One notes how swiftly the fearless Washington displayed derring-do. In dealing with troublemakers, he meted out harsh punishments, including having them ride the wooden horse, an ordeal in which the offender sat on the sharp wooden rail of a sawhorse, his hands bound behind his back and heavy weights anchored to his feet to heighten the pain. One also notes in the anecdote the conspicuous presence of Billy Lee, who remained steadfastly at Washington’s side throughout the Revolution.
As Washington examined his army with care, he was dismayed to find no more than 14,500 men fit for service—far fewer than the 20,000 fighting Yankees he had expected to find. This, the first of many unpleasant surprises, meant that he had to be an expert bluffer, pretending to a military strength he didn’t possess. In confidence, he told James Warren, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, “Your own prudence will suggest the necessity of secrecy on this subject, as we have the utmost reason to think the enemy suppose our numbers much greater than they are—an error which is not [in] our interest to remove.”24
If Washington had taken away one lesson from the French and Indian War, it was the need for a compact defense. It therefore irked him that he had to maintain a vast defensive perimeter of breastworks and trenches stretching for eight or nine miles. On the other hand, he feared the psychological blow if he retreated from fortifications so laboriously constructed. He also had to contend with a grave gunpowder shortage. At first he was told that he had 308 barrels of powder, only to learn from Brigadier General John Sullivan that the actual number was 36, a risible nine rounds per man. When he conveyed this stunning news to Washington, Sullivan recalled, the general “did not utter a word for half an hour.”25 Washington realized how easily his army could be wiped out and was slightly mystified why the British didn’t attack. He looked increasingly frazzled and careworn. “I pity our good general,” wrote one observer, “who has a greater burden on his shoulders and more difficulties to struggle with than I think should fall to the share of so good a man.”26
Washington was thrust into a terrible dilemma: he couldn’t defend his own performance without citing the deficiencies of men, munitions, and supplies, but that would alert the enemy to his weaknesses. He had to swallow his doubts and appear the picture of confidence, making him more tight-lipped in his public pronouncements, if more vehement in private. An accomplished actor, he learned to exploit liberally the “gift of silence” that John Adams cited as one of his cardinal strengths. For the rest of his life, Washington remained the prisoner of roles that forced him into secrecy and evasion, accentuating an already reticent personality. His reserve was further reinforced by a view of military leadership that frowned on camaraderie. Abigail Adams made the insightful comment that Washington “has a dignity which forbids familiarity, mixed with an easy affability which creates love and reverence.”27 Washington’s officers admired him, but with the slightest touch of fear. “The dignity of his presence,” wrote Timothy Pickering, “large and manly, increased by steady, firm, and grave countenance and an unusual share of reserve, forbidding all familiarity, excited no little reverence in his presence.”28 Washington’s public role threw up an invisible barrier that prevented true intimacy with all but a select handful of friends and family members.
HAVING HAD FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE with smallpox, Washington was farsighted in his efforts to stem its spread among the troops through inoculation. By the time he arrived in Cambridge, General Ward had established a smallpox hospital in a secluded spot west of town and ordered daily inspections of his men for symptoms. “We shall continue the utmost vigilance against this most dangerous enemy,” Washington vowed to Hancock, and he diligently quarantined soldiers who exhibited the first signs of the disease.29
In the fall of 1775, when smallpox surfaced in British-occupied Boston, Washington grew alarmed that it might be spread to his own men. “The smallpox is in every part of Boston,” he informed Joseph Reed in mid-December. “The soldiers there who have never had it are, we are told, under inoculation . . . If we escape the smallpox in this camp and the country round about, it will be miraculous.”30 When General Howe herded 300 destitute Bostonians, riddled with disease, onto boats and dumped them near American lines, Washington feared that they carried smallpox; he sent them humanitarian provisions while carefully insulating them from his troops. After a second wave of 150 sickly Bostonians was expelled, Washington grew convinced that Howe had stooped to using smallpox as a “weapon of defense” against his army.31 By January 1777 he ordered Dr. William Shippen to inoculate every soldier who had never had the disease. “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure,” he wrote, “for should the disorder infect the army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence, we should have more to dread from it than the sword of the enemy.”32 This enlightened decision was as important as any military measure Washington adopted during the war.
Meanwhile, in early August 1775, Washington grappled with the grave problem of a gunpowder shortage. To protect his troops, he circulated the fiction that he possessed eighteen hundred barrels of powder—an early American case of a successful disinformation campaign. In giving the go-ahead to a Rhode Island plan to send ships to the Caribbean in order to seize powder stored in Bermuda, he noted that “enterprises which appear chimerical” often succeed because they are unexpected.33 This statement offers a key insight into Washington’s military thinking—his belief that wildly audacious moves sometimes work because they seem too preposterous for the enemy to credit. As it turned out, General Gage had already removed the Bermuda gunpowder as a precaution.
Washington considered his army’s lack of gunpowder such a “profound secret” that, in early August, he would divulge it in person only to the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, not trusting the entire legislature with the news.34 Secrecy and deception were fast becoming essential aspects of his repertoire. Contributing to the depletion of gunpowder was the antic behavior of the trigger-happy Virginia riflemen, who loved to fire their weapons at random, exhausting the whole camp with the commotion. Without disclosing the real reason for his concern, Washington issued this general order: “It is with indignation and shame the general observes that, notwithstanding the repeated orders which have been given to prevent the firing of guns in and about camp . . . it is daily and hourly practiced.” 35 It was a magnificent bluff: Washington made it sound as if he were irate only at insubordination, not at the waste of precious ammunition.
That August George Washington conducted a revealing exchange of letters with General Gage. Upon hearing that the British had taken American officers captured at Bunker Hill and clapped them into jails with common criminals, Washington flew into a rage. He was furious that American prisoners were being mistreated and that officers were being mingled with other prisoners. He protested that Gage had shown “no consideration . . . for those of the most respectable rank when languishing with wounds and sickness.” In demanding better treatment, Washington appealed to “the rights of humanity and claims of rank” and threatened to retaliate against British captives.36 Two days later Gage sent Washington a reply reeking of condescension. He recognized no rank among American prisoners, he conceded, “for I acknowledge no rank that is not derived from the king.” Then he pompously lectured the rebel chieftain: “Be temperate in political disquisition, give free operation to truth, and punish those who deceive and misrepresent and [then] not only the effects, but the causes of this unhappy conflict will be removed.”37