Washington [296]
Aghast that the perpetrator of such a “horrid deed” was freed, Washington ordered Brigadier General Moses Hazen to choose by lot a British officer to be executed in retaliation for Captain Huddy. Palpably torn by this decision, Washington instructed Hazen that “every possible tenderness that is consistent with the security . . . should be shown to the person whose unfortunate lot it may be to suffer.”9 The person selected at random to die powerfully enlisted his captors’ sympathy. Captain Charles Asgill of the First British Regiment of Foot was only nineteen and of distinguished parentage; his father, a former lord mayor of London, had been a Whig sympathetic to American grievances. Making the decision still more agonizing was that Asgill had been captured at Yorktown, where Washington had guaranteed the safety of prisoners in the articles of capitulation. A conflicted Washington admitted that Captain Asgill was a young man “of humor and sentiment” and that his plight engendered the “keenest anguish.”10
The projected execution blossomed into a cause célèbre as protests flooded in to Washington from abroad. Congress approved the execution, and public opinion overwhelmingly favored it. The brouhaha reawakened memories of the Major André affair and enlisted some of the same partisans. Evidently, some coolness still existed between Hamilton and Washington, for Hamilton protested the execution via Henry Knox rather than directly to Washington. Of the scheduled hanging, Hamilton insisted that “a sacrifice of this kind is entirely repugnant to the genius of the age we live in and is without example in modern history . . . It is a deliberate sacrifice of the innocent for the guilty and must be condemned.”11
Still haunted by André’s execution, Washington didn’t care to execute another sensitive young British officer and protested to one general that “while my duty calls me to make this decisive determination, humanity dictates a fear for the unfortunate offering and inclines me to say that I most devoutly wish his life may be saved . . . but it must be effected by the British commander-in-chief.”12 Interestingly enough, the unsentimental Benjamin Franklin favored a tough, uncompromising stand. “If the English refuse to deliver up or punish this murderer,” he wrote, “it is saying that they choose to preserve him rather than Captain Asgill.”13 Aware that he might be the target of patriotic reprisals, William Franklin fled to London.
In the end Washington handled the matter shrewdly and temporized instead of rushing to judgment. In an unexpected development, Lady Asgill pleaded her son’s case so eloquently at the court of Versailles that the king had his foreign minister request mercy for Captain Asgill. That November Congress obliged France by passing a resolution that granted clemency to the young British captain. It was a neat solution to a ticklish dilemma: Captain Asgill would be released at the behest of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Undoubtedly with enormous relief, Washington issued a pass that would take Captain Asgill to New York, thus ending the affair. He had dealt with it the way he would with many controversies during his presidency: by letting them simmer instead of bringing them to a premature boil.
The French partnership, however useful most of the time, was awkward at others, requiring Washington to pay homage to the French monarchy even as Americans fought against King George III. In the spring of 1782, when Louis XVI had a male heir, Washington was duty-bound to celebrate “the auspicious birth of a dauphin” and hope divine providence would “shed its choicest blessings upon the King of France and his royal consorts and favor them with a long, happy, and glorious reign.”14 Having fought for independence, Americans still had no idea what sort of government would emerge in the aftermath of a successful war. Thus far the new nation had no real executive branch, just a few departments; no independent judiciary; and only an ineffectual Congress. For most Americans, the idea of royalty