The Ides of War
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The Ides of War

George Washington and the Newburgh Crisis

Stephen Howard Browne, Thomas W. Benson

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The Ides of War

George Washington and the Newburgh Crisis

Stephen Howard Browne, Thomas W. Benson

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A history and analysis of how George Washington stopped an attempted military coup at the end of the American Revolutionary War. History tells us that on a day when the forces of civil government confront the forces of military might, no one knows what may follow. Americans believe that they have avoided this moment, that whatever other challenges the country has faced, at least it never has had to deal with the prospects of a coup d'état. Stephen Howard Browne maintains that this view is mistaken, that in fact the United States faced such a crisis, at the very moment when the country announced its arrival on the world scene in the spring of 1783 in a rustic meeting hall along the Hudson River near Newburgh, New York. The crisis was resolved by George Washington, commander in chief of the US Army, in an address he delivered to a roomful of restive and deeply disaffected officers. In The Ides of War, Browne examines the resolution of the first confrontation between the forces of American civil government and the American military—the Newburgh Crisis. He tells the story of what transpired on that day, examines what was said, and suggests what we might learn from the affair. Browne shows that George Washington's Newburgh Address is a stunning example of the power of human agency to broker one of our most persistent, most troublesome dilemmas: the rival claims to power of civil and military authorities. At stake in this story are biding questions about the meaning and legacy of revolution, the nature of republican government, and ultimately what kind of people we are and profess to be. Browne holds that although these are monolithic and vexed themes, they are vital and need to be confronted to obtain a coherent and convincing account of history. The Newburgh Crisis offers an unmatched opportunity to examine these themes, as well as the role of rhetoric in the founding of the world's first modern republic. "Few speeches have shaped the course of American history more than George Washington's address to his potentially mutinous officers in Newburgh, New York, on March 15, 1783. In this splendid book, Browne deftly brings to life the Newburgh conspiracy, Washington's masterful response to it, and the lasting implications of both for civil-military relations in a republican government." —Stephen Lucas, Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin "This elegant and persuasive book expands our knowledge of a little known but hugely significant turning point in American history, one that set it on course toward liberty and democracy. In the process, Browne brings new understanding to the founding of the United States, its military system, and its first commander in chief." —Richard H. Kohn, professor emeritus of history and peace, war, and defense, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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CHAPTER 1

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Washington’s Character and the Craft of Military Leadership

