had to concede that patriotic fervor was a fair-weather phenomenon. Regardless of the odds, many colonials had expected a fast and furious victory. After two years of conflict — with no clear winner in sight — revolutionaries were transforming into political fence-sitters faster than anyone had anticipated, and a dense fog of cynical self-interest was settling over the countryside.
In Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow sums up Washington’s disappointment and outrage, illustrating that the general could, in fact, express himself effectively when the spirit moved him:
Seeing the decay of public virtue everywhere, he berated speculators, monopolists, and war profiteers. “Is the paltry consideration of a little dirty pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation and of millions yet unborn?” he asked James Warren. “. . . And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it heaven!” Washington himself could be a hard-driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of “the speculators — various tribes of money makers — and stock jobbers of all denominations to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything . . . in one common ruin.”
Washington’s strong words fell on deaf ears. Efforts to shame fiscal predators, no matter how eloquently those justifiable sentiments were conveyed, did not save the day as men continued to die from starvation, disease, and exposure to the cold. The dream of freedom was kept alive that winter by Washington’s own ability to endure one demoralizing scene after another. While letters reveal that he felt incredible anguish and despair at times, he continued to inspire those who were suffering for the cause.
Based on historical writings alone, Chernow finds it “astonishing” that the army didn’t “disintegrate or revolt en masse.” He remarks that he can only explain Washington’s success by emphasizing, once again, that the Revolutionary War hero
projected leadership in nonverbal ways that are hard for posterity to recreate. Even contemporaries found it difficult to convey the essence of his calm grandeur. “I cannot describe the impression that the first sight of that great man made upon me,” said one Frenchman. “I could not keep my eyes from that imposing countenance: grave yet not severe; affable without familiarity. Its predominant expression was calm dignity, through which you could trace the strong feelings of the patriot and discern the father as well as the commander of his soldiers.”
Fierce Sensitivity
As I pored over numerous books and colonial-era documents, looking for clues to Washington’s extraordinary presence in the patterns of his actions, it struck me that his unique combination of fierceness, fairness, and compassion kept the troops together at Valley Forge and beyond. The general didn’t coddle deserters or looters, ordering severe floggings of men caught stealing food. On rare occasions during his tenure, he executed soldiers planning widespread revolt. And finally, after months of tolerating profiteering by local farmers and merchants, hoping to resurrect their failing patriotic instincts, he allowed Nathanael Greene (considered one of the Continental army’s most gifted officers) to organize a regional confiscation of all cattle and sheep fit for slaughter. Washington found this option innately reprehensible, however. He gave the order to forcibly obtain food for his starving troops only after two thousand men had perished not in battle but through widespread neglect from Americans who had charged him with raising an army in the first place.
And yet Washington never sacrificed empathy for effectiveness. Letters to trusted allies, friends, and family members reveal that he felt the plight of soldiers and settlers he encountered. “I see their situation, know their danger, and participate in their sufferings without having it in my power to give them further relief than uncertain promises,” he had written earlier to British superiors, in 1756, asking for assistance during the French and Indian War. “The supplicating tears of the women and moving petitions from the men melt me into such deadly sorrow that I solemnly declare, if I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that it would contribute to the people’s ease.”
Martyring himself might have been an easier, seemingly courageous, though grossly less effective, option: the fear-management and emotional-resilience skills he mastered in hopeless situations ultimately gave him a razor-thin edge to win the most important battle of all, the War of Independence. Luckily for posterity’s sake, Washington’s talent for survival won out, allowing him to further develop the no doubt painful, eternally frustrating skill of appealing to the upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic for help through numerous conflicts to come.
Though he was able to renew himself in Mount Vernon’s pastoral embrace after the French and Indian War, rest and success did not make him complacent. As Washington repeatedly reentered public life, supporting one desperate cause after another, the turmoil he endured voluntarily is truly staggering. Rather than shield his heart against the disappointment, anguish, and sheer horror he witnessed, Washington remained steady and thoughtful in the midst of feelings that would have short-circuited the average person’s nervous system. His was not the coolness of the sociopath who felt no fear, but the authentic, hard-won calmness of a man whose emotional stamina was so great that he was willing to accompany people into the depths of despair, and stay with them, offering hope through sheer presence because he had been there before and had come out the other side. After all, by the time the Revolutionary War erupted, Washington was living proof that personal and professional tragedy could be accompanied by loyalty, love, and prosperity, that a brave, openhearted man could ride life’s roller coaster with gusto — and even find a mate willing to share the journey.
In the dismal winter of 1777–78, he stayed, once again, with a group of brave though impoverished, weary souls at Valley Forge, doing what little he could to ease the pain of an impossible situation. The British were comfortably settled in Philadelphia with their servants and mistresses, their warm fires, soft beds, and silver place settings, waiting until spring to take up arms and finally quash that troublesome little colonial rebellion once and for all.
Washington was fronting his own money for war expenses and struggling to keep his plantation financially viable from a distance during a dangerous economic climate. His wife, Martha, was grieving the recent loss of her sister and one of her closest friends as the couple’s second grandchild arrived on New Year’s Eve. For a woman who’d already lost three of her own four children — one at age three, another at four, and most recently, a seventeen-year-old daughter who died from a violent epileptic seizure — birth was not a light and carefree occasion but a cause for continued hypervigilance. Washington could have delegated authority during the break in combat and gone home for a few weeks. Still, the general must have known that he possessed an extra “something” crucial to keeping the army together at Valley Forge. He deferred a much-needed, thoroughly justified trip to Mount Vernon and sent for his wife.
True Grit
Here’s what you need to know about Martha Washington: she was one of the Revolution’s secret weapons. The general hadn’t called for his spouse exclusively because he was worried about her. He was enlisting the support of his most trusted confidant at a time when his considerable physical and psychological resources were taxed to the limit. And, as numerous historians have emphasized, he just plain missed her, terribly. As Chernow reports, “He pined for her presence” when family obligations delayed her trip to Valley Forge that winter.
If the long carriage ride on bumpy, frozen roads didn’t exhaust her completely, what Martha saw upon arrival at this legendary encampment must have chilled her to the bone. Though she had visited her husband at previous military installations, she was visibly taken aback by his humble quarters. What’s more, the general had lost his baggage a few months earlier, including his kitchen utensils, managing to hang on to a single spoon. But it
