Washington [133]
On July 4 the Congress formally incorporated the state militias into the Continental Army, enabling Washington to issue general orders that would sound the signature themes of his tenure. This George Washington differed from the callow, sometimes grasping young colonel who had governed the Virginia Regiment and was narrowly absorbed in his career. From the outset, his official voice pulsated with high ideals. He tried to dissolve state differences into a new national identity, telling his men that the troops being raised from various colonies were “now the troops of the United Provinces of North America and it is hoped that all distinctions of colonies will be laid aside.”3
Always buffed and polished, with an elegant sword strapped to his side and silver spurs on his boots, Washington roamed all over the camp. “His Excellency was on horseback, in company with several other military gentlemen,” Dr. James Thacher wrote. “It was not difficult to distinguish him from the others; his personal appearance is truly noble and majestic.”4 A local diarist, Ezekiel Price, picked up reports on July 5 that “General Washington had visited the camps, and the soldiers were much pleased with him.”5 As at Mount Vernon, Washington rose at sunup to ride about the camp, lifting sagging spirits with his presence. Suddenly rejuvenated troops were happily digging trenches at four in the morning. “There is great overturning in the camp as to order and regularity,” said an impressed chaplain. “New lords, new laws.”6 A beefy former bookseller from Boston named Henry Knox stood in awe of Washington’s panache: “General Washington fills his place with vast ease and dignity and dispenses happiness around him.”7 An enthusiastic friend reported to John Adams that Washington “has in a manner inspired officers and soldiers with a taste for discipline and they go into it readily, as they all venerate and love the general.”8 His Excellency also left the ladies agog. “You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of George Washington,” Abigail Adams chided her husband, “but I thought the half was not told me. Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and soldier, look agreeably blended in him.”9
For all the favorable assessments, Washington, as a newcomer from Virginia, confronted pervasive Yankee suspicions, and he, in turn, was inwardly revolted by the alien world he surveyed daily in Cambridge. With little tolerance for error and scant patience for disorder, he was surrounded by an unruly, vociferous mass of men who didn’t take well to orders. At this point, he never dreamed that these shabby men would someday show prodigious courage or that he would grow to love them. Soon he squawked to his brother Sam that he had “found a numerous army of provincials under very little command, discipline, or order.”10 Two months later, a shrill note entering his letter, he protested to John Hancock that “licentious-ness and every kind of disorder triumphantly reign.”11 Two people seemed to coexist inside George Washington’s breast. One was the political militant who mouthed republican slogans; this Washington thought his troops would fight better if motivated by patriotic ideals. The other, schooled in the British military system, believed devoutly in top-down discipline and rank as necessary to a well-run army. This Washington was also the Virginia planter who felt little in common with the scruffy plebeians around him.
Washington expressed dismay that many New England militias elected their own officers, choosing farmers, artisans, or storekeepers. It bothered him that egalitarian officers fraternized with their men, joined them in line for food, and even gave them shaves. In disbelief, he wrote to one Virginian that the Massachusetts officers “are nearly of the same kidney with the privates.”12 To Patrick Henry, Washington worried