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 tarring, 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.