The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 John Ripin Miller

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Little A, New York

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  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477820209 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1477820205 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781477820193 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1477820191 (paperback)

  Cover design by Isaac Tobin

  First edition

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Epilogue

  AFTERWORD

  APPENDIX A: NOTES

  APPENDIX B

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  FOREWORD

  In his wonderfully evocative The Man Who Could Be King, John Ripin Miller succeeds in telling two important stories simultaneously. An attempt near the close of the Revolutionary War by officers in the Continental Army to organize a military coup to seize power from the elected Congress is the story in the foreground. In the incident—known to history as the Newburgh Conspiracy because it occurred at the army’s cantonment at that place in New York—General George Washington stymied the officers disgruntled over delinquent pay and a perceived lack of appreciation through a stunning theatrical display that highlighted his immense personal sacrifices for the cause of the nation’s independence under a free government. The second story that Miller tells with admirable clarity and economy is how Washington persevered and prevailed over the course of seven years as commander in chief. Through vivid flashbacks, readers learn the essentials of Washington’s triumphs at Boston, Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown, and his composure during the struggles that characterized a series of defeats around New York City in 1776.

  The people in Miller’s work pop from the pages as three-dimensional figures. Some—like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Marquis de Lafayette, Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, and Benedict Arnold—are famous or notorious in the annals of the war and United States history. Others—like John Armstrong Jr., John Laurens, Joseph Reed, Alexander McDougall, Horatio Gates, and Benjamin Lincoln—exist on the periphery of memory but deserve to be better known. Miller makes discovering all these people a painless exercise.

  Some readers may balk at Miller’s deployment of a fictional military aide named Josiah as the narrator. No reason exists for worry or concern. Josiah is a faithful composite of the more than twenty-five men who served Washington as aides-de-camp or secretaries over the years of the Revolutionary War. Moreover, being an imaginary character, Josiah can speak unburdened by the contentions of actual historical relationships or the arguments among historians. In short, his voice is ideal for communicating impressions of General Washington’s appearance, demeanor, and actions as well as probing the murkier world of his thoughts. Josiah casts a neutral eye on the world that is consistently plausible. While a bias emerges that is decidedly favorable toward Washington, it is a perspective that the great man earns through meritorious conduct.

  Miller grounds his portrayals and words in authentic historical documents. He has researched extensively and impressively. These efforts make his story accurate as well as accessible. John Ripin Miller’s The Man Who Could Be King is both good history and a good read for all interested in George Washington, the Revolutionary War, and how military subordination to civilian authority became an enduring principle in the United States.

  William M. Ferraro

  Research Associate Professor and Acting Editor-in-Chief (Managing Editor)

  Washington Papers (Papers of George Washington)

  University of Virginia

  PROLOGUE

  NOTES FOR MY GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN

  JOSIAH PENN STOCKBRIDGE, 1843, SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS (EDITED AND REVISED)

  The dawn is overcast, the morning low’rs,

  And heavily in clouds brings on the day,

  The great, th’ important day, big with the fate

  Of Cato and of Rome.

  —Portius, Cato, Act I, Scene 1

  Ioften cannot recall recent events. And yet I do recall that week almost sixty years ago, and I remember it more vividly than any time in the eight years I served the General. You may wonder at my ability to write today in the early 1840s about events so long ago, but as I write now, I realize that outside of the important times recorded on the flyleaf of our family Bible, there is no period I remember better.

  Of course I can’t be sure of all the details of the nascent mutiny that almost changed our country forever. While I kept copies of much of the General’s correspondence and many of my notes, perhaps I’ve got some of the names or the exact sequence of events wrong. I hope my great-grandchildren will excuse me for that, just as I also hope they will excuse me for recalling so many of my random thoughts that week. But February 22, the General’s birthday, is a month from now; their school has already started its annual study of the General’s life, and they want to come over and ask questions about him. It seems their schoolteacher believes the General had plenty of flaws. He did, but I probably know them better than anyone else, and I believe I can explain them better than any schoolteacher who wasn’t there.

  That brings me back to Monday, March 10, 1783, in Newburgh, New York, and the extraordinary events that followed over the next several days. I just don’t understand why everyone writes about what was right and wrong about his generalship and presidency, and you never hear about that week. Maybe it’s partly because of the way history is taught in our schools now. My great-grandchildren tell me the War for Independence ended with the surrender at Yorktown in 1781. No one teaches them that the Revolutionary War went on for almost two more years after Yorktown, albeit with very limited fighting, until a peace treaty was signed. We rarely talk about the conflicts during those two years and the consequences for our country, but the greatest conflict then, I believe, was within the heart and mind of our commanding general.

