• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 26226 0

aloud about “the soldier and officer being too nearly on a level. Discipline and subordination add life and vigor to military movements.”13 In part, Washington had an old-fashioned faith in military hierarchy as likely to produce the most efficient army. He often evinced a partiality for wellborn officers, as if he wanted to transfer the hierarchy of civilian life intact into the army. As he once observed about choosing officers, “The first rule . . . is to determine whether the candidate is truly a gentleman, whether he has a genuine sense of honor and a reputation to risk.”14 At one point, while arguing for better pay for officers, Washington warned John Hancock that only such a move would “induce gentlemen and men of character to engage and till the bulk of your officers are composed of such persons . . . you have little to expect of them.”15 However much Washington theoretically preferred having his social peers as fellow officers, however, he would compile an outstanding record of advancing officers who lacked such pedigrees.

During his first month in Cambridge, to differentiate the army’s upper echelons, Washington ordered field officers to sport red or pink cockades in their hats, captains yellow or buff, and subordinate officers green. It upset Washington when sentinels stopped generals because they didn’t recognize them. He decreed a light blue sash for himself, a pink one for major and brigadier generals, and a green one for his aides-de-camp. It says much about Washington’s evolution during the war that he emphasized these distinctions much less as the war progressed. “His uniform is exactly like that of his soldiers,” a French officer noted four years later. “Formerly, on solemn occasions, that is to say on days of battle, he wore a large blue sash, but he has given up that unrepublican distinction.”16

Even as he introduced distinctions between officers and their men, he struggled to obliterate differences among the states to forge a national army. When he arrived in Cambridge, there was no army as such, only a mosaic of New England militias, wearing a medley of homemade hats, shoes, and other clothing. A fervent nationalist, Washington wanted to eliminate regiments based on geography at a time when militias were identified with states—a visionary suggestion that was promptly rejected. As he later wrote, “In the early stages of this war, I used every means in my power to destroy all kind of state distinctions and labored to have every part and parcel of the army considered as continental.”17 Because of a shortage of wool, once imported from Great Britain, Washington planned to issue ten thousand linen hunting shirts, such as those used in the French and Indian War, creating a makeshift national uniform. But there wasn’t enough tow cloth, and he had to settle for the motley array of costumes worn by state militias. Washington also argued futilely that the Congress should appoint officers instead of provisional governments. This proposal was vetoed since it clashed with republican ideology, which romanticized militias as superior to standing armies, a dilemma that was to bedevil him throughout the war.

Nobody would have found the camp’s vile sanitary conditions more repellent than did the fastidious Washington. The open latrines emitted a potent stench, and it was a challenge to coax soldiers into using them. One orderly book complained that they left “excrement about the fields perniciously.”18 Having experienced firsthand the epidemics that can decimate armies, Washington urged officers to keep their men clean, tend their latrines, and forbid fishing in freshwater ponds, “as there may be danger of introducing the smallpox into the army.”19 Washington must also have recoiled at the queer collection of improvised tents. Of these outlandish dwellings, the Reverend William Emerson said, “Some are made of boards, some of sail-cloth, and some partly of one and partly of the other. Others are made of stone and turf and others again of birch and other brush . . . others are curiously wrought with doors and windows