Washington [144]
Even as Washington sent this request, Schuyler sat down to write a somber message, announcing General Montgomery’s death in a shattering defeat at Quebec. “I wish I had no occasion to send my dear general this melancholy account,” wrote Schuyler.27 Moreover a musket ball had torn a jagged slash below Arnold’s knee, the first of two major leg injuries that scarred him with a permanent limp. The Quebec catastrophe was a severe setback for Washington, whose first strategic plan had misfired. The defeat also confirmed his worst fears that inexperienced troops would lose their nerve and flee in panic. For Washington, the disaster underscored the danger of relying on men with short enlistments; had Montgomery not labored under that restriction, he believed, he might have continued a blockade of Quebec and averted disaster. Arnold’s bravery, meanwhile, fostered an image, later hard to eradicate, of an officer who was dedicated root and branch to the cause and who acted courageously on his own initiative.
IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE REVOLUTION, George Washington endured a Sisyphean nightmare of whipping raw recruits into shape, only to see them melt away when their one-year enlistments expired. Officers were reduced to drill sergeants training soldiers in rudimentary warfare, then lost them once they learned to fight. For Washington, the failure to create a permanent army early in the war was the original sin from which the patriots almost never recovered. Of the pernicious effect of short-term enlistments, he later wrote, “It may easily be shown that all the misfortunes we have met with in the military line are to be attributed to this cause.”28 Washington faced the grim prospect that on January 1, 1776, the bulk of his army would simply vanish.
Forced to deal with human nature as it was, Washington didn’t rely on revolutionary fervor alone to win the war: he knew he had to cater to economic self-interest as well. This aim was complicated by the fact that some states offered higher bounties for enlistment in their militias. The soldiers exploited this system by dropping out of one unit, then popping up in another to collect a new bounty, a ruse so pervasive that Washington said disputes about it could have engrossed all his time.29 Instead of raising bounties to attract new recruits, Washington would have preferred a draft, but it ran afoul of republican resistance to anything resembling a standing army.
By late November, as snow blanketed the American camp, Washington’s spirits drooped along with the temperature. He felt himself sinking in a quicksand from which he might never escape. “No man, I believe, ever had a greater choice of difficulties and less means to extricate himself from them,” he confided to his brother Jack.30 By the end of November, a paltry 3,500 men had agreed to stay with the dwindling army. In a confidential letter to Joseph Reed, Washington succumbed to black despair, railing against the mercenary spirit of the New Englanders as they haggled for more money, better clothes, and more furloughs before reenlisting. The vehemence of his anguish belies the image of a cool, unemotional Washington. “Could I have foreseen what I have and am like to experience,” he told Reed, “no consideration upon earth should have induced me to accept this command,” he said with a touch of melodrama.31
As he mulled over various schemes to strengthen his frail army, Washington wrestled with the vexed question of whether to accept blacks into the Continental Army, not as an instrument of social policy but as a matter of stark military necessity. Many people were struck, not always favorably, by the prevalence of black