The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel Read online

  I was brought up short by what seemed like an attack on anyone, including the General, who might dare oppose the writer’s views. And then came the writer’s call for a “bold” and “last remonstrance . . . by men who can feel as well as write,” which would make clear that Congress should not take the army for granted, and that “the Army has its alternative.”

  And what was the alternative? The writer offered two. The first alternative was, in the event of the anticipated peace, “that nothing shall separate you from your arms but death.” What exactly could this mean? I asked myself.

  The army was to stay armed and do what? Just sit in Newburgh and let British troops move back on the offensive? Or was the writer referring to the suggestion that had been talked about for weeks: that the army should march on Philadelphia and impose its will on the Congress? The writer apparently left this to the reader’s imagination.

  Then came the writer’s second alternative. If the war should continue, “that courting the auspices, and inviting the direction of your illustrious leader, you will retire to some unsettled country, smile in your turn, and mock when their fear cometh on.”

  Presumably the army was to withdraw to the unsettled West, let the British crush the Congress and the state governors, and then occupy the whole Eastern Seaboard. The phrase “inviting the direction of your illustrious leader” seemed less like an attack on the General than an invitation, I read with relief, for him to join and lead the mutiny.

  The writer allowed that if the Congress and presumably the states met the army’s demands, the army would maintain its “allegiance,” and when the war ended, the writer pictured for his readers a grand and heroic finish: “You would withdraw into the shade of private life—and give the world another subject of wonder and applause, an Army victorious over its enemies, victorious over itself.”

  I did not doubt for a moment the effect the letter would have on the army. I myself, normally a cautious person, was moved.

  As the spell of the letter receded, I reflected more calmly on its nature and authorship. The letter was unerring in its aim at the emotions of the troops. It was so unerring that I immediately concluded it could not have been written by the British. No British military aide in New York could know so well the mood of the army. The letter in both its length and eloquence bespoke days of thought, and the quick distribution after the General’s order and its invitation to the General as the “illustrious leader”—did this not show that the writer was right in our midst?

  Equally clear, to me at least, was that no one could write such a letter without the backing of a significant number of officers. Every phrase bespoke the confidence of a man who already knew that a large number of officers and troops supported his entreaties.

  As for my earlier suspicion of the General’s role, I was relieved to admit that the conflicting counsels against the General’s moderation and the invitation for him to lead the revolt showed that perhaps he had not authorized the letter, at least not directly.

  And what of the choice posed in the letter: the call either for withdrawal to the West or keeping arms and possibly directing them against the Congress? As I tried to focus on my writing tasks for that day, I pondered the chances of success for the writer’s entreaties at the coming Saturday meeting. Withdrawing to the West while the war continued seemed unlikely. That would mean many officers and troops leaving their families and farms behind. Certainly the writer knew this would not be an appealing prospect.

  But what if a peace agreement was signed quickly? It might have already been signed with the news still coming by ship from Paris. No, the letter clearly assumed a peace agreement; the choice advocated was keeping arms, threatening the Congress, and, if necessary, marching on Philadelphia and overthrowing the Congress. This was a course of action that offered prospects of success. As I have said, there had been an increasing number of mutinies as the war progressed. After the early Pennsylvania mountain men mutiny, there was the Connecticut regiment mutiny, the Virginia officers refusing orders to join General Greene in the Carolinas, and the rebellious officers at Fort Pitt. Just two years ago came the most serious one yet: thousands of Pennsylvania militia had mutinied, killed some of their officers, and marched on the Congress.

  I knew the details of the Pennsylvania 1781 mutiny because of my cousin Benjamin. He was a couple of years younger than I and somewhat of a ne’er-do-well. He enlisted in the Pennsylvania militia, the 11th Regiment with Colonel Stewart. We ran into each other later at Yorktown, and he told me the whole story. Many of the troops had enlisted for three years or the duration of the war. The Pennsylvania authorities wanted to hold them to the end of the war without the bounties that troops from other states were getting. The Pennsylvania troops began chafing at the perceived unfairness. Plus, fighting in ever more tattered clothing, the men lost patience with the repeated promises of shirts, caps, and pants that never came. Even after the mutiny started and the clothes were again promised, they were not delivered.

  Benjamin said that if the General had used force, the mutiny would have spread, or at least continued. After all, twenty-five hundred troops was not a small number, and, as I well knew as the General’s aide, the units from nearby states had little appetite for disciplining their Pennsylvania neighbors. At the time, I had wondered if the General’s strategy was correct—he had ordered General Anthony Wayne to stay with the mutineers, even acting as a hostage through weeks of negotiations—but in the end the mutiny had ended with most of the troops reenlisting. (I never did know why General Wayne got the nickname Mad Anthony. His conduct during the mutiny was careful and cautious, and he scrupulously followed the General’s orders to stay with and negotiate with the mutineers.) Benjamin told me that the mutineers were well aware of the General’s sympathy with many of their requests.

  The British probably thought the mutineers would join their forces, but the mutineers made clear from the beginning that their quarrel was not with their commanding officers but with Congress and the Pennsylvania Council. When the British sent emissaries, the mutineers turned them over to General Wayne, and they were shot. The British had encountered many mutinies but never one like that! The mutineers were not completely successful—some were hung but some got discharged, and some got a month’s furlough, a month’s pay, and some clothing before returning.

