command of a young colonel named Benedict Arnold. Washington’s thinking about the importance of the Canadian theater reflected his memories of the French and Indian War, in which Canadian forts had been the strategic keys to victory, as well as his belief that the stakes in the current war included the entire eastern half of North America. As he put it to Arnold, “I need not mention to you the great importance of this place & the consequent possession of all Canada in the Scale of American affairs—to whomsoever It belongs, in there favour probably, will the Balance turn.” By capturing Quebec, Arnold would “restore the only link wanting in the great chain of Continental union.”
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However conventional his thinking about Quebec’s strategic significance, Washington’s commitment to a Canadian campaign was recklessly bold. Arnold’s force had to traverse 350 miles of the most difficult terrain in New England during the outset of the winter snows. Within a month the troops were eating their horses, dogs, and moccasins, dying by the scores from exposure and disease. It is difficult to imagine such a campaign ever being contemplated later in the war, but at this early stage Washington shared the prevalent belief that patriotic fervor, combined with sheer courage, could defeat the elements and the odds.

Despite truly heroic efforts by Arnold and his troops, the Canadian campaign exposed the illusory character of Washington’s convictions. After linking up with a force commanded by General Richard Montgomery as planned, Arnold’s depleted army made a desperate night assault on Quebec in a blinding snowstorm on December 31, 1775. The result was a catastrophic defeat, both Arnold and Montgomery falling in the first minutes of the battle. (Arnold suffered a serious leg wound but survived, while Montgomery had his face shot off and died on the spot.) If Canada was the key, the British now held it more firmly than before. The Quebec debacle was a decisive blow, but not the kind Washington had intended.
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Finally, the Cambridge chapter revealed another Washington trait that has not received sufficient attention in the existent scholarship because it is only indirectly connected to military strategy. Historians have long known that more than two-thirds of the American casualties in the war were the result of disease. But only recently—and this is rather remarkable—have they recognized that the American Revolution occurred within a virulent smallpox epidemic of continental scope that claimed about 100,000 lives. Washington first encountered the epidemic outside Boston, where he learned that between ten and thirty funerals were occurring each day because of the disease. British troops, though hardly impervious to the smallpox virus, tended to possess greater immunity because they came from English, Scottish, and Irish regions, where the disease had existed for generations, allowing resistance to build up within families over time. The soldiers in the Continental army, on the other hand, tended to come from previously unexposed farms and villages, so they were extremely vulnerable. At any point in time, between one-fourth and one-fifth of Washington’s army at Cambridge was unfit for duty, the majority down with smallpox. Quite probably Arnold’s force at Quebec was also decimated by the disease in the weeks before the fatal attack.
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Washington, of course, was immune to smallpox because of his youthful exposure in Barbados. (Subsequent admirers claimed that he was immune to everything.) Equally important, he understood the ravaging implications of a smallpox epidemic within the congested conditions of his encampment, and he quarantined the patients in a hospital at Roxbury. When the British began their evacuation of Boston in March 1776, he ordered that only troops with pockmarked faces be allowed into the city. And although many educated Americans opposed inoculation, believing that it actually spread the disease, Washington strongly supported it. It would take two years before inoculation became mandatory for all troops serving in the Continental army, but the policy began to be implemented in the first year of the war. When historians debate Washington’s most consequential decisions as commander in chief, they are almost always arguing about specific battles. A compelling case can be made that his swift response to the smallpox epidemic and to a policy of inoculation was the most important strategic decision of his military career.

After lingering in the Boston harbor for over a week, the British fleet sailed away on March 17, 1776. The American press reported the retreat as a crushing blow to the British army. The Continental Congress ordered a gold medallion cast in Washington’s honor. Harvard College awarded him an honorary degree. And John Hancock predicted that he had earned “a conspicuous Place in the Temple of Fame, which Shall inform Posterity, that under your Directions, an undisciplined Band of Husbandmen, in the Course of a few Months became Soldiers,” defeating “an Army of Veterans, commanded by the most experienced Generals.” While uplifting, subsequent events would soon show that this was an overly optimistic appraisal.
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PANORAMA

