CAMBRIDGE CAMP, JULY–OCTOBER 1775
A sultry overcast thickened above the American encampments on Sunday morning, July 2. By order of General Ward, company officers had begun scrutinizing their troops during daily formation for signs of smallpox. Militiamen marched to prayer services for yet another sermon on the evils of profanity. At General Putnam’s suggestion, they sometimes shouted Amen! loud enough to alarm British sentries.
Even on the Sabbath, British cannons pummeled Roxbury. “The balls came rattling through the houses,” a soldier told his diary. “They neither killed nor wounded any of our men, which seems almost impossible.” The Yankees answered with a pointless spatter of musketry. Heavy rain began to fall at eleven a.m., sharpening the camp odors of green firewood, animal manure, and human waste. Private Samuel Haws updated his journal: “July 1. Nothing remarkable this day. July 2. Ditto.” Private Phineas Ingalls was a bit more descriptive in his Sunday diary entry: “Rained. A new general from Philadelphia.”
Possibly not one of the seventeen thousand soldiers now under his command in Massachusetts knew what George Washington of Virginia looked like. Few Americans did. Imaginary portraits that bore no resemblance to him had been sketched and printed in the penny sheets after his unanimous selection by the Continental Congress seventeen days earlier to be “general and commander-in-chief of the American forces,” a host to be known as the Continental Army. Now here he was in the flesh, trotting past the sodden pickets just after noon with a small cavalry escort and baggage that included a stack of books on generalship, notably Military Instructions for Officers Detached in the Field and a volume with copperplate diagrams on how to build fortifications and otherwise run a war. At Hastings House, a dour Ward handed over his orderly book to the man Private Haws soon called “Lesemo,” a perversion of generalissimo. No salute was fired; the Lesemo’s new army could not spare the powder.
“His personal appearance is truly noble and majestic, being tall and well-proportioned,” wrote a doctor in Cambridge. “His dress is a blue coat with buff-colored facings, a rich epaulet on each shoulder, buff underdress, and an elegant small sword, a black cockade in his hat.” At age forty-three, he was all that and more: over six feet tall, but so erect he seemed taller; nimble for a large man, as demonstrated on many a dance floor, and so graceful in the saddle that some reckoned him the finest horseman of the age; fair skin that burned easily, lightly spattered with smallpox pits and stretched across high cheekbones beneath wide-set slate-blue eyes; fine hair with a hint of auburn, tied back in a queue. He had first lost teeth in the French and Indian War, symptomatic of the perpetual dental miseries that kept him from smiling much. “His appearance alone gave confidence to the timid and imposed respect on the bold,” in one soldier’s estimation, or, as a Connecticut congressman observed, “No harum-scarum, ranting, swearing fellow, but sober, steady, and calm.” Abigail Adams, who would invite Washington to coffee soon after his arrival, told her husband, John, “Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.” Clearly smitten, she paraphrased the English poet John Dryden: “Mark his majestic fabric! He’s a temple / Sacred by birth, and built by hands divine.” John Adams, in turn, noted that Washington “possessed the gift of silence,” a virtue rarely found in Lawyer Adams.
Washington’s other traits, if less visible, would soon become conspicuous enough to those he commanded. Born into Virginia’s planter class, he was ambitious and dogged, with a resolve that made him seem tireless. If unquestionably brave, diligent, and sensible, he could also be humorless, aloof, and touchy about his lack of formal education. Those military books in his kit were merely the latest texts of a lifelong autodidact; as a youth he had famously copied 110 maxims from the English translation of a Jesuit etiquette manual, including, “Let your countenance be pleasant but in serious matters somewhat grave.… Do not puff up in the cheeks, loll not out the tongue.… Cleanse not your teeth with the tablecloth.” As a twenty-three-year-old colonel commanding Virginia’s provincial forces in the last French war, he had been with Braddock—and Thomas Gage—for the disaster on the Monongahela, surviving four bullets through his uniform, another through his hat, and two horses shot dead beneath him, before dragging his mortally wounded commander across the river and riding sixty miles for help in covering the British retreat. That ordeal—more than four hundred British dead, including wounded men scalped or burned alive—gave Washington a tincture of indestructibility while convincing him that “the all-powerful dispensations of Providence” had protected him “beyond all human probability.”
He had shed the uniform in 1758, telling his officers, “It really was the greatest honor of my life to command gentlemen who made me happy in their company and easy by their conduct.” Over the subsequent seventeen years, he paid little attention to military matters. Yet that experience of observing British commanders, organizing military expeditions, and leading men in battle had served Washington well. He was a talented administrator, with a brain suited to executive action, thanks to a remarkable memory, a knack for incisive thinking and clear writing, and a penchant for detail, learned first as a young officer and then practiced daily as suzerain of his sprawling, complex estate on the Potomac River at Mount Vernon. His fortunes, personal and pecuniary, grew considerably in 1759 when he married Virginia’s richest widow, the amiable and attractive Martha Dandridge Custis. Over the years, their convenient business arrangement had become a love match.
Great responsibility would enlarge him. His youthful vainglory—“I heard bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound,” he had written his brother in 1754—had been supplanted by a more mature reflection that those charming bullets meant dead boys and sobbing mothers. War at its core, he acknowledged, was “gloom & horror.” Once keen to advance himself and his interests, whether as a land speculator or a young colonel on the make, he now displayed a becoming, if artful, modesty. He was seen as “noble and disinterested,” in John Adams’s phrase: ecumenical, judicious, formal but not regal, emblematic of republican virtues in sacrificing personal interest to the greater public good, yet elevated above the republican riffraff. As a passionate supporter of the American cause, a well-connected and native-born political figure, and a man “strongly bent to arms,” in his phrase, Washington was all but the inevitable choice to become commander in chief. Although he refrained from overtly angling for the post, he had worn his Virginia militia uniform in Congress to remind his fellow delegates of his combat experience. He had declined the offer of a $500 monthly salary, accepting only reimbursement for his expenses. From ferry fares and saddle repairs to grog and Madeira, those would be carefully logged in his account ledgers, beginning with the five horses and the light phaeton he bought before leaving Philadelphia.
Washington professed to be fighting for “all that is dear and valuable in life” against a British regime intent on “despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us”—a curious sentiment from someone who owned 135 slaves, including the intrepid Billy Lee, purchased for £61 and now at his side in Cambridge. Clearly he nursed resentments: at the preference given British land speculators, the imperial restrictions on western expansion, and the large debts accumulated with British merchants. Twice he had tried to ascend from the Virginia provincials by securing regular commissions for himself and his officers, and twice he had been snubbed. British tax policies jeopardized his commercial ambitions and offended his moral equilibrium; the royal governor in Virginia had threatened, through a technicality, to annul land grants issued twenty years earlier, which would have stripped Washington of twenty-three thousand wilderness acres.
Yet just as clearly he saw the glory of the American cause: a continental empire to be built upon republican ideals, buttressed with American mettle, ambition, and genius. He also knew that it could all end badly on a Tower Hill scaffold, as it had for the Jacobite rebels of 1745. Thousands had been arrested and at least eighty hanged or beheaded; some of their skulls were still displayed on spikes at Temple Bar in central London. As a precaution, Washington had drafted his will before leaving Philadelphia.
Few would guess that the imposing, confident figure who rode into Cambridge that Sunday afternoon concealed his own anxieties and insecurities. In tears he had told a fellow Virginian, Patrick Henry, “From the