Washington [151]
Not until mid-December did Wheatley’s poem come to Washington’s attention, and he didn’t find time to reply until late February. His cordial, respectful letter is little short of astonishing for a large Virginia slave owner replying to a young woman in bondage. This was the same Washington who had recently reviled Lord Dunmore as diabolical for promising freedom to defecting slaves. Washington started his note by saying that he should have replied sooner. “But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay and plead my excuse for the seeming, but not real, neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the elegant lines you enclosed. And however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical talents.”78 He concluded with an invitation: “If you should ever come to Cambridge or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favour[e]d by the Muses and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am with great respect your obed[ien]t humble servant.”79 This is the sort of exquisite letter that, once upon a time, Washington might have reserved for the eyes of a duchess. Few incidents in the early days of the war suggest how powerfully Revolutionary ideals were transforming George Washington as his reaction to Phillis Wheatley.
Washington considered publishing the poem, but feared it might be misinterpreted as a mark of vanity. Also the poem, with its imagery of crowns and thrones, had some uncomfortable overtones. Nevertheless Washington appears to have received Phillis Wheatley at his Cambridge headquarters in March with a “very courteous reception,” and through Joseph Reed, the poem found its way into print in April.80 It didn’t seem to bother Washington that Wheatley was a slave, and it evidently didn’t bother Wheatley that Washington was a substantial slave owner. Certainly there were Mount Vernon slaves whom Washington knew intimately and some to whom he spoke in a friendly manner, such as Billy Lee, but he had never met any black person on such terms of social equality. That Washington appreciated Wheatley’s poetry and received her warmly showed his great potential for growth. Once again he had displayed a striking capacity to adapt to new circumstances, even though he still had an immense distance to travel on the slavery issue.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Heights
THE REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGY that Washington absorbed from his avid reading of Revolutionary pamphlets never fit easily with his patrician reflexes as a Virginia planter. Perhaps few actions he took during the war exhibited his inconsistent nature in such bold relief as his creation of a personal guard during the dispiriting Cambridge winter. In part, the decision arose from legitimate concerns for his safety. “To guard against assassination, which I neither expect nor dread, is impossible,” Washington later wrote, but he knew that kidnapping attempts were always a possibility, especially since he himself would hatch a couple of failed schemes to kidnap British generals.1
His order to forge a personal guard or Life Guard, as it was commonly called, also sprang from a desire to be surrounded by a crack team of disciplined professionals who would accompany him whenever he rode out to review the troops. Protective of his historical reputation, Washington committed the care of his personal papers to this guard. Having such an elite corps at the beck and call of the chief general was a throwback to the glittering world of European armies.
In general orders for March 11, 1776, Washington instructed the commanding officer of each regiment to pluck out four men apiece for his guard. His description of