A
S WASHINGTON
took his army south from Boston to New York in the spring of 1776, the Continental Congress moved closer to declaring American independence, and a British fleet carrying 33,000 soldiers and sailors—the largest expeditionary force yet to cross the Atlantic—moved closer to the American coastline. The conjunction of these two dramatic developments virtually assured that the formerly remote prospects for a peaceful reconciliation were now gone altogether. One of the great ironies imbedded in that propitious moment, available to us only in retrospect, was that widespread support for what Washington described as the “American Cause” was in fact cresting, and would never again reach the height it achieved during the Boston siege. “The spirit of ’76” should more accurately (if less lyrically) be called “the spirit of late ’75 and early ’76,” because patriotic fervor began to erode just as the war became politically official and militarily threatening.
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Though Washington himself never wavered—in the end, steadfastness was his most valuable attribute, along with the stamina that accompanied it—popular enthusiasm for the war faded alongside the illusion that it would be a brief affair. The mythological rendition of dedicated citizen-soldiers united for eight years in the fight for American liberty was, in fact, a romantic fiction designed by later generations to conceal the deep divisions and widespread apathy within the patriot camp. The fundamental strategic challenge facing Washington was to fight a conventional war against the British army in the midst of a civil war for the hearts and minds of the American people. And the very term “American people” suggests a national collective that was still in the process of being born. If we are to properly assess his achievement, we need to fully understand his predicament after the Boston phase. That means moving to a higher elevation from which to scan the historical terrain more panoramically than anyone on the ground could manage at the time.
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Why was that huge British fleet sailing toward the American coast? The obvious answer is that George III and his chief ministers, Lord North and Lord George Germain, had decided to crush the rebellion with one massive projection of British military power. But since, at least in retrospect, this decision has gone down as one of the biggest blunders in the history of British statecraft, and since, again in retrospect, the ingredients for a viable political solution to the imperial crisis were clearly present from 1774 onward, why did the ministry regard war as its only option? The political solution had been offered by the Continental Congress in 1774 and again in 1775. Three years later, after the disastrous defeat at Saratoga, Lord North proposed essentially the same solution: freedom from Parliament’s authority over colonial domestic affairs in return for continued economic membership in the British Empire. But by then it was too late. This principle of shared or overlapping sovereignty between the home government and peripheral states eventually became the political framework for the British Commonwealth, and before that the federal idea at the core of the American Constitution. By embracing it in 1775 the British government would have prolonged American membership in the British Empire until well into the next century and avoided the American Revolution, and American history would have flowed forward in a direction that took little if any account of George Washington.

More recent American history should allow us to comprehend more empathetically the reasons for the fatal British miscalculation. In the late eighteenth century Great Britain was a newly arrived world power still learning how to manage its recently acquired empire. A version of the “domino theory” haunted all the ministry’s deliberations: if the American colonies were granted political autonomy over their domestic affairs, then Canada, Ireland, and the British Caribbean possessions would surely demand equivalent status and the entire empire, India included, would gradually unravel. Military advisors tended to view the looming conflict through the prism of the French and Indian War, where the British army captured French forts at the strategic strong-points (such as Louisbourg, Quebec, and Pittsburgh) and won a decisive victory, all the while developing only contempt for the fighting prowess of American militia. (The Earl of Sandwich informed the ministry that, based on his experience, 1,000 British regulars could defeat 100,000 provincial troops.) Dissenting voices warned that the lessons of the French and Indian War were irrelevant, since there were no strategic strong-points that, once captured, produced a decisive conclusion. Lord Camden, for example, cautioned his colleagues in Parliament that the British army would find itself adrift in a boundless sea of troubles: “To conquer a great continent of 1,800 miles, containing three millions of people . . . seems an undertaking not to be rashly engaged in.” But such dissenters were ignored. The best and brightest minds in the government were confident that the bulk of the American population were loyal to the king and that, regardless of colonial loyalty, the British army was invincible.
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In short, the arrogance of British power should strike a chord that is eerily and painfully familiar to students of the American empire in its own formative phase, most especially its twentieth-century commitment in Southeast Asia. For our present purposes the most salient point is that the British commitment represented the ministry’s misguided but deeply felt conviction that the very future of the British Empire was at stake. This conviction would continue to animate the highest echelons of the government long after British popular opinion had grown weary of the war and even after a succession of battlefield setbacks had demonstrated that the war was unwinnable in any traditional sense of the term. Conventional wisdom is that space and time were on the American side. But no one in 1776 fully appreciated how long the British ministry was prepared to stay the course, or how quickly the revolutionary fires would subside and in several regions of America nearly die out completely. It was a recipe for a protracted war of attrition.
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What were the major military advantages and disadvantages facing the British army? On the positive side, it possessed two enormous assets. First, it enjoyed nearly total naval supremacy, which meant that all the major American cities—Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston—were vulnerable to destruction and occupation. It also meant that in any engagements along the coast or on coastal rivers the British army possessed superior mobility. Second, although the Earl of Sandwich’s estimate of British military prowess was wildly exaggerated, the discipline and combat experience of British regulars gave them a decisive advantage on any battlefield where they were not greatly outnumbered, especially in any open-field battle conducted along the orthodox lines of European warfare.