The Washington iconology is peculiar in any number of ways, but surely its tendency to immobilize the General is strange above all. The deliberate pose, the marbled aspect, the featureless monumentation: one looks in vain to Stuart, Houdon, or the Ladies of Mount Vernon for anything remotely suggestive of the man Washington was in life, in fact. He was in truth a gifted athlete, confident and graceful on the dance floor, a superb horseman, as a warrior indefatigable and intrepid. Why this figure should so often be rendered in stasis is explicable in part by the aesthetic conventions of the day—but only in part. Trumbull’s Death of General Warren gives moving evidence that the age was fully capable of appreciating more dynamic modes of representation. The rest is mystery, for Washington was nothing if not a man of action. Even when still he was moving: no one could possibly write that many letters and missives, directions and complaints, without a nearly obsessive need to be always doing, always thinking, always seeking ways of pressing his will on the world.1
If we are to make any headway toward understanding Washington’s role in the Newburgh crisis, this fixation on the stilled figured must be resisted, and aggressively. The challenge is formidable, the more so because we must contend against not only such leaden material renderings but generation after generation of verbal testimony to the great man’s Olympian virtues. Hagiography has its place, and we can learn from it if we know where and how to look, but in this case it burdens our exploration from the outset. Like the statuary, paintings, and monumentation it mimics, such a legacy has the effect of fixing those virtues on a kind of timeless and immutable plane, where the vagaries of circumstance must give way to a product now outside history and thus, somehow, available to all and everywhere. “Death has put the seal to his fame,” as a British writer put it in words grown, even by 1800, so familiar, “and his character and conduct will now be admitted to have been deserving of every tribute of praise which have been bestowed upon them. His coolness in danger, his firmness in distress, his moderation in the hour of victory, his resignation of power, and his meritorious deportment in private life, have established a name which will go down to posterity with those who have deserved well of their country with those who are entitled to be considered the benefactors of mankind.”2
American audiences were treated on Washington’s death to an unprecedented outpouring, more magniloquent and unrestrained than any before or since. We need not survey this body of panegyric in any detail to get a general sense of its tenor, but a brief sampling will help remind us that Parson Weems was scarcely alone in the work of deification. “His integrity was unblemished,” intoned Oliver Everett to his Dorchester audience, “his humanity ever conspicuous and his benevolence unbounded. Neither in action, nor in suffering, did his courage, or his prudence ever fail.” In Albany mourners recalled a man whose “Ambition was infinitely beneath the towering sublimity of his mind” and whose “pure heart was fixed on heaven.” Bostonians were reminded by George Minot that “the whole desire of his heart, the whole pursuit of his labours, has been the good of his fellow-men.” From Newburyport came reflections on the “robust vigour of his virtue,” which, “like the undazzled eye of the eagle, was inaccessible to human weakness; and the unaspiring temperament of his passions, like the regenerating ashes of the phoenix, gave new life to the greatness it could not extinguish.” And from his native land these words from General Lee: “Possessing a clear and penetrating mind, a strong and sound judgment, calmness and temper for deliberation, with invincible firmness and perseverance in resolutions maturely formed, drawing information from all; acting from himself, with incorruptible integrity and unvarying patriotism: his own superiority and the public confidence alike marked him as the man designed by heaven.”3
Heartfelt, certainly, but the sentiments and sentimentality mount to the point where it is difficult to retrieve a sense of Washington as a living, struggling, succeeding, failing, and ultimately triumphant human being. We cannot unseal death, as the English memorialist had it, but we need not embalm Washington’s life in the attempt. The important thing is to seek after not so much the product but the process, to rediscover, that is, Washington-in-action. The Newburgh crisis was a moment in time and place, beset by contingency, danger, and the drama of power. To grasp Washington as a man of action is to grasp how he mobilized the resources of self, how he gave voice to shared aspiration, and how he gave to that drama its full shape and meaning.
How best to proceed? At least two options suggest themselves, and, while opposed in obvious ways, they both deserve our serious consideration. The first recommends that we attend to Washington, if we wish to see him in action, as operating, as it were, from the beginning. From this perspective, we view the iconic figure asserting himself in those historical moments born of portent, at the outset, when all is new or seemingly so. This is the Washington of firsts—first in war, first in peace, in Lee’s memorable phrase, and first . . . we know the rest of the line because Washington has been installed first in the hearts of his countrymen and women ever since he emerged upon the world scene. It will be worth pausing, therefore, to reflect for a moment on what this angle of sight affords us and what it does not.4
There is, of course, every good reason to dwell on the image of Washington thus situated. No public figure in American history, it is safe to say, has ever bettered his talent for showing up at just the right time and place. The man knew how to make an entrance: at the start of hostilities in 1754 that would help launch an interminable war for great-power hegemony between England and France; at the beginning of continental gatherings to formalize colonial resistance. Washington was the first of America’s commanders in chief, its first president, the first to deliver an inaugural address, the first and only president to lead a military expedition in office, the first former president to pass from this world. These firsts are the more notable because they were made conspicuous, either because history conspired to make them so or because Washington himself made certain that his arrival onto the scenes of public life was duly recognized. That might mean writing up an account of his early adventures into the Allegheny Valley, or donning his blue and buff uniform at the second Continental Congress, or riding into New York City showered with flower petals. But, whatever its form, his beginnings were designed for optimal symbolic resonance.5
That Washington could be at once complicit in this stagecraft and largely untouched by its more destructive effects was not a given. As an otherwise appreciative British officer observed in 1780, His Excellency may have been actuated by principles early on, but “Few men have fortitude enough to withstand the dazzling glare of power, the love of which too often intoxicates the human heart, and where it takes possession, seldom fails to stifle the good affections which rise to resist it.” In time, something like this very tendency would animate the partisan battles of the republic’s first decade. But until then, most agreed that Washington entered on stage so dramatically because that was precisely where he belonged; when history thus beckoned, who could begrudge the actor his art?

