Washington: A Life (40 page)

Nevertheless, within a year, by dint of dawn-to-dusk work habits, Greene emerged as general of the Rhode Island Army of Observation, leading to his promotion by the Continental Congress. Washington must have felt an instinctive sympathy for this young man restrained by handicaps and with a pretty and pregnant young wife. He also would have admired what Greene had done with the Rhode Island troops in Cambridge—they lived in “proper tents … and looked like the regular camp of the enemy,” according to the Reverend William Emerson.
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Nathanael Greene had other qualities that recommended him to the commander in chief. Like Washington, he despised profanity, gambling, and excessive drinking among his men. Like Washington, he was temperamental, hypersensitive to criticism, and chary of his reputation, and he craved recognition. As he slept in dusty blankets, tormented by asthma throughout the war, he had a plucky dedication to his work and proved a battlefield general firmly in the Washington mold, exposing himself fearlessly to enemy fire. Years later Washington described Greene as “a man of abilities, bravery and coolness. He has a comprehensive knowledge of our affairs and is a man of fortitude and resources.”
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Henry Knox paid tribute to his friend by saying that he “came to us the rawest, the most untutored being I ever met with” but within a year “was equal in military knowledge to any general officer in the army and very superior to most of them.”
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This tactful man, with his tremendous political intuitions, wound up as George Washington’s favorite general. When Washington was later asked who should replace him in case of an accident, he replied unhesitatingly, “General Greene.”
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Washington’s other favorite officer was the warm, ebullient Henry Knox, who weighed almost three hundred pounds and was promoted to colonel of the Continental artillery that December. Like many overweight people, Knox walked in a slightly odd, pigeon-toed fashion, with his legs bowed outward and his paunch, big as a cannonball, bulging under his vest. Still, he dressed smartly and moved with an erect military carriage, cutting a fine figure despite his weight. From a shotgun accident while hunting in 1773, he had lost two fingers of his left hand, which he disguised by wrapping it in a handkerchief. Knox was genial and outgoing, savored food and drink, and enjoyed instant rapport with people. Good-humored and rubicund, with a ready laugh, he relished telling funny stories in his resonant voice while his blue eyes twinkled with merriment. There was something exceptionally winning about Henry Knox, and one French admirer concluded, “It is impossible to know [him] without esteeming him, or to see [him] without loving him.”
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For those who looked deeply, however, Henry Knox carried a private melancholy beneath all the hearty bonhomie.

Born near Boston Harbor, Knox was the son of a failed shipmaster who deserted the family when Henry was nine, forcing him to drop out of Boston Latin Grammar School to support his mother and younger brother. He clerked in a Boston bookstore and took advantage of every spare moment to read, preferring military history and engineering. In 1771 the twenty-one-year-old Knox opened his own shop, the New London Book Store, which offered a “large and very elegant assortment” of imported works, as Knox claimed in an ad.
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He soaked up military knowledge from the British officers who frequented the shop. All the while he was becoming a convinced patriot. In the last advertisement he placed in the
Boston Gazette,
he announced the sale of an anti-British tract, “The Farmer Refuted,” an anonymous work written by a King’s College student in New York named Alexander Hamilton.

Knox’s wife, Lucy Flucker, the daughter of a highborn Tory, was a bright, socially ambitious woman who excelled at chess and loved to gamble at cards. She had a girth to match her husband’s. Abigail Adams reported, “Her size is enormous; I am frightened when I look at her.”
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Perhaps because of her weight and high regard for fashion, Lucy Knox became something of a laughingstock in the Continental Army. Dr. Manasseh Cutler, an army chaplain, made Lucy sound like a ridiculous caricature out of Dickens, with her hair piled “up at least a foot high, much in the form of a churn bottom upward, and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form, covered with black gauze, which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is a large braid confined in a monstrous crooked comb.”
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The tall, outrageous hairstyle was actually the modish
pouf
newly popularized by Marie-Antoinette.

