The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel Page 3

  I was stunned at this event so early in the war. Not so the General. He had apparently encountered similar episodes in the French and Indian War. After mounting overwhelming force to stop the mutiny from spreading, the General convened court-martials, which fined many of the mutineers twenty shillings from their next month’s pay for the hospital fund and imprisoned the ringleader, Jonathan Leaman, for what I thought was an extremely lenient six-day sentence. The General then had me draft letters to the Pennsylvania authorities about failed promises leaving “the greater part of the army in a state not far from mutiny.”

  By 1783 the clothing and food situation had improved somewhat, due to French money, but the pay was delinquent as always. This was the eighth year of a war we had expected to end in a year, and over a year after the British surrender at Yorktown. And still the war and negotiations to end it dragged on. Rumors always plague an army, but given the circumstances, it was no wonder that rumors of mutiny and marching on Philadelphia to take over the government were rife at Newburgh.

  Most of the troop mutinies that followed the early one in Boston were small, easily dispersed affairs. These uprisings were not because of lack of loyalty by our men to our cause. Our troops were honest farmers, tradesman, and fishermen, and they expected that promises made would be kept. When they weren’t, there was trouble, and the Congress and the governors left the General to deal with the mess. Of course, the General could not allow the troops to just run off, no matter what the justification. But this letter delivered by General Knox that Monday was not about some Pennsylvania mountain men or even the 1781 mutiny of thousands, about which I will tell you later. This was a letter to hundreds of officers in the main army encampment. For months, rumors of a mutiny and a march on Philadelphia to seize control of the government had been circulating through the camps at Newburgh and New Windsor, New York, where our army had come after the victory at Yorktown. The soldiers had not been paid for months, and many officers had never been paid since the beginning of the war. Congress didn’t want to levy taxes to support the war, and when it finally had to, the states didn’t want to collect them. And then, when the states did collect taxes, they spent the money on their own needs.

  It wasn’t just the lack of pay. As General Nathanael Greene once told me, “Politicians think we can live on air as in heaven without eating or drinking.” He could have added that the politicians didn’t think we needed clothing either. Officers from friendly European nations were shocked to see troops often half naked or without shoes. The delegation of officers the General had sent to seek back pay and future pensions from Congress in Philadelphia had reported nothing but soothing words, all of which the anonymous letter writer and those who read the letter well knew.

  I do believe that many Americans thought the war had been won with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. But the General knew better. We were in Newburgh and New Windsor on the Hudson River because the British still held Savannah, Charleston, and, most importantly, New York City. General Guy Carleton commanded fourteen thousand British troops in New York City—far more than our forces of seventy-five hundred—and the General worried that Carleton would move upriver and try to split New England from the rest of the colonies. So there we were, a worn-out army with a headquarters, guardhouse, powder magazine, quarters for tailors, and other supporting buildings in Newburgh, along with a temple and hundreds of buildings for the troops in New Windsor. Fighting was at a lull, and peace negotiations had been going on in Paris for over a year, but these negotiations had produced no final agreement. King George III was reported to be incensed by Cornwallis’s surrender and was threatening to send even more troops across the ocean, although the faction in Parliament led by Fox and Burke, which was against the war, seemed to be growing stronger. Benjamin Franklin had recently written the General and others that negotiations were taking a positive turn and the next month or two might bring peace and independence, but the General had heard this story before. Still, the General could have remained at Mount Vernon after Yorktown to not only enjoy home life but be closer to our other armies in the South. There were so many rumors of mutiny or a coup that I suspected the General’s presence in Newburgh was not entirely motivated by military tactics.

  And now came this anonymous letter. The author was obviously confident that the officers would attend the meeting. But then what? March on Philadelphia and take over the Congress? Or maybe the author had some other plan in mind. And who was the anonymous author? I remember thinking of so many possible answers to that question and not finding any convincing.

  Was it General Horatio Gates or one of his aides? Gates was second-in-command at Newburgh. All of us on the General’s staff knew he had resented the General’s appointment and had yearned for the top command since the start of the war. Whenever I looked into Gates’s face with its sagging eyes and Roman nose, I thought of a bloodhound, and he was indeed tenacious; nothing in his life had come without striving and capitalizing on his connections. No officer spent more time lobbying Congress to advance his career. A few years older than the General, Gates had served in the British army years ago in Germany and then had met Washington when they were both young officers fighting in the Braddock expedition during the French and Indian War. Unlike other officers, Gates and Washington, while outwardly cordial, apparently had never bonded.

  Gates’s desire for advancement and his resentment of the General had led to his involvement in the 1777 plot with the French-Irish adventurer Conway. The aim was to have the Congress remove the General and replace him with Gates. Referring to the Scriptures, we on the General’s staff used to describe Gates as Old Leaven, like sourdough starter that had gone bad and had to be thrown out. As I reflected on the anonymous letter, it seemed quite plausible that a man who had plotted just a few years ago to usurp the General’s role now saw a chance to seize control of the army and lead the mutiny.

