Washington: A Life

Nothing expressed Washington’s outrage over the abuse of civilians more powerfully than an October 1778 incident involving his personal guard. John Herring, a member of that guard, was sent to get supplies for Washington’s table and was furnished with a horse and pass. When rebuffed at the home of a Tory named Prince Howland, he spied some costly objects he coveted and dispatched three others from Washington’s guard—John Herrick, Moses Walton, and a fifer named Elias Brown—to procure them. The three men broke into Howland’s house and looted silver spoons, silver dollars, and clothing, then repeated the performance at the home of one John Hoag. In protesting the incident, Howland described the three vandals as having worn the round hats adorned with bearskin strips that distinguished Washington’s guard. Washington endorsed the death sentences handed down by a court-martial to Herring, Brown, and Walton, along with one hundred lashes for Herrick. “His Excellency the Commander in Chief approves these sentences,” read the general orders. “Shocked at the frequent, horrible villainies of this nature committed by the troops of late, he is determined to make examples which will deter the boldest and most harden[e]d offenders.”9 While Walton and Brown escaped before execution, John Herring was duly hung, and John Herrick received his one hundred lashes.

The opinions of New Jersey’s citizens became of paramount importance after the Trenton and Princeton victories removed the aura of protection that had sustained Loyalist families. A militant to his fingertips, Washington cherished no love for Tories, whom he portrayed as diabolical and branded “abominable pests of society.” 10 He now promulgated an order that those who had sworn loyalty to England should swear allegiance to the United States. For those who demurred, Washington granted (in a lovely rhetorical ploy) “full liberty” to defect to the other side.11 He devised an exquisitely civilized policy: Loyalists would be conducted to British lines with their personal possessions but would have the option of leaving behind their wives and children. Such Solomon-like solutions made George Washington the country’s first chief executive a dozen years before he was officially elected to the post.

During the winter of 1776-77 the British sent out foraging parties from New York to raid the New Jersey countryside, and Washington directed the militia to “harass their troops to death” in what became a conflict of “daily skirmishes.”12 This small-scale warfare whittled away British power as the militia gathered horses, cattle, and sheep to feed the American army. Thomas Jones, a Loyalist judge in New York, wrote that not “a stick of wood, a spear of grass or a kernel of corn could the troops in New Jersey procure without fighting for it.”13 Congressmen constantly requested that Washington defend their districts but refused to appropriate money to do so. These amateur experts, he thought, had no idea of the handicaps under which he toiled. “In a word,” he seethed, “when they are at a distance, they think it is but to say, ‘Presto! Begone’ and everything is done.”14 It took tremendous strength to parry requests from politicians whose support he desperately needed.

During the long Morristown winter, Washington made notable advances in organizing a spy network under his personal supervision. This operation had enjoyed a top priority from the moment he arrived in Cambridge in 1775. With his natural reticence and sphinxlike personality, Washington was a natural student of espionage. At first his spy operation was haphazard in nature, cohering into a true system only by 1779. To guarantee secrecy, he never hinted in letters at the identity of spies. Instead he assigned them names or numbers or employed vague locutions, such as “the person you mentioned.”15 He favored having the minimum number of people involved in any spy ring, and the diagram of the network existed in his mind alone. After 1779 he frequently had spies communicate via invisible ink, developed by John James’s brother James, who was a doctor and an amateur chemist. This ink was usually applied to blank pages of books or interlined in family letters. “It is in my power, I believe, to procure a liquid which nothing but a counter liquor (rubbed over the paper afterwards) can make legible” was how he described its workings.16 Secret notes were typically pressed between leather bindings and pasteboard covers of transported books.

To spy on New York—“the fountain of all intelligence,” Washington anointed it—was his principal objective, and he soon had the town covered with informers. He preferred people who could gather intelligence in the course of their everyday affairs, and his mind proved inventive in its choices.17 With some spies Washington even offered personal coaching, telling one to “mix with and put on the airs of a Tory to cover his real character and avoid suspicion.”18 With an insatiable appetite for intelligence, he entreated Presbyterian minister Alexander McWhorter, the chaplain of an artillery brigade, to press convicted spies for information, while offering them theological comfort before they were hung.

Right before the Princeton battle, Washington informed Philadelphia financier Robert Morris that “we have the greatest occasion at present for hard money to pay a certain set of people who are of particular use to us . . . Silver would be most convenient.” 19 Washington considered Morris, a huge man with a ruddy complexion and a genial personality, the financier with the best mercantile knowledge and co

The circumspect Washington showed real artistry as a spymaster. This wasn’t surprising, since he had repeatedly engaged in bluffs to fool the enemy. In April 1777 he alerted Joseph Reed that an u