Knox first met Washington and Lee on July 16, when they rode out to Roxbury to appraise the breastworks Knox had helped to engineer. “When they viewed the works,” Knox told Lucy, “they expressed the greatest pleasure and surprise at their situation and apparent utility, to say nothing of the plan, which did not escape their praise.”
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Before long, Washington and Knox formed a bond of fraternal trust. Washington liked Knox’s imagination, candor, and enterprise and the way he shot cannon with his own hands. In artillery matters Washington trusted Knox’s judgment implicitly. In turn, Henry Knox rewarded Washington with unconditional devotion and delighted in calling him “Your Excellency,” which some saw as a little too fawning. Even later on, amid widespread grumbling about Washington’s military missteps, the loyal Knox never breathed a syllable of criticism. After the war Knox thanked Washington and expressed his “affection and gratitude to you for the innumerable instances of your kindness and attention to me.”
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In the ultimate tribute to Knox, Washington later told John Adams, “I can say with truth, there is no man in the United States with whom I have been in habits of greater intimacy; no one whom I have loved more sincerely; nor any for whom I have had a greater friendship.”
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It says much about Washington’s leadership style that he searched outside the ranks of professional soldiers and gave scope to talented newcomers—a meritocratic bent that clashed with his aristocratic background and grew more pronounced with time. With Greene and Knox, he encouraged two aspiring young men who bore psychological scars from their childhood. He boosted their courage and made them believe in themselves. This effort, of course, was driven by necessity: Washington had to deal with a chronic shortage of good generals, something Knox himself recognized in 1776 when he wrote that “there is a radical evil in our army—the lack of officers … the bulk of the officers of the army are a parcel of ignorant, stupid men, who might make tolerable soldiers, but are bad officers.”
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In the end, the generals who succeeded in the Continental Army weren’t grizzled veterans, such as Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, but young, homegrown officers who were quite daring and stayed loyal to George Washington.

FORSOMEONE of George Washington’s vigorous nature, nothing disturbed him more than the charge that he had proved timid when he possessed the high ground of Prospect Hill, Cambridge, and Roxbury, with General Gage’s troops pinned down below inside Boston. “The commencement of [Washington’s] command was the commencement of inactivity,” wrote Thomas Paine after he later turned into a waspish critic of Washington’s leadership. “If we may judge from the resistance at Concord and afterwards at Bunker Hill, there was a spirit of enterprise at that time, which the presence of Mr. Washington chilled into cold defense.”
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The reality was that during the siege of Boston George Washington was restless and all too eager to pounce. Fond of crisp decisions, he wanted to be done with this devilish stalemate and return to Mount Vernon. As he insisted to brother John, “The inactive state we lie in is exceedingly disagreeable.”
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The caution for which he was legendary struggled against a strong, nearly reckless streak in his nature. As the British lobbed bombs futilely over the American camp—one soldier said “sometimes from two to six at a time could be seen in the air overhead, looking like moving stars in the heavens”—Washington felt powerless to retaliate.
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“It would not be prudent in me to attempt a measure which would necessarily bring on a consumption of all the ammunition we have, thereby leaving the army at the mercy of the enemy,” he explained to Richard Henry Lee. So dire was the gunpowder shortage that spears were distributed to save ammunition, and Washington concluded that he couldn’t afford the big, bold action he desired: “I know by not doing it that I shall stand in a very unfavorable light in the opinion of those who expect much and will find little done … [S] uch, however, is the fate of all those who are obliged to act the part I do.”
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Washington frequently had Billy Lee remove his mahogany and brass spyglass from its handsome leather case so he could engage in surveillance of his adversary. He discerned signs of a British desperation at least equal to his own. The enemy was hollowing out much of Boston, stripping wooden houses for firewood and removing combustible materials that might erupt in flames should the patriots attack. Washington received a much clearer picture of both British and American fortifications when the young John Trumbull crept through high grass on his belly to sketch some maps. The son of Connecticut’s governor, the Harvard-educated Trumbull had exceptional talent as an artist despite a childhood injury that deprived him of sight in one eye, and he was destined to become the chief visual chronicler of the American Revolution. Enthralled by his accurate maps, Washington enlisted Trumbull as an aide-de-camp.

