Washington [299]
Sitting in his snowbound Newburgh quarters, Washington wouldn’t hear about the provisional peace treaty until February. In the meantime, he knew the time “will pass heavily on in this dreary mansion in which we are fast locked by frost and snow.”31 Affected by the frigid weather and isolation of Newburgh, Washington sounded a somber note in his letters. He wrote to General Heath, “Without amusements or avocations, I am spending another winter (I hope it will be the last that I shall be kept from returning to domestic life) among these rugged and dreary mountains.”32
The army’s sullen discontent revolved around the same stale complaints that had beset Washington throughout the war. As he recounted them to Major General John Armstrong, “The army, as usual, are without pay and a great part of the soldiery without shirts. And tho[ugh] the patience of them is equally threadbare, the states seem perfectly indifferent to their cries.”33 The soldiers were so famished that when local vendors peddled produce at their huts, they often plundered these simple country folk. Once again Washington couldn’t locate forage for his starving horses, complaining at Christmas that they “have been four days without a handful of hay and three of the same without a mouthful of grain.”34 The upshot of this outrageous situation was that officers canceled business that could be conducted only on horseback and found it impossible to confer with Washington at headquarters.
Dissatisfaction in the ranks was only sharpened by talk of demobilizing the army, which was rattled by the possible outbreak of peace. As long as soldiers remained together, they shared a common sense of purpose; once sent home, they would contrast their own impecunious state with that of the well-fed civilian population. As Washington explained to General Benjamin Lincoln, they were “about to be turned into the world, soured by penury and what they call the ingratitude of the public, involved in debts, without one farthing of money to carry them home.”35 What made the disaffection most disturbing was that it stemmed from the officers, who subsisted on such meager rations that, even when entertaining French officers, they could offer little more than “stinking whiskey” and “a bit of beef without vegetables.”36 Many doubted they would receive years of back pay owed to them or that Congress would redeem its 1780 pledge to provide veterans with half pay for life. Washington wondered darkly what would happen if the officers who had suppressed previous mutinies turned mutinous themselves.
As he dealt with this discontent, Washington again had to deal with his disgruntled mother. Mary Washington had written to apprise him that the overseer at her Little Falls Quarter farm was pocketing all the profits for himself, and this made George no less upset than his mother. As he told brother Jack, he had maintained this place for her with “no earthly inducement to meddle with it, but to comply with her wish and to free her from care,” but he hadn’t received a penny in return. He protested that it was “too much while I am suffering in every other way (and hardly able to keep my own estate from sale), to be saddled with all the expense of hers and not be able to derive the smallest return from it.”37 This parenthetical statement—that he could hardly keep Mount Vernon safe from sale again—reveals the dreadful toll that his neglected business interests had taken on his personal fortune.
After asking Jack to stop by Little Falls to replace the overseer, Washington mentioned that he had heard nothing further of their mother’s petition for a pension from the Virginia assembly. But it turned out that Mary was still up to her old antics and broadcasting her financial grievances to anyone who cared to listen. As Washington worried anew that she would blacken his reputation, his repressed anger toward her, long tamped down, spilled out. He told his brother that he had learned “from very good authority