  Then again, there were other possible authors. Might it have been written by the British in the city to spread disunity? Or perhaps by some who wanted a meeting to threaten Congress into tax measures that favored creditors as well as the army? I knew there was a faction in Congress that was bitter about the weakness of the confederation and eager to strengthen the national government, as was Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris.

  Still another possibility gnawed at me. Could the General himself have inspired the letter? I knew many were urging the General to take power. It had all started with a letter from the first chaplain of the First Continental Congress, Jacob Duché, in 1777 telling the General that the people no longer supported Congress, that the cause was hopeless with congressional leadership, and that if a peace could not be negotiated with the British, there should be a coup d’état with the General taking over the government.

  The General had immediately dictated a response to the reverend disavowing this suggestion and had then made sure that copies of both letters were sent to Congress. I was not certain, however, if the General was assuring Congress of his loyalty or showing Congress that it must act more vigorously to help the army.

  There were even calls from within Congress for the General to head up a military dictatorship, such as the call in 1781 from the Rhode Islander Ezekiel Cornell.

  And then there was the statement of Congressman William Hooper of North Carolina, calling the General “the greatest man on earth” and leaving the conclusion to the imagination of the reader. Letters expressing such sentiments reached the General with rising frequency as the war proceeded, and I don’t know how many people whispered such sentiments in the General’s ear. Some of these sentiments weren’t just whispered. Why, just a year and a half ago, I heard General Cornwallis at a dinner a day after his surrender at Yorktown say, “Well, General, it looks like the colonials will be exchanging one George for another.” I didn’t hear the General say anything in response; he had never indicated to me he approved such sentiments. And yet . . .

  With these thoughts running through my mind, it was hard t
o concentrate on doing routine tasks while awaiting the General’s return. I wrote an order asking for uniform haircuts (cut short or tied in a neat bow), a letter both thanking Robert Livingston for passing on information on peace negotiations and conveying Lady Washington’s best wishes to Mrs. Livingston, a letter thanking General James Varnum for his oration extolling the General (there were always letters of this kind), and a letter thanking a society in Holland for sending a barrel of herring along with its best wishes to the General. It was all very usual correspondence, much of it responding to adulatory letters. Upon reflection, the letter to General Varnum didn’t seem so routine when I recalled that he was another who not a year earlier had advocated monarchy with the General as king.

  The General, as was his custom, returned in the early afternoon to prepare for dinner and accosted me with his usual question: “Josiah—dispatches?” I handed him the letter. There was no visible reaction. It was as if he had been expecting it. Of course, I couldn’t read much into that. The General prided himself on controlling his emotions. The more momentous an issue, the less emotion the General showed. Oh, you’ve read about his tempestuous outbursts, and there were some, but I always believed most of them were calculated.

  Motioning me to follow, the General marched into his study and poured two glasses of Madeira. That was unusual. Generally, the Madeira came out in the late afternoon after the three p.m. dinner and the meeting with aides to review the day’s correspondence. I knew then how seriously the General had taken the letter.

  “Well, Josiah, what do you think of this?”

  I gave the General all the explanations that had run through my mind earlier that afternoon, except, of course, the one about the General inspiring the letter himself. Could the letter writer be someone in Philadelphia—perhaps a congressman or inspired by a congressman—frustrated by Congress’s weakness and trying to force its hand? Or someone in New York—a British sower of discord—trying to split our army apart in a last desperate move to win the war? Or someone here in Newburgh seeking to overthrow the General—perhaps General Gates, who had earlier conspired to remove the General? I thought I detected the muscles in his mouth and chin tensing.

  After a moment of silence, the General dismissed all my explanations except one. “This was written by one of General Carleton’s”—the British general’s—“aides. The British are getting more desperate. If they can break up our army, they can still win the war.”

  I didn’t know how he could be so sure. Maybe the General did not want to suspect a fellow general or friends of the army in Congress. Perhaps he did not want to admit to me that he might have had a hand in the letter. But then, the General did not trust the British at all. Like many Americans, his views of the British were complex and constantly evolving. All his aides knew that, after being commissioned as a colonel in the Virginia forces in appreciation of his services during the French and Indian War, he had been turned down for a British army captain’s commission. We knew how proud the General was and how much that must have hurt. The General once told me that being turned down for a commission wasn’t as irritating as having to obey the orders of British junior officers he outranked who turned up, received far more pay, and knew nothing.

  The General observed, “They just didn’t believe we colonials were their equals. They treated us like conquered people, not British citizens.” But the General held himself to a different standard, certainly treating the British with respect. Why, on the day back in the early 1770s when he convened a meeting in Williamsburg to ban British imports from Virginia, I heard he went riding with Earl Dunmore, the royal governor! And the General never took out his feelings on his British neighbors back in Virginia. He could separate causes from people. I reviewed letters he sent to the Fairfax family, neighbors who had fled back to England before the war. The letters were all full of fond reminiscences and hopes that they would return after the war. I always wondered whether the Fairfaxes received any of those letters. If they did, it was probably after the British had intercepted, read, and then resealed them.

