The Smaller Wheels

George Washington. Middlebrook, in the Province of New Jersey. Friday, 11 December 1778.

The Continental dollar had depreciated to near-worthlessness, giving rise to the expression "not worth a Continental", and fiscal exhaustion on both sides contributed materially to the settlement.

The Universal Register: The Four-Year War

The army went into its huts along the Middle Brook in the second week of December, in a cold rain, and he rode along the lines on the first afternoon with Tilghman and Hamilton behind him and looked at it, and could not find anything to complain of, which unsettled him a good deal more than it should have.

It was the best army he had ever commanded. He had known it since June, since the ridge at Monmouth, but he had not until that afternoon had the leisure to look at it as a whole, standing still, and see it plain. Seven brigades of it lay here, the Virginians and the Marylanders and the Pennsylvanians and the men of the Lower Counties, hutting along the southern face of the first ridge of the Watchung hills above the Raritan, with the valley below them and the King’s army at New York thirty miles off on the far side of it; and the men were building their huts by regiments, in streets, as they had built them at Valley Forge, and they were building them well, and quickly, and they were clothed. That was the thing he kept looking at. They had coats. Most of them had shoes. They were healthier, the surgeons said, than they had been at any time since the army was formed; and when a brigade went past him on the road to its ground it went at a fixed step, in column, with its intervals kept, and wheeled where it was told to wheel, and halted when it was told to halt, and nobody shouted.

He had written to the Congress that he hoped the troops would be in a more comfortable situation than they had been the winter before. He saw, riding along the lines in the rain, that they would be; and he found that it did not comfort him at all.

He had two rooms below stairs in Mr Wallace’s house, near the Raritan, a handsome new house of a Philadelphia merchant who had been glad to let them and would, Washington had no doubt, be glad to be paid for them. He had asked for the two rooms by letter, from Elizabethtown, because two rooms were what he needed: one to sleep in, and one in which to sit at a table with his aides from seven in the morning until eleven at night and write to everybody in America who could feed, clothe, pay or recruit an army, and to a good many who could not.

Clinton held New York. The French fleet had gone to the islands. Washington had an army trained enough to face the regulars, and no campaign in which he could use it. He looked through the reports at Wallace’s table, trying to find where a change could be made.

And at Boston, since November, there was a battalion of the King’s foot sitting at Castle William in the harbour by an arrangement with the Council of the Massachusetts Bay, with the King’s colours over it, and the town going about its business round it, and his own Continental guard on Dorchester Heights looking at it across a mile or so of water with orders not to fire.

He had given those orders himself. The Congress had asked it of him, having accepted the King’s ratification of Burgoyne’s Convention, and the Council at Boston had asked it, and he had not liked it, and had said so, and had given the orders. He had thought about it more than he would have admitted to anybody, in the weeks since. It was the first time in the war that anybody had found a way for the two armies to be in the same place without killing each other. He did not know yet what that was worth. He had a feeling, which he did not trust, that it might be worth a good deal.

He went to Philadelphia three days before Christmas, at the Congress’s request, to confer with it about the next campaign, and stayed six weeks, and came back to Middlebrook more frightened than he had been at any time since the Delaware.

It was not the Congress. The Congress was what it had always been: a body of men, many of them able, most of them honest, sitting in the State House again with the windows mended, who appointed committees and debated the committees’ reports and could not make up their minds. He had expected that. He went before it on Christmas Eve, and was received by the President, and withdrew, and spent the next fortnight with a committee of conference, giving it a few imperfect minutes on the state of the army and listening to it decide not to invade Canada after all. That was all as it should be. It was the town that frightened him.

He had been in Philadelphia often. He had never seen it like this. The King’s army had been gone six months, and the city had filled up again behind it, and it was rich. It was rich in a way he did not recognise and did not like: suddenly, on paper, on the backs of other men. There were assemblies every week, and concerts, and dinners at which the cost of the supper alone would have fed a regiment for a month; there were carriages in the streets that had not been there in seventy-six, belonging to men who had not been anybody in seventy-six, who had made their money buying flour and salt and leather and selling them to the army at three times the price, or buying the Congress’s paper at a discount and the farmers’ crops with it, or simply waiting, with goods in a warehouse, while the money sank. It was sinking five in the hundred a week that winter. He had the figure from a merchant at a dinner, who gave it to him with great cheerfulness, as a man gives the price of tea.

