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Whatever his personal trepidation as a slave owner, Washington knew he couldn’t afford to cast off able-bodied men, even if they happened to be black. The Revolution forced him to contemplate thoughts that would have seemed unthinkable a year earlier. Even as he fumed about Lord Dunmore, in late December 1775 he dashed off a letter to John Hancock stating that “it has been represented to me that the free Negroes who have served in this army are very much dissatisfied at being discarded. As it is to be apprehended that they may seek employ in the ministerial army, I have presumed to depart from the resolution respecting them and have given licence for their being enlisted.”41 Two weeks later the Congress ratified this extraordinary decision and allowed free blacks to reenlist. Plainly Washington had acted under duress. He urgently needed more men before enlistments expired at year’s end and feared that black soldiers might defect to the British. At the same time, he was forced to recognize the competence of black soldiers. Whatever his motivations, it was a water-shed moment in American history, opening the way for approximately five thousand blacks to serve in the Continental Army, making it the most integrated American fighting force before the Vietnam War. At various times, blacks would make up anywhere from 6 to 12 percent of Washington’s army.42 Already the Revolutionary War was proving a laboratory for new ideas that operated outside the confines of the slavery system. Everyone felt the new force of liberty in whose name the colonists fought and recognized the flagrant contradiction of slavery. It was fitting that 1775 witnessed the formation of the first antislavery society in Philadelphia.

ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1775 Cambridge was gripped by freezing temperatures and covered with a foot of snow, only deepening Washington’s gloom. So frigid was the weather that sentries had to be replaced hourly. With trees leveled in every direction for firewood, the Continental Army inhabited a bleak, denuded landscape. As soldiers left for home in droves, not enough remained to man the redoubts, leaving glaring gaps in the defensive lines. Washington took the high road in calling for reenlistments, but General Charles Lee couldn’t govern his temper. As one soldier recorded in his diary, “We was ordered to form a hollow square and General Lee came in and the first words was, ‘Men I do not know what to call you; [you] are the worst of all creatures,’ and [he] flung and cursed and swore at us.”43 By contrast, Washington appealed to the New Englanders’ honor, saying that “should any accident happen to them before the new army gets greater strength, they not only fix eternal disgrace upon themselves as soldiers, but inevitable ruin perhaps upon their country and families.”44

As the year ended, only 9,650 men had signed up for the new army, less than half the number envisioned by Congress and scarcely a resounding affirmation of the patriotic spirit. Still, Washington struck an upbeat tone in his New Year’s Day message, noting the official start of a genuine Continental Army: “This day giving commencement to the new army, which in every point of view is entirely continental . . . His Excellency hopes that the importance of the great cause we are engaged in will be deeply impressed upon every man’s mind.”45 To start the new year with a fresh slate, Washington pardoned all offenders from the old army. In truth, it was an anxious interval for the commander in chief, who again hid his weakness. As one army was dismissed and another assembled in its place, the British could see thousands of soldiers leaving and might be tempted to take advantage of the situation. As he waited with bated breath, Washington told Hancock confidentially, “It is not in the pages of history perhaps to furnish a case like ours; to maintain a post within musket shot of the enemy for six months together, without [powder] and at the same time to disband one army and recruit another within that distance of twenty odd British regiments.”46

In mid-January Washington complained that his army had no money, no powder, no cache of arms, no engineers, not even a tent for his own use in a field campaign. He sounded a note of sleepless despair, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, saying that he experienced “many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep.”47 A man who hated failure, Washington again mused about whether he had erred in accepting the top command: “I have often thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting of a command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket upon my shoulder and entered the ranks or . . . had retir[e]d to the back country and lived in a wigwam.”48 The British were feeling cocky about their prospects. At Faneuil Hall in Boston that January, enemy officers roared with delight at a farce entitled The Blockade, supposedly written by General John Burgoyne, which mocked Washington as a bumbling general in a big floppy wig, flailing about with a rusty sword.

At midday on January 1, 1776, the atmosphere of the conflict abruptly lurched toward total war when Lord Dunmore torched Norfolk, Virginia. The fleet under his command pounded the town with cannonballs for seven hours, and the blackened ruins smoked for days. “Thus was destroyed,” wrote John Marshall, “the most populous and flourishing town in Virginia.”49 This conflagration banished any lingering traces of Anglophilia that Washington retained. He hoped the Norfolk holocaust would unite the country “against a nation which seems to be lost to every sense of virtue and those feelings which distinguish a civilized people from the most barbarous savages.”50

The conflict sharpened further on January 10, 1776, with the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a landmark pamphlet that galvanized the colonies to seek outright independence. The thirty-eight-year-old Paine was a brilliant if abrasive personality who had arrived in Philadelphia two years before after a checkered career as a corset maker and shopkeeper in England. While many colonists clung to the fairy tale of George III as a benign father figure in thrall to a wicked ministry, Paine bluntly demolished these illusions, dubbing the king “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”51 Within three months Paine’s astonishing work had sold 150,000 copies in a country of only three million people. Beyond its quotable prose, Common Sense benefited from perfect timing. It appeared just as Americans digested news of the Norfolk horror as well as George III’s October speech to Parliament in which he denounced the rebels as traitors and threatened to send foreign mercenaries to vanquish them. The historian Bernard Bailyn has noted that “one had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence,” but Paine’s work—“slapdash as it is, rambling as it is, crude as it is”—produced that magical effect.52

Common Sense was just the fillip needed by a demoralized Continental Army. In a letter to Washington, General Charles Lee pronounced the pamphlet “a masterly, irresistible performance” and said he had become a complete convert to independence. 53 From Virginia, Fielding Lewis, Washington’s brother-in-law, informed him that talk of independence was rapidly gaining ground and that “most of those who have read the pamphlet Common Sense say it’s unanswerable.”54 Although ignorant at first of the author’s identity, Washington instantly grasped the work’s significance. “A few more of such flaming arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk,” he told Joseph Reed, “added to the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contain[e]d (in the pamphlet) Common Sense, will not leave numbers at a loss to decide upon the propriety of a separation.”55 Once his identity became known, Paine endeared himself to the troops by donating proceeds from his pamphlet to purchase woolen mittens for them. Within a year he was traveling as an aide-de-camp to Nathanael Greene and formed a close relationship with Washington. Even after the war Washington remained solicitous about Paine’s impoverished state, inquiring of James Madison, “Can nothing be done in our assembly for poor Paine? Must the merits and services of Common Sense continue to glide down the stream of time, unrewarded by this country?”56