Washington [136]
Washington was thrust into a terrible dilemma: he couldn’t defend his own performance without citing the deficiencies of men, munitions, and supplies, but that would alert the enemy to his weaknesses. He had to swallow his doubts and appear the picture of confidence, making him more tight-lipped in his public pronouncements, if more vehement in private. An accomplished actor, he learned to exploit liberally the “gift of silence” that John Adams cited as one of his cardinal strengths. For the rest of his life, Washington remained the prisoner of roles that forced him into secrecy and evasion, accentuating an already reticent personality. His reserve was further reinforced by a view of military leadership that frowned on camaraderie. Abigail Adams made the insightful comment that Washington “has a dignity which forbids familiarity, mixed with an easy affability which creates love and reverence.”27 Washington’s officers admired him, but with the slightest touch of fear. “The dignity of his presence,” wrote Timothy Pickering, “large and manly, increased by steady, firm, and grave countenance and an unusual share of reserve, forbidding all familiarity, excited no little reverence in his presence.”28 Washington’s public role threw up an invisible barrier that prevented true intimacy with all but a select handful of friends and family members.
HAVING HAD FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE with smallpox, Washington was farsighted in his efforts to stem its spread among the troops through inoculation. By the time he arrived in Cambridge, General Ward had established a smallpox hospital in a secluded spot west of town and ordered daily inspections of his men for symptoms. “We shall continue the utmost vigilance against this most dangerous enemy,” Washington vowed to Hancock, and he diligently quarantined soldiers who exhibited the first signs of the disease.29
In the fall of 1775, when smallpox surfaced in British-occupied Boston, Washington grew alarmed that it might be spread to his own men. “The smallpox is in every part of Boston,” he informed Joseph Reed in mid-December. “The soldiers there who have never had it are, we are told, under inoculation . . . If we escape the smallpox in this camp and the country round about, it will be miraculous.”30 When General Howe herded 300 destitute Bostonians, riddled with disease, onto boats and dumped them near American lines, Washington feared that they carried smallpox; he sent them humanitarian provisions while carefully insulating them from his troops. After a second wave of 150 sickly Bostonians was expelled, Washington grew convinced that Howe had stooped to using smallpox as a “weapon of defense” against his army.31 By January 1777 he ordered Dr. William Shippen to inoculate every soldier who had never had the disease. “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure,” he wrote, “for should the disorder infect the army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence, we should have more to dread from it than the sword of the enemy.”32 This enlightened decision was as important as any military measure Washington adopted during the war.
Meanwhile, in early August 1775, Washington grappled with the grave problem of a gunpowder shortage. To protect his troops, he circulated the fiction that he possessed eighteen hundred barrels of powder—an early American case