  You are probably wondering how I happened to be there. I still puzzle about how I became chief aide to the General. We had met back in 1775 when the Second Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia. Joseph Reed, who the General retained after his appointment as commanding general, had introduced us. My qualifications, I thought, were slim. No military experience but a year at Princeton (despite my parents’ misgivings), some experience apprenticed to an uncle in the family’s Philadelphia merchant business, and a knowledge of French. He asked whether I liked to write and did I write well. I didn’t realize at the time, but the General wanted an aide who was a good writer and could correct his own writing—he was very diffident about having had only one year of formal schooling. He also wanted an aide who could communicate with the French, already looking on them as potential allies.

  The General didn’t ask about my family, but he must have known that, unlike me, many of them were practicing Quakers who opposed the war for religious reasons, although I must admit their strong commercial links to Britain may have played a role. Back then almost every well-off family in Philadelphia had divided loyalties. Animosity increased during the war, leading to t
arring, feathering, and worse atrocities that Americans now don’t like to talk about, but back when the war started, at least in Philadelphia, nobody cared much if you had relatives on the side of the king. When we arrived later in Boston, the General retained Edmund Randolph as an aide. His father was a well-known loyalist, but this did not bother the General.

  When the General offered me the position, I quickly said yes. Perhaps too quickly. I thought only of the glory and romance that would accompany my position and impress the women I was wooing, especially Prescilla, the woman I would later marry. I thought little, at least until that evening, of my fear of physical danger and the battlefield. I wish I could say it was noble Quaker conscientious objection to war that gave me second thoughts, but I don’t think this fear had much to do with my religious upbringing; the more I analyzed my emotions, the more I realized I was just plain scared of being maimed or killed. All throughout the war, I would try to control and hide such fear. But I could never hide it from myself.

  Back in 1775 most Americans thought there wouldn’t be much of a war, or if there was, it would be over in less than a year. We believed the British would quickly grant us self-government, if not complete independence, and if they didn’t, we would give them a prompt drubbing. When I said yes to the General, I not only assumed the war would be short but that all the challenges of recruiting and supplying an army from thirteen colonies would be easily surmounted. Washington would command, those commands would be obeyed, and thence everything would unfold in an orderly manner. I don’t say that the General himself believed this—he didn’t—but most of us did.

  As it turned out, I was the only aide who spent the whole war with him. There were thirty-two in all but never more than five or six at one time. We were, as the General referred to us, his “official family.” Patriotism, sense of duty, and the power of the General’s personality were all motivating reasons for the aides’ service. Still, there was much turnover in the group. Many of them, such as Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens, wanted military commands and action, a prospect that alarmed rather than enticed me. Some, such as Tench Tilghman, yearned to get back to their families. Others wanted to enter politics. James McHenry left to serve in the Maryland legislature. Colonel Robert Harrison left to serve as Maryland’s chief justice. Hamilton served as an artillery and infantry commander and later as a member of Congress from New York—all that came before his service as our first secretary of the treasury and before his hotheadedness led him into that lamentable and fatal duel with Aaron Burr. One aide, George Baylor, just couldn’t write well enough and was moved quickly to head a regiment. There was even an artist, one of the Trumbull brothers from Connecticut, who went to study painting in London with the American painter Benjamin West, but not before he produced some fine drawings of the British fortifications at Boston. And then there was Joseph Reed, who, after the defeats in New York, showed the intrigues that can plague a general’s staff by going from the General’s fawning admirer to his scheming detractor—but more about him later.

  Most of his aides revered the General, but, as you will soon hear, I was far more skeptical. The reverence for the General should not be a surprise given the events that seemed to take place almost every day. For example, I remember when we arrived in Cambridge at the beginning of the war in 1775 and the General took command of the troops. The Virginia riflemen and the Massachusetts Marblehead Regiment, which included free blacks, got in a brawl over goodness knows what. The General and his slave, Will Lee—the General always called him “my fellow”—were riding nearby. Someone else might have ignored the melee or called in the regimental commanding officers for a dressing-down later. Not the General. I saw the General and Will ride right into the middle of the brawl where the General dismounted, grabbed the two ringleaders, and lifted them in the air while cussing them out. The two men he grabbed were mean-looking six-footers and the General just lifted them up like they were dolls. Hundreds of surrounding men looked on for a moment in silence and then just fled. When I asked him back at headquarters what would have happened if he had failed, the General looked as if the thought had never occurred to him and just grunted, “Josiah, these state militia have to start fighting the British instead of each other.”