Fearing the onset of the New England winter, with an army short of both clothing and blankets, Washington hoped to strike a telling blow in the autumn. It would be expensive to build winter barracks for so many men, and he would have to chop down a forest of firewood to keep them warm. A minor mutiny among Pennsylvania riflemen on September 10 only fed Washington’s sense of urgency. As Connecticut and Rhode Island enlistments expired with the new year, he feared a total dissolution of his army. “The paymaster has not a single dollar in hand,” he told John Hancock, predicting that without money “the army must absolutely break up.”
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He gnashed his teeth over inexperienced militia soldiers, “dragged from the tender scenes of domestic life” and “unaccustomed to the din of arms,” and doubted they could stand up to British regulars, the best trained and equipped army in the world.
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From the beginning, Washington heeded a congressional directive that all major military engagements should be approved by a council of war. This committee structure gave a conservative bias to his plans, curbing his more daring impulses. At a war council on September 11, 1775, he presented a dramatic plan for an amphibious assault across Back Bay in flat-bottomed boats, telling the eight generals present that, with the element of surprise, such a plan “did not appear impractical, though hazardous.”
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It was roundly defeated by generals who worried that any delay might expose men to a massacre in an outgoing tide. Washington could be persuasive, able to bend men to his will. He “has so happy a faculty of appearing to accommodate and yet carrying his point, that if he was really not one of the best-intentioned men in the world, he might be a very dangerous one,” observed Abigail Adams.
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But the vocal New England generals had no qualms about overruling Washington, and he abided, however grudgingly, by their decision. Before long Washington was to say that, had he anticipated the unending difficulties ahead, “all the generals upon earth should not have convinced me of the propriety of delaying an attack upon Boston.”
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Despite his own hard-charging nature, Washington realized that, in view of the fragility of his army, it was sometimes better to miss a major opportunity than barge into a costly error. He once lectured the Marquis de Lafayette, “
No rational person
will condemn you for
not fighting
with the odds against [you] and while so much is depending on it, but all will censure a rash step if it is not attended with success.”
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The general strategy would develop into a war of attrition, with the major emphasis on preserving the Continental Army and stalling until it was in suitable condition to fight. To John Adams, Washington later summarized the dilatory strategy as one of “time, caution, and worrying the enemy until we could be better provided with arms and other means and had better disciplined troops to carry it on.”
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Washington was often likened to the Roman general Fabius, who held Hannibal at bay through a prudent strategy of dodging encounters that played to the enemy’s strength. Nevertheless this commonly cited analogy can easily be overstated, for Washington nursed fantasies throughout the war about fighting a grand climactic battle that would end the conflict with a single stroke.

In October Washington entertained a delegation of three congressmen, headed by Benjamin Franklin, who came to ponder military plans. Washington deplored the reliance on ephemeral New England volunteers. Hoping to graduate to a dependable professional army, he requested a new force of twenty thousand men, with enlistments lasting at least one year, a plan ratified by the politicians in Philadelphia. He sensed his visitors’ eagerness for a tremendous victory before the embattled British Army could be relieved by fresh troops in the spring. That October, after King George III declared the upstart colonies to be in a state of open rebellion, the Crown replaced General Thomas Gage—ridiculed as “Blundering Tom” by his men—with the formidable Major General William Howe.
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Washington knew that all hope for reconciliation with Great Britain had now been snuffed out. Prompted by his visitors, he convened a second war council on October 18, 1775, and informed his generals that he had received “an intimation from the Congress that an attack upon Boston, if practicable, was much desired.”
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Of the eight generals, only Nathanael Greene showed enthusiasm for an attack and then only if ten thousand troops could be safely landed in Boston.