In the summer of 1783, as he awaited news of the definitive peace treaty, Washington found himself trapped in a strange limbo. About two-thirds of his army had been sent home, enabling him to indulge thoughts of relaxation for the first time in eight years. Having always wanted to visit upstate New York, he now seized the chance. Traveling by horseback and canoe, he covered 750 miles in a little more than two weeks, showing he was still a hardy specimen. It was a measure of Washington’s self-assurance that he wanted to visit the Saratoga battlefield, the scene of Horatio Gates’s signal triumph. Reverting to prewar form, Washington even engaged in some land speculation along the Mohawk River. Back at camp, Washington and his officers had so much extra time on their hands that they took turns stepping on a scale and recording their weight. For all the austerity of war, they weren’t a terribly lean bunch: Washington weighed 209 pounds, Henry Knox a robust 280 pounds, and eight of eleven officers tipped the scale at more than 200 pounds.

In late August Congress summoned Washington to its temporary home in Princeton, New Jersey. The legislature had temporarily been banished there after mutinous troops from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, brandishing weapons, had stormed into Philadelphia and demanded back pay. Washington briefly postponed the trip to Princeton because Martha was “exceedingly unwell” and he didn’t wish to leave her behind.³⁹ When they finally made the journey, they resided at a farmhouse in Rocky Hill, a few miles outside Princeton, where Washington planned to stay until the definitive peace treaty arrived.

This restful time for Washington peeled away layers of tension built up during the stressful war years. One day he threw a dinner for Congress in a grand trophy of the war, a capacious tent captured from the British, and his guests delighted in his newfound calm. “The general’s front is uncommonly open and pleasant,” said David Howell of Rhode Island. “The contracted, pensive phiz [face], betokening deep thought and much care . . . is done away, and a pleasant smile and sparkling vivacity of wit and humor succeeds.”⁴⁰ This dinner afforded rare vignettes of Washington succumbing to a merry mood. When the president of Congress regretted that Robert Morris had his hands full, Washington retorted, “I wish he had his pockets full.”⁴¹

Congress needed to discuss with Washington military arrangements for the postwar period. Doubtless with Yorktown in mind, when only the French possessed the requisite skills for a siege, he endorsed the creation of a military academy to train engineers as well as artillery officers. Following up on his “Circular to State Governments,” he outlined plans for a “national militia” made up of individual state units guided by consistent national standards. And worried that the United States would be vulnerable if it disarmed too quickly, he favored a peacetime army of 2,631 men. Most of all, he approved the creation of a navy that could repel European intruders. Washington also sounded out Henry Knox on whether Knox might take the post of secretary at war, showing that, despite his professions of retreating from public life, Washington was still prepared to intervene directly in the country’s future affairs.

During his stay at Rocky Hill, Washington learned that Thomas Paine was in the neighborhood and invited him for a chat with a gracious note. Paine was a difficult man, even something of a malcontent, and although Congress had offered him a job as official historian of the American Revolution, he preferred to chide it for “continued neglect” of his services.⁴² Congress decided that individual states should reward him instead, and Washington agreed to lobby friends in the Virginia legislature on his behalf. “That his Common Sense and many of his Crisis [essays] were well timed and had a happy effect upon the public mind, none, I believe . . . will deny,” Washington wrote. “Does not common justice then point to some compensation?” ⁴³ Although Paine eventually received a large honorarium from Congress and ample property from New York, he continued to nurse grievances about his treatment and would later lash out at his erstwhile hero.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Cincinnatus

THE PEACE NEGOTIATIONS IN PARIS were hampered by an array of baffling issues, not the least of which was the contentious question of fishing rights off the Newfoundland coast. As John Adams recalled wearily, the sessions droned on in “a constant scuffle morning, noon, and night about cod and haddock on the Grand Bank, deerskins on the Ohio, and pine trees at Penobscot, and what were worse than all the [Loyalist] refugees.”¹ Although the final treaty was signed on September 3, 1783, the news was delayed for two months by transatlantic travel, and Washington didn’t find out indisputably that the war had ceased until November 1. To his horror, Congress promptly adjourned without making adequate provision for the peacetime army or overdue pay for his long-suffering men.

A virtuoso of farewell messages, Washington disseminated from Rocky Hill his “Farewell Address to the Armies of the United States.” It was his fondest wish that the same process that had welded men from various states into the Continental Army would now form a model for the country: “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 . . . would instantly become but one patriotic band of brothers.”² In this affectionate valedictory, Washington reminisced about the high drama and dreamlike events of the war, telling his men that what they had experienced together “was little short of a standing miracle” and that such events had “seldom if ever before taken place on the stage of human action, nor can they probably ever happen again.”³

After forwarding his baggage to Mount Vernon, Washington rejoined his remaining troops on the Hudson one last time. Martha Washington, who had a special capacity to enter into whatever captivated her husband, had grown to love the men as much as he did. By the end of the war, the woman who in 1775 had shuddered in fright at cannon blasts was enchanted by the sight of well-drilled units and thrilled to the lilt of fifes and drums. One postwar visitor to Mount Vernon, a young Scot named Robert Hunter, heard an earful from Martha Washington about the Continental Army’s crisp efficiency: “It’s astonishing with what raptures Mrs. Washington spoke about the discipline of the army, the excellent order they were in, superior to any troops, she said, upon the face of the earth towards the close of the war.”⁴ She never forgot the “heavenly sight” of the troops in those closing weeks. “Almost every soldier shed tears at parting with the general, when the army was disbanded,” she told Hunter, calling it “a most melancholy sight.”⁵

That fall the mood in the camp was hardly all sweetness and light, as Washington had to contend with residual bitterness among his officers. When Robert Morris couldn’t muster one month’s pay for departing officers, they grew surly again. Washington made a pitch to Morris for more money, even though federal coffers were depleted. Morris promised to do what he could while admitting that “the goodwill is all which I have in my power . . . I am constantly involved in scenes of distress . . . and there is not any money in the treasury.”⁶ So furious were the officers over the absence of promised pay that they canceled a climactic dinner intended as a parting tribute to their commander in chief. Washington ended the war still smarting under the humiliation that he had had to beg for money for his men.