The consecutive battles exalted George Washington to a new pinnacle of renown. He had taken the demoralized men who shuffled wearily across New Jersey and shaped them into valiant heroes. Through the many newspaper accounts, these events passed directly into American legend. “Had he lived in the days of idolatry,” said a rhapsodic piece in the Pennsylvania Journal, Washington would have “been worshiped as a god.”⁶³ The battle’s repercussions were worldwide, overturning the presumption that amateur volunteers could never defeat a well-trained European army. Even Frederick the Great added his congratulations: “The achievements of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, a space of 10 days, were the most brilliant of any recorded in the annals of military achievements.”⁶⁴

For all the many virtues he had shown in his life, nothing quite foreshadowed the wisdom, courage, fortitude, and resolution that George Washington had just exhibited. Adversity had brought his best traits to the surface and even ennobled him. Sensing it, Abigail Adams told her friend Mercy Otis Warren, “I am apt to think that our later misfortunes have called out the hidden excellencies of our commander-in-chief.” She quoted a line from the English poet Edward Young: “ ‘Affliction is the good man’s shining time.’”⁶⁵ One consistent thread from his earlier life had prefigured these events: Washington’s tenacity of purpose, his singular ability to stalk a goal with all the resources at his disposal.

Another stalwart admirer of Washington was Charles Willson Peale. In 1779 the Supreme Executive Council of Philadelphia commissioned him to execute a full-length portrait of Washington to commemorate his Princeton triumph. Washington sat for the portrait over a two-week period, and the result was an inspiring work of easy, graceful lines. A debonair Washington stands with Nassau Hall in the background and a Hessian standard unfurled at his feet. His blue jacket with gold epaulettes opens to reveal a pale blue sash curving across his paunch. He holds one arm akimbo, the other resting on the barrel of a cannon. At the height of his power, Washington stands tall and imposing in high black boots with gold-colored spurs; the left foot is elegantly drawn back, resting on its toes. The portrait breathes a manly swagger, an air of high-flown accomplishment. All traces of provincial tentativeness and uncertainty have disappeared from Washington’s personality. This was the magnetic Washington that so enthralled his contemporaries, not the stiff, craggy figure made familiar to later generations by Gilbert Stuart.

Washington didn’t pause to savor his victory at Princeton. Once Cornwallis awoke and discovered the American ruse, he rushed toward Princeton at a maddening, helter-skelter pace “in a most infernal sweat, running, puffing and blowing and swearing at being so outwitted,” laughed Henry Knox.⁶⁶ The British arrived an hour after the Continental Army had deserted the town. Washington put his dazed, depleted men through the paces of another fifteen-mile march north to Somerset Court House. They arrived there after sundown and, exhausted, instantly fell asleep on any available bed of straw they could find.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Busy Scenes of a Camp

FOR ALL THE ILLUSTRIOUS FEATS that Washington’s soldiers performed at Trenton and Princeton, they were weary from their epic labors, and the euphoria of their victory was short-lived. The heroism of the patriot army, though quite real, would prove sporadic throughout the war, so that Washington’s own constancy became necessary to sustain the Revolution. Notwithstanding the bounties they had pocketed, men kept vanishing into the woods every day, and Washington griped that he headed an army that was “here today, gone tomorrow, without assigning a reason or even apprising you of it.”¹ To flesh out sixteen new regiments, he had to offer twenty-dollar bounties, one hundred acres of land, and a new suit of clothes to anyone older than seventeen but younger than fifty.

Washington remained frustrated with congressional reluctance to confer on him the power to appoint his own general officers. Some of the political resistance sprang from fear of arbitrary power, but it also testified to envy festering below the hero worship, a petulant undercurrent that would persist for the rest of Washington’s career. Speaking of Washington, John Adams lectured his congressional colleagues not “to idolize an image which their own hands have molten.” Adams thought Washington already had too much power: “It becomes us to attend early to the restraining [of] our army.”²

After Princeton, an exhausted Washington took his shrunken army into winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, instead of retreating back into Pennsylvania. This inspired decision enabled him to harass British supply lines and to expel the enemy from many parts of New Jersey. Nonetheless the decision carried grave risks. Washington was now perilously short of men, and as he admitted years later, the British could easily have vanquished this thinly guarded camp, “if they had only thought proper to march against us.”³ A small incident shows that he didn’t wish to jinx his recent run of victories through any precipitate action. On January 8 he thanked the Pennsylvania Council of Safety for “your notice of the eclipse of the sun which is to happen tomorrow. This event, without a previous knowledge, might affect the minds of the soldiery.”⁴ In an age alive to portents, Washington feared that his soldiers might interpret a solar eclipse as a sign of providential displeasure.

Twenty-five miles west of New York City, ringed by protective hills, Morristown was rich in farms that could feed famished troops and provide a snug winter retreat. For his headquarters, Washington chose a building on the village green that once served as a tavern. He enjoyed a frugal life, compared to the sumptuous balls that General Howe was throwing for his officers in Manhattan. Once the hubbub of battle subsided, Washington longed for Martha’s company and was starved for news of home. For months he had discontinued correspondence with friends and family in Virginia, “finding it incompatible with my public business,” as he told Robert Morris. “A letter or two from my family are regularly sent by the post, but very irregularly received, which is rather mortifying, as it deprives me of the consolation of hearing from home on domestic matters.”⁵ With his emotional life still rooted in Mount Vernon and the war now threatening to drag on interminably, he contended that nobody “suffers more by an absence from home than myself.”⁶ Martha, unable to travel across a snowbound landscape, wouldn’t arrive until nearly spring.

The commander in chief had no respite from the crisis atmosphere that had shadowed him for months. Conditions were so appalling in patriot hospitals that one doctor remembered having seen “from four to five patients die on the same straw before it was changed.” ⁷ When smallpox appeared in his camp, Washington feared a calamity and hastily informed Hancock that he planned to inoculate all his troops. He also asked Dr. William Shippen to inoculate recruits passing through Philadelphia en route to his army, an enlightened action that helped stave off an epidemic.

Washington’s tenure as commander in chief featured relatively few battles, often fought after extended intervals of relative calm, underscoring the importance of winning the allegiance of a population that vacillated between fealty to the Crown and patriotic indignation. The fair treatment of civilians formed an essential part of the war effort. Washington had a sure grasp of the principles of this republican revolution, asserting that “the spirit and willingness of the people must in a great measure take [the] place of coercion.”⁸ No British general could compete with him in this contest for popular opinion. With one eye fixed on the civilian populace, Washington showed punctilious respect for private property and was especially perturbed when American troops sacked houses under the pretext that the owners were Tories. His overriding goal was to contrast his own humane behavior with the predatory ways of the enemy.