Washington [238]
Lee was charged with disobeying orders, permitting a disorderly retreat, and disrespecting the commander in chief. A court-martial, presided over by twelve officers, took testimony for six weeks, found Lee guilty, and suspended him from the army for twelve months. The verdict effectively ended his military career. With exemplary restraint, Washington did not comment on the decision until Congress certified it. As Congress procrastinated for four months, word of the verdict leaked out. Intent on fairness, Washington wrote in confidence to his brother Jack, “This delay is a manifest injustice either to the Gener[a]l himself or the public; for if he is guilty of the charges, punishment ought to follow; if he is innocent, ’tis cruel to keep him under the harrow.”47 Charles Lee proclaimed to anyone who would listen that he had been subjected to an “inquisition” worthy of Mazarin or Cardinal Richelieu.48 The inept Lee may not have been guilty of all the charges directed against him, but neither had he covered himself with glory at Monmouth.
Washington had not heard the last from Charles Lee. In early December Lee published a vindication of his conduct, contending that Washington had failed to give him definite orders at Monmouth Court House. If Washington chafed at the accusation, it wasn’t his style to engage in public feuding. At the same time he worried that, if he didn’t refute Lee’s charges, it might seem “a tacit acknowledgment of the justice of his assertions,” as Washington told Joseph Reed. He confessed that he had always found Lee’s temperament “too versatile and violent to attract my admiration. And that I have escaped the venom of his tongue and pen so long is more to be wondered at than applauded.”49
Even though Congress confirmed the court-martial verdict and suspended Lee in December 1778, Washington still worried that Lee’s charges had sullied his honor. In late December John Laurens, with Alexander Hamilton acting as his second, challenged Lee to a duel. “I am informed that in contempt of decency and truth you have publicly abused General Washington in the grossest terms,” Laurens informed Lee. “The relation in which I stand to him forbids me to pass such conduct unnoticed.”50 At the duel Laurens wounded Lee in the side, but the latter survived. Whether the duel had Washington’s tacit approval remains unclear. Unlike many military men, Washington opposed dueling and had advised Lafayette against fighting a duel that year, chiding him gently that “the generous spirit of chivalry, exploded by the rest of the world, finds a refuge, my dear friend, in the sensibility of your nation only.”51 On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that Laurens and Hamilton would have defied the explicit wishes of Washington, who had felt gagged in responding to Lee’s libelous comments.
From the retirement of his farm in Virginia, Charles Lee, as irascible as ever, continued to wage a campaign of vituperation against Washington. In 1780 he sent to Congress a letter whose tone was so obnoxious that he was cashiered for good from the armed forces. Before his death in 1782, Lee requested that he be buried somewhere other than a churchyard, stating that “since I have resided in this country, I have kept so much bad company while living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead.”52
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Pests of Society
EVEN AS THE CONTINENTAL ARMY FOUGHT in the gritty heat of Monmouth Court House, then filed wearily toward the Hudson River, blessed relief seemed to arrive when a French fleet dropped anchor off Delaware Bay on July 8, 1778. This majestic armada