BEGINNINGS

“We have it in our power,” Thomas Paine famously wrote in Common Sense, “to begin the world over again.” The sentiment is at once outrageous and thrilling; it is an arrogant and probably delusional claim on the power of human agency and a bracing insistence that human beings are not—must not be—forever fated to their past. The phrasing is classically of the Enlightenment, but the spirit it breathes is as old as human aspiration itself. To begin anew was the promise of the Christ child and of every revolutionary since; while debate remains over whether all American colonists believed themselves to be making the world over again, there can be no doubt that many certainly did. To the extent that we continue to accord to that momentous event the status of a founding, we are thus reminded of the enduring appeal of Paine’s own declaration of independence. And since Washington is in some sense understood as the “Founding Father,” we have warrant for further reflection on the matter of beginnings. Here, perhaps, we will find a means of ingress into his character and, presumably, the circumstances at Newburgh to which it gave expression.6
What is the nature of an act that is said to be an act that begins something? We can presume at the outset that because it is an act, it is by definition an expression of one’s humanness. This is what Hannah Arendt meant to describe when she wrote of natality as ingredient to the human condition. A given action—in this case, the act of beginning—is thus at once sui generis and generalizable to our shared humanity. And precisely because to begin something is a human act, it can be said to entail certain moral implications. Acts in general and acts of beginning in particular by their nature are conducted under conditions of risk; a world marked by contingency and change ensures this fact. Such conditions invariably undermine blithe assumptions of stability or permanence. When we seek to begin something, then, we look for ways to give to our acts some chance of survival in an otherwise inhospitable environment. These provisions for the relative safety of our acts represent their ethical component, and here we inch back more closely to the matter of Washington’s character and our access to it. When we seek to effect a beginning, we wish to provide it with some degree of security. We can do this by assuming certain obligations; these frequently take the form of commitments to oneself (I am acting in a manner consistent with my most fundamental and genuine beliefs), to others (I am acting in a manner consistent with your best interests), and to the cause on behalf of which the act is undertaken (I am acting in a manner consistent with my understanding of the principles at stake). Taken together, these commitments add up to a promise of sorts, as if to say: I promise that in exercising my power to begin, I do so mindful of the moral obligations thereby imposed upon me, and I do so not for arbitrary or self-regarding reasons but because the beginning I envision is compatible with our collective welfare.7
Such reflections may be excused, perhaps, if they prompt us to think more subtly about beginnings, their complexity as rhetorical acts, and the ethical contexts within which they might be best understood. I have suggested that this emphasis on beginnings offers us one route in our search for Washington’s character and so a means to better grasp the role it played in resolving the crisis of 1783. The operative assumption here is that Washington’s stagecraft was not only stagecraft, not merely self-aggrandizement and a flair for the dramatic. Probably some of these qualities were in play: the powerful can be as fully predictable as others. But the deeper principle holds that you can tell a great deal about a person in the act of beginning; such acts are disclosive: they reveal one’s character and make of it an object of public judgment. They provide the conditions, ultimately, in which a person’s ethical assumptions and responsibilities are made manifest. In short, if we really want to see Washington in action, to see how character works to get things done, then we need to see him in his beginnings.8
The merits of such an approach are not hard to find. Washington was in fact there at the beginning—so many beginnings—and he was keenly attuned to the symbolic potential beginnings represented. And when he acted to set events into motion, he could not help but disclose a great deal about himself, foremost his commitment to the integrity of the action envisioned and his sense of obligation to those who would be affected by it. Still, we have several reasons to be cautious about this approach and, without dismissing it, to ask after its limitations. First, to fix upon the moment of beginning remains a kind of seizure, and we are looking for ways out of that mode of analysis. Second, a preoccupation with beginnings can tempt us into ascribing powers of agency beyond the reach of mortal man—even and especially Washington’s. It is telling, in this regard, to note how often the young Virginian is credited with—or blamed for—unleashing the furies of global war through his clumsy handling of the Jumonville affair in 1754. Thus Horace Walpole: “The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world afire.” This is nonsense, of course—Washington no more started the Seven Years War than Gavrilo Princip started the Great War—but the point here is to mind the boundary where emphasis on individual action shades into the vexed territory of causation and influence. Nevertheless: a strong sense of beginnings gives us a means to see Washington in action, and it helps us identify moral commitments basic to his character. This much we will hold onto for the analysis ahead.9