  Lots of Americans changed their views leading up to the war (including some of my Quaker friends), but I believe, after reading some of his old correspondence, that the General was one of the first to advocate separation. I came across a letter to George Mason in 1769 where the General wrote that, as a last resort, we should be prepared to take up arms in defense of our freedom. Oh, the stamp and other taxes without our consent bothered him, but what really incensed him was how the British forced all trade from the colonies to go through England. He couldn’t sell tobacco, wheat, or anything else he grew, except to British agents called “factors,” and he groaned about all the transportation and insurance costs he had to bear. The factors would send him back goods “of low quality and high price.” The clothing, observed the General, “was always tight because these English tailors couldn’t believe American colonials were so tall.” Then the factors would resell the General’s crops to other countries at huge profits, which of course they kept for themselves.

  The General wasn’t one for rhetorical flourishes, but I remember him saying with regard to the tea tax, “Josiah, Parliament hath no more right to put their hands into my pocket without my consent than I have to put my hands into yours without your consent.” Not that the General approved of property destruction like the Boston Tea Party, but he more strongly disapproved of British countermeasures to close the port of Boston.

  The General, I have heard, was one of the Virginia leaders in gaining the colony’s adoption of a measure to ban imports of British goods and slaves. When Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton, and George Mason gathered at Mount Vernon before the First Continental Congress, Lady Washington took Henry aside and reportedly told him, “Be strong. I know George will.”

  The General’s resentment of the British did not lead him, as it did some other leaders, to support reneging on debts owed to British merchants, including Wakelin Welch, the factor to whom the General was indebted. “That, Josiah, would show a complete lack of integrity. Imagine what our descendants would think of us.”

  I heard that, even after the war, the General offered to pay off his own debts to his factor, except for the interest accrued during the war. I had to admit that, while the General had financial interests and could be quite avaricious, he was certainly willing to sacrifice them to uphold principle—or create a picture of upholding principle for our successors, not that I suppose there’s much difference.

  Sometimes, the General’s resentment of the British, mixed with his pride, produced a response that I, but not many others, knew all too well. I remember when, early in the war, the British sent envoys to explore peace. They offered to repeal all taxes not approved by the colonies and to consider—just consider—American membership in the Parliament. They sent a letter addressed “George Washington, Esquire.” I saw the General when he read that letter—the squint of his eyes and pursing of his lips disrupted the impassive façade. He must have felt like he did back in colonial times when the British officers would not give him his due. Finally, the General commented, “They never change,” and refused to send representatives to a meeting until the British sent a letter addressed to him as “General.” When they finally complied, the General sent a team to parley, but he remarked, “They’re three years too late.”

  Of course, the General’s view may have been tempered by more than a British failure to address him by his proper title. They had not offered amnesty to American leaders, and the General knew full well what had happened to the military commanders of the Irish armed rebels just decades earlier—they had been disemboweled, then executed. He hardly could have relished such a fate. Often he joked with us that “my neck does not feel like it was made for a halter.”

  If the General sometimes restrained his emotions vis-à-vis the British, it was the opposite with the French, at least outwardly. The General would make a great show of affection for the French, but I sensed that underneath was a reservoir of ca
ution, perhaps dating to what he regarded as their duplicity during the French and Indian War. The General knew how vital our alliance was and would make a point of publicly celebrating the French king’s birthday and the birth of the Dauphin, ostentatiously feting the French officers. The French commanders, sensing the General’s emergence as a world hero, were full of admiration for the General and would let him know it. But neither French compliments nor the General’s reciprocation with friendly gestures seemed to affect the General’s judgment. Despite French pressure, after the early misadventure in Quebec, the General avoided all enticements to claim that former French colony for our allies.

  “Josiah,” he pointed out to me, “we must think ahead. We do not want the French controlling Quebec, the country to the north of us, when they already, through the Indians, control the backcountry to the west of us and may soon take territories from Spain to the south of us. No nation, Josiah, is to be trusted further than it is bound by its present interests.”

  I responded that the French were our friends.

  “Yes.” The General sighed. “They are for now . . .”

  This seemed a rather callous way to look at an ally, but then, the General, despite outward appearances, could be quite calculating in his judgments. He confided to me his suspicion that the French ambassador had members of Congress on the French payroll to help dictate negotiations at the end of the war. Still, the General wanted to preserve for all, especially the British, the picture of close French-American cooperation. When French sailors and American workers got into a brawl in Boston, the General showed no surprise but tried to prevent the news from spreading.

  Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the General was more driven by his dislike of the British or by his ambition—nay, really an obsession—to win the war no matter what the costs, although I suppose it didn’t make much of a difference. The General’s obsession with winning the war led him to more considered and pragmatic actions, which his colleagues, although they did not challenge him, thought highly peculiar or, to say the least, unconventional. Nothing showed this more than the General’s desire to use everyone, and I mean everyone—Negroes, Indians, and even women—to increase his forces against the British. I suspect congressmen, some of his neighbors down in Virginia, and many other Americans would have been shocked if they had known, but the General masked his actions very carefully.