Washington: A Life

Washington devoted far more time to the onerous task of drafting letters than to leading men into battle. Ru

Washington had trained himself to write pithy, meaty letters, with little frivolity or small talk. The letters were always clear, sometimes elegant, often forceful. Even Jefferson, a fluent wordsmith, praised Washington’s correspondence, saying that “he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and correct style.”28 Because aides drafted most of Washington’s superlative wartime letters, some historians have denied him credit. But Washington oversaw their work, first giving them the gist of messages, then editing drafts until they met his exacting standards. His aides became fine mimics of their boss, and their letters echo one another’s because they were well schooled in Washington’s style. He wanted letters so immaculate that he had them rewritten several times if they contained even small erasures.

Washington worked in close proximity with aides, who typically slept under the same roof. These scribes labored in a single room, bent over small wooden tables, while the commander kept a small office to the side. As at Mount Vernon, Washington adhered to an unvarying daily routine. Arriving fully dressed, he breakfasted with his aides and parceled out letters to be answered, along with his preferred responses. He then reviewed his troops on horseback and expected to find the letters in finished form by the time of his noonday return.

The best camaraderie that Washington enjoyed came in the convivial company of his young aides during midafternoon di

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In early 1777 a large turnover occurred in Washington’s military family as his first batch of aides gave way to a flock of new faces. Nathanael Greene briefly replaced Joseph Reed, who had resigned and was somewhat estranged from Washington. After the Fort Washington disaster, Greene was thrilled to be rehabilitated, even if it meant being temporarily demoted to clerical work. “I am exceedingly happy in the full confidence of His Excellency General Washington, and I found [that confidence] to increase every hour, the more [difficult] and distressing our affairs grew,” Greene told his wife.31 Washington demanded self-sacrifice from aides, who had to follow his schedule uncomplainingly. If he slept in the open air before a battle, so did they. “When I joined His Excellency’s suite,” wrote James McHenry, “I gave up soft beds, undisturbed repose, and the habits of ease and indulgence . . . for a single blanket, the hard floor or the softer sod of the fields, early rising, and almost perpetual duty.”32

Washington’s choices for his military family were permeated by an aristocratic ethos that could be hard to square with the republican spirit. He perpetuated the patrician ethos first encountered on General Braddock’s staff; indeed, his use of the term “family” was borrowed from British practice. Of twenty-two aides-de-camp and military secretaries that he appointed during the first two years of the conflict, more than half came from Virginia and Maryland, many of them smart young men from his own social class. Robert Hanson Harrison of Virginia and Tench Tilghman of Maryland fit the bill perfectly, while Caleb Gibbs took the role of the token New Englander.

Washington was adept at identifying young talent. He wanted eager young men who worked well together, pitched in with alacrity, and showed esprit de corps. His own personality forbade backslapping familiarity or easy joviality. Beneath his reserve, however, he had an excellent capacity for reading people and adapting his personality to them. As before the war, he remained wary in relationships and lowered his emotional barriers only slowly, but he was trusting once colleagues earned his confidence. Washington’s young aides satisfied a need for affection that men his own age, with whom he felt far more competitive, could scarcely have done.

Debilitated by never-ending bags of mail, Washington said he needed someone who could “comprehend at one view the diversity of matter which comes before me.”33 On March 1, 1777, that person appeared in the shape of Alexander Hamilton, the twenty-two-year-old boy wonder and artillery captain whose pyrotechnics at White Plains and the Raritan River had so impressed Washington. In the short, slim, and ingenious Hamilton, Washington encountered an ambition that could well have reminded him of his younger self.

Unlike the often affluent aides in Washington’s family, Hamilton was an illegitimate young man who had been born on Nevis and spent his adolescence on St. Croix. Five years earlier he had been an impoverished clerk in a Caribbean trading house. Thanks to a subscription taken up by wealthy local merchants who spotted his potential, he was sent to school in North America. Starting in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and then at King’s College in New York, he displayed the same knack as the young Washington for capturing the confidence of influential older men. Possessed of an aristocratic savoir faire that belied his background, Hamilton turned himself, with uncommon speed, from an outcast of the islands into a Revolutionary insider. His perfectionist nature rivaled Washington’s own. He toted about a sack of books, including Plutarch’s Lives, to improve himself and made extensive notations in the empty pages of a pay book. Still, noticeable differences between the two men introduced tensions. Hamilton was more cerebral than Washington and less tolerant of human foibles, racing through life at a frenetic pace. Where Washington could usually subdue his strong emotions, Hamilton was often impetuous, with highly fallible judgment. For all his charm, he was much too proud and headstrong to be a surrogate son to George Washington or anyone else.