had good reason to exact revenge when the opportunity arose. Yet with the first major American victory came a wholly unexpected demand they do the exact opposite. Washington not only spared the lives of a thousand Hessians captured during the Battle of Trenton, he literally marched them toward the promise of a new life. “Treat them with humanity,” he wrote in orders handed down to all his officers, “and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren. . . . Provide everything necessary for them on the road.”
Through this extraordinary, thoroughly unprecedented move, Washington instilled tremendous self-control, and more than a hint of compassion, in his men. As James Parrish Hodges observed in Beyond the Cherry Tree: The Leadership Wisdom of George Washington, his reasons were both practical and idealistic. By introducing what John Adams later called a “policy of humanity,” Washington was protecting his own soldiers, hoping the British might reciprocate in future altercations, if only to trade colonial troops for valued officers. He also correctly assumed that some of the Hessians might desert their cruel taskmasters and join the American cause. To encourage them, he “marched the prisoners through the German villages in Pennsylvania so they could see how prosperous their former countrymen were.” Over time, Congress officially recognized the respectful treatment of enemy combatants as a strategic advantage that also exemplified the goals of the American Revolution.
“We were fighting for the rights of ordinary people,” Hodges emphasized. By showing mercy when the British insisted on giving no quarter to his own troops, Washington set an example for the world, manifesting a new dream, a new way of being. The experience of the ideal profoundly affected his very first prisoners of war. Hodges reports that “about 40 percent of the Hessians stayed outright or went back to Germany, got their families, and came back over.” As a result, Washington’s eloquence of action demonstrated what Abraham Lincoln later so eloquently described in words: “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.”
British leaders eventually conceded the negative effects of their own institutionalized cruelty. In 1778, Colonel Charles Stuart wrote to his father, the Earl of Bute: “Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observed in a 2005 Los Angeles Times editorial:
In the end, our founding fathers not only protected our national values, they defeated a militarily superior enemy. Indeed, it was their disciplined adherence to those values that helped them win a hopeless struggle against the best soldiers in Europe.
In accordance with this proud American tradition, President Lincoln instituted the first formal code of conduct for the humane treatment of prisoners of war in 1863. Lincoln’s order forbade any form of torture or cruelty, and it became the model for the 1929 Geneva Convention. Dwight Eisenhower made a point to guarantee exemplary treatment to German POWs in World War II, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur ordered application of the Geneva Convention during the Korean War, even though the U.S. was not yet a signatory. In the Vietnam War, the United States extended the convention’s protection to Viet Cong prisoners even though the law did not technically require it.
The very fact that Kennedy had to write an article opposing torture in the twenty-first century shows how easy it is for people to slide back into old habits. But if scenes of American soldiers waterboarding suspected terrorists and humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners would have saddened Washington, recent acts of corporate greed would have inflamed his legendary temper. After all, when you consider that Washington fought the entire Revolutionary War as a volunteer — and I mean he literally did not collect a salary during the eight years he dodged artillery fire on horseback and begged for funds to feed and clothe his soldiers — well, you begin to understand how rarely the entrepreneurs and politicians who most profited from his efforts have bothered to follow his example.
And it is here, curiously enough, that Washington’s long and varied career offers yet another revolutionary example, one of hope that people can actively change their ways despite aggressive personality traits and egregious past transgressions. In this respect, his horses may have provided the ultimate nonverbal education in the counterintuitive benefits of nonpredatory power.
George Washington’s mother was an enigma: a true maverick, a pistol, a tough cookie, an inconvenient woman. Though well schooled in the genteel social graces demanded of a wealthy officer’s daughter, she also knew how to shoot a gun, manage a boat, and, most exceptional for a woman of her era, train a horse.
An accomplished rider in her teens, Mary Ball dodged marriage until the ripe old age of twenty-three, when she became the second wife of a successful Virginia tobacco planter, sheriff, and politician. During Augustine Washington’s frequent business trips, she proved capable of running one of his extensive properties, a seven-hundred-acre operation near Fredericksburg later known as Ferry Farm. Unlike most plantation wives, she refused to hire an overseer to help her. So when Augustine died in 1743, he left his wife in charge — until their eleven-year-old son, George, came of age to claim his inheritance or Mary found a new husband, whichever came first. Augustine’s will specified that his widow would remain custodian of the farm until she remarried; at that point the man of the house would take over, as was customary in the 1700s. Many biographers believe she rebuffed all subsequent suitors to maintain her position.
By her midthirties, Mary Ball Washington cut a proud and imposing figure — backed by an unspoken power that people found unnerving. “She awed me in the midst of her kindness, for she was, indeed, truly kind,” George’s cousin Lawrence Washington marveled later in life, noting that he had been “ten times more afraid” of his aunt than of his own parents. “I could not behold that majestic woman without feelings impossible to describe. . . . Whoever has seen that awe-inspiring air and manner so characteristic of the Father of his Country, will remember the matron as she appeared when the presiding genius of her well-ordered household, commanding and being obeyed.”
Mary’s ability to protect her interests, voice her opinions, and run the plantation as she saw fit led to her subsequent reputation as a difficult woman. Modern historians, however, are more likely to see her as a strong, independent matriarch intelligent and assertive enough to nurture the untapped potential of a future war hero, entrepreneur, and statesman. Her enthusiasm for riding was pivotal, not only in exercising her son’s nonverbal leadership abilities but also in exposing him to a rare yet influential phenomenon: a responsible, highly effective feminine approach to power. Long after George officially claimed his inheritance, she maintained an active role at the farm until she moved to a nearby townhouse at age sixty-four. (Augustine’s son by a previous marriage, also named Lawrence, inherited the now-more-famous Mount Vernon, which became George’s preferred home base after his beloved half-brother and role model succumbed to tuberculosis at age thirty-four.)
Reports of Mary’s willfulness and short temper, especially later in life, reveal the ongoing frustration of a woman who knew that, no matter how accomplished and successful she became, she would always be a second-class citizen. Like the status of the slaves she oversaw at Ferry Farm, Mary’s status was not changed by a Declaration of Independence declaring all men created equal. Her legendary crankiness, sometimes directed at her increasingly influential son, stemmed from an unsettling combination of pride in George’s accomplishments and jealousy of the opportunities afforded him, especially when she had to ask him for money. The farm she so diligently managed for decades, after all, was never hers.
Still, Mary was truly revolutionary for
