During the summer of 1782 Washington showed his willingness to accept recognition of a more democratic sort when the newly incorporated Washington College was named in his honor in Chestertown, Maryland. Washington seldom allowed the use of his name, suggesting that he was flattered by this distinction. “I am much indebted for the honor conferred on me by giving my name to the college at Chester,” he wrote to the Reverend William Smith, the school’s first president, a Scottish Anglican clergyman. Washington donated fifty guineas to the school—promptly used to purchase optical instruments—and also served on its board.18 Always regretting his own lack of a college education, Washington had surrounded himself with college-educated men, and his patronage of Washington College was perhaps a final way of wiping away that ancient stigma. In 1789 he received an honorary degree from the school.
At times during this uneventful year, Washington sent halfhearted letters to Rochambeau, proposing operations against New York or Charleston—suggestions that came to naught. Suspecting a British ploy, Washington scoffed at rumors of a negotiated peace in the offing and grew especially vigilant after Admiral Rodney defeated de Grasse in the Caribbean in April, sending London into a delirium of joy. Even when official word came in August from the British command in New York that peace talks had been opened in Paris, Washington still couldn’t conquer his ingrained suspicion. “That the King will push the war as long as the nation will find men or money admits not of a doubt in my mind,” he said flatly.19 A thoroughgoing skeptic in foreign policy, Washington denigrated the British as devoid of idealism and driven only by pride and self-interest. Before setting aside arms, he wanted nothing less than “an absolute, unequivocal admission of American independence,” he told Thomas Paine.20 After all these years of war, Washington was still a hot-blooded militant and railed against “the persevering obstinacy of the king, the wickedness of his ministry and the haughty pride” of the British nation.21 Such moral fervor had sustained him during the prolonged conflict.
Afraid that his army might relax its guard prematurely, he kept drilling troops on the parade ground, demanded that his men look sharp, and barked out a steady stream of instructions: “The commander in chief recommends to the officers to pay particular attention to the carriage of their men either upon parade or marching . . . Nothing contributes so much to the appearance of a soldier, or so plainly indicates discipline, as an erect carriage, firm step, and steady countenance.”22 He indicated his displeasure that soldiers didn’t “step boldly and freely, but short and with bent knees.”23 Not only did he want his men to look bright and snappy, but he wanted them housed in style, insisting that “regularity, convenience, and even some degree of elegance should be attended to in the construction of their huts.”24
To maintain the fighting spirit of his army, Washington introduced a decoration that came to be known as the “Purple Heart.” In cases of “unusual gallantry” or “extraordinary fidelity and essential service,” soldiers would receive a purple heart-shaped cloth, to be worn over the left breast.25 Since it was to be conferred on noncommissioned officers and ordinary soldiers, the decoration supplied further proof of Washington’s growing egalitarian spirit during the war. (After a lapse in its use, the Purple Heart was revived by presidential order in 1932, and anyone in the U.S. Army became eligible for it.) At the time when Washington inaugurated the honor, fighting had largely ceased, and only isolated deaths remained in the war. One of the last victims was his sparkling young aide John Laurens, who had hoped to raise black troops in the South. “Poor Laurens is no more,” Washington wrote glumly to Lafayette that October. “He fell in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina, attempting to prevent the enemy from plundering the country of rice.”26
Washington didn’t know that on November 30, 1782, a preliminary peace treaty had been signed in Paris and that the American side had won everything it could have wished, including recognition of independence and broad borders stretching north to the Great Lakes and west to the Mississippi. Washington got a glimmer of the truth in mid-December when the British general Alexander Leslie and his troops sailed from Charleston, South Carolina; a few hours later Nathanael Greene entered the city, bringing the southern war to a close. Washington congratulated Greene “on the glorious end you have put to hostilities in the southern states.”27 Whenever Washington lauded Greene, his praise never contained even a twinge of envy, only unmistakable pride. In marking the conclusion of southern combat, he paid lavish tribute to Greene, stating that “this happy change has been wrought, almost solely, by the personal abilities of Major Gen[era]l Greene.”28 This rosey outcome justified the faith Washington had shown early in the war, when Greene had blundered at Fort Washington and another commander might have lost all confidence in him.
What should have been a joyous moment for Washington turned into a troubled one. The national treasury had again run empty, the states having failed to make their requisite payments. As another icy winter loomed, Washington sensed deep discontent roiling his troops. Suddenly reluctant to leave them alone in Newburgh, he relinquished his cherished hope of returning to Mount Vernon. At first he even declined to ask Martha to make her annual pilgrimage to the camp, although he relented and she arrived in December. “The temper of the army is much soured,” he told one congressman in mid-November, “and has become more irritable than at any period since the commencement of the war.”29 Girding himself for disturbances, he vowed to stick close to his men and “try like a careful physician to prevent if possible the disorders getting to an incurable height.”30
Sitting in his snowbound Newburgh quarters, Washington wouldn’t hear about the provisional peace treaty until February. In the meantime, he knew the time “will pass heavily on in this dreary mansion in which we are fast locked by frost and snow.”31 Affected by the frigid weather and isolation of Newburgh, Washington sounded a somber note in his letters. He wrote to General Heath, “Without amusements or avocations, I am spending another winter (I hope it will be the last that I shall be kept from returning to domestic life) among these rugged and dreary mountains.”32
The army’s sullen discontent revolved around the same stale complaints that had beset Washington throughout the war. As he recounted them to Major General John Armstrong, “The army, as usual, are without pay and a great part of the soldiery without shirts. And tho[ugh] the patience of them is equally threadbare, the states seem perfectly indifferent to their cries.”33 The soldiers were so famished that when local vendors peddled produce at their huts, they often plundered these simple country folk. Once again Washington couldn’t locate forage for his starving horses, complaining at Christmas that they “have been four days without a handful of hay and three of the same without a mouthful of grain.”34 The upshot of this outrageous situation was that officers canceled business that could be conducted only on horseback and found it impossible to confer with Washington at headquarters.
Dissatisfaction in the ranks was only sharpened by talk of demobilizing the army, which was rattled by the possible outbreak of peace. As long as soldiers remained together, they shared a common sense of purpose; once sent home, they would contrast their own impecunious state with that of the well-fed civilian population. As Washington explained to General Benjamin Lincoln, they were “about to be turned into the world, soured by penury and what they call the ingratitude of the public, involved in debts, without one farthing of money to carry them home.”35 What made the disaffection most disturbing was that it stemmed from the officers, who subsisted on such meager rations that, even when entertaining French officers, they could offer little more than “stinking whiskey” and “a bit of beef without vegetables.”36 Many doubted they would receive years of back pay owed to them or that Congress would redeem its 1780 pledge to provide veterans with half pay for life. Washington wondered darkly what would happen if the officers who had suppressed previous mutinies turned mutinous themselves.