On the twenty-eighth the Masons of the city walked in procession to Christ Church to hear a sermon on St John’s Day, three hundred of them, in their aprons, with music; and he walked with them, supported by the Grand Master and his deputy, because he was a Mason and had been asked, and the town turned out in the cold to cheer him; and he walked between the cheering crowds in his apron and thought that half the men cheering him had made more money out of the war in a twelvemonth than his officers would see in their lives.

He wrote to Ben Harrison about it, in Virginia, on the thirtieth of December, at a table in the house where he was staying, very late. He had begun the letter at Middlebrook and been unable to finish it. He finished it in Philadelphia, in a long postscript, and he did not choose his words.

If he were called upon to draw a picture of the times and of men, he wrote, from what he had seen and heard, he should say in one word that idleness, dissipation and extravagance seems to have laid fast hold of most of them. That Speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seems to have got the better of every other consideration and almost of every order of Men.

He wrote that an assembly, a concert, a dinner or supper that would cost three or four hundred pounds would not only take men off from acting in this business but even from thinking of it; while a great part of the officers of the army were quitting the service from absolute necessity, and the more virtuous few, rather than do it, were sinking by sure degrees into beggary and want. He wrote that the country’s affairs were in a more distressed, ruinous and deplorable condition than they had been since the commencement of the war. And he wrote to Harrison, who sat in the Virginia Assembly, asking where the able men of Virginia had gone, Mason and Wythe and Jefferson and Pendleton and the rest; because they had gone home, every one of them, to their own Assemblies and their own plantations, and left the Congress to men who could not hold it together.

It answered no good purpose, he wrote, to keep the smaller wheels in order if the greater one, which was the support and prime mover of the whole, was neglected.

He saw Arnold in the city, more than once.

Arnold was the military governor of Philadelphia, since the summer, because his leg would not let him take the field and because Washington had wanted to give him something; and he lived in the Penn house in Market Street, which Sir William Howe had lived in all the winter before, in great style, with a coach and four and a household of servants and a table that was talked of, and he was courting one of Judge Shippen’s daughters, the youngest, who was eighteen and very pretty and had danced with British officers all the winter of the occupation. And he was quarrelling with everybody. He was quarrelling with the Council of Pennsylvania, whose President was now Joseph Reed: the same Reed, who had been Washington’s adjutant general at the Delaware and had received a letter from General Lee that Washington had opened by mistake. Reed was Pennsylvania’s first magistrate now, and a hard one, and he did not like Arnold, and Arnold did not like being disliked.

They dined together once, Washington and Arnold, at the Penn house. Arnold limped. The leg was two inches shorter than the other, he said, and laughed, and talked a great deal about Saratoga, and about the Congress’s ingratitude, and about the price of everything, which he seemed to know very exactly. Washington liked him. He had always liked him. He had liked him at Cambridge in seventy-five, when Arnold came in with his plan to take Quebec through the wilderness, and he liked him now, at his own table, with his leg up on a stool and his voice too loud; and he went home that night and could not say what it was about the evening that had made him uneasy, and did not try.

In February, when he was back at Middlebrook, the Pennsylvania Council published eight charges against Arnold in the newspapers, and Arnold came limping into headquarters a few days after to complain of them, and asked for a court-martial to clear his name. Washington promised him one. He thought it would clear him. He thought most of the charges were small and some were spite, and that Arnold had been foolish rather than anything worse, and he told him so, kindly, and Arnold thanked him and went back to Philadelphia to be married.

Martha came back with him to Middlebrook in February, and the house was better for it, as every house was.

She had the other rooms below stairs, and the officers’ wives came to her, Mrs Greene and Mrs Knox and the rest; and in the evenings there was company at headquarters, and sometimes dancing. There was a night in March, at a little ball at the Greenes’, when he danced with Caty Greene for upwards of three hours without once sitting down, and Greene put it in a letter to a friend the next morning, and the whole army heard of it and was delighted, and so, if he was honest, was he.

But it was a hard winter, for all that the huts were warm.

The money went on sinking. It took a sheet of paper with the Congress’s name on it to buy a sheet of paper now, the joke went in the army, and it was nearly true. The Congress had withdrawn two whole emissions of its bills in January, because the King’s people at New York had counterfeited them so well and in such quantities that no man could tell the true from the false, and had sent the false ones out into the country by the bale, and nobody at New York had needed to fire a shot to do it. A private soldier’s pay for a month would not buy him a pair of shoes. Officers who had been in the army since Lexington were resigning by the dozen, not because they were tired of the war, but because their wives at home were selling the furniture to buy bread; and he could not blame them, and he could not stop them, and he wrote to the Congress about it every week and the Congress resolved that it was very sensible of the merits of the officers of the army.

