The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel Page 2

  The General, after making his inspection rounds, would gather us together and review what we had written. We knew the General’s style, but he was a stickler, and no letter or order went out without his approval, sometimes not until late afternoon.

  Then we had to write copies. Everything the General did was with an eye on history. He was very conscious of how he would look to future Americans, perhaps too conscious. We all felt it, even though he never said so. Why, that very week in the midst of the crises I shall soon describe, Colonel Richard Varick was coming across the Hudson from his office in Poughkeepsie and filing all the copies of the General’s orders and letters so later Americans could read them. With our nation deciding between peace and continued war, I thought the General should spend less time on filing records and more on frustrating the plots against our country that week that I will soon tell you about. I have come to believe, however, that most of us, from the Founding Fathers to me, a lowly aide, were focused in those perilous times on what our descendants might think of us. I admit I rather enjoy the way my grandchildren and great-grandchildren look up to me and eagerly listen to my stories of the Revolution. Still, I never knew anyone like the General, who carefully calculated every daily action by how it would look decades later. Not that I suppose such action is sinful. It just struck me back then as odd and made me uncomfortable.

  All the aides wrote letters concerning the General’s orders and official correspondence. As the war proceeded, however, the General turned to me to write and edit his personal letters. These included his letters to Lady Washington when she was not with us as well as his letters to his plantation manager and his cousin Lund, and the numerous responses to charitable and personal loan requests. Whether it was caring for the children of his deceased brother, Samuel, giving bequests to the school for orphans in Alexandria, or loaning money to his neighbors (to the surprise of this son of a city merchant, it was apparently bad form for a Virginia planter to turn down a neighbor’s request for a loan or to press too hard for repayment), the General increasingly sought my help in answering requests.

  Another of our tasks was to be messengers and intermediaries. We carried his orders to the various generals, colonels, majors, and captains at all times of the day and night and often in the heat of battle. It gave us the feeling of importance, as if we were giving the orders ourselves. It was a duty about which I had mixed feelings. I never could overcome my fear of bullets. Fortunately, I rarely found myself in direct combat and never had to fire a weapon at the enemy. I always feared that the General suspected my timidity, but if he did so, he never let on.

  The General also used us as hosts and entertainers. When the congressmen would visit—often they did so when we were in camp, although rarely in the danger of battle when the General was doing more important things—we hosted them and tried to answer their interminable questions until the General could return and see them.

  My father chuckled when I told him one of my duties was to keep the General’s expense accounts. My uncle considered me careless with money, and my family would not have trusted me back then with handling any accounts, let alone those of such importance. To say the General was careful about financial matters would be an understatement. The General told me he had been shocked and embarrassed when a friend and ally in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Speaker Robinson, had been found to have used public currency to guarantee personal loans. The General had never forgotten the shame attached to this conduct, and he made clear to us what he expected with our own handling of public monies.

  I believe I told you the General didn’t take a salary, but the arrangement with the Congress was that he would be reimbursed for expenses. The General footed many of the day-to-day bills, but when he entertained, which was often (Lady Washington was invariably present, and they would joke about how they rarely dined alone), he kept meticulous accounts. This was particularly true of the lunches he held for the congressmen, French officers, and numerous foreign visitors.

  Another major accounting category was intelligence. The General never stinted when it came to paying spies or even friendly citizens who incurred risks to pass on information about British comings and goings.

  I never saw a man so careful about his spending. I read after the war that the Congress had reviewed the bills the General had submitted, and they’d found an error: he had undercharged the Congress one dollar! Naturally I took some pride in that.

  The General seemed quite content with being compensated for his expenses while taking no salary for his services. Early on, the General said to me, “Josiah, the approbation of my country is sufficient recompense for my services.” That sounded quite noble to me until I realized what an insatiable desire the General had for approbation, and the fame and applause that went with it. I began to suspect that such a desire could become a dangerous drive. This made me apprehensive as the week at Newburgh wore on.

  I’ve told you the official duties I had as an aide-de-camp. As the war went on, I sometimes thought my major, if unofficial, duty was just listening to the General. After the afternoon dinner with Lady Washington, various officers, and foreign and domestic visitors selected by Lady Washington—generally consisting of some fish, mashed potatoes, and soft vegetables since the General had started to have some trouble with his teeth—and after the meeting with aides to go over what we had written or rewritten during the day, the General would retire to his study with me for some Madeira and Brazil nuts. I suppose some of the aides resented this, but I was, after all, the senior aide in service for most of the war. The General had read widely and always had plenty of books on his desk, but one that was never absent was the Rules of Civility drafted by some French priest. I suppose you could call it a guide to conduct, but it contained the simplest rules you could imagine.

  There were rules for speech, such as Rule 88: “Be not tedious in discourse; make not many digressions; nor repeat often the same manner of discourse.”

  There were rules for table manners, such as Rule 97: “Put not another bit into your mouth ’till the former be swallowed. Let not your morsels be too big for the jowls.”

