With these thoughts running through my mind, it was hard to 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.