He wrote to Lund at Mount Vernon in February about his own affairs, which were going to ruin like everybody else’s. He had been paid in paper for four years for everything Mount Vernon sold, and what he had been paid would not now buy the seed for next year. He and Lund had been writing to each other about selling some of the people on the place, and turning the price into land, which would keep. Washington thought about it for a long time. He wrote back that he was willing, if it could be done in such a way that husband and wife, and parents and children, were not separated from each other; and then that he could not tell when to do it, because the currency was like the flux and reflux of the water, and turned the moment it reached its ebb; and he left it, in the end, undone. He was not proud of the letter. He did not think about why he was not proud of it, because there were a great many other things to think about that winter, and that was one of the things there was always something else to think about instead of.

And there was the frontier.

The news of Cherry Valley had come to him in November, before the army went into its huts: a settlement in Tryon County fallen upon by Butler’s rangers and the Senecas and Brant’s Mohawks, and the women and children killed in their houses, thirty of them and more, and the valley burned behind them. The newspapers had made Brant the author of it, as they had made him the author of Wyoming in the summer; and Washington, who had never seen Brant, supposed that it did not much matter now which of them it had been. In February the Congress resolved that effectual measures be taken for the protection of the inhabitants and the chastisement of the savages, and in March he sat down at Mr Wallace’s table with his maps and planned them: an army to go into the country of the Six Nations in the summer, to chastise and intimidate the hostile nations, to countenance and encourage the friendly ones, and to relieve the frontiers. He offered the command to Gates, who declined it. He wrote the plan very carefully. He knew what it would mean when it was done, the towns and the corn and the orchards, because he had seen what armies did to a country in this war, all of them; and he wrote it anyway, because the frontier was burning and it was his to put out.

In March the Baron came out from Philadelphia with the book.

He had been at it all winter, in rooms in the city, with the young Frenchman and three or four officers who could write English, putting on paper everything he had taught the army at Valley Forge, so that it could be printed and given to every officer, and the army would never have to be taught it again by a man who could only swear in two languages. He brought the manuscript to headquarters and stood by while Washington turned the pages: the position of a soldier, and the facings, and the manual exercise, and the marches, and the wheelings, and the formation of a column, and the duties of every officer from the colonel to the corporal. It was very clear. It was clearer than anything the army had ever had.

He read that the common step was to be two feet long, and about seventy-five in a minute.

He read it twice. He thought of the line on the ridge at Monmouth, standing; and of a boy he had seen at Valley Forge in the spring, at the guns, at the end of a drag rope, keeping the step like a clock while the brigade wheeled past him. He had noticed the boy because the boy had been looking at him, and then had not.

“It is very good, Baron,” he said. “It is the best thing any man has done for this army.”

The Baron bowed, very pleased, and went red, and said something in French to the young man at his elbow, who said that the Baron was honoured, and wished only that there were a war in which to use it; and then went red himself, because he had translated too much.

At the end of March he wrote to George Mason, in Virginia, because Mason was his neighbour and his oldest friend in public life, and he could write to Mason what he could not write to the Congress.

He wrote that he had beheld no day since the commencement of hostilities on which he had thought the country’s liberties in such danger as now. He wrote that friends and foes seemed to have combined to pull down the goodly fabric they had been raising at the expense of so much time, blood and treasure. He wrote of the various tribes of money makers, and the stock-jobbers of all denominations, who seemed to wish the war continued for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice must plunge everything, themselves included, in one common ruin. Nothing could save them, in his judgement, but a total reformation in their own conduct, or some decisive turn to affairs in Europe.

He sat a long time over that last sentence, with the pen in his hand.

He finished the letter. He signed it. Then he got up from Mr Wallace’s table and went to the window, and looked out at the camp in the dusk, the lines of huts going up the face of the hill with their smoke and their lights, the best army he had ever had, and very likely the best he ever would; and he heard, from somewhere along the lines, a drum beating the retreat, at a steady pace, without hurry, about seventy-five to the minute.

In April he wrote to John Jay, who was President of the Congress now, that a wagon load of money would scarcely purchase a wagon load of provision. It was the plainest thing he could find to say, and he said it, and it was true.