  But these earlier mutinies were either privates led on occasion by corporals or sergeants or a small number of officers defying a single order. Here at Newburgh was a potential mutiny of the main army unit of seventy-five hundred led by and involving hundreds of the highest-ranking officers. Even those earlier smaller mutinies, particularly the last Pennsylvania one, might have spread but for the General’s careful responses; now this week came a potential mutiny that invited the leadership of the General himself!

  I realized that thinking back to those earlier mutinies offered little in the way of guidance. Still, the willingness of the authorities to negotiate according to the General’s wishes back in 1781 showed that a mutiny today might intimidate the Congress into passing the necessary revenue measures. Those in Congress sympathetic to our plight already were proposing taxes on imports and exports. Collecting the revenue might prove more difficult but looked achievable. The governors and legislatures of nearby states could be intimidated, but even that might not be necessary. The revenues could be collected without the states’ acquiescence just by continuing to occupy the ports of Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, and by moving into the port of New York—moves that would probably be uncontested by the British under any peace agreement bringing independence. Such a revenue-raising strategy might indeed succeed.

  Success would probably need the cooperation of other army elements, particularly the officers and troops in the South who could move into Charleston. But if the main body in Newburgh raised the flag of insurrection, and if the General even just stood aside, other units would probably join. The Pennsylvania mutineers in 1781 had quickly been joined by New Jersey elements
. If the General took the lead, I was sure almost all units would join.

  If General McDougall was correct and the letter was already being read with enthusiastic approval, perhaps on Saturday the officers would make the decision to move with or without the General. With the writer’s argument to resist the voices of “moderation,” the letter seemed to make the argument to go ahead in either case. But the invitation to our “illustrious leader” showed that the movers behind the letter clearly preferred the General’s support.

  I went back to more mundane matters. I drafted a response to a confusing letter from Elijah Hunter in New Jersey, who begged the General to help recover Hunter’s horses that had presumably been stolen by American militia. Then I drafted an order to William Shattuck to go into Vermont and track down two miscreants wanted by the Congress for treason. This assignment was made more difficult because the General did not want Shattuck to rile Vermonters led by Ethan Allen. (Allen was playing a double game—taking our side while at the same time negotiating for a union with Canada.) Then I drafted a plea to General Benjamin Lincoln, the secretary of war in Philadelphia, to urge on Superintendent of Finance Morris the rapid dispatch of needed clothing to the army. Oh, how many letters of this nature I had drafted.

  The General arrived back shortly past noon, and before I could utter a word, he gave a list of orders he wanted sent to various units regarding the lack of discipline he had observed. Here the war might or might not be drawing to a close, a mutiny was in the offing, and the General was noticing the marching and formation habits of units and demanding that standards be upheld!

  “General,” I said, “we have another anonymous letter.”

  He grabbed it out of my hands, led me back into his study, and read the letter through not once but twice. He did not seem as calm as when reading the short letter the day before but perhaps that was my imagination. “Well, Josiah,” he said, “this man has a good pen . . . he certainly appeals to the passions of the moment. And does not our army have grievances?”

  With this comment, the General embarked on a speech I had heard many times, comparing the nobility of our troops with the corruption of some merchants and congressmen and the unwillingness of many of our citizens to pay taxes to support the war effort. “Chimney corner patriots” he called them—men orating from their cozy fireside seats while our underdressed, underfed, and underpaid army struggled on unassisted. The General lamented that the lust for private gain was increasingly replacing the desire to sacrifice for liberty. As the General’s irritation increased, he went through the list of the worst offenders. There was Comfort Sands, that New York merchant who had promised and failed to deliver rations and then had finally delivered spoiled flour, rotten beef, and putrid whiskey. There was Congressman Samuel Chase of Maryland, who used his office to parlay knowledge of the arrival of the French fleet to buy wheat at low prices and sell at a huge profit. There were the citizens of Norwich, Connecticut, who rioted about paying taxes for the support of the army and then drank toasts to King George III. The General’s anger reminded me of the sentiments oft expressed to me by my cousin Benjamin.

  “Josiah,” the General bellowed—all his coolness had disappeared, as this was one subject that could drive him into a rage—“if I had the power, I would impale these speculators on stakes five times higher and sharper than the one prepared by Haman for Mordecai.” Then he caught himself as he saw my eyes widen at the phrase “if I had the power.” He became quieter as he reflected on the contrast between the chimney corner patriots and the sacrifices of our army.

  “It baffles the mind,” the General said, “that these men would prey on their own country, their own army, like this. And such an army! Who has before seen such a disciplined army formed so quickly from such an inferior number of raw, untrained recruits? Who, that was not a witness, could imagine that the most violent local prejudices would cease so soon and that men who came from the different parts of the continent, strongly disposed by the habits of education to despise and quarrel with each other, would become”—in one of the General’s favorite, albeit borrowed, phrases—“one band of brothers?”

