the British and their fierce allies, the Hessians, marched on Trenton, New Jersey, from their garrison in Princeton, Howland was one of a thousand troops assigned to delay the enemy’s advance through a gutsy attack and retreat/ambush, across Assunpink Creek. “The bridge was narrow,” he remembered, “and our platoons were, in passing it, crowded into a dense and solid mass, in the rear of which the enemy were making their best efforts.” Yet in that moment of utter confusion and desperation, Howland touched a vision of power, gaining, in the crush of battle, a sense of steadiness, renewal, and awe: “The noble horse of Gen. Washington stood with his breast pressed close against the end of the west rail of the bridge, and the firm, composed, and majestic countenance of the general inspired confidence and assurance in a moment so important and critical. In this passage across the bridge rail, it was my fortune to be next the west rail, and arriving at the end of the bridge, I pressed against the shoulder of the general’s horse, and in contact with the general’s boot. The horse stood as firm as the rider, and seemed to understand that he was not to quit his post and station.”
Washington alone did not create that transformational effect. It was the dedication and poise his mount exhibited that inspired the same in young Howland. Yet to fathom what an outrageous achievement it was for Washington to find and train an animal capable of enduring such a scene, you have to appreciate, first of all, the horror of the sound alone. For thousands of years, warriors fought with swords, spears, and arrows. The Revolutionary War seethed with musket fire and cannon blasts. And something else: “Horses were screaming on the battlefield,” historian James Parrish Hodges reminded me during an interview in which we talked about Washington’s leadership abilities. Riding a prey animal, a vegetarian, a species that much prefers flight over fight, anywhere near the scent of blood — let alone the din of absolute chaos and unmitigated agony — goes against every hardwired impulse the horse possesses. If the general’s mount had been a machine programmed for survival, incapable of transcending instinct, such an act would have been impossible. Luckily, the general didn’t believe this was true, or he wouldn’t have been able to ride the same two trusted equine companions through the entire revolution with the odds stacked against them all, horse and human alike.
“It was a miracle,” Hodges says of the colonists’ success. “Washington tapped more in his people than they themselves thought they could give.” And he never would have lived through the first of those battles if he hadn’t inspired similar acts of heroism in his horses. After all, a good twenty years earlier Washington had received a promotion to the rank of colonel when Joshua Fry, commander of the Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War, had died after falling from his horse.
The Silence of Power
While brief, eyewitness accounts of Washington’s impressive riding skills were commonplace, historians past and present have failed to recognize the importance of his distinction as one of the finest horse trainers on either side of the Atlantic. To be sure, Thomas Jefferson characterized him as “the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that could be seen on horseback.” Yet few politicians and writers at that time understood the equestrian arts well enough to fathom the general’s genius in that arena. Our only glimpse comes from the marquis de Chastellux, a French nobleman, military officer, and philosopher who served as liaison between Washington and the French forces that ultimately helped defeat the British during the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. Chastellux published his complete recollections of the American War of Independence five years later, including a description of his subsequent travels through the newly formed United States. Because of his literary talent and acute sense of observation, he produced what are still considered the most vivid descriptions of George Washington as an effective yet profoundly human leader in wartime. A peacetime visit to Mount Vernon gave Chastellux a still deeper understanding of his former comrade in arms.
Two crucial aspects of Washington’s life and personality made it difficult for anyone to know him intimately, let alone write about him effectively: his preference for silence over casual conversation and the vast amount of time he spent in the saddle, for business as well as pleasure. As an accomplished equestrian himself, Chastellux was simply able to go where few men had gone before — riding with the Revolutionary War hero, on one of his exquisitely trained horses, no less.
“The weather being fair,” Chastellux wrote, “I got on horseback, after breakfasting with the General. He was so attentive as to give me the horse he rode on the day of my arrival, which I had greatly commended. I found him as good as he is handsome, but above all well broke and well trained having a good mouth, easy in hand, and stopping short in a gallop without bearing on the bit. I mention these minute particulars, because it is the General himself who breaks all his own horses, and he is a very excellent and bold horseman, leaping the highest fences, and going extremely quick, without standing upon his stirrups, bearing on the bridle, or letting his horse run wild.”
Washington could not have used abusive dominance techniques to create a mount of this caliber. In equestrian terms, he taught the horse to “carry himself” with the utmost grace and responsiveness. The general rode with a light yet persuasive touch, creating an agile, thoughtful partner rather than a dissociative, machinelike mode of transportation. And Chastellux, a man who’d visited the stables of European royalty, was impressed.
In addition to a long-standing, vigorous devotion to horse breeding, racing, and foxhunting (an athletic equestrian sport that involves racing cross-country and leaping over fences with packs of baying hounds), Washington’s postwar and postpresidency “retirement” routine at Mount Vernon involved rising with the sun and literally rousting many of his own workers. After providing meticulous instructions on a variety of farm tasks and repairs, he ate a light breakfast at seven o’clock and then spent a good six hours in the saddle. In His Excellency: George Washington, Joseph J. Ellis describes him riding around the farm, “ordering drainage ditches to be widened, inspecting the operation of a new distillery he had recently commissioned on the premises, warning poachers that the deer on his property had become domesticated and must not be hunted, inquiring after a favored house slave who had recently been bitten by a dog.”
What historians consistently fail to mention about his daily schedule (no doubt because Washington himself didn’t discuss it much) concerns when and how he trained his horses, who would have needed years of careful development to reach the level of expertise under saddle that Chastellux reported, let alone exhibit the courage under fire Washington’s favored war mounts possessed. The general trusted those horses with his life, and they proved worthy of his confidence in so many subtle yet remarkable ways. When he returned to the mansion around two o’clock each afternoon, Ellis reveals, “no one needed to take the reins off his horse. Washington simply slapped him on the backside and he trotted over to the barn on his own. (Horses like men, seemed disposed to acknowledge his authority.)”
That authority rested to a great extent on Washington’s instinctual understanding of the leader’s role as educator rather than dictator. He cultivated trust, courage, and devotion as much as he commanded it. It’s a crying shame he didn’t write a book on horse training, but the art form, being almost exclusively nonverbal, probably eluded his efforts to describe it in the brief journal entries he had time to record at the end of the day. Washington was too busy building an agricultural empire at Mount Vernon, fighting a revolutionary war, and negotiating the parameters of the very first U.S. presidency. Still, his success in all of those realms was without a doubt tied to his profound mastery of the human-equine relationship. As Thomas Jefferson later complained when he and Washington became political rivals, the persistent image of the elder statesman on horseback always seemed to trump the most eloquent speeches and persuasive intellectual arguments anyone else devised in opposition. Without saying a word, the man radiated dignity and power.
And there was no arguing with him. Not because he wouldn’t listen — Ellis describes a crucial element of his presidential style as “leading by listening.” He’d spend hours, even days, letting people speak their piece, sometimes to the chagrin of younger,