  There were rules for personal conduct, such as Rule 82: “Undertake not what you cannot perform, but be careful to keep your promise.”

  And rules for relating to others, such as Rule 44: “When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it.”

  My favorite rule was Rule 4 (because, except when in the General’s presence, I violated it all the time): “In the presence of others, sing not to yourself with a humming noise; nor drum with your fingers or feet.”

  The rules—all 110—were so obvious and simplistic that I wondered why the General spent so much time with them. I concluded that the General had received little training in the social graces as a child and was very concerned about embarrassing himself. I found it useful to memorize those rules because, especially with the rules for conduct, it helped me gauge how the General was going to react.

  Many of those afternoons, the General and I sat in silence. Sometimes he mused aloud. I could never be sure he cared what my opinions were, but he would often ask for them. Many times he would ask for the latest information or rumors. I’m not suggesting I got close to the General. With the exception of Lady Washington—and perhaps his cousin Lund; his brother John Augustine; and his manservant and slave, Will Lee—no one was close to the General in the sense of being a close friend. But these were easy, pleasant meetings . . . until that week of March 9, 1783, in Newburgh.

  When we aides weren’t working, we spent plenty of time gossiping about the General and Lady Washington, generally about their wealth or sexual conduct. Most of us initially believed the General’s wealth largely came from his marriage to Lady Washington. The General said nothing to discourage this assumption, but as I discovered in looking over his private correspondence, the General had substantial wealth before his marriage either via inheritance from his half brother, Lawrence, or from self-taught surv
eying, and this wealth was probably more assured than Lady Washington’s when they married.

  Most of the latter’s wealth was tied up for decades in litigation, because her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, had a grandfather, also named Daniel, who was a very wealthy man in the West Indies and had sowed illegitimate offspring far and wide. These children claimed to be the rightful heirs to his grandfather’s vast Virginia and West Indian properties. It was apparently a close call as to whether Lady Washington would inherit much, if anything, of the lands she and Daniel Parke Custis had occupied. It took twenty years of litigation involving the top lawyers in Virginia and the Privy Council in London to give Lady Washington title to the properties, long after Daniel Parke Custis’s death and Lady Washington’s marriage to the General.

  As for the gossip about sex, we aides were disappointed about the lack of grist for juicy speculation. There were plenty of rumors about the General being in love with a New York heiress and also a wealthy Virginia neighbor, but these stories all preceded his marriage to Lady Washington.

  Most of the gossip about sex pertained to Lady Washington and the family of her first husband, Daniel Custis. It was rumored that her first husband’s father, John Custis, had the same sexual proclivities as her grandfather-in-law and had produced a son, Mulatto Jack, to whom John, at least briefly, threatened to bequeath the family estate. Under Virginia’s racial inheritance laws, this would have deprived Lady Washington and her first husband of their inheritance.

  Another rumor was that Lady Washington’s father, John Dandridge, had sired a Negro-Indian girl who was Martha’s half sister.

  Just a few years ago I heard a rumor that Lady Washington’s grandson Wash had several affairs and children with slaves.

  As for the General, we all knew that many Southern planters had hypocritical attitudes on slavery. It has been charged by newspapers hostile to Thomas Jefferson (I don’t know if it is true or not) that our third president had relations and children with his slave Sally Hemings, which is surprising coming from a man who, I have read in his Notes on the State of Virginia, described Negroes as inferior and compared them to “oran-gutans.” We never heard the General use such language, however, and he seemed so prim, proper, and concerned with his reputation that we doubted the General would engage in such sexual conduct. Maybe all the stories about interracial sex in Lady Washington’s family explain why Lady Washington, while gracious to all and adored by the troops, seemed far more diffident than the General when it came to associating with free blacks and slaves.

  We aides all agreed that theirs was a puzzling relationship. The British had tried to sow discord. Articles appeared in British-controlled New York newspapers claiming, on the basis of intercepted letters and eyewitness accounts, that the General often visited a mistress in New Jersey or had gone to this or that whorehouse. However, the British efforts were so clumsy—dates when the General was known by his troops to be elsewhere or in the company of Lady Washington—that they were more a source of amusement than of worry. We aides read the stories with much glee and thought them a great joke. The General told me he was used to false rumors; in the French and Indian War, it was widely believed he had been killed. I doubted, however, that Lady Washington was amused.

  Sometimes we laughed over whether our proper leader even had relations with Lady Washington, let alone ran off hundreds of miles to visit a whorehouse. We concluded that their affection and love was so great they must have, although the lack of children—the children were all by Lady Washington’s deceased first husband—caused some wonder. The General always wore a miniature picture of Lady Washington around his neck. He also made clear, in the many letters I reviewed, his desire that Martha stay with him as much as possible during the war, which she did. She was with the General for most of the war, enduring the cold winters and generally only returning to Mount Vernon during the summers to supervise the plantation. In late 1782 and early 1783, Lady Washington was with us every month, including that week in Newburgh. They appeared to dote on one another, and their private letters were full of affection, although I do not recall hearing any public expressions of that affection. I do know the General thought of Lady Washington often, particularly during her absences, and was very appreciative of her presence with us during the war. Often the General told me he would find more happiness in one month at home with Lady Washington than in all his service in the war.

