Washington [165]
At this point Paterson launched into a prepared speech about how the goodness and benevolence of the king had induced him to send the Howe brothers to reach an accommodation with the unhappy colonists, this meeting being the first step. Washington denied that he was vested with powers to negotiate a settlement. Then he showed what a deft diplomat he could be. According to Joseph Reed’s memo, he argued that the Howe brothers had only the power “to grant pardons; that those who had committed no fault wanted no pardon; that we were only defending what we deemed our indisputable rights.”44 Paterson acknowledged that this opened a wide field for discussion. Washington remained polite, treating him with impeccable courtesy and even inviting him “to partake of a small collation” before he returned to his ship.45 He was always careful to separate the personal from the political, the man from the mission. If the British had hoped to mollify Washington, their diplomatic overture failed. The same day that he received Colonel Paterson, Washington wrote to Colonel Adam Stephen and decried “the vile machinations of still viler ministerial agents.”46 Two days later he dismissed the peace efforts of the Howe brothers as a mere propaganda exercise calculated expressly “to deceive and unguard, not only the good people of our own country, but those of the English nation that were averse to the proceedings of the king and ministry.”47 Once Washington had set his sights on independence, his vision was unblinking, and his consistency proved one of his most compelling qualities.
BY LATE JULY Washington’s men were laboring in a parched city under a blazing sky. “From breakfast to dinner I am boiling in a sun hot enough to roast an egg,” Knox groused to his wife. “Indeed, my dear Lucy, I never suffered so much from fatigue in my life.”48 It was precisely the atmosphere in which disease festered, and dysentery, typhoid fever, malaria, and smallpox infected the troops, disabling up to a third of them. “The vile water here sickens us all,” wrote Philip Fithian, a Presbyterian chaplain attached to the New Jersey militia. “I am very sick.”49 Illness was so prevalent that some regiments couldn’t field a single healthy officer. The men often relieved themselves in open ditches, until Nathanael Greene warned that “the stench arising from such places will soon breed a pestilence in the camp.”50 Responding to Greene’s request, Washington allowed the regiments to switch more of their diet from meat to fresh vegetables to combat scurvy. The troops also lacked uniforms, and Washington advised them to wear hunting shirts so the British would think they faced an army of skilled backwoods marksmen. To remedy the weapons shortage, Greene handed out three hundred spears. All in all, the Continental Army was a bizarre, mongrel corps that flouted the rules of conventional warfare. It was a far more peculiar army than the British troops had ever faced, leading Ambrose Serle to belittle them: “Their army is the strangest that was ever collected: old men of