  Of course, the war aged the General. I’m not sure he could have lifted those men up in 1783, but back in 1775 he was six foot three, a lean 209 pounds, and could lift and throw iron bars or a ball farther than anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s amazing to me that these days we just see portraits of the General in his last years with white hair and a paunch and hear the stories about his false teeth. What a specimen the General was when I met him. A slightly pockmarked face did not detract from but added to his rugged good looks. When Benjamin Rush said, “There is not a king in Europe that would not look like a valet de chambre by his side,” this was no exaggeration.

  The story of breaking up the brawl was like many stories that just grew and grew with retelling—later I heard the General had sent six men sprawling—until even I wasn’t sure what I had really observed.

  That I was a skeptic among a largely worshipful, emotional group of aides in retrospect should not be surprising. My fear of war may not have had anything to do with my Quaker upbringing, but my skepticism with respect to offices and titles had everything to do with my Quaker ancestors, who stood for the right to never doff their hats to anyone, including generals. So there I was, a twenty-year-old youth, brought up in the “plain,” practical, and peace-loving world of the Society of Friends, suddenly adorned with the undeniably fancy and warlike title of lieutenant colonel. I had no military experience, no family farm to get back to, and my stake in my family business gave me the wherewithal to serve for thirty-three-dollars-a-month pay. The General finally prevailed on Congress to raise our pay to forty and then to sixty-six dollars a month, but whatever amount Congress specified was really meaningless, since many months no pay arrived at all.

  At first Congress’s broken pay promises irritated me, but when I thought how the General had volunteered to serve without any pay, it hardly seemed like I should complain. Indeed, many of my fellow officers had received far less pay than I had. It was just expected that officers should finance their service, including food and clothing.

  Things were even worse for the troops. Yes, most had received bounties of twenty dollars or more to enlist and steady if depreciated pay, albeit a meager six and two-thirds dollars per month. But there were months when the promised leather jacket or pair of overalls or shoes did not arrive, and days when meals consisted of a slab of bread and a cup of beef broth mixed with burnt leaves.

  Armies are always rife with rumors, all the more so when troops wait with no combat looming, as was the case at Newburgh in the winter of 1782 to 1783. It is especially true after seven years of broken congressional promises on pay, clothing, and food. And still more true after the broken promises and lack of action on petitions resulted in numerous small mutinies that the public knows nothing of, mutinies that had been suppressed but which we on the General’s staff were all too well aware of. With the return from Philadelphia of General Alexander McDougall reporting no action by Congress on our petition, that week in Newburgh was as tense in its own way as any combat-filled week on the Delaware or at Yorktown, or week of suffering at Valley Forge or Morristown. I did not realize it at the beginning of the week, but the patriotic resolve of our troops, our officers, and our commanding General were about to be tested in ways that had never happened in the whole war.

  Many times I have been asked what an aide-de-camp does. The French phrase means “camp assistant,” and we were there, at all times, to help the General in whatever he needed. Our job was to take all the lesser matters off the General’s hands that we could, so as to allow him to focus on the military decisions that needed all his attention.

  In Newburgh we aides came to work every morning at Hasbrouck House, a farmhouse on a sloping hill above the Hudson River where the General and Lady Washington had lived,
worked, and entertained since most of the army had moved north from Yorktown in the spring of 1782. The house had been acquired from a widow of a militia officer. It was chosen for its location north of West Point and close to the army depot at New Windsor. There were seven dark rooms plus a hallway used for sleeping and a separate kitchen linked to the house. The aides’ office adjoined the General’s study and office. The light came from one large window, candles that we burned throughout almost every day, and a huge fireplace through whose cavernous chimney you could see the sky. When it snowed, the flakes would melt on the fire. Our office, one of the three largest rooms, sometimes served as a waiting room for those wanting to see the General. Along with the two offices, there was also a bedroom for the Washingtons, an aides’ bedroom, a room for clothing, a dining room, and a parlor room that was used by overnight visitors and also by Lady Washington.

  We wrote and reviewed the General’s letters, both public and private. The General insisted on answering every letter he received and he wanted to be sure when he sent out a letter that it conveyed his thoughts exactly and the spelling was correct. (The General, a notoriously bad speller, was particularly concerned about spelling.) Every morning after breakfast the General would gather several of us for a meeting and either dictate letters or, after giving his thoughts, tell us to write drafts.

  Most of the letters were either pleas to Congress and the governors for money, clothing, and food, or responses to the letters that thanked, complimented, or extolled the General, often implicitly or explicitly suggesting in the most unseemly manner—at least in my opinion—that he should become king or a military dictator. Some present writers, out of republican sympathies, or because they want to enhance the General’s reputation, dismiss such suggestions as beyond the General’s consideration. As one who watched the General for almost eight years, I believe it was impossible for the General to not consider such suggestions, as you will soon find out.