  I never did understand why Lady Washington burned all the correspondence between them after the General’s death. There was nothing embarrassing in any of the letters I penned to her back at Mount Vernon, just expressions of affection, a yearning for her presence, and queries about the stepchildren and grandchildren. I think back to the letters we aides sent to our lady friends during the war, boasting of our positions with the General and setting up as many dalliances as possible during our leaves. (Of course, that was before my engagement to Prescilla.) Now, those are letters I wouldn’t want published! I suppose Lady Washington burned their letters because, while the General and Lady Washington were public figures, they were very private people. I was told burning personal letters was a tradition in Lady Washington’s family.

  Keeping seventy-five hundred troops occupied at Newburgh and New Windsor and out of mischief, with most of the limited fighting taking place far to the south, was a challenge, and the General searched for projects to keep the men busy. This led to the Temple that will figure so prominently in the story I am about to tell you. Chaplain Israel Evans’s proposal for a structure at nearby New Windsor for religious services and social gatherings quickly won the General’s approval. It was a rough-hewn one-story log structure, but at 110 feet long and 30 feet wide, it was easily the most imposing edifice the army built during the entire war. It had a central hall and four side rooms for smaller meetings and office work. On the platform at the front of the hall, soldiers skilled in fine woodworking built a white columned balustrade with a dark railing. There, a chaplain could give a sermon, an officer could give a speech, or fiddlers could play a tune.

  I’m often asked if we did anything for recreation in those encampments when there was little prospect of fighting. The troops threw the ball around, played cards, and drank their rations of rum. The General himself loved the theater and encouraged officers and troops to witness the shows he brought to Newburgh and New Windsor. Once, the Puritans in Congress passed a resolution that there should be no frivolous entertainment for troops such as plays. It is the only time I can remember the General saying a swear word directed at Congress. “Josiah,” he said, “no damn congressman is going to deny me the pleasure of going to the theater.”

  And the General was true to his word. He must have seen Addison’s Cato, his favorite play, ten times during the war, either in the camps or nearby cities. It was one of the few congressional orders that the General flouted. I do not believe a day went by when the General did not quote Cato at least once to me. On mornings of looming battles, the General would turn to me and, acting as if he had never quoted those opening lines before, say: “Josiah, 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.”

  The General did not utter those words that week at Newburgh. No armed battle with the British loomed. And yet those words from Cato rang through my mind as we approached what I increasingly sensed was the most important conflict, if not armed battle, of the war.

  Anyway, you now know why I was there in Newburgh and what we aides did in what I believe is the most eventful but least known week in our young country’s history.

  Chapter One

  DAY ONE—MONDAY

  The First Anonymous Letter

  Meanwhile I’ll hasten to my Roman soldiers,

  Inflame the mutiny, and underhand

  Blow up their discontents, till they breakfast

  Unlook’d for, and discharge themselves on Cato.

  —Sempronius, Cato, Act I, Scen
e 3

  General Henry Knox delivered the letter. I remember the day—Monday, March 10, 1783—and Knox hauling his three hundred pounds across our threshold, approaching me with that pigeon-toed gait he had and thrusting his hand, minus his two lost fingers, toward me with several copies of the letter before our afternoon aides’ meeting. I admired Knox because he always struck me as the epitome of the Continental soldier; he had been a New England bookseller, a self-taught student in the classics and military engineering, who became an artillery officer and worked himself up to be one of the General’s most trusted and able commanders. Knox told me copies were circulating all over the camps. He asked me to show them to the General, who was out reviewing the troops.

  When I read the letter, I knew why no one had dared to deliver it to the General on his daily rounds. It was brief, to the point, and anonymous.

  Its full text read:

  A meeting of the Gen’l & Field Officers is requested, at the public building, on Tuesday next at 11 o’clock—

  A Commiss’d officer from each company is expected, and a delegate from the Medical Staff—

  The Object of this Convention, is to consider the Late Letter from our Representatives in Philadelphia; and what measures (if any) should be adopted, to obtain that redress of Grievances, which they seem to have solicited in vain.

  A shock ran through me. “Tuesday next” was tomorrow. “The public building” was our recently completed Temple. The letter might sound innocuous sixty years later, but it wasn’t to those who read it then. No one but the General circulated a letter calling for an officers’ meeting, and here was a letter apparently calling an unauthorized meeting to redress the army’s grievances. There had been grievances in the army throughout the war, and some had even led to mutinies—more than you might think. But those incidents had generally involved troops rather than officers. The first mutiny had come right during the siege of Boston in 1775. Thirty-two Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish mountain men had mutinied after agents of the Pennsylvania governor and legislature broke promises that the men would not do guard duty and would get certain clothing and pay.