Washington [269]
Anthony Wayne had no qualms about his action and wrote proudly to Washington that “a liberal dose of niter [gunpowder] had done the trick.”8 Washington, who could be extremely tough when necessary, didn’t second-guess Wayne’s reprisals. Months later he told Wayne, “Sudden and exemplary punishments were certainly necessary upon the new appearance of that daring and mutinous spirit which convulsed the line last winter.”9 Washington had long believed that mutinies, if not stamped out vigorously, would only multiply.
No sooner was the Pennsylvania mutiny suppressed than the contagion spread to the New Jersey Line in Pompton. As two hundred mutinous troops, giddy with liquor, headed for the state capital at Trenton, Washington decided he had had enough. He refused to negotiate with the rebels, demanded unconditional submission, and vowed to execute several of the leaders. To quell the uprising, he ordered five hundred or six hundred troops under Major General Robert Howe to march from West Point toward New Jersey. He also tried to impress upon the loyal troops “how dangerous to civil liberty the precedent is of armed soldiers dictating terms to their country.”10 Sending troops was a high-stakes gamble, since Washington didn’t know whether they would fire upon rowdy fellow soldiers, “but I thought it indispensable to bring the matter to an issue and risk all extremities,” he told Congress.11 On January 27 General Howe surrounded the mutineers, snuffed out the revolt, and made an example of several instigators. He lined up a firing squad composed of a dozen mutineers and ordered them to execute two mutinous sergeants. Three of the executioners were told to shoot at the head and three at the heart, while the other six stood ready to finish off victims that lay squirming on the ground. Once again Washington feared he would squander his authority if men disobeyed him, and he kept his distance from the scene at Ringwood, New Jersey. Once he heard that the New Jersey men had surrendered and repented, he took up their crusade to lobby politicians for better pay, food, and housing.
A critical element of the relief effort lay in soliciting fresh money from France. In December Congress drafted John Laurens as a special envoy to France, where it hoped he would team up with Benjamin Franklin to wrest a huge loan from the court at Versailles. Laurens, with Thomas Paine acting as his secretary, was to fire up French enthusiasm through compelling eyewitness accounts of the war. Because of Washington’s renown in France, Congress also hoped that a certified member of his military family would receive an effusive welcome. For three days Washington huddled with Laurens and Paine to forge a strategy. “We are at the end of our tether,” Washington told them, “and now or never our deliverance must come.”12 He deemed a foreign loan essential, since America had only a tiny moneyed elite and Congress had mismanaged its finances. If he had to keep confiscating produce from farmers, Washington feared that supporters would find the Continental Army’s methods “burdensome and oppressive,” defeating the idea of a fight for liberty.13
Even as Washington jockeyed to keep his northern army from unraveling, the prospects for victory brightened in the South. On January 17 Brigadier General Daniel Morgan pulled off a spectacular victory at Cowpens, South Carolina, routing a veteran army under the notorious Tarleton. For once, it was the Americans who spread terror by sprinting forward