  The General’s praise of the nobility of our army led me to recall that at first he had not reflected so kindly on the troops or officers under his command. Over the years he had changed his opinion. Perhaps this was because he recognized that, as the commander of an army from the thirteen colonies, he knew he had to win the allegiance of all, but I do believe he came to appreciate the performance of all his troops, especially when he compared their tribulations with the easier life of the British and their Hessian allies. Now he spoke once again to me of how, years from now, posterity would not believe the miraculous behavior of our men.

  “Josiah, historiographers will bestow on their labors the epithet and marks of fiction. It will not be believed that such a force as Great Britain has employed in this country could be baffled in their plan of subjugating it, by numbers infinitely less, composed of men oftentimes half starved, always in rags, often without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress that human nature is capable of undergoing. Has any army suffered greater hardships than ours?”

  The words had a familiar ring to me, and then I realized the General was expressing the same thoughts as he had in a letter a month ago to General Greene. The General had a habit of quoting himself—or me—without realizing it.

  “Of course, Josiah,” the General continued, “the composition of our troops has changed in the last eight years. There is more discipline and fewer desertions.”

  I listened dutifully as the General stated what I well knew.

  “At the beginning, although fewer than twelve thousand troops stepped forward of the twenty-three thousand Congress asked for, they were all full of patriotic fervor. We had mainly New Englanders and Virginians. Many, however, left by the end of 1775 to return to their farms. Today we still have many farmers, but also more of the poor, landless, unemployed, indentured servants, and ex-slaves. What motivates men to fight, Josiah? Patriotism? Natural bravery? Present or future reward? Respect of peers? Patriotism is a great motivation, Josiah; an eighty-dollar bounty for reenlisting for the duration of the war and the chance to eat are apparently also great motivations. We have more troops now because there are greater prospects of both success and at least some financial reward. Yet despite the desertions and the turnover, the resilience has been remarkable, don’t you think?”

  He did not wait for me to answer the question. “Just think of the lack of food and clothing and, for most of the war, one-third having no shoes. Well, at least they are better fed and clothed now thanks to French money. They are few compared to the many who did not fight or profited by their endeavors, but they are indeed a band of brothers.”

  Ah, there was that phrase “band of brothers” again.

  It was really remarkable how the General, who most perceived was by birth part of the Virginia aristocracy—which of course he wasn’t—had come to love and repeat that phrase from the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V when the king rallies his outnumbered army before the 1415 Battle of Agincourt:

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered,—

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he today that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother . . .

  I could see why the General loved this speech. It sounded to me very much like himself. And the officers and troops certainly responded to this phrase. The General was so aloof at times, but the troops, even more so the newer recruits, looked in awe at him.

  I believe in part the troops respected the General because of his courage in battle. Someone showed me an old article from the French and Indian War where the General commented that he had “heard the bullets whistle” and there was “something charming in the sound.” To one who found whistling bullets more terrifying than charming, this was hard to fathom. I don’t know wh
ether the General still found being shot at “charming” or whether in his middle age he felt a need to act as if he did and an obligation to show courage to those he asked to follow him.

  I have read that our military doctrine today follows the British model that suggests generals should always stay in the rear, the better to direct troop movements. The General would have deemed this preposterous. When a battle was developing, he would occasionally sit on a hill in the rear, but as soon as the battle was joined, the General would always move to the front.

  Perhaps the respect of his troops was in part because they knew the General, while at times critical, appreciated them. The General instituted awards, ribbons, and what we now call purple hearts. A small matter, you may say, but, as far as I know, the General was the first commander in the world to show such recognition for enlisted men.

  Or perhaps the respect stemmed from knowing that the General understood both his troops’ potential and their limitations. The General had no illusions about human nature. “A common man can be a hero and a coward,” he was fond of saying. “Discipline and leadership will go a long ways toward determining which it is.” Such comments always made me feel uncomfortable, believing that I was more coward than hero. I often suspected the General knew this, but he never broached the subject and always acted as if I was a comrade in arms.

  The General admired officers who were, as he put it, “educated gentlemen,” unlike himself, but he expected more from them, and when they did not meet his standards, he demonstrated anger far exceeding what he showed toward enlisted men. I remember his curt words when he ordered the execution of an officer convicted of looting loyalist property; and I also remember how the General leaped off his horse, Old Nelson, and struck those officers fleeing British troops on Manhattan Island.

  The General had mellowed on deserters, although not mutineers, as the war went on. The year before, several soldiers had returned six months after deserting, and the General gravely sentenced them to loss of pay for the time they were away! If that had happened during the early years, there would have been at least many lashes of the whip. Of course, those who did not return voluntarily and were caught still got the lashes. For soldiers who mutinied—and as I have said, there were more mutinies than those who now glorify the war admit—the General showed little mercy. The penalty recommended by officers at the court-martials of mutineers, at least for the leaders, was death. As the war drew on, the General less frequently issued pardons, particularly after the scare of the last Pennsylvania uprising. I understood the necessity of the executions, and I realized that the cause of almost every mutiny—the broken promises of food, clothing, and pay—could have been invoked, but wasn’t, by all who served. Still I could not bring myself to witness those hangings.