ENDINGS

Andrew Jackson was not, in the ordinary sense of things, a man given to reflection. But he could be astute, and, standing on thresholds of his own in 1825, he offered up a telling comment on the only general more famous than he. “Both the surrender of his sword to Congress at the termination of the Revolutionary War, and his relinquishment of the Presidency,” Jackson wrote of Washington, “are imperishable monuments of self-conquest, from which future generations will learn how vain is the fame of the Warrior or the renown of the Statesman, when built upon the ruins and subjection of a country.” An imperishable monument of self-conquest: this Jackson never was nor would ever be, but the insight is both his own and basic to the received wisdom on Washington’s legacy. It bespeaks a keen appreciation for that rarest of human traits: the capacity to cede power when one is most in possession of it. We are thus reminded that while beginnings may be one way to read Washington’s character, surely endings offer another, for if the man knew better than most how to enter the room, none excelled him in leaving it.10
The proposition is promising: how a person manages the various endings and exits of life, reaches closure, as we might put it today, can say a great deal about that person. Certainly Washington’s contemporaries thought so, friends and even rivals who seemed to have an especially well-developed taste for the art of leave-taking. Not surprisingly, the General’s talent along these lines encouraged a robust cottage industry devoted to the cultivation of his image as an American Cincinnatus, the warrior returning to his plow, the statesman to his vine and fig tree. This is fair. One cannot help but be struck by how much symbolic charge Washington was able to coax from those moments when he stepped off the stage: of Mount Vernon, of Congress, of the battlefield, of the presidency, of life itself. The final Circular to the States at war’s end, the yielding of his commission, the Farewell Address: it is hardly coincidental that among the most memorable of Washington’s productions are precisely those designed not just to announce his departure but to do so with maximum rhetorical efffect.11
And it worked. George III is reputed to have declared that, should Washington indeed repair to his crops after final victory in battle, “he will be the greatest man alive.” Modern historians, less given to saying such things, are nevertheless increasingly impressed by how assiduously Washington shaped to strategic ends his own endings. Garry Wills, among others, has observed that Washington proved to be “a virtuoso of resignations,” who in time “perfected the art of power by giving it away.” Similarly, Joseph Ellis claims—a bit extravagantly—that “Washington’s extraordinary reputation rested less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits.” We do not typically think of Washington, the object of so much artistic labor, as himself an artist. In fact he was exquisitely attuned to the aesthetics of the exit, and we may learn much by asking after its assumptions, structure, and implications.12
We have established that a focus on beginnings offers us a means of access to Washington’s character. Its essence we discovered to lie in the form of a promise, which may be taken to represent the moral content of the act. Turning now to its counterpart—endings—we are in a position to observe at the outset several interesting ways in which beginnings and endings are attuned to each other. We note, for example, that endings and beginnings hold a number of elements in common; though opposed in obvious ways, both nonetheless lend themselves to ritual, thus to display and its attendant stagecraft. Endings and beginnings together mark the space of the liminal, notably between the private and the public. Both presume a degree of historical consciousness and entail strategic interventions into the course of events. And both, we find, function as media of disclosure, wherein may be discerned the workings of character and its moral exercise.
But endings are of course categorically different from beginnings, and here we may pause and determine what is gained by fixing on the subject. Some advantage may be gained by stressing early the point that endings are not to be understood in the negative—as portending absence only—but are to be seen as performing tasks to which they are distinctively suited. Endings in this sense are not given but made; they are constructed and thus made to bear the imprint of their creator.
Washington took his leave on several and on very different occasions. But, like all such managed exits, his were bound by a set of assumptions basic to the art; from these assumptions we can chart our course to a better grasp of the character at work in Newburgh. To publicly mark the end of a series...

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