I look forward to meeting with my great-grandchildren soon. I will answer their questions about what I did during the war, of course omitting my fear and avoidance of combat in close quarters. My great-grandchildren will ask me all sorts of questions about the General. I will try to answer them, but I also will tell them the story of Newburgh. I will focus on the General’s rather than my own role.
Yes, I will tell them that the General had flaws. Maybe our country will someday see a better general. Maybe someone else will bring delegates together to draft a new constitution. Maybe someday we will see a greater president. But after telling them the story of Newburgh, I will try to convey to my great-grandchildren that the General’s true greatness lay not so much in what he did but what he didn’t do. Then I will dig out and show them this 1791 news clipping from the Hartford Courant dug up and sent me by my old Connecticut colleague David Humphreys after the General’s death.
Many a private man might make a great President; but will there ever be a President who will make so great a man as WASHINGTON?
General George Washington at Trenton
General George Washington before Yorktown
David Humphreys, aide to General Washington, later ambassador to Spain
Alexander Hamilton, aide to General Washington, later secretary of the treasury
John Laurens, aide to General Washington, unsuccessfully sought approval of South Carolina legislature to arm slaves
Major General Horatio Gates, alleged chief conspirator in nascent Newburgh mutiny
Major General James Varnum, writer of letter to General Washington urging absolute monarchy or military dictatorship
Phillis Wheatley, free black poet, wrote ode to General Washington and later met with him
Marquis de Lafayette, outstanding general, admirer and supporter of General Washington
Martha Washington, wife of General Washington and chief organizer of clothing repairs for army
AFTERWORD
This is a novel about George Washington and power, or rather, the greatest temptation to assume absolute power ever faced by any American leader. It is also a book about one of the least known but most momentous episodes in American history. As the reader has discovered, our first army—poorly fed and clothed, often unpaid, and with little hope of promised retirement benefits—while camped on the Hudson River in New York during a week in the last months of the Revolutionary War, faced a long-put-off decision: whether to gain what the army believed was its just due by marching on Philadelphia and taking over the civilian government. That decision would establish whether our country was to have civilian supremacy over the military or go the route followed by most revolutions toward a military dictatorship.
Any reader of an historical novel will find himself wondering what is fact and what is fiction—or speculation. What you have read here of that week in early 1783 in Newburgh and New Windsor, New York, is overwhelmingly factual, and the more surprising the information, the more likely it is to be factual. Where I suspect the reader will be surprised that something included in the novel is factual or may want more information, I have provided short background essays in Appendix A, which the reader may pursue at leisure.
I have also provided in Appendix B the full text of some of the key documents from that period, e.g., speeches, letters, resolutions, etc., that convey the tensions and suspicions of that fateful week.
Looking into the supporting material in Appendixes A and B, the reader will see that even much of what is fiction is closely tied to fact. Josiah, the General’s aide, who narrates the story, and who I have come to know as well as any of my ancestors, is, alas, fictional. However, his duties and activities as an aide-de-camp of General Washington are based on those of the thirty-two men who served in that position during the war. The conversations are also imagined, but they are almost always based, sometimes in total, on letters, sometimes either of the characters quoted, or of others describing the characters. In all cases the views I have attributed to the characters, including Washington, are the views held by those characters during the late eighteenth century, although not necessarily on the precise date. I have limited myself to selected essays and documentation in the appendixes, because to cite every letter and source would take more pages than the novel itself.
The speculation in this novel centers on four questions: who was behind the incipient revolt; whether the revolt could have succeeded; whether Washington ever considered leading it; and if so, how he wrestled with the temptation of taking leadership of the revolt and setting up an American monarchy or military dictatorship.
Historians have espoused many views on who was behind the potential mutiny. Most point to officers at Newburgh led by General Horatio Gates, some point to members of Congress, and some point to both. There is little doubt, however, that Gates’s aide, Major John Armstrong Jr., wrote the letters that sparked the crises, and I do not believe Armstrong would have written such letters without General Gates’s approval.
On the question of whether the revolt might have succeeded, there are opposing views. Some historians say the revolt would have failed. Some see the revolt as partially successful with a passive mutiny leading the army to stop fighting the British and weakening civil authority. Still others believe that the revolt, particularly with General Washington’s leadership, would have overthrown the government, resulting in a coup